“Know thyself” – the inscription written above the portico of the Temple of Delphi

This is a post about gnosticism.

For readers familiar with this Substack, a regular point is made how (1) globohomo forcing neoliberal feudalism onto the world along with (2) global overpopulation leading to a future neo-Malthusian catastrophe means that those without spiritual grounding and intentionally decreased consumption are going to be ill-prepared as their material quality of life continues to decline. We can already feel the decline in both our pocketbooks but also psychically; it’s hanging heavy in the air, as Paulos points out. It’s going to get much worse. Lurking behind globohomo’s actions and a study of human history is the possibility of a creative, sadistic, malevolent Demiurge, the builder/maintainer of material reality who enjoys torturing God-souls.

For newer readers interested in how these topics were covered previously, see the following discussions about the problem of evil, the nature of the soul, philosophical pessimism, here and here on the need to live beneath our means, and an analysis of the environmental movement and neo-malthusianism. I’ve also covered Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism as part of the egalitarian ratchet effect, Jews and Judaism, and have future post(s) planned on Islam.

The perspectives offered in these essays increasingly points towards a gnostic understanding of the world. This alignment has been occurring naturally like water flowing downstream or the pieces fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle, whichever analogy you prefer. Even my studies on individuals such as Ernst Junger pointed in curious gnostic-leaning ways. In his war journals he wrote, “I harbored the suspicion that this world is modeled on the perfidious prototype of the charnel house [i.e. place of death]”. But there is no certainty being proffered here; merely guideposts along a journey with an unknown destination.

This post will also serve as a possible response to Erik Hoel’s erudite post about the 21st century dynamics surrounding mob behavior. He proposes that the 21st century will take the action of mob behavior and the reaction of what he calls “sovereign citizens” (i.e. rich and powerful people who use elements of the mob to protect themselves from becoming victims of it) in order to reach a yet unknown dialectical synthesis. Perhaps individuated gnosticism can be such a synthesis.

“Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing” by Stephan Hoeller offers a clear, concise, and very readable overview of the topic and I highly recommend it. Hoeller runs an open sacramental neo-gnostic church called the Ecclesia Gnostica which has active parishes in Seattle, Portland, Austin, and Los Angeles. Hoeller is 92 years old but apparently still gives lectures which are recorded and published; he comes across as erudite and considered in them. Here’s a fairly interesting article in LA Weekly on his church.

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Defining gnosticism

There is much confusion around the term “gnosticism”, but there are two basic meanings.

The first definition

The first use is basically a smear by exoteric Christians against those they don’t like, including against each other. According to scholar Ioan Culianu:

Once I believed that Gnosticism was a well-defined phenomenon belonging to the religious history of Late Antiquity. Of course, I was ready to accept the idea of different prolongations of ancient Gnosis, and even that of spontaneous generation of views of the world in which, at different times, the distinctive features of Gnosticism occur again.

I was soon to learn, however, that I was a naif indeed. Not only Gnosis was gnostic, but the Catholic authors were gnostic, the Neoplatonic too, Reformation was gnostic, Communism was gnostic, Nazism was gnostic, liberalism, existentialism and psychoanalysis were gnostic too, modern biology was gnostic, Blake, Yeats, Kafka were gnostic….I learned further that science is gnostic and superstition is gnostic…Hegel is gnostic and Marx is gnostic; all things and their opposite are equally gnostic. (see Hoeller, 182)

The core of this interpretation is an accusation that one’s opponents are using the pursuit of an Ideal as an idol that is not the ineffable Godhood – whether that be environmentalism/Gaia worship, race, economic equality/communism, etc. Through the pursuit of this Ideal – usually a secularized, blind devotional religious energy – with the correct understanding or outlook, adherents believe they can bring Heaven to Earth materially.

N.S. Lyons goes into various uses of the term here. As L.P. Koch states: “Calling the left “Gnostic” worked because it is seen as a swear word both by materialist atheists and Christian fundies. It’s ironic though because today’s right-wing thought is full of Gnostic motives. Besides, the idea of mystical union with something higher to transcend the endless running in circles in our reality is something important and present in any real religiosity that isn’t merely subscribing to some authoritarian belief system.”

Even within exoteric religion the ideal of the ineffable God can be – and often is – perverted into a quest for political and material power. Indeed, the incentives of any institution based on expansion always corrupts in a sense.1 This is the reason for the Albigensian Crusade where Catholics under Pope Innocent III murdered and burned to death anywhere from 200,000-1,000,000 gnostic, peaceful Cathars (and a bunch of Catholics, too; “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius”) and the same reason why the horrific Fourth Crusade resulted in the sack of Constantinople. Institutions will rationally not allow threats to their power to manifest, even peacefully; they live according to politics, not metaphysics despite the window dressing.

Perhaps this use of the term “gnostic” is why Jasun Horsley in his recent interview with Rurik Skywalker stated he used to consider himself gnostic but no longer does.

The second definition

The other definition of gnosticism is as follows, even though it is an umbrella term that encapsulates many different movements with differing beliefs (i.e. Elcesaites, Mandaeism, Simonians, Valentinianism, Basilidians, Marcionism, Manichaeism, Catharism, etc). Gnosis begins with an understanding that the incentive structure of material reality is fundamentally flawed. See this June 10, 1991 Time magazine article by Lance Morrow, who states that one could agree with any two of these three propositions, but not all three: (1) God is all-powerful. (2) God is all-good. (3) Terrible things happen. You can declare that there is an all-powerful God who allows terrible things to happen, but this God could not be all-good. On the other hand, there might be an all-good God who lets terrible things happen because he does not have the power to stop them; thus he is not all-powerful. At the beginning of his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas admitted that the existence of evil is the best argument against the existence of God.

As terrible things happen, if God is good then he cannot be all-powerful. This leads to an understanding that this material realm was created and is controlled by a malevolent Demiurgic creator (and/or a bumbling one; one of it’s common names, Yaldabaoth, means “the childish god”) and that by adopting an attitude of asceticism, humility and philosophical pessimism, by grappling with the contradictions inherent within this reality to try to achieve a higher-level synthesis, by trying to perfect our own phenotypes via our own unique spiritual, intuitive journeys, a gnosis that has to be personally and mystically experienced and not merely learned via exoterism, one may hope to spiritually ascend from this realm both on earth (via a higher-level state of mind) and in the afterlife.

Unlike the traditional story of Adam and Eve where the serpent resulted in mankind’s fall, under the gnostic interpretation Eve and the serpent awaken Adam out of his materialist slumber; the knowledge of good and evil is what allows him to reconnect to the Godhood beyond the range of the Demiurge.

Hoeller breaks this definition of gnosticism down into fourteen core beliefs, p. 187:

1. There is an original and transcendental spiritual unity from which emanated a vast manifestation of pluralities.
2. The manifest universe of matter and mind was created not by the original spiritual unity but by spiritual beings possessing inferior powers.
3. One of the objectives of these creators is the perpetual separation of humans from the unity (God).
4. The human being is a composite: the outer aspect is the handiwork of the inferior creators, while the inner aspect is a fallen spark of the ultimate divine unity.
5. The sparks of transcendental holiness slumber in their material and mental prison, their self-awareness stupefied by the forces of materiality and mind.
6. The slumbering sparks have not been abandoned by the ultimate unity; rather, a constant effort directed toward their awakening and liberation comes forth from this unity.
7. The awakening of the inmost divine essence in humans comes through salvific knowledge, called “gnosis.”
8. Gnosis is not brought about by belief or by the performance of virtuous deeds or by obedience to commandments; these at best serve to prepare one for liberating knowledge.
9. Among those aiding the slumbering sparks, a particular position of honor and importance belongs to a feminine emanation of the unity, Sophia (Wisdom). She was involved in the creation of the world and ever since has remained the guide of her orphaned human children.
10. From the earliest times of history, messengers of Light have been sent forth from the ultimate unity for the purpose of advancing gnosis in the souls of humans.
11. The greatest of these messengers in our historical and geographical matrix was the descended Logos of God manifest in Jesus Christ.
12. Jesus exercised a twofold ministry: he was a teacher, imparting instruction concerning the way of gnosis; and he was a hierophant, imparting mysteries.
13. The mysteries imparted by Jesus (which are also known as sacraments) are mighty aids toward gnosis and have been entrusted by him to his apostles and their successors.
14. Through the spiritual practice of the mysteries (sacraments) and a relentless and uncompromising striving for gnosis, humans can steadily advance toward liberation from all confinement, material and otherwise. The ultimate objective of this process of liberation is the achievement of salvific knowledge and with it, freedom from embodied existence and return to the ultimate unity.

A common gnostic understanding, exemplified by Marcionism, is that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are different Gods; the God of the Old Testament is the Demiurge, a wrathful, demanding, spiteful tribal God who created and rules over material reality (perhaps explaining why the Chosen People are so dominant on the material plane despite being so few in number). The God of the New Testament, a God of love and forgiveness, cannot be easily reconciled with the God of the Old Testament, and this gives credence to the Godhead/Demiurgic split.

Paul and the Gospel of John have a curious role in gnosticism: they are both seen as sympathetic to gnosis (indeed, Paul never met Jesus and his vision of Jesus is what led to him becoming a Christian), while at the same time as Nietzsche argued and as I’ve pointed out (also here), Christianity was likely created as a brilliant way to invert Roman values and, via spiritual bolshevism, to smash the existing Roman order as revenge for the destruction of the Second Temple. Nietzsche had called Jesus the “one true Christian”, believing that Paul corrupted his message right at the start. There is a contradiction here which needs further contemplation and synthesis.

Another common theme of gnosticism is that it seems to arise spontaneously throughout history with similar core beliefs only to be brutally suppressed, likely because of how anti-authoritarian, pacifistic and anti-materialist it is. It is almost like there is a personality type attracted to it – introverted, free-thinking, pessimistic and sensitive to injustice – and it has to manifest in a particular way religiously. Whether it takes hold and for how long depends on cultural, political, religious and other factors which impacts how far the gnostic idea spreads, but its core ideals always prevent it from succeeding in the material realm against religions that are more power centric, more political, more materialistic.

Gnosticism also has much in common with Buddhism, sharing philosophical pessimism2 and ideas that enlightenment involves asceticism and personalized insight, as well as aspects of Hinduism. As Hoeller states in an interview:

The accusation that Gnostics are world-hating pessimists was first voiced by the heresy-hunting church fathers of the early centuries A.D. It was false then, and it is false now. Most religious systems recognise that the world is imperfect, as indeed do Gnostics. The difference between the Gnostic position and others concerns the origins of this imperfect state of the world. Judeo-Christian orthodoxy places the blame on human beings: their original sin came to corrupt not only humans themselves, but all of creation. Gnostics, on the other hand, have always held that the world did not fall but was created in a grossly imperfect way to begin with.

Professor Gilles Quispel, the late, great scholar, was wont to tell the tale that when observing the destruction of a British fighter plane over Holland in World War II, he had the sudden insight: “Valentinus the Gnostic was right: earthly life is tragic.” Gnostics, like Buddhists, recognise that earthly life is filled with suffering, cruelty, and impermanence. I have noted on occasions that we live in a gigantic slaughterhouse cum cafeteria – all forms of life kill and consume other forms to nourish themselves. Some creatures exhibit behaviour that is not related to stilling their hunger. Cats play cruelly with their prey. Some insects kill and eat their mates while copulating; indeed cannibalism is rampant among many species. Natural disasters bring much suffering and death in their wake. On the other hand, Gnostics have always felt that humans can attain to freedom from this suffering world by attaining to Gnosis, that is, a higher kind of consciousness, which allows the liberated Gnostic to soar above this tragic world.

“All forms of life kill and consume other forms to nourish themselves” is a critical point. For those who feel a pull toward living the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you – it is impossible to live up to that standard because one must consume other living things in order to survive. Even a plant screams if it’s being eaten and unleashes secretions to ward away predators. This contradiction between ethics and material reality form, for me, the core gnostic argument.

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Gnosis and physiognomy

While all humans and perhaps everything alive contains an element of the God-spark within it, perhaps only a subset is likely capable of achieving gnosis, which involves perfecting our archetypes (or physiognomy, the science of which is discussed here).

Man is a hodge-podge of a material body crafted by the Demiurge, a personality formed by the movement of the planets i.e. astrology, and a piece of the ineffable God-soul. Reflecting this composition, there are three levels of spiritual development: those ruled entirely by materialist desires (hylics), those ruled by the mind (psychics) who are confused but questioning, and finally those ruled by the spirit (pneumatics) who have achieved enlightenment. These are equated to levels of sleep: wakefulness (materialism), dreaming (psychics), and deep sleep (pneumatic).3 Some gnostic sects believe that souls reincarnate until they tire of materialism and become pneumatics. L.P. Koch argues: “Everybody criticizes genetic/biological blank slatism, but it’s soul-level blank slatism that stands in the way of understanding so many aspects of our world. Perhaps we just haven’t (re-)found a language to talk about these things yet, although the NPC meme has done much to bring such heresy back into the modern world.” And: “The measure of someone’s mental-spiritual development: pain tolerance for truth and uncertainty. And what the person decides to do with it.”

It is an interesting question to what extent specific religious beliefs are phenotype-derived versus culture-derived. It’s hard to imagine an extravert optimist being attracted to gnosticism without significant cultural influences, and even then its hold would likely be fairly weak. Certain beliefs will do better in certain periods; during a period of dramatically increasing material quality of life such as America experienced in the wake of World War 2 gnosticism would likely have had very limited appeal, while in a period of increasing neoliberal feudalism as we are in now I think gnosticism will do well and the prosperity gospel will do quite poorly…

To clarify on this point further, Ernst Junger noted in his interview with Julien Hervier at 90 years old in his “The Details of Time”, “An aversion to violence and brutality is certainly innate in some men: they like it or do not like it.” And the same could be said for one’s attraction to materialism or psychology or exotericism or esotericism; these are traits built into who we are, and we can merely try to perfect who we were meant to become. You’re not going to convince Gandhi or Hitler to adopt each other’s viewpoints; it is beyond each’s physiognomy to adopt such alien perspectives. Junger continues, p. 38:

“On my table, I found a book entitled Hassidic Tales, edited, I believe, by Martin Buber. Anyway, I read several anecdotes, one of which I greatly liked, the one about Rabbi Zousya. He said to his audience or to his pupils, “When I go to heaven, I won’t be asked whether I lived like Moses, I’ll be asked whether I lived like Rabbi Zousya.” I consider that essential: everyone has to fulfill what he received at birth; it’s the only thing that I can say to those young people. You have to lay out your money advantageously, that is, develop your own capacities to an optimal degree. That’s very dangerous, of course, for Rabbi Zousya thought that, as Rabbi Zousya, he had lived according to the law. But what is the law for someone who is born a pickpocket? Nietzsche has an answer for that, naturally, but Rabbi Zousya lived a long time before Nietzsche. After Nietzsche, the matter looks very different, and it becomes very perilous, but that’s all I wish to say about this topic.”

This quote ended enigmatically – I’m not sure exactly what Junger meant with this Nietzsche reference, a Darwinian survival of the fittest of phenotypes? But it does raise an interesting point. If we are to become the best version of ourselves possible by following our intuition (balanced by our reason, feelings and senses), what would one prone to say, being a serial killer be encouraged to do? And this is where the importance of balancing intuition against an established ritualistic tradition comes in — learning from those who have come before, their wisdom and mistakes, so that one doesn’t fall as easily into the pitfalls of ego. This is a core point that perennialist scholar Frithjof Schuon makes here when analyzing Sufi esotericist Rene Guenon’s philosophy, quoted at length:

Besides there is, in the expression “chose a path”, when applied to a case like that of Guénon, something inadequate, tiresome and awkward-sounding; for Guénon was intrinsically a “pneumatic” of the “gnostic” or “jnāni” category; and, in this case, there is no question of a “path” or at least, if there is, the meaning is so altered that the expression itself becomes misleading. A pneumatic is in a way the “incarnation” of a spiritual archetype, which means that he is born with a state of knowledge which, for other people, would actually be the goal, and not the point of departure; the pneumatic does not “go forward” towards something “other than himself’; he stays where he is in order to become fully what he himself is—namely his archetype—by ridding himself, one after the other, of veils or outer surfaces, shackles imposed by the ambience or perhaps by heredity. He becomes rid of them by means of ritual supports— “sacraments”, one might say—not forgetting meditation and prayer; but his situation is nonetheless quite other than that of ordinary men, even prodigiously gifted ones. From another point of view it must be recognized that a born gnostic is by nature more or less independent, not only as regards the “letter” but also as regards the “law”; and this does not make his relation with the ambience any simpler, either psychologically or socially. At this point the following objection has to be parried: does not the “path” consist for every man in getting rid of obstacles and in “becoming oneself”? Yes and no; that is to say: metaphysically it is so, but not humanly because, I repeat, the pneumatic “realizes” or “actualizes” what he “is”, whereas the non-pneumatic realizes what he “must become”—a difference at once “absolute” and “relative” about which one could argue indefinitely….

What the natural gnostic seeks, from the point of view of “realization”, is much less a “path” than a “framework”—a traditional, sacramental and liturgical setting which will allow him to be ever more genuinely “himself’, namely a particular archetype of celestial “iconostasis”….

“Know thyself” was the inscription written above the portico of the Temple of Delphi; that is, know thine immortal essence but also, by that very token, know thine archetype. This injunction no doubt applies in principle to every man, but it applies to the pneumatic in a far more direct manner, in the sense that he has, by definition, awareness of his celestial model in spite of the flaws which his earthly shell may have undergone in contact with an all too uncongenial ambience. Paradox is part of the economy of this world below, given that the limitlessness of Universal Possibility necessarily implies unexpected, if not incomprehensible, combinations of things; phenomena can be what they are, but vincit omnia veritas.

Schuon touches correctly on the inequality of souls; we all have a touch of the divine within us (hence, an element of egalitarianism), but the development of souls is wildly unequal. The vast majority of people today (and perhaps always) are unthinking hypic NPCs, fooled constantly by propaganda who havn’t even begun their spiritual paths or to discover who they really are. They are shuffling empty zombies, rotating between work, eating, and imbibing establishment propaganda, sports and Netflix.

For those seeking to develop spiritually within an existing framework, according to Hoeller, gnosticism shares many of the same “ritual supports” as Catholicism: in the Gospel of Philip there is baptism, Chrism (anointing), the Eucharist, a rite of Redemption (possibly related to a final purification and absolution from earthly faults) and a supreme mystery rite of the Bridal Chamber.

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The dangers of gnosticism

Much like philosophical pessimism, the dangers of gnosticism appear to be that it can lead to passivity, resignation, an inclination to withdraw from interacting with the real world as a “lost cause” or, in extreme cases, possibly even suicide. Because the outlook de-emphasizes the value of real world action it also tends to lose consistently against other ideologies and outlooks that inspire action and, really, being on the losing side of things is not fun. As L.P. Koch eloquently argues here:

This danger of esoteric ideas is also present in Gnosticism: clearly, some gnostically inclined folks have taken all of that way too far. Escapism is not the solution, and neither is waging war against reality itself, dreaming up an utopia of eternal bliss instead of engaging with the world as it is, suffering and all.

Transcendence means seeing the unseen as reflected in the material world, not overcoming the material world by declaring it irrelevant. It means paying more attention to reality, not less, with the mind firmly oriented towards the higher and the lower worlds simultaneously….

All things esoteric are dangerous. It’s all-too easy to lose the plot and go off the rails, as so much nonsense in the New Age department and other cultist delusions over the course of history have shown, including parts of the so-called Gnostic movements.

Hence, it is understandable, at least to a degree, why the church has always considered Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and all kinds of other mystic movements as heretic abominations.

Religion plays the role of a guardian, a protector that keeps people from plunging headlong into dangerous terrain that might turn them into madmen and, ultimately, throw them into the arms of the Devil. The scientism of our age has played a similar role: it has kept the masses from exploring fringe ideas that might threaten the fabric of society and their personal sanity.

The thing is, though, that some of us will never be content with this sort of “protection.” In our search for truth, we are willing to face the danger. Our longing tells us that there must be more out there than meets the eye.

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Conclusion

Hoeller argues in an interview that Carl Jung, the greatest gnostic of our era, believes that we are entering, with great difficulty and pain, the Age of Aquarius where mankind’s spiritual abilities will be changed and uplifted in accordance with gnosis. He states:

[Hoeller]: Speaking of Jung, it is no doubt known to many that his mysterious and long-awaited book Liber Novus (The Red Book) has been published at last. One of the principal disclosures to be found in this work is Jung’s belief that the Age of Aquarius is upon us, that significant changes in the consciousness of humanity are taking place, and that more of the same may be expected in the future. The “Aeon of Aquarius,” as Jung calls it, will eventually bring great psychological changes in its wake, amounting to a new religious consciousness which will differ greatly from the religious consciousness of the Piscean Age. It will manifest primarily in a new God-image that was very important to the ancient Gnostics and that in various ways has made its appearance throughout history in the esoteric tradition.

Two thousand and some years ago a new religion constellated itself in the Mediterranean region. With that religion came a new myth of redemption, centred in the image of Jesus, the Saviour God. Now Jung is telling us in The Red Book that the Aeon of Aquarius is upon us, and with it comes the new God-image of the God within. This image is of course none other than the God to whom St. Paul referred as “the Christ in you, our hope of glory.” It is also the indwelling Christ affirmed and venerated in the Gnostic tradition.

There is no doubt that Jung saw in the new Gnostic Renaissance, which began with the discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi library, a manifestation of his own prophecy in the then still secret Red Book. The connection of Jung’s prophecy with the tradition of Gnosis is unmistakable.

In his Red Book, Jung stated clearly that the task of the present and near future was “to give birth to the ancient in a new time,” and he clearly meant the Gnostic tradition is in fact that ancient thing to which he and others were giving birth.

I have spent a very large portion of my adult life studying and commenting upon the work of Jung and the Gnostic sacred writings. I should say, then, that humanity today is experiencing the rebirth of Gnosticism, and its principal God-image is being born in a new time. The esoteric as well as the exoteric implications of this process are momentous.

I hope this positive hope for the future will bear fruit. Alternatively, perhaps a focus on gnosticism is simply a reinterpreted Ghost Dance, i.e. a retreat into powerless mystical esotericism as the possibilities for truly meaningful change shut, as John Carter warns here. The Ghost Dance didn’t help the Indians, in the end…

I’ll continue to post about my exploration of gnosticism and other relevant topics as time goes on. Thanks for being part of the journey and for reading.

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1 As Eugene Ionesco stated, “There are certainly two types of people: those who live according to metaphysics and those who live according to politics. The latter are not horrified by evil. They live in this world and are content therewith. Those who live according to metaphysics know that evil is posed to us as an enigma. Theologians themselves live according to politics; this is the reason why religions find it very difficult to explain how evil was introduced in the world.” As quoted in Guido Preparata’s “The Political Scripting of Jesus”.

2 “By laying a heavy emphasis on human life as something that needs to be
drastically reworked due to the First Noble Truth of dukkha, Buddhism has been
disparaged as pessimistic. Naturally, Buddhists deny that their religion is any such
thing. It is a system for uncovering our true nature—and nothing else. Nevertheless,
Buddhism and pessimism cannot be pried loose from each other. The likeness
between them is simply too pronounced to be overlooked. Buddhists claim that they
are not pessimists but realists. Pessimists make the same claim. Buddhists also claim
they are not pessimists because their founder’s teachings showed a way out of
suffering for all sentient beings. Pessimists also have their plans toward this end.”

—Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

3 From this quite dense post by Jean Borella reposted at Sensus Catholicus, “But the point that seems most significant to us concerns what Guénon calls, in The Demiurge, the “pneumatic world”, distinguished from the “hylic” and “psychic” worlds. Approaching these gnostic (and Pauline) names to the Vêdânta doctrine, he writes: “He who has become aware of the two manifested worlds, that is, of the hylic world, the set of gross or material manifestations, and of the psychic world, the set of subtle manifestations, is twice born, Dwidja ; but he who is conscious of the unmanifested Universe or the formless World, that is, the pneumatic World, and who has reached the identification of himself with the universal Spirit Âtmâ, he alone can be called a Yogi, that is, united with the Universal Spirit”. And, a few lines further on, he establishes the correspondence of these three worlds with the three states of wakefulness, dreaming, and deep sleep. In such a cosmology, manifestation thus comprises only two worlds, corporeal and psychic, the pneumatic world being unmanifested, and the “Pleroma, neither manifest nor unmanifest”. Now, as we know, according to Man and His Becoming, universal manifestation comprises three worlds, the third being constituted by the intelligible or informal realities. Compared to the Gnostic conception of The Demiurge, the manifested universe is thus expanded by an additional degree, the one that India calls Mahat or Buddhi. Hence, the state of deep sleep (sushuptasthâna), which is the state of Prâjna (the “knowing one”), no longer corresponds only to the unmanifested degree of pure Being, but also encompasses the informal manifestation: “Buddhi must in a certain manner be included in the state of Prâjna.””

I previously covered the Israel/Hamas war, arguing that Israel was jammed into the side of the Arab world, much like Taiwan with China and Pakistan with India, to further longterm globohomo goals using divide-and-conquer, balance-of-power strategies. This post focuses on the propaganda used by each side in this war, what they are trying to accomplish and how, and argues for viewing politics through a prism of Western re-assertion of self-interest: specifically, a return to isolationism and end to U.S. hegemony. It is a rephrasing of the arguments made here, here and here that almost all modern wars have been unjust. This is a politics/culture post which doesn’t interest me as much these days, but many are stuck on the topic1 and hopefully it may offer some illumination.

“The first sentence of Nietzsche’s war practice, “I only attack things that are victorious,” is less powerful than the second, “I only attack things where I would find no allies, where I stand alone.”” – Ernst Junger in his commentary on “The Worker”

The propaganda surrounding the Israel/Hamas war has been fascinating to watch. There is an essentially naked display of tribalism by all sides except for white Christian America, which is prohibited from forming or expressing group solidarity. Instead, they do it by proxy by allying with one of the other parties, in this case either Israel or Hamas representing Jews and Muslims, respectively. These sides utilize intense propaganda primarily with appeals to victimhood – Israel with the hundreds of kidnapped citizens, especially those of women and children, while Hamas with photos of bombed, dead children – because appeals to victimhood are what the West responds to given it is steeped in extreme egalitarianism and is increasingly ruled (at least in its energy) by menopausal, childless women.

Both sides are spending so much energy with this victimhood propaganda because America is still the world’s sole superpower (for the moment) and it has a significant ability to impact the outcome of this conflict.

This topic is to some extent a distraction and a red herring. Emerald Robinson is correct when she stated back in October,“It’s simply astonishing to see the number of Americans who can’t stop talking about the Hamas invasion of Israel while 8 million illegal aliens swarm across their own border [per year]. Look how easily your attention was diverted. Look how quickly you forgot your own nation.” Although that’s changed a little bit in February/March as election season heats up. As discussed repeatedly, including recently about the pro-Palestinian campus protests, unless the media covers something it does not exist for most people.

In this post we will first review the Muslim approach to the conflict, then the Jewish approach to the conflict, then the West’s approach to the conflict, concluding that historic American’s best interests are served by a return to isolationism – a total withdrawal, let the world fend for itself.

As a preamble, not everyone within a particular group is the way described herein. To organize and understand the world one must generalize while hopefully keeping an open mind that any particular person has their own perspective and viewpoints that may differ from group opinion. There are plenty of people on each side who would prefer to maintain the status quo, fearful of change in any direction, and some even go against the grain with their own unique perspectives. However, everyone has an element of pull toward group solidarity when (1) that individual is categorized by others on a group basis and (2) that group’s interests are perceived as threatened. That degree of pull is impacted by lots of influences, one’s personality, disposition, outlook, religious beliefs, culture, ideology etc.

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The Islamic approach: cohesive

Let’s take a look at the psychology of politicized Muslims in America and in Europe. Many are vocal that they want to conquer Israel “from the “[Jordan] river to the sea” with all that entails. Both the Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel and Iran regularly calls both for the destruction of the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan” (U.S. and Israel, respectively).2

But they are quiet that they generally seek increasing group power and self-assertion in the West itself. Islamic immigration into non-Islamic lands follows a clear and repeatable pattern, which one can read about here (the below percentages for identified countries are higher now).

As long as the Muslim population remains around 1% of any given country they will be regarded as a peace-loving minority and not as a threat to anyone. In fact, they may be featured in articles and films, stereotyped for their colorful uniqueness (U.S., Australia, Canada, China, Italy, Norway).

At 2% and 3% they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs: Denmark, Germany, UK, Spain, Thailand.

From 5% on they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population.  They will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature it on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply. France, Philippines, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Trinidad and Tobago.

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islam is not to convert the world but to establish Sharia law over the entire world.

When Muslims reach 10% of the population, they will increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions (Paris — car-burnings). Any non-Muslim action that offends Islam will result in uprisings and threats (Amsterdam — Mohammed cartoons). Guyana, India, Israel, Kenya, Russia.

After reaching 20% expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings and church and synagogue burning: Ethiopia.

At 40% you will find widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks and ongoing militia warfare. Bosnia, Chad, Lebanon.

From 60% you may expect unfettered persecution of non-believers and other religions, sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon and Jizya, the tax placed on infidels: Albania, Malaysia, Qatar, Sudan.

After 80% expect State run ethnic cleansing and genocide: Bangladesh, Egypt, Gaza, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, UAE.

100% will usher in the peace of ‘Dar-es-Salaam’ — the Islamic House of Peace — there’s supposed to be peace because everybody is a Muslim. Afghanistan, Saudia Arabia, Somalia, Yemen. Of course, peace never comes. Muslims then start killing each other for a variety of reasons…[Pakistan recently ordered the 1.7 million Afghans under its control around the Durand Line to leave the country within 48 hours as an “ethnic cleanse”, but no one cares as both countries are Muslim.]

Essentially as they make a foothold into non-Muslim lands they increasingly seek self-assertion and then domination. This is because Islam separates the world into dar Al-Islam (territory of Islam) and dar Al-Harb (territory of war); even Lee Kuan Yew, the great master of nation building, thought Muslims uniquely refused to integrate:

In the book, Mr Lee, when asked to assess the progress of multiracialism in Singapore, said: “I have to speak candidly to be of value, but I do not wish to offend the Muslim community. “I think we were progressing very nicely until the surge of Islam came, and if you asked me for my observations, the other communities have easier integration – friends, intermarriages and so on, Indians with Chinese, Chinese with Indians – than Muslims. That’s the result of the surge from the Arab states.” He added: “I would say today, we can integrate all religions and races except Islam.” He also said: “I think the Muslims socially do not cause any trouble, but they are distinct and separate.”

In a tribal conflict within the Middle East they want short-term allies (Christians, liberal women, gays, trannies etc) on their side, and while it is ultimately about subjugation and not oppression, the latter is a propaganda tactic to further the former. This is both understandable and smart, as it is natural to advance one’s tribal interests using any methods available – something those in the West, so steeped in individualism, are not used to.

Despite their public protests, the Islamic world doesn’t care about the Palestinians except to the extent they can be used to promote their wider interests. If they truly cared at least one Muslim state would be accepting Palestinian refugees. But host Islamic countries that already have a large population of Palestinians as in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan have major problems with them as they consistently try to undermine and overthrow their governments; none of them want any more.

The Islamic world’s strategy, then, is to feign outrage as thousands of Palestinians are killed in order to translate fake outrage into desired political objectives. The more Palestinians who are killed by Israel, the more photos and videos of dead babies and bombed hospitals there will be the better because it inflames the Islamic world against Israel and its supporters in Europe and America which furthers their long-term strategies for Islamic domination.3 This is why they secretly consider, according to unreliable Gaza ministry figures, the tens of thousands of dead so far in Gaza to be a good thing. This is the dead baby propaganda strategy (the Israelis tried this strategy too with the “beheaded babies” and “roasted babies in ovens” propaganda, which failed). It’s a great strategy because it works for its intended purpose of turning world opinion against Israel and Jews, which the Jerusalem Post referred to as a “trap” set by Hamas. Trump warned in mid-March that the world opinion had turned against Israel.

The desire by both the left and far right to view Muslim nations as victims due to it being brown and technologically backwards betrays a lack of understanding of history. While Islamic countries have been conquered economically and militarily by the West since the 19th century (something I will cover in a future post), there has been no serious attempt to contract the religion since the Crusades. On a historical level Islam has only expanded, never facing any serious contraction except from southern Spain’s Reconquista. See the historical spread of Islam below:

This expansion is currently headed deeply into Europe based on both immigration and much higher birthrates compared to the native population. Spaceman Spiff comments on the process taking place within Britain here. And see Houellebecq’s famed Submission novel about a white professor who converts to Islam out of a lack of other options.

IQ and China fetishist blogger Spandrell argues here and here that unless the West develops a new religion, Islam is simply going to conquer it. Like Houellebecq, he also reluctantly suggests conversion:

Western elites are hell-bent in allowing unrestricted immigration into Europe and America. Even if they’re all ISIS operatives. Muslims are not deemed to be a threat to the progressive establishment the same way that white-nationalism is, and they’re mostly right about that.

Given present demographic trends, at this rate large swathes of the West will be Muslim in 20 years time; and again the progressive establishment will do nothing about that; because doing something about that would strengthen the hand of white-nationalists, and that directly threatens the power of the progressive establishment….

A characteristic of Islam is that it requires of the faithful to take power once it has the numbers to achieve it. A 50% Muslim country, let alone an 80% one, wouldn’t remain progressive for long. Eventually the Muslims will take over. The question is who is going to be part of that. You could remain defiant, and become a jizya-paying white minority, to be squeezed and bullied forever. Or you can convert early and join the fun before the Arabs get too uppity. Ever seen the pictures of the Ottoman sultans? They’re whiter than me. Ever seen the Istanbul elite? They’re whiter than you.

Maybe an Islamic world conquest won’t be so terrible. It’s masculine, patriarchal, traditional, although it is also primitive and brutal. It certainly beats what globohomo is offering with gay marriage thrown in your face, child trannies, the inversion of every societal value out of spite and neoliberal feudalism. And its pessimistic take on human nature – treating people basically as aggressive, wild cattle that need to “submit” or face physical punishment – seems to be more in line with reality than exoteric Christianity’s optimistic take of the masses’s freedom-to-choose.4

Now, a counter to the argument about Islamic conquest is that Saudi Arabia is behind the scenes deeply allied with Israel and perhaps even controlled by them (definitely controlled by the central bank owners, though). This is why you end up with stuff like Saudi Arabia entering the Miss Universe pageant, Saudi arresting Israel critics, and the legalization of female drivers with more liberalization upcoming. Likely other Islamic leaders are as well such as Hamas and Iran (see footnote 1) and much of the rest of the Islamic world. And this may be so; but it is a leadership that hides behind closed doors with these actions, ashamed; there is no significant liberal block within Islamic society calling for integration within the globohomo order (except perhaps in Iran), unlike what we will see with Jews below. Also note that the West is increasingly trying to skinsuit imams within their lands, as Eilean Bharraigh explores here.

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The Jewish approach: split

There is a fundamental split with respect to the Jewish strategy which is not reflected in the simpler Islamic conquest strategy. This split is between nationalist, Zionist religious Jews and globalist, anti-Zionist secular Jews.

The nationalist, Zionist religious Jewish perspective

The religious right-wing Jews want to reinstate greater Israel which encompasses the following territory:

You can see this perspective reflected in Jared Kushner’s recent comments (which are interesting given his influence on Trump) where he hopes to displace Gazans in order to develop beachfront property. His opinions are within the mainstream of Orthodox Judaism. The way he speaks is also interesting, with an understated but extreme arrogant tone even though he is middling IQ and only accepted into Harvard because of Daddy’s $2.5 million donation.

Given this religious position one can see the changes in Israel’s territory versus that of Palestinians over time, reflecting both victories in 1967 and following the expansion of Israeli settlers into the West Bank:

Now, a society/civilization never sits still. There is always momentum behind it one way or another: it must always be seeking to expand, otherwise it will contract and die. Such is the nature of viewing a civilization as a Spenglerian living being. Christianity has been on a retreating, dying path for a long time now. Demographics matter just as much as territory changes and both the ultra-Orthodox Jews and Muslims have far more children than secular leftist Jews, meaning the future will likely belong to them.

In order to effectuate the Greater Israel strategy these right-wing Jews try to tell the world how ethically they are behaving, how they try to minimize Muslim civilian casualties5, that if Muslims win then Israel would be destroyed, and lean heavily on the United States for support. In addition Israeli leadership likely knew about the impending attack and let it happen (see Netanyahu’s  about how countries could be led to war) so they would have a casus belli to destroy Gaza. That Israel leadership could allow the attack to happen should not be a surprise as the Jewish population within Israel was the most forced-vaccinated in the world, demonstrating deep animus toward the population.

The central bank owner’s ambivalent relationship with the Jewish population has been covered previously; they’re fine with sacrificing the Jewish masses as necessary for broader goals. Regardless, I had the misfortune of watching Fox News for the first time in many years at the start of the conflict and it was wall-to-wall coverage about Israel’s plight. They were trying to drum up support for another Middle Eastern war among the masses — in between commercials plugging evangelical end-of-the-world books and diabetes, obesity and boner pills, anyway.

The goal of the right-wing Jews, then, is to use this Gaza war as an opportunity to further the Greater Israel project using whichever strategies are necessary as they continue to outbreed and outcompete secular leftist Jews for power and control.

The globalist, anti-Zionist secular Jewish perspective

On the other hand, left-wing Jews are highly ambivalent about Israel and many of them openly side with Muslims; see this Slate article which describes some of this energy, or this one about Kamala Harris’s Jewish stepdaughter raising $8 million for Gaza. There are many such examples. Their loyalty is not to an ethnic or religious state but to the vision of globohomo itself; i.e. they have adopted the vision of the central bank owners as their own, to mix the world into a “one world” low IQ soup controlled by our financial overlords followed by a de-population agenda. Their arguments for “equivalence” and “proportionality” are calls for perpetual extension of the conflict, although Israel has decisively lost the propaganda battle and the U.S. is not supportive of the war’s continuation.

Guido Giacmomo Preparata argued that the point of Israel’s creation and continued existence is to generate perpetual conflict which globohomo benefits from/controls:

“To isolate each conflict, the targeted territorial portion had to be severed from its adjacent district, and bled white by prolonged strife waged in the name of political, religious, or ethnic diversity. Thus the Anglo-Americans have always acted: in Europe by spinning everybody against Germany (1904-45); in the Near East, by jamming Israel in the heart of the Arab world (1917-present); in the Far East, by planting thorns in the side of China: Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan (1950-present); in Central Asia by destabilizing the entire region intro tribal warfare with the help of Pakistan to prevent the Caspian seaboard from gravitating into the Russian sphere of influence.

Most importantly, in such trying games of conquest, results might never be expected to take shape quickly, but might take a matter of weeks, months or even decades. Imperial strategems are protracted affairs. The captains of world aggression measure their achievements, or failures, on a timescale whose unit is the generation.”

Under this perspective Israel’s existence is needed to provide globohomo leverage over the oil producing countries of the region; if they act out of hand they can be overthrown and destroyed like Qaddafi and Saddam.

The vast majority of these leftist Jews do not understand the bigger picture, but they feel this perspective on an emotional level for reasons that are complicated and debatable. To this group Israel serves as an unprincipled exception to the globalist vision of dissolving nations and intermixing all peoples to live in poverty as slaves, presided over by a tiny oligarchical banking elite, and therefore they approach it with great ambivalence.6 If Israel was destroyed these leftist Jews might not really care except to the extent their lives become in danger and they need a place to flee.

General Jewish agreement on open U.S. borders

Let’s tie Islam’s ongoing demographic conquest of the West in with the Jewish strategy. In the modern era both leftist and rightist Jews were and remain strong proponents of allowing millions of anti-Jewish Muslims and other non-whites into the West.7 They correctly thought they could use unlimited immigration as a wedge strategy against white Christian America for greater power and influence as these immigrants and their children vote overwhelmingly Democrat and for open borders. However, this has had a second order effect of younger white and Christian Americans losing interest in supporting Jews and Israels from the right.

Nor is the summoned Islamic and intersectional Golem controllable from the left (regardless of Bill Ackman’s temper tantrums), which will be discussed further below. Jewish author Stephen Steinlight had warned about unlimited Islamic immigration back in 2001 when switching approaches could have made a big impact, a message which went unheeded. Jews would either have to wake up and dramatically reverse course on open borders and unlimited immigration within America (as they have supported closed borders and no illegal immigration into Israel) or risk being swallowed by the non-white multitudes. Their best path forward would be to make peace with historic America, understand their role in the Rothschild central bank scam and try to keep America a functional, healthy Christian society, as argued previously. Will they attempt to do so? Highly unlikely, but I doubt such an attempt would be successful at this late stage regardless.

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The Christian approach: broken and confused

Those in the West are caught between these two perspectives. Because whites and Christians are forbidden from pursuing their group interests directly and have been for generations (learned helplessness), they try to further their interests via supporting proxies – which is a poor strategy and doesn’t work. Look at how the Christian world has responded to Christian Armenia being ethnically cleansed recently (hundreds of thousands of people or more) from Islamic Azerbaijan’s invasion which absorbed 1/3 of the country: crickets. No commentary at all. Why? Because Christians are forbidden from expressing group solidarity8, and also because the media simply didn’t cover it and for most people if the media doesn’t cover it it doesn’t exist. Instead you have broken men like Aaron Bushnell lighting himself on fire protesting a conflict which he has no ethnic or religious interest in.

There is a generational divide at play: the increasingly non-white youth generally support Hamas and Islam while older, whiter generations support Israel.

The generational divide

Less than half of U.S. youth under the age of 15 are white according to census data. These youth have been brainwashed in school and university into intersectionality politics9; everything is viewed through the prism of oppressor and oppressed. Intersectionality politics derives from Critical Race Theory which was derived from Critical Legal Theory and which itself came from the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, an ideology heavily pushed by Jewish intellectuals. Critical Race Theory is simply anti-white racism steeped in intense and complex victimization jargon.

As such, they see Muslims as victims of a “white” powerful Israel and, due to the laws of intersectionality, the former must be promoted at the expense of the latter (“the last shall be first” deriving ultimately from Christianity).

The solidly leftist, non-white youth are highly pro-Hamas as a result. Here they are solidly leftist:

The trend is clear that popular opinion is turning against Israel with each successive generation:

Corresponding to America increasingly turning non-white:

One might note that neither Hamas nor Islam generally looks fondly upon the homosexuality and transgenderism that American leftist youth embrace – but that is irrelevant. These youth aren’t pro-homosexual, pro-feminist, or progressive, although that’s how they think of themselves. Instead, they have anti-values; whatever tears down what is white, male, Christian, powerful, etc they consider to be a good thing; it is a toxic combination of Nietzschian ressentiment and the egalitarian ratchet effect. This is why you end up with videos like this one where drag queens, who would be (correctly) brutally suppressed under an Islamic regime, tell young children during story hour to repeat “Free Palestine” (clickable image):

Kaczynski commented on these anti-values when he argued that leftists have no self esteem. There is thus no conflict between favoring Islam due to intersectionality and their own feelings because those impulses stem from the same cause.

Meanwhile older generations side with Israel due to the messaging they received from youth about the Holocaust while Christians, especially evangelicals, feel sympathy for Israel because of the religious connection. But younger whites and Christians increasingly feel bitter toward Israel due to the destruction of western civilization which has been presided over by a hugely disproportionate number of Jews. Because of this, and also because of the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the media propaganda to push war with Muslims is not having the effectiveness that it had in prior wars. It is subject to the law of diminishing returns. But Islam is rapidly spreading through Europe and to a lesser extent America as well. It is a tribal djinn religion of conquest, authoritarianism and anti-technology. Interestingly, Islam and Judaism have much more in common than either with Christianity.10

Putting this all together, it is not really enough to be reflexively pro- or anti-whatever the mainstream media is pushing because that still feeds into the dialectical action → reaction → synthesis that globohomo utilizes. Instead, start with the baseline: under what approach do I, my family, friends, and extended tribe benefit both in the short term, the medium term, and the long term? This should be the North Star orienting any political question. Sometimes the answers are clear, sometimes the answers are not so clear, and sometimes what is best in the long-term isn’t necessarily what is best in the short or medium-term, or vice versa. For example, many on the far-right are cheering on the Palestinians (“the enemy of my enemy is my friend”) which is perhaps a short or mid-term benefit but a long-term detriment given the ever-expanding Islamic conquest of Europe – unless they want to eventually convert to Islam, in which case this strategy makes perfect sense.

Elon Musk had an interesting tweet on identity politics recently, agreeing with the argument that Jews do not deserve sympathy from majority America because they pushed anti-white tribal policies for so long:

More here, here and here. Candace Owens joined in as well, barking at her employer Ben Shapiro. Musk later apologized after Jews pressured major corporations to withdraw advertising on Twitter and he had to go on an apology tour in Israel and then another one to visit concentration camps in Poland with Shapiro. Owens was recently fired by Shapiro and then went off on attacking him.

In this case, perhaps the best strategy for natives in the West is to simply say: the Middle East is not our problem, let them fight their forever tribal wars, we are done being the world’s policeman and withdrawing our forces and all foreign aid. Deal with your own problems, we have our own to deal with, especially as we are ruled by vicious central bank owning enemies. This is the point John Carter made where he encouraged whites not to join the U.S. military. Things are so bad for the military that they are begging discharged anti-vaxx dissidents to rejoin and looking to enlist illegals. Kenaz Filan declared his neutrality in the Israel/Hamas conflict here. But his is a small minority view; it is blackpilling that so few of majority Americans approach politics with a “cui bono?” mentality.

Of course globohomo likes and promotes Middle Eastern conflict which maintains dollar hegemony from the petrodollar system; it needs Middle Eastern conflict using Israel as leverage like it does with Taiwan/China, India/Pakistan and Ukraine/Russia. The petrodollar system is about dominance, control, and greed, as the U.S. has all the resources it needs to maintain an autarky but instead set out to conquer the world. And it seems natural for the Western world to focus on Jews given Paul’s strategy to turn gentiles into noahides by incorporating the Old Testament as a cornerstone of Christian belief.

The benefits of isolationism

The intensity and sophistication of the propaganda war waged against the hearts and minds of America is fifth-generational warfare in action. It wasn’t so long ago that people generally understood that intervention worldwide was a huge net negative for themselves and a huge net positive for tiny, sinister oligarchical powers. 90% of Americans were against entry into both World War 1 and World War 2 prior to globohomo engineering it’s entry via the power of propaganda and false flag attacks. Heroes like Charles August Lindbergh and his son’s American First Committee11 represented this pro-America isolationist position, but it’s been a very long time since such ideas have been allowed to flourish in mainstream discourse. This shows how very far the West has fallen.

Given the way things are playing out demographically and technologically – as Europe will turn Islamic due to demographic trends within another couple generations – those in the West may ultimately be faced with being second-class dhimmis to a worldwide, low IQ Islamic caliphate (after which Christians will eventually be wiped out, just as they have been all but wiped out in the Middle East) or alternatively being noahides to globohomo central bank Rothschild control. These are both poor futures unless they reassert their own ethnic and religious identities and are proud to pursue their interests without resorting to proxy battles: and those interests are served by an end to imperium.

Ultimately, everyone pursues their own personal and group interests and anyone who pretends to be altruistic is either deeply confused/brainwashed or lying, either to themselves or to you. Focus on what is good for those you care about without falling for psychological operations by other groups, who are merely trying to con you for their own benefit. This is Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction. Do you want to send your hard-earned money for endless foreign wars, paid for by future generations, your taxes and inflation, where $95 billion was just authorized by the Senate yet again to so-called “fund” Ukraine, Israel and Gaza?12 Do you want yourself or your friends or relatives to fight and die to advance the central bank owner goals half a world away? Do you favor a future of non-white Islamic domination? If not, step back and think things through to try to advance your own interests. American interests are best served by an end to American worldwide hegemony as Team America: World Police and a return to autarky isolationism. Stop invading and inviting the world; stop funding the world. End it all. This would certainly have a devastating impact on the value of the U.S. dollar and to the American quality of life which would no longer be able to export inflation or print fiat loldollars to infinity, but no matter; it should be done and it is the morally correct thing to do. There was never a reason to conquer the world other than unquenchable Faustian greed at the expense of the Golden Rule.

This doesn’t mean this line of argument will win out in the political realm; it very likely won’t as this world is arguably controlled by a malevolent Demiruge. But no matter; the argument stands on its own merits for your weighing. Maybe it sucks and I’m wrong. Think for yourself.

Thanks for reading.

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1 As CJ Hopkins stated, “This is Day 202 of Israel’s war on Hamas, or its liquidation of Gaza, depending on your perspective. I haven’t said too much about it publicly. I said a few things about it when it began. That didn’t go well. No one was listening. The propaganda from both sides was already deafening. I described the Hamas attack as mass murder. My pro-Palestinian readers didn’t like that. I described Israel as a typical mass-murdering nation-state, no different than the United States of America, Germany, France, Spain, The Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the British empire, the Ottoman empire, the Holy Roman Empire, or any other mass-murdering nation-state or empire. My pro-Israeli readers didn’t like that. Neither side wanted to hear about history. The history of asymmetric warfare, or terrorism, depending on your perspective. The history of nation-states and empires. They wanted to hear a story about monsters. About the monsters on the other side.”

2 Although both are servants of the Western intelligence apparatus which created them: Israel created Hamas (also see here) and the Mullahs were installed in Iran. As Guido Preparata has stated, “First they topple Mossadegh (1953), then they handle Iran to Khomeini (1979), much like the Brits handed Russia to the Bolsheviks; it’s a game. Persians in [the west] steeped in conspiratorial literature [will] tell you modern Iran is entirely ruled by the US within these Orwellian configurations.” Rurik Skywalker goes into some of the details about Iran here.

3 Hamas deliberately operates out of civilian areas, especially hospitals and schools. Their command centers are underneath hospitals (including released drone footage of tunnels under al-Shifa hospital) and they launch rockets from within or next to these locations.

4 Esoteric Christianity in the form of gnosticism has a decidedly pessimistic take on human nature, both in terms of believing this world was created and is maintained by a malevolent demiurge as well as separated human souls into three categories: hylics/materialists, psychics, and pneumatics depending on the level of development of their soul. Most people are hylics, much fewer are psychics, and very few are pneumatics. Each type of development has a different relationship with religion and with government and society, and applying one type to another just doesn’t work.

5 Which they don’t care about, but they do care about not unnecessarily inflaming the much larger Islamic world for strategic reasons, plus continued U.S. support is contingent on minimizing those casualties.

6 For whatever reason globohomo forced Israel (along with Australia) to be the most force-COVID vaxxed country in the world.

7 During the critical period leading up to the 1965 Immigration Act that transformed the demographic reality of America, for example, per MacDonald, “Anti-restrictionist attitudes were held by the vast majority of the organized Jewish community—‘the entire body of religious opinion and lay opinion within the Jewish group, religiously speaking, from the extreme right and extreme left,’ in the words of Judge Simon Rifkind who testified in Congress representing a long list of national and local Jewish groups in 1948. Cofnas advocates the ‘default hypothesis’ that because of their intellectual prowess, Jews have always been highly overrepresented on both sides of various issues. This was certainly not true in the case of immigration during the critical period up to 1965 when the national origins provisions of the 1924 and 1952 laws were overturned—and long thereafter. I have never found any Jewish organization or prominent Jews leading the forces favoring the 1924 and 1952 laws—or those opposed to the 1965 law at the time it was enacted. Joyce (2021) shows the continuing powerful role of Jews in pro-immigration activism in the contemporary U.S., and, as noted above, there is substantial Jewish consensus on immigration into the present.”

8 Even tepidly pro-white congressman Steve King was hounded out of office by the media for no reason in 2021.

9 Although some, like the Indians and Chinese, adapt intersectionality cynically to the extent it promotes their group interests.

10 Both Islam and Judaism are religions which regulate to minute detail every aspect of a believer’s life with their respective Sharia and Halakhah systems.   Both traditions contain detailed legal and ethical instructions for both religious and social life.  Unlike Christianity, which relies on councils or synods to rule on doctrine, ethics and behavior, the laws and beliefs in Islam and Judaism are derived through a process of debate. In fact the two religions are so close in terms of their structure that the tenth-century rabbinic leader Saadia Gaon unselfconsciously referred to Jewish law as shar’ia, the prayer leader in a synagogue as an imam and the direction Jews faced when praying as qibla.  Both religions emphasize correct action (orthopractic belief) versus the Christian focus on prayer/repentance for salvation and an emphasis on correct belief (orthodoxy).   Per Israel Shahak, Jews view Christianity as idolatrous but not Islam.

11 This is why Trump the Peaceful used the term America First.

12 I write so-called because the vast majority of those funds will be funneled through Ukraine, Israel and Gaza back into the hands of the transnational security elite, as Julian Assange said so eloquently when describing the forever-war in Afghanistan:

This is a post about the Praetorian Guard in Rome and how they became kingmakers, the makers and breakers of emperors. This is important because the modern day Praetorians, the makers and breakers of presidents, the enforcers of globohomo dictates worldwide and the initiators of wars, are the transnational security elite. Therefore to see how the Guard evolved over time, the challenges it faced and how it was eventually disbanded sheds light on our modern kingmaker institutions, the CIA and FBI, which is currently assisting with globohomo tactics to unlawfully imprison Donald Trump, a topic I previously covered last July here.

As I have written about previously in my discussions of Lee Kuan Yew and Pyotr Stolypin, there are two basic forms of governance:

1. a so-called “democracy” or “republic” which is in actuality an oligarchy (because those who control the propaganda organs control the population), where the top and the bottom of society ally against the middle class1, ultimately resulting in poverty for all but the upper elites; or
2. a dictatorship where one man at the very top allies with the middle class against the upper class oligarchy and bottom, resulting in a relative egalitarianism so long as leadership is strong and stable.2

By the time of Julius Caesar, Rome’s oligarchy in the guise of a “republic” had become decadent and corrupt and the nation was spiraling into the abyss, having lost its virtues in the opulence and wealth gained after defeating Carthage in the Punic Wars.3 Rome was lucky to have a man come in and accept responsibility for the affairs of the state, as the alternative was simply dissolution. One man being responsible for the direction of a nation makes that man acutely sensitive toward maintaining stability and prosperity, otherwise his head will be on the line. The downside of one-man-rule is a conspiracy can kill him (oligarchy is much more resilient against murder or overthrow), along with uncertainties around succession – who will become the next emperor and what kind of emperor would he be, good or bad, weak or strong?

We think of Roman emperors as almost God-like deities who had total power in their hands: the ability to take life at a whim, the ability to order war, to have sex with anyone’s wives or engage in orgies, to make and change laws however they wished.

In reality, though, emperors were enormously restricted by politics. They were mortal and there was danger to their lives lurking around every corner, with the Sword of Damocles hanging by a hair over their heads. Let’s recount that story:

As Cicero tells it, [King Dionysius II of Syracuse]’s dissatisfaction came to a head one day after a court flatterer named Damocles showered him with compliments and remarked how blissful his life must be. “Since this life delights you,” an annoyed Dionysius replied, “do you wish to taste it yourself and make a trial of my good fortune?” When Damocles agreed, Dionysius seated him on a golden couch and ordered a host of servants to wait on him. He was treated to succulent cuts of meat and lavished with scented perfumes and ointments.

Damocles couldn’t believe his luck, but just as he was starting to enjoy the life of a king, he noticed that Dionysius had also hung a razor-sharp sword from the ceiling. It was positioned over Damocles’ head, suspended only by a single strand of horsehair. From then on, the courtier’s fear for his life made it impossible for him to savor the opulence of the feast or enjoy the servants. After casting several nervous glances at the blade dangling above him, he asked to be excused, saying he no longer wished to be so fortunate.

For Cicero, the tale of Dionysius and Damocles represented the idea that those in power always labor under the specter of anxiety and death, and that “there can be no happiness for one who is under constant apprehensions.” The parable later became a common motif in medieval literature, and the phrase “sword of Damocles” is now commonly used as a catchall term to describe a looming danger. Likewise, the saying “hanging by a thread” has become shorthand for a fraught or precarious situation.

Danger could arise from usurpers, from wives murdering the line of succession or even their husband to set up their own children as future emperors, and from the Praetorian Guard, who were supposed to protect the life of the emperor but who grew into a kingmaker role. Indeed, being emperor was such a dangerous job (both to themselves and to their family members, such as Livia’s systematic removal of Augustus’ heirs until her own son, Tiberius, was the prime candidate), prone to treachery (Claudius being poisoned by his wife Agrippina) and overthrow, that out of almost 60 imperial reigns regarded as legitimate there was around thirty overthrows and 105 usurpations, an insanely high number. Emperors and their families were at such high risk that Julian’s prefect Salutius thought the position was cursed and turned it down when offered it, as did others at various points in Roman history such as Verginius Rufus and Triarius Maternus Lascivius (who lost his clothes trying to get away from the soldiers trying to force him to accept). It is more surprising, then, that the position was still so desperately coveted by so many, despite how few lived out their natural lives as emperor. Hope, pride, ambition and glory spring eternal, I guess. And if you become emperor, even for a moment, you enter the history books.

This post is about the relationship between the Praetorian Guard and the office it was supposed to protect and how those roles evolved over time. Why is it relevant? Because as much as we love the concept of separation of powers in America, it is a lie, and power always rests somewhere, whether overt or covert. What is this power? What Carl Schmitt referred to with the excellent expression, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception“. After all, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

In America’s case power rests primarily with the central bank owners who own the Federal Reserve (which prints money out of thin air and then lends it at interest to the government), but secondarily with the transnational security elite. These security elites are represented domestically by the FBI and CIA, along with the “five eyes” of Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Canada who, as one example, routinely spy on each other’s citizens to get around domestic spying laws. These organizations can make or break any president, senator or congressman — as Chuck Schumer said, “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you”. Examples include likely having a role in assassinating Kennedy; unjustly taking down Nixon (on a spying allegation that has been dwarfed by Obama’s intense and comprehensive spying operation on his political opposition); appointing former CIA director George H.W. Bush as president and extending their loyalty to his idiot, arrogant neocon man-child son; and stymying the presidency of Trump in a dozen different ways. Look how Speaker Johnson was just skin-suited, or at how these organizations used lawfare to bankrupt Alex Jones. The CIA and FBI (and to a lesser extent the NSA and DOJ) are the modern day Praetorian Guard, the kingmakers behind the scenes.

Now, I have discussed the tactics of these transnational security elites previously – see here if you want to read the grisly details – but seeing these same types of people use and abuse their power during the heyday of Rome reinforces the concept that ultimate power will always rest somewhere, and the best thing one can hope for is to tie responsibility to power. In other words, everyone should know who is actually in control so they can be blamed if things go wrong, as opposed to getting mad at figureheads, parties or institutions that don’t actually have real power like we do with the figurehead puppet politicians of the central bank owners.

Let’s go through the history of the Praetorian Guard, how they operated, and why they were so feared. Much of the below information is from Guy de la Bedoyere’s excellent and readable “Praetorian: The Rise and Fall of Rome’s Imperial Bodyguard”.

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The creation of the guard

During the Roman Republic there was no formal Praetorian Guard. Instead, there were generic soldiers placed on details to guard their commanding officer. Julius Caesar did employ a body of 400 loyal German cavalry during the Gallic Wars which he habitually kept with him, but those foreign troops were not the Guard. In 44 BC he dismissed a bodyguard made-up of Spaniards, a moment of arrogant overconfidence that contributed to his unprotected assassination. Caesar was convinced that possession of a bodyguard was a sign of a man who lived constantly in fear of death, and he decided unwisely to rely on popular goodwill for protection. These events were portrayed in the wonderful TV series Rome, which I highly recommend.

During the civil war that followed between Octavian and Antony, Octavian’s bodyguard of ten thousand grew mutinous when Octavian suggested sending them to fight against Antony. Octavian had to back off, fast, and he told the soldiers they would only be needed for emergencies and promised them more money to calm down. Octavian learned an important lesson about a bodyguard of troops: they could be bought, but only under certain conditions, that their vanity needed flattering and that they needed organizing. Another time soldiers almost rioted and killed Octavian over a misunderstanding during a demonstration of games when he had no bodyguard, and another time when starving rioters in Rome stoned and almost murdered him. When Octavian finally secured supreme power in 31 BC, he vowed not to make the same mistake that Julius Caesar had made. This led to the creation of the Guard which would have to swear loyalty to Octavian personally, something that would later transfer to other emperors.

Octavian, re-styled as Augustus, created the Guard to control the Senate and coerce the Roman aristocracy on his behalf; he would never let himself be put in a situation where the Senate could conspire to assassinate him. He made the Guard permanent and set up the urban cohorts (a military city police force) as a kind of less-prestigious check on and rival to the praetorian’s power. There were not many plots against him, though, because Augustus’s supremacy was unquestioned and no one wanted to return to the chaos of the civil war years. The Guard did foil one plot by a group of senatorial conspirators led by one Fannius Caepio but they were found out and quickly executed. But it was a precarious balance as the emperor needed to have more prestige and influence than the Guard if he was to maintain control, something many future emperors lacked.

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Composition of the guard

Praetorians were named for a general’s tent or residence on campaign, the praetorium. The word was derived from the word praetor meaning ‘the man who goes before others.’ It was comprised of roughly 8,000-10,000 soldiers (but the numbers differed wildly depending on the era), much better pay (double that of normal legionaries)4 and its members served less time (16 years generally versus the 20 for normal soldiers), it was more prestigious than any of the other armed forces and located right outside Rome during the reign of Tiberius at a place called the Castra Praetoria. This location so close to the center of power served as an ever-looming and sinister influence on those seeking to hold office within Rome itself.

The Guard were sometimes depicted as privileged bullies as they possessed certain powers and immunities that others lacked: they could thrash a civilian without fear of redress and their court cases would be heard immediately before anyone else, as just two examples of their privilege.

The Guard was recruited from freeborn Italian Roman citizens aged from their mid-teens to as old as thirty-two, which would remain stable until 193 when Septimius Severus switched recruitment to deserving soldiers from any legion. Command of the Guard went to a man of the equestrian rank (second-grade aristocrats) called the praetorian prefect because if it went to a man of senatorial rank he would be much more likely to try to overthrow the emperor to seize power. Men of equestrian rank were not eligible to hold supreme power. This position of praetorian prefect was one of considerable power and influence to the point where the incumbent could play a dramatically important role in influencing Roman imperial rule, such as Sejanus under Tiberius who came extremely close to toppling the emperor (and his successor Marco may have murdered Tiberius), while Tigellinus under Nero and Perennis under Commodus wielded extraordinary control.

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Evolution of the Guard

After Augustus’s reign the Guard, like any institution, was gradually replaced by new generations that had no understanding or memory of life before its existence. They became enmeshed in their positions, comfortable in them, and then gradually came to feel entitled to them, especially as younger emperors who had less experience than those in the Guard came to the throne. We can see the same thing today in the U.S. civil service which has an extreme element of entitlement and hatred toward middle America which they see as threatening to their sinecure, as N.S. Lyons points out. Gibbon commented on the Guard:

Such formidable servants are always necessary, but often fatal to the throne of despotism. By thus introducing the Praetorian guards, as it were, into the palace and the senate, the emperors taught them to perceive their own strength, and the weakness of the civil government; to view the vices of their masters with familiar contempt, and to lay aside that reverential awe, which distance only, and mystery, can preserve toward an imaginary power. In the luxurious idleness of an opulent city, their pride was nourished by the sense of their irresistible weight; nor was it possible to conceal from them, that the person of the sovereign, the authority of the senate, the public treasure, and the seat of Empire, were all in their hands. To divert the Praetorian bands from these dangerous reflections the firmest and best established princes were obliged to mix blandishments with commands, rewards with punishments, to flatter their pride, indulge their pleasures, connive at their irregularities, and to purchase their precarious faith by a liberal donative; which, since the elevation of Claudius, was exacted as a legal claim, on the accession of every new emperor.

On the topic of Claudius, the Guard elevated him to emperor after they helped a number of disaffected senators assassinate Caligula because they desperately needed someone, anyone to be emperor, without which the Guard would no longer have a secure position and be entitled to status and pay. Claudius was from the correct bloodline despite being a semi-invalid. Claudius reluctantly offered the praetorians a remarkable sum of money which marked the first – but not the last – dubious occasion where outright bribery was used to secure the Guards’ loyalty.

Per Bedoyere, the power that the Guard came to wield to raise or destroy emperors was immense:

The Guard’s ambitions, and those of its prefects, expanded to fill the voids left by inadequate or vulnerable rulers. Thus, Tiberius’ self-imposed exile to Capri made it possible for the praetorian prefect Sejanus to try to become emperor himself. The disastrous reign of Caligula in 37-41 led to his assassination to the Guard appointing its own emperor in the form of Claudius. The loss of the Guard’s support played a key part in Nero giving up and committing suicide in 68. During the civil war of 68-9 the Guard played crucial roles in the fight between the rivals for the Empire. In the second century AD the succession of strong and effective rulers meant that from 98 until 180 the Guard rarely appears in ancient sources. The dereliction of the reign of Commodus (180-92) brought the Guard back to the fore once more and it was the behavior of the praetorians that led to the murder of Pertinax and the brief and tawdry reign of Didius Julianus. In volatile and unsettled times the Guard acted as catalysts and opportunists, and their prefects as major players, for good or ill.

The role of the Guard evolved over time too. Originally it was to protect the life of the emperor, but then it was increasingly used to carry out sensitive tasks, perform tax collections, law enforcement, assassinations of the emperor’s enemies (such as Tiberius having the Guard murder Augustus’s last grandson by Agrippa, Agrippa Postumus), and serve as administrators across the Empire. And like most institutions, they gradually came to embody the inverse of what their original function was; i.e. they could kill and overthrow emperors on a whim. That being said, the Guard remainder symbiotically attached to the position of emperor for without an emperor to “guard” there would be no guard, no high status and no pay. In much the same way that without constant “threats” to America the CIA and FBI would not have justification for their control and power, and continued funding – even though most or almost all of these so-called “threats” were created and propagated by these organizations in the first place.

One interesting anecdote of how the Guard was used was the story in 61 AD of Lucius Pedanius Secundus, the prefect of Rome, who was killed by one of his slaves. This story also highlights how strange and different Rome’s morals and ethics were compared to ours today:

The motive is not clear; the slave had either been denied his freedom after it had been agreed or had challenged his master for the affections of another male slave in the household. The traditional legal response to such a dramatic situation was to execute all the slaves on the grounds of collective guilt. This excited a popular protest, which degenerated into riots after the senate ordered that the law must take its course. Nero stood fast and ordered praetorians to line the route along which the condemned slaves were led.

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Corruption of the guard

Any man that ascended to the role of emperor became expected to give the Guard a massive donative. In search of a promised reward, they abandoned the reigning emperor Nero but only because Galba seemed a better financial prospect. When Galba failed to pay they turned on him too: “By 68 a very distinct pattern had formed. The praetorians had emerged as the single group of people whose support, or lack of, could make or break an emperor. Their headquarters, the Castra Praetoria, was turning into the place where emperors and senators went to seek support. Nevertheless, the end of Nero’s reign marked a new twist. This was the first time the praetorians had broken their oath to a living emperor….the revelation that the Guard’s loyalty was transferable was an uncomfortable discovery, firstly for Nero.”

In the second century AD a series of strong and competent emperors contributed to a period of stability where the Praetorians had no opportunity or perhaps wish to play a part in toppling or appointing emperors, and they spent much more time in the field fighting in the emperor’s various wars.5 But the death of Marcus Aurelius and the ascension of his weak and reckless son Commodus created a power vacuum into which the Guard was sucked into and the praetorian prefect Quintus Aemilius Laetus participated in a successful plot to kill him. In the space of five months they installed another emperor and then abandoned him with unseemly haste. The appalling spectacle is worth quoting at length:

On 28 March AD 193 the emperor Pertinax was murdered after a reign of just eighty-seven days. His efforts to rule Rome with integrity and order had been generally welcomed. The Praetorian Guard, Rome’s spoilt, privileged and elite imperial bodyguard was the most conspicuous exception. Pertinax had tried to instill meaningful discipline among the swaggering praetorians, who had become accustomed during the reign of Commodus to behaving as badly as they pleased, including hitting passers-by. To soften the impact of the new rules, Pertinax had promised the Guard 12,000 sestertii each, claiming he was matching what Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had paid them on their accession in 160….The praetorians, however, took exception to the idea they might return the favour by improving their behavior. After all, they were aware that Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had actually paid 20,000 sestertii to their predecessors and that Pertinax had possibly only ever paid half of what he had offered. The praetorians killed Pertinax but, terrified of the consequences of what they had done, they dashed back to their camp, the Castra Praetoria, and locked the gates.

Strangely, everything quieted down and the praetorians realized no one had come after them. Fully aware now that they were the ones who were really in charge, they posted a notice at the Castra Praetoria offering the Roman Empire for sale….

The praetorians capitalized on the fact that no one could hope to be emperor without their backing. Didius Julianus and Flavius Sulpicianus, each desperate for supreme power, started making rival cash offers to the Guard. The soldiers enthusiastically threw themselves into the auction, running across the camp between the candidates to tell each how much he would have to raise his bid by. Sulpicianus was about to win with an offer of 20,000 sestertii per praetorian when Julianus seized the day with a reckless counter bid of 25,000. Julianus added added for good measure the warning that Sulpicianus might seek revenge for the death of Pertinax and also that he, Julianus, would restore all the freedoms the praetorians had enjoyed under Commodus. So delighted were the praetorians by the new offer they promptly declared Julianus to be the new emperor.

This event was so extraordinary, tawdry and demeaning that even now it seems barely credible that the Roman Empire could have stooped so low. Herodian described it as a decisive turning point, the moment when soldiers lost any respect for the emperors and which contributed to so much of the disorder that was to follow in the years to come. The Praetorian Guard had brazenly created an emperor purely on the promise of a huge cash handout, consummately and nakedly abusing their position and power. Julianus lasted even less time than Pertinax, having injudiciously offered far more money than he could afford. He was executed on the orders of the senate just sixty-six days after he was made emperor.

What a morbid but funny story.

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The Guard’s downfall

The downfall of the Guard came about when they backed the wrong horse in the civil war between Constantine and Maxentius. This culminated in the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, which was also the impetus for Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Constantine’s victory signaled the final conquest of the upstart religion over the Hellenic world, with a brief but doomed attempt by Julian the Apostate to reverse it which I covered previously here.

After Constantine’s victory he disbanded the Guard permanently and dismantled the Castra Praetoria. This did not mean that Constantine did not need a bodyguard, he did, but the Guard had become a liability, undermining the emperor and creating a lot of instability. “In an era when the emperor needed to be able to move with exceptional rapidity around his fragmenting empire and deal with remote rebellions or frontier incursions, an armed bodyguard with a fortified base in Rome was a colossal liability.” Constantine instead created a mounted palace bodyguard, much smaller in number and answerable directly to the emperor instead of to a prefect, which drastically reduced the risks inherent in having a bodyguard – but also removed much of the power and prestige associated with the position.

Everything has an end and just as the Guard eventually met its own end at the twilight of the Hellenist era and the emergence of the Christian era, our transnational security elite and the unelected civil service will also have their own end down the road, in whatever surprising, circuitous and perhaps tortured direction it may take; perhaps it will take the beginning of a new era, with new and strange values, before it meets its own end.6 After all, the Guard lasted for more than three hundred years through long periods of shocking corruption and decadence — and as we are seeing now, the unelected civil service is burrowing in like a tic on their entrenched positions and dramatically expanding their power and spying apparatus.

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1 At its best, ancient Greece or early America which allowed individual liberty to flourish. At its worst, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.

2 At its best, Lee Kuan Yew and Augustus. There are many historical examples of poor dictators due to corruption, weakness, and militant aggression.

3 A note stressed by the historian Sallust, which will be discussed in a future post.

4 Interestingly, soldiers did not receive their pay until they were discharged, less deductions for equipment. This may explain the added attraction of accession donatives paid by new emperors to praetorians. Additionally soldiers, including praetorians, were not allowed to marry during their service (as it would decrease their willingness to fight) although many had unofficial wives.

5 Given the Guard existed to protect the emperor, when the emperor was leading a campaign it makes sense that they also participated in those campaigns.

6 The way trends are going that would likely be the ascension of Islam in the West.

Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles. – Ezra Pound

In the 2022 Brazil presidential election Brazil’s version of the deep state successfully rigged the election against popular populist Bolsonaro, running the same strategy that they had deployed against Trump in America. Protesters had their funds stolen from their bank accounts and they were held down and forcibly COVID vaccinated against their will and then jailed. Lula, the globohomo candidate, immediately announced that Brazil would begin de-dollarization efforts. Lawfare efforts commenced against Bolsonaro and he fled the country.

During the 2022 Canadian Freedom Convoy protests against COVID vaccine mandates, Justin Trudeau and one of his top ministers announced that they would steal the funds out of the bank accounts of the protesters. The next day, chagrined, they reversed themselves – they had received a reprimand from above; it was not yet time to roll it out in Canada. Meanwhile, all new trucks by 2025 will have remote kill-switches installed in them, preventing such protests from fomenting in the future.

In 2022 Pakistan’s National Assembly and Supreme Court ousted populist leader Imran Khan and lawfare efforts were then initiated to imprison him. Khan was ousted because he was neutral in the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

In 2022 Romania arrested populist clown-figure Andrew Tate because Tate was upsetting globohomo with his pro-masculinity takes. Romania had little to no interest in investigating or imprisoning Tate but did so on orders from above.

In 2020-2021 the CIA attempted to overthrow Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, repeating what they accomplished against a democratically elected leader in Ukraine, which was thwarted.

In mid-2023 Russian nationalist Igor Strelkov and many others were arrested and thrown in prison by authorities with little to no justification offered during the ongoing globohomo-sponsored Ukraine war.

I could go on as these are just a handful of examples. These events are viewed as disparate events by most people, but I see them as a connected conspiracy, orchestrated from the owners of the world central banks who use the political actors of their nation-state subjects to crush populism wherever it is found.

Look, all one has to do is observe the worldwide coordinated efforts during COVID to see how global this monster is. Every country in the world worked in lockstep on economic shutdowns and forced untested, deadly vaccinations, including the so-called independent states of China, Russia, Iran, Brazil, Saudi etc. Only Africa was exempt from these forced measures and Sweden feebly resisted to a very limited extent. Dissenters worldwide to this process were banned from the public realm, lost their jobs or worse. Of course the creator of the PCR test, the gold standard of COVID testing, believed the PCR test was wildly inappropriate for testing for COVID (and he curiously died right before the start of COVID), but this was seen as a benefit by globohomo because they could get any result they wanted from the tests depending on the number of cycles they used for amplification (amplifying tests more than 25x would come back positive for anything, and there are reports COVID tests were amplified at varying rates over time but as high as 40x) — in other words, globohomo could create surges of COVID waves at their will depending on political needs.

See this great post by Iain Davis where he breaks the argument down further:

All governments in all major economies are avid enthusiasts of SDGs, biosecurity, digitalisation, tokenisation, the censorship of “disinformation,” CBDC (digital money), population surveillance and, most crucially, global governance under the auspices of the United Nations (UN)….This suggests oligarch control external of international relations and conflicts. There is evidence of supranational sovereignty and political authority being exercised, right now, by a global network that operates beyond the reach of national governments”…

Quite evidently, there is very real and bitter conflict between nations and it is causing immense suffering. In fact, one of our chief concerns is that the transition to a MWO will cause significantly more suffering.

What we are saying is that there is no disagreement on the pillars from any quarter. But this is no claim that national governments are “all in it together.” On the contrary, the fact that there is both conflict and, at the same time, global agreement on the pillars, suggests a “geopolitical reality” that no member of the multipolar fan club seemingly wants to discuss.

Agreement on the pillars does not suggest all national governments are of one, single hive mind. It suggests that governments do not control the global governance system. They are subject to it, just like the rest of us. The best they can achieve is “partner” status. And they are not senior partners.

The pillars did not originate with national governments. The pillars were mapped out by public-private globalist think tanks and international organisations that serve the interests of oligarchs.

The cabal structure is represented as follows from here:

The BIS is the coordinating entity of the world central banks and is based in Basil, Switzerland. It is not subject to the laws of Switzerland and has its own police force. The BIS itself is owned by a very small number of families although the exact details are of course closely guarded and not released for public consumption. See this link which explains how most of the layers above the Policy Subject level are exempted from paying taxes. In other words, this system is a worldwide parasitical system that extracts wealth from the public for its own consumption.

The private owners of the world central banks are seemingly animated by a malevolent Demiurgic spirit which seeks a total inversion of human values and quite possibly an end to humanity itself, as Tree of Woe points out here. While they may not be literally inspired by an actual Demon, their actions are indistinguishable from it.

As Ezra Pound said, “Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.” The central banks of the world print funds out of thin air and then loan those funds to governments at interest. If you think U.S. debt is bad now, look at what is being projected by the Treasury:

Debt held by the public is a measure of all federal debt that the federal government owes to those outside of the federal government. It includes debt held by individuals, businesses, banks, insurance companies, state and local governments, pension funds, mutual funds, foreign governments, foreign businesses and individuals, and the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. An increase in government borrowing reduces the amount of money available to other borrowers, putting upward pressure on interest rates and reducing private investment.

I had previously posted a representation of this neoliberal feudal structure as follows:

One of the last things that Julian Assange had tweeted was a subset of this structure before he was silenced. I previously covered Assange’s story here.

Many of you reading this are well educated; most have spent a lot of time following political developments. Why do so few know about this structure even though it is both hierarchical and simple to understand? The answer is they make every attempt to conceal it from the public; even the far right basically just focuses on the World Economic Forum or the Federal Reserve or Jews (the relationship between the Jewish people and the central bank owners I covered previously here). The propaganda outlets would never discuss the actual structure of the world, nor academics or anyone who receives benefits from this system. As the Rothschild firm of London wrote to associates in New York, 1863:

“The few who understand the system will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favours that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.”

A system designed like this must stay in the shadows and must keep the world’s population focused on distractions. It is more akin to a parasite on a host than anything else. It is a closed feedback system: it prints unlimited money out of thin air via their privately owned central banks then it feeds the media, academic, intelligence community and political systems which then push values and laws that increase the power of the central banks further and impoverish the general population via increased crime, illegal immigration, etc.  It is a closed system so the ability to impact it from the outside is very low (the limited extent it can influence the system is finding ways to decrease the system’s legitimacy, such as via the Canadian trucker protest during COVID), and the #1 priority of the system is to oppress political threats to its continued propagation – hence, it crushes, viciously, any organized opposition.  It is basically like the mafia.  And this is very dispiriting for those outside the system who want to have an impact: dissident energies and funds are quite limited without any institutional or foreign support, and when this closed system simply ignores them and doubles down on egalitarianism and open borders the energies of dissidents get depressed and then dissolve…

With that said they are few in number and we are many; hence populism is what the system is most afraid of, because if enough people wake up to how this worked they would be furious and overthrow it. This is why free speech is de-facto banned and any attempts at organizing are immediately infiltrated with federal provocateurs.

Now, this is a train with no brakes: every system carries momentum within it, and if a system is not striving toward something then it could easily break up amidst squabbling and lack of control. This is what European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde means when she says CBDCs are required or else they will lose control (even this Substack is tiny evidence of populist attacks on their control; people are slowly, ever so slowly, waking up): they need to push forward with instituting total, permanent control over the masses via a slave CBDC system or their criminal enterprise could fall apart. They need to further weaken and destroy the host (even though a dead host could kill the parasite) because not doing so entails certain destruction. This is why the EU wants to import 75 million more illegal migrants in furtherance of the Kalergi plan.

As part of this strategy the central bank owners could issue a transition from a unipolar to a multi-polar world as is currently being publicly hinted at in a number of ways and as argued by bloggers like The Dissident Writer with a surface level analysis here, but such a transition would not change the structure of the above hierarchy, especially the upper layers and hence it is false and a lie, even if it ends up in dramatically lowering U.S. quality of living by BRICS de-dollarizing and shifting off the petrodollar system. The negative inflationary effects of unlimited monetary printing pushing more and more people into poverty was recently covered by Theodore Atkinson here; it will get much worse.

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How did this system arise?

This system originally arose due to carveouts which gave Jewish families the exclusive right to money lend to the masses during the European Middle Ages; see this post and the second half of this post for details on this process. A small, highly successful sub-set came to understand how money is the primary driver for most people and that by manipulating the money supply one could manipulate human behavior for their own ends. There was no competition; no one else understood what money really represented at its core, and it was not the ability to trade, consume or wage war but the ability to shape belief. It wasn’t usually done as crudely as direct bribery; rather, money was printed out of thin air via the Bank of England (established in 1694) and then funneled to favored causes and organizations that would increase its power and destroy their enemies. As Mayer Amschel Rothschild famously stated, ″Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who establishes its laws.″ His lovely wife also supposedly said, “If my sons did not want wars, there would be none.”

There has been a flat zero significant1 opposition to this system since the end of World War 2 where Germany was set up for failure by the world’s financial forces. Before that globohomo conquered America in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve and conquered Russia by overthrowing the Tsar and brutally murdering him and his entire family. China has been owned by globohomo for a long time and their project concluded with the country’s induction into the WTO with US patronage, while Iran has always been a globohomo plaything, first by toppling Mossadegh (1953) and then by handing Iran to Khomeini (1979) who was living in Britain before the handover, much as the British handed Russia to the Bolsheviks (and Lenin was also living in the West beforehand). Rurik Skywalker touches on some of these ideas about Iran in his recent post here.

Again, there was not significant competition because the Tsar, kings and emperors were operating on a different, lower plane; they saw the use of money incorrectly for tapping its full potential. These kings pursued a personal power maximization strategy, risking their lives and thrones jostling in battles against other kings for territorial changes to improve their reputations. But they were always controlled by the funding that they relied on, and by controlling the money supply the central bank owners could make or break kings (the latter by funding their opposition2) while setting the incentives in place for societal changes as a whole. They had no need to put their own necks on the line or to be identified as the source of power to the public. The central bank owners were five steps ahead and their vision so much greater.

The understanding of the globohomo structure is critical to understanding the Russia/Ukraine war from the proper perspective. It iseasy otherwise to get fooled by governmental, media or alternative (usually CIA backed) propaganda like from Larry Johnson, Scott Ritter or otherwise, or by bloggers like Simplicius. Both Russia and Ukraine are mere “Policy Enforcers” of this system and both are beholden to the forces at the layers above them.

This is a big reason why both garden-variety civic nationalism and far-right white nationalism is a dead end: putting aside that the West is rapidly turning brown and black and that the Germans who elected the Nazis had a 98% white country (i.e. it was an easy Schelling point at the time), and that the white world population has shrunk from 25% of the world population in 1900 to 6.5% today, it doesn’t understand that their globohomo opposition suppresses nationalism everywhere, therefore resistance to it needs to take place on a global basis from a position of populism and nationalism everywhere. Everyone in the world other than the tiny number of central bank owning families and their underlings is a slave to this system, therefore everyone has an incentive to upend it. Even if the end goal is nationalism, it cannot be accomplished while this global system is in force. A focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. is a distraction given the scope of the problem, except perhaps to understand the complicated relationship between the central bankers and the Jewish people as a whole. Indeed, encouraging the populations of the world to fight amongst each other, rooted in the egalitarian ratchet effect, is one of globohomo’s chief methods of control to keep people from discovering their ongoing theft. Any objective of self-sovereignty must begin with the identification of this system as it structurally exists and then fought locally and worldwide with the conviction that globohomo’s national “leaders” are mere powerless figureheads for global forces. In other words, the North Star when viewing “new political or social developments” should be with the structure and motivations of the world’s central bank owners in mind. And as OGRE points out, the more knowledge of truth spreads the weaker globohomo becomes.

Thanks for reading.

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1 Qaddafi in Libya and Saddam in Iraq wanted to get off this system but were destroyed quite rapidly in response.

2 According to Professor Stuart Crane as told by Gary Allen, “If you will look back at every war in Europe during the Nineteenth Century, you will see that they always ended with the establishment of a ‘balance of power’.  With each reshuffling there was a balance of power in a new grouping around the House of Rothschild in England, France or Austria.  They grouped nations so that if any king got out of line a war would break out and the war would be decided by which way the financing went.  Researching the debt positions of the warring nations will usually indicate who was to be punished.”

This is a post about one of the best and most life-affirming bands in the modern era, ABBA.1

This is a strange topic for a post. Shouldn’t I be discussing how terrible politics is and always will be, with the demonic central bank owners endlessly fooling hordes of eye-glazed NPCs while a malevolent Demiurge tortures the god souls within us as the higher-level God is passive and peaced out? Well, sure, I’ll get back to that in future posts, don’t worry. And maybe reading about an old Swedish band isn’t your cup of tea. But I felt compelled to write this and you get what you pay for, right?

The specific impulse for this post is that I’ve been listening to ABBA for months on end, with some breaks here or there but to the point family members have told me it’s annoying and to turn it off.

So now it’s your turn.

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What is ABBA?

For those who don’t know ABBA, it was a Swedish band between the years 1972 and 1982. It were made up of two married couples, Benny Andersson with Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Björn Ulvaeus with Agnetha Fältskog; the band name was a palindrome of the first letters of their first names.

Benny and Bjorn wrote and composed the music together and Anni-Fred and Agnetha provided the vocals. Benny had the mark of genius, I think; he was previously part of the Hep Stars, the the most successful of contemporary 1960s Swedish pop groups performing in the English language. Bjorn did not have prior mainstream success although he was a member of a regional band, the Hootenanny Singers. From watching Bjorn’s interviews and reading about him he comes across as an odd and mercurial fellow, obsessed with the latest and greatest in technology: it seems like he pushed the band to adopt cutting edge composing, editing, clothing, and other techniques. These techniques were quite successful both in the music and in the music videos, which hold up very well to this day. Benny credited 90% of the sound of ABBA to the girls, which seems very generous. Both girls had great and distinctive voices although Agnetha’s voice had a higher range.

The band shot to fame as the winners of the 1974 Eurovision contest with the song Waterloo. This is widely considered the best Eurovision performance of all time. Here it is:

They were playing to a pre-recorded track but the vocals, which were excellent, were live.

At the 50th anniversary celebration of the Eurovision Song Contest it was chosen as the best song in the competition’s history.

They were expected to be a one-hit wonder but came out with hit after hit, mostly in the English language but with some Spanish versions thrown in as well. They ultimately released nine albums: Ring Ring (1973), Waterloo (1974), ABBA (1975), Arrival (1976), The Album (1977), Voulez-Vous (1979), Super Trouper (1980), The Visitors (1981) and, after they got back together, Voyage (2021). The band is among the best-selling music artists in history with record sales estimated to be between 150 million to 385 million sold worldwide. The group was ranked the 3rd best-selling singles artists in the United Kingdom with a total of 11.3 million singles sold by 2012.

To compose their music the songwriters would sit in a cabin for weeks or months on end composing songs on a piano, and then add other instruments and effects thereafter. Although they released many dozens of songs Andersson thought they had maybe ten or fifteen good songs between them they ever wrote; a man of admirably high standards:

They didn’t like to tour much. I counted 106 concerts over their entire ten year history, pretty minimal for a worldwide sensation. Instead they preferred the process of music creation. Anni-Fred and Agnetha were excellent singers and they both looked sexy in the music videos released.

Some of their most famous songs include the following (links to the songs with music videos or ABBA performances where applicable): Honey Honey, Thank You for the Music (see below), ”Money, Money, Money”, Mamma Mia, Chiquitita, Dancing Queen, Lay All Your Love on Me, Super Trooper, “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”, The Name of the Game, Voulez-Vous (see below), Under Attack, One of Us, S.O.S., Does Your Mother Know?, Our Last Summer, Slipping Through My Fingers, The Winner Takes It All (see below), Take a Chance on Me, I Have a Dream, Fernando, “Andante, Andante”, Angel Eyes, among others.

Even though I listen to most of these regularly, the one I end up playing on repeat is Voulez-Vous, a little known song that received scant attention when it was released. It’s wild Dionysian energies are deeply attractive to my subconscious as the energies I project in real life are highly rigid and Apollonian, to borrow the terms from Nietzsche.

Lyric video:

Live:

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What happened to the band?

Eventually both couples divorced due to the fame they received, declining ratings and perhaps other reasons. “The Winner Takes It All” (1980), one of ABBA’s best of their later songs, and “One of Us” (1981), dealt with the painful experience of separating from a long-term partner. Ulvaeus said that when he gave the lyrics to the former to Fältskog to read “a tear or two welled up in her eyes. Because the words really affected her.”

The above song, along with Thank you for the Music, highlights the incredible range and power of her voice:

After they divorced and the band disbanded none of its members had major solo success on their own.

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The musical

Long after Abba disbanded Benny and Bjorn worked to bring Mamma Mia to Broadway. They were initially unenthused when pitched the idea but were eventually won over. The musical opened in the West End at the Prince Edward Theatre in 1999 and on Broadway in 2001. As of now it is the ninth longest-running Broadway show and the longest-running jukebox musical in Broadway history.

The plot of Mamma Mia is quite degenerate – a fatherless daughter about to get married in Greece discovers her aged mother is a blown out slut who slept condomless with three guys in a short period of time and any of them could be her father. She invites all three of them to her wedding and they come, and the film is about discovering who the father is as the wedding approaches as all three men reconnect with the mother. There’s other non-traditional elements including homosexuality and other such things one may notice. The plot is fun as long as you can stomach such degeneracy, but really that’s everywhere these days and the plot is mostly there just to serve as a driver for ABBA songs.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve spent hours trawling through various Youtube videos to find the best performances of the musical. The curtain call from the 2023 Australia cast I thought was particularly strong:

Or closer up during an actual performance (not a media call):

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The movies

The success of the theater production eventually led to two movies, Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Here’s the Mamma Mia song from the first movie where the mother discovers her three former lovers are there, sung and performed well by Meryl Streep:

And here’s Voulez Vous, an excellent rendition:

Here’s some behind-the-scenes of the making of that scene if you have interest.

The sequel is a kind of mental trip; the story is nonsensical and barely strung together in order for the rest of ABBA’s best songs to be played. This 40-minute review explaining the sequel’s surrealism was entertaining.

The cast loved filming the movies so much that they would love to do another, although the cast is getting old (and Julie Waters has cancer) and they’ve gone through all of the good songs already. There are rumors of a third movie in the works.

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Recent activities

Recently there was a British TV show called Mamma Mia! I Have a Dream to find talent for the Broadway show, much like the 2007 BBC show Any Dream Will Do about finding talent to perform in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It wasn’t very good and it received mediocre reviews.

ABBA reformed recently for a new album and a high tech hologram concert production in a specially designed London theater called ABBA Voyage. For this production the band members were de-aged by Industrial Light and Magic, again pushing the limits of technology as the band members are all in their 70s. I would love to see it in person one day; apparently it’s coming to Las Vegas soon. Here’s the trailer for the London version:

Benny recently released an album where he plays some of his favorite songs on piano. Not many songs of the album are from ABBA but the following one was quite good:

Or see him play it live for an appreciate crowd here. Look how much joy he brings.

Meanwhile, Bjorn has spent time on Tiktok where brief clips of ABBA songs have been quite popularly set to whatever Tiktok users want to share. There’s some information on it here.

There’s also a fairly new trend of speeding up ABBA songs using a mode called “nightcore”. Some of the songs actually sound better sped up, for example here is Angel Eyes:

And then there’s a thousand covers of ABBA songs on Youtube. I’ve particularly enjoyed Francisco Parrino’s piano covers. Here is one:

There’s also reaction videos to ABBA songs. The below guy Shnootz has reacted to every single ABBA song on his channel. I liked his Voulez-Vous reaction:

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Why was ABBA so good?

ABBA’s music was so good, as far as I can tell, because of Bjorn’s technology focus and the girls’ attractiveness and wonderful singing voices, but ultimately the “X” factor (to the extent one can pinpoint one individually, when it was really a blending of their talents into something unique) was Benny’s life-affirming personality. Every video I’ve seen him in he exudes joy and happiness. Let’s look at Benny’s natal Sun degree, which 23 degrees Sagittarius, Weber interpretation:

23-24 deg Sagittarius

Cancer-Capricorn with sensitive Pisces added makes a damp-dark degree for the Leo/Sagittarius sector of the zodiac. Hopeful and cheerful, possible poisoning, early death, and other dangers, all shortening the life span. Protection is needed. May be forced to travel, perhaps as a homeless refugee. Has Sagittarius bravery and optimism – and Piscean love and compassion which helps for charitable deeds. Often musical, perhaps a muse, bringer of joy, or caretaker.

Now, I don’t know him personally so can’t speak to the full interpretation, but “forced to travel”, “hopeful and cheerful”, “bravery and optimism”, “love and compassion” and especially “musical, perhaps a muse, bringer of joy” seem to fit the guy very well.

Anyway thank you for coming on this strange journey of ABBA with me. I know it’s far off from most of my other posts, but exploring new avenues is a big part of what makes this Substack place fun.

There will be plenty of time for gloom and doom in future posts.

Thanks for reading (and here, listening!).

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1 Maybe Queen comes close, although I think ABBA has many more good songs.

This is a post about inceldom, specifically in the context of the eponymous novel by ARX-Han which you can find here. First I’ll discuss my reluctance to read and possibly review a novel about inceldom (which, to be clear, ARX-Hax had not asked for this review), then my reasons for doing so anyway. Then I will cover the plot of the novel with some select quotes so you can see the quality of the writing, which is high, then review its strengths and weaknesses as I see them. I try to avoid spoilers below but there is one or two things I point out that may be construed as such.

This isn’t a topic that I was very excited to revisit for a couple of reasons. First, I am not in a dating phase of my life and the struggles and lessons learned (in part) I’ve tried to impart in various posts about dating and male/female dynamics here, here and here. Why revisit the topic of dating from new perspectives when it doesn’t speak to my current experiences and when I felt pretty comfortable with the conclusions I have drawn? Second, I am increasingly doing a deep-dive into aspects of the esoteric tradition and inceldom is truly the apex of nihilism, and life is hard enough without wallowing in it. My hope is to find a worldview that works for me to re-enchant the world so the weight of material existence and globohomo control is not so heavy. My time is limited so focusing on a novel about incels is perhaps not the best use of it. Third, the topic felt outdated; not in the sense that incels don’t take up a major portion of the (mostly male) public in globohomo Hellworld 2024, but rather that they’ve semi-disappeared from the public light, walling themselves off on Reddit (r/foreveralone) or forums such as incels.is, looksmax.org, or plenty of others (it can actually be hard to join these communities; they moderate new users and screen out all but the most dedicated). The last incel terror attack I can think of was Alek Minassian in 2018 and, of course, the “Supreme Gentleman” Elliot Rogers in 2014; perhaps there have been more recent ones, but really not many and I think it signals that the copycat wave of such rage/spite induced attacks has dwindled.

Okay, so there were plenty of reasons to not read the book. But I ultimately picked it up anyway; why? Well, first ARX’s Substack writing is solid. I especially liked his posts detailing how difficult it is for an independent writer to develop reader interest; i.e. the skillset of marketing is a completely different skillset from that of writing, something that other wonderful writers like Guido Giacomo Preparata have also struggled with. And it’s not just a completely different skillset but one entirely stacked against the independent writer. You can see ARX’s two posts on this topic here where he offers two examples of indie writers who have achieved some degree of public recognition, Delicious Tacos and Mike Ma, and here where he argues that mainstream publishers spend money haphazardly without knowing what will be successful or not, and that they chase high status trends as much as profits (or more so). Writing about low status men from a neutral or empathetic perspective is declasse so such topics get no funding or support. Thus, even though my audience here is limited I wanted to read it in a show of solidarity and, if it was any good, to write a post about it and maybe it might interest a couple people to read it. Tiny little indie writers should support each other if they offer interesting and thought provoking work, should we not?

Second, I like to stagger my reading — I can’t read multiple books on the same topic or from a similar perspective, I like to go heavy-light-heavy-light on topics and style, and while most of what interests me is non-fiction, increasingly fiction has a place as well (such as Goethe’s Faust). Incel hit from a different and fictional angle versus most of the other stuff I’ve been reading, which is a plus. Third, perhaps there was still something for me to learn here — one can think they know a topic well but can still be surprised and learn new things; it’s the mark of a foolish man to think one knows everything there is to know about an issue. And lastly: I think it is important to read writers who write not for fame or fortune or attention, which is most, but because they feel compelled to write as a way of almost exorcising a Demon: the act of writing relieves the burden and the torment of carrying around the heaviness of a subjectively important idea. This is something Brett Andersen has experienced (you can see his Substack or check out his Youtube) and something that ARX has felt as well. It was philosopher Emil Cioran who stated,

“In my opinion, a book should be written without thinking of others. You shouldn’t write for anyone, only for yourself….Everything I’ve written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, suffocation.  It wasn’t from inspiration, as they say.  It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe.” He also stressed the importance of writing in accordance with temperament: “A writer mustn’t know things in depth.  If he speaks of something, he shouldn’t know everything about it, only the things that go with his temperament.  He should not be objective.  One can go into depth with a subject, but in a certain direction, not trying to cover the whole thing.  For a writer the university is death.”

Ernst Junger agreed with this, writing in his World War 2 journals, p. 96:

[Special insights] come from authentic intuition, which itself exists outside of time. This truck me in regards to On the Marble Cliffs, which was triggered by a dream in a single night. But after the flash of intuition, it can take me an entire year to work it out. That’s why I often jokingly say to my wife, “Pray to heaven that I don’t get an idea!” Because then you become the slave of your own idea, and that’s the worst kind of slavery. If a work has to attain a certain rank, it goes back to that initial flash of intuition; then the implementation either succeeds or fails, but in any case, it demands quite a long time.

Okay, so I picked up the book and read it. What was it actually about and how was it?

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The novel

Incel tells the first-person story of a twenty-two year old graduate student named “anon” who has never had sex and who plans to kill himself if he doesn’t get laid by his twenty-third birthday. His values are rooted deeply in the nihilism of the modern West, as Han explained here:

And so—the modern incel—“the quintessential subject of modernity,” is a young man who has searched for meaning but found it absent. If he is alive right now, he has lived through a late-USSR style collapse in nearly every possible dimension of meaning: religion (killed by science), state (killed by oligarchical financialization), community (killed by industrial capitalism), art (killed by homogenization), family (killed by the preceding three) and lastly, love (killed by inceldom).

Wealth does not count as a sufficient source of meaning.

In modernity, the only ritual of masculinity that remains for the young man is to have sex. In effect, it is the main remaining prerequisite for a successful transition into adulthood (reproduction is no longer required). If he is unable to achieve this, there is essentially nothing left that is socially prescribed for him apart from wealth accumulation. This dynamic exists against a background of intense atomization and loneliness that is already a feature of our urban societies.

Because the story is told through the first-person, there are elements introduced where anon’s narrative is unreliable and it later comes to haunt him on a number of occasions. His graduate studies are in evolutionary psychology and he autistically approaches every interaction with women like he’s playing a video game and not like he’s dealing with a human being. Input the right combination of statements and expressions, achieve the desired output of sex. He iterates and evolves his approaches, hitting on women everywhere he goes while still striking out and experiencing a lot of anger and frustration:

While studying her face over the course of this conversation, I also note the flash of discomfort that periodically darts across her eyes, mapping these movements onto a preset understanding. Even with the comparative disadvantage of my minimal intergender experience, it’s plainly evidence that the girl probably senses something wrong contained within the central parameters of my psyche. She is, of course, entirely correct in her analysis: not only is loneliness a profoundly aversive stimulus to members of the female race, it’s a defect that seems to produce a sort of audiovisual field that continuously dissipates from the pores of your skin. The paradox is that this acts like a positive feedback cycle – the repulsion exerted by this field of force is omnipresent and omnidirectional, further entrenching your own automization by amplifying the strength of your isolation. I try my best to mask this but do not always succeed. In order to connect with human beings, you must bury your pain so deeply that it becomes imperceptible to others. To face the world, you must show only strength.

And another:

I decide that Jason’s philosophy is indeed an accurate depiction of reality; if ever you find yourself deeply wanting someone, it means that you’ll never be desired in return. After thinking over his advice from the previous night, I’ve concluded that the cause of this dynamic is an extremely simple one. The strength of your desire is proportionate to your discrepancy in mate value: the higher her value relative to yours, the less likely the girl is to reciprocate your interest. A couple of hours after meeting Zoe I’m still crushing on her big time, and her silence contains the message of negation. It’s the amorphous, distributed intelligence of the universe and its hidden streams of causation, which, sensing your weakness, cohere into a singular negative intentionality that astrally projects a Big Black Cock into the domain of your daydreams, stalking you through the corridors of non-Euclidean space until it finds and slaps you across the cheek with a relentless, turgid velocity that terminates in your absolute submission to the void.

His tone reminded me to an extent of the bitterly truthful Red Pill Comics such as this one (others can be seen here):

Anon’s outlets including a few close friends, boxing, endless amounts of pornography and browsing depressive Reddit sites to hear other people wallow in their misery. Here’s an excerpt on this last part after a woman anon really likes ghosts him:

What I most like about the internet – well, what everyone likes about the internet, I suppose – is knowing that you are not alone in your suffering. Insofar as the anonymity of a forum displays the hidden qualia of otherwise atomized individuals in a centralized pool, its value lies in its honest ability to capture the media primate’s daily existence on this orbiting hellscape. Only when you peel away the flesh of a man’s face can you directly examine the contents of his consciousness, opening an unobstructed channel past the myriad filters of social calibration that constrain the public exhibition of his existential distress. Mental states are like resonant frequencies: they seek coherence and amplification from like-minded peers. Thus, the cure for loneliness is to plug into the lives of others; through the reciprocal interface of voyeurism and exhibitionism, you can relegate yourself to a single node among a collection of otherwise isolated individuals. This amounts to a networked vampirism – a sucking of energy from the lost, disaffected souls who spend days immortalizing their grievances onto the marks of a digital ledger. Perhaps the enlightened primate understands that transcendence emerges from the descent into the void, not the ascent into Valhalla.

If you stare at the screen long enough, you can hear the sound of their screaming.

In aggregate, they coagulate into a very particular feeling: the feeling of being in a place called hell. Yes, the internet is hell, and the reason it is hell is because we are in hell. On the internet you are always in the center of the pentagram, the focal point in a vast perimeter of interconnected souls screaming in unremitting torment, the primary conductor of a grand chorus reifying the subjective centrality of your own misery over and above the world’s. There is no part of you that does not enjoy being among the suffering of others. The best thing about hell is that it contains other people.

This is strong writing.

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Strengths and weaknesses

As mentioned, the writing in the book is superb throughout. The words grabbed me and I felt compelled to read it through. With many books I read as long as I am deriving value from it; even if the writing is poor and is a slog to get through I will power through it so long as the benefits of the accruing knowledge outweigh the pain of getting through it (The Gulag Archipelago was one such painful exercise). Samuel Chapman makes a similar point here. Incel was a pleasure to read and I could tell that a lot of thought and effort went into it.

One of the strengths of the novel is that it combines accurate, grim facts about the nature of dating and of reality itself with the subjectivity of an unreliable first person narrative, kind of like Fight Club which is referenced once or twice (indeed, it seemed at one point that his best friend and opposite in many ways might have been a similar Tyler Durden-esque figure). The mark of a strong narrative is that is can be and is multiple things at once, like a prism refracting light depending on the angle of the viewer watching it. The fact that a loser who can’t get laid uses those facts as a shield to protect his fragile ego so he doesn’t kill himself doesn’t mean that those facts or studies are useless or that he necessarily interpreted them wrongly; rather, it highlights one of Han’s core points (correctly) that ultimately intellectualism should not detract from having a lived experience of connection with other humans organically, a point also stressed heavily by Goethe in Faust.

ARX set the novel in 2012 which is probably appropriate because that was when the incel community was really having an underground impact – but this also means perhaps that the timing of the release of the novel is off. For example, Neil Strauss released a couple books on game when the game movement was at the edge of mainstream society; he parlayed that into success. If he had released those books today they would not have done nearly as well because that “moment” is over.

Regardless of timing, ARX gets many of the details of the difficulties in dating in the modern era correctly if one isn’t Chad. To share a piece of my own story, I had a lot of trouble dating in a similar fashion as anon due to a combination of autism, being an outsider to the mainstream zeitgeist, having a pessimist outlook and possessing high levels of disagreeability. I ultimately had success in dating when I decided to treat it like a second job and arranged for 3-5 dates a week, striking out way more than I succeeded but over time iterated a process that increasingly worked for me. I only found a long-term partner when I had that success and was starting to enjoy it; the relationship just kind of crept up on me naturally. Strange how that works. But that didn’t solve all my problems; the residue from not being successful with women during my formative years will always be there, lurking as a danger toward misogyny, much as anon will never have average or normal feelings on this topic.

On this note, I think ARX does a good job in writing anon from at least a partially sympathetic perspective. We all change and evolve over time; are you the same person you were five or ten or twenty years ago? To what extent would you have things in common with that person? And also what does our changes in personality say about the nature of the soul? It is important to have empathy for who we once were even if one has evolved past it: Ernst Junger makes this point in his later interviews, basically how he didn’t identify with his gung-ho nationalist self from the 1920s anymore but he understood and empathized with where he was coming from. He never apologized for who he used to be.

Han made the main character anon twenty-two years old and white, but his intellectual knowledge both seemed greater than a twenty-two year old and he seemed very Asian to me, or at least half-Asian (ARX has stated that he himself is a Chinese-American). Perhaps ARX intended the novel to be aimed at deradicalizing white incels specifically but from that perspective I don’t think he nailed the tone of that ethnic group. Rather, anon seemed to at least be a hapa (half Asian half white) — and it seems that hapa males with white fathers and Asian mothers mentally struggle a great deal in Western society compared to other groups (this dynamic does not really apply to hapa males with white mothers and Asian fathers, but those are much rarer). Furthermore, I don’t think anon’s parents were mentioned at all – his sister features prominently, but it’s interesting why the parents would have been left out along with other family members (unless there was something I missed). It was also curious the lack of anon having or trying to find male role models; usually desperate young men flailing around in a choking sea of nihilism reach out and try to find someone, usually an older male, to guide them where possible…this is where the silly Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson phenomenons came from (but after the time set in the novel). Clean your room!

Lastly, with respect to Han’s stated intent of deradicalization1: it’s a tricky subject, isn’t it? Nietzsche believed that truth required a synthesis of opposites and I think that’s accurate: while political radicalization combined with inceldom is a difficult path for a man to follow, it doesn’t mean that their criticisms about the nature of society are illegitimate – with respect to female entitlement and obesity, divorce laws favoring women, the difficulty of financially supporting a family or buying a home, etc. (and women, please don’t think that I believe men are innocents in this process; there’s a large amount of obesity, entitlement, and laziness with men as well). See this video which Elon Musk agreed with highlighting this point. I think on this basis that the book’s afterward is a bit too on-the-nose explaining its themes, perhaps ultimately detracting from the power of the novel – it should stand on its own terms – although I personally found it interesting to see ARX’s motivations regardless.

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Conclusion

Writing talent, even high writing talent, is no guarantee of success in this world. Talent in anything, actually, is no guarantee of success. I was listening to the wonderful song Hallelujah recently and I looked up its history. Leonard Cohen released a terrible version that no one listened to, then years later John Cale released a wonderful/my favorite version which also got no attention. You can hear it here:

Then years later Jeff Buckley released a new version and that too received no attention until Buckley died in a freak drowning accident. After that Buckley’s version and then Cale’s version became popular and then it spawned a huge number of covers as well as the song being featured prominently in a huge number of stupid globohomo television shows and films. Why did it take so long for the song to become popular? Would it have ever achieved popularity and fame without this very specific series of events? How many other wonderful songs are out there that didn’t have a lucky break like this?

This also brings to mind famous musicians playing on a street corner as an experiment and getting routinely ignored. Can the public recognize talent unless certified “experts” tell them that something received official approval?

Such is the nature of everything. One counter is that the harder one works the luckier one becomes. So ARX, congratulations on writing an interesting and very readable novel which raises a lot of interesting issues. Congratulations on ending the novel on a true, authentic beat instead of something artificial and saccharine. I hope you have luck with marketing and promotion even if the road to getting more people to read it is a circuitous one, and even if marketing efforts such as on Twitter is an uphill battle.

This era of ubiquitous nihilism is really a choking one, and any efforts to push past it will certainly not be coming from within the mainstream. It’s guys who have no connections writing from pure passion that will have to be the change if it ever comes; they are the only ones who can really speak truth to power, and it is that dangerous act where true art is made. So ARX-Han, thank you for following your passion.

If this review piqued your interest, you can find the novel here.

Thank you for reading.

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1 Although ARX stated in a podcast that the deradicalization framing is ultimately wrong and it’s more about identifying an aspect of society’s spiritual malaise in order to grapple with it directly.

This post investigates why and how globohomo skinsuited the Catholic Church, begun in earnest in the aftermath of World War 2 and finalized with the widespread allegations of priest sexual abuse in 2002. Prior entries on religion include the origination and evolution of Christianity, the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the relationship between the central bank owners and the Jewish people, and an analysis of different religions in the context of group fertility rates. Islam will be covered in a future post.

“The Church’s maw’s remarkably capacious, Gobbles up whole realms, everything precious / Nor once suffers qualms, not even belches; The Church alone is able to digest / Goods illegitimately possessed.” – Mephisto in Faust: Part One, Scene: Out Walking

As Nietzsche explained in his first treatise in “On the Genealogy of Morality” and as discussed previously on this Substack, Christianity originally arose as a way to rile up the masses of poor, women, and slaves to smash the hated, powerful Roman Empire by inverting its core values. To the Roman elites what was “good” was what separated them from the masses i.e. strength, immediacy of purpose, nobility, victory, while “bad” was anything that made the elites like the masses. Meanwhile Christians believed in a system of good/evil where what was “good” were the traditionally “bad” Roman values, i.e. weakness, humility, blind belief, meekness, subservience, equality, pity, guilt, suffering and self-hatred, and what was “evil” was the traditionally Roman “good” values. An inversion of society from top to bottom.

Christianity caught on like wildfire, but its inherent pacifism and egalitarianism was not a viable route toward empire building or power acquisition. The Catholic Church evolved to solve this problem by outcompeting and destroying its competition (Hellenic, Arian, gnostic) and putting rigid hierarchical guardrails in place around its core egalitarian energies.

This strategy succeeded and ultimately reached a kind of egalitarian/inegalitarian balance, lasting for about 1,000 years until the adoption of Aristotelian logic by Aquinas. The adoption of rationalist empiricism gradually gnawed away at the belief system of the Church and led/devolved to Protestantism, secularism, modern-day shitliberalism and the hollowing out of the Church itself.

Perhaps this is ultimately why we have Pope “Francis” Bergoglio continuing this trend and now blessing same sex marriage, building on earlier Vatican documents, while calling for a “paradigm shift” in theology for the world of today:

This post will focus on the actions and belief of the current Pope and the history of what led to his election. After all, he was elected by a majority of the College of Cardinals so his views represent the dominant outlook of most Catholic Cardinals and therefore the Church itself. There are many indications that this far-leftist faction remains in power while few or no indicators to the contrary.

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Some of the Pope’ recent actions

In 2020 Francis blessed the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a group led by Lynn Forester de Rothschild that represents $2.1 trillion in market cap and 200 million employees.  The Group is pushing environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices in business that seek to bankrupt small and midsize businesses and consolidate control among big business in the name of environmental sustainability.

He also called for the West to accept endless hordes of non-integrating illegals:

In 2019 Francis donated funds to illegal immigrants ($500,000 for a quoted 75,000 migrants, or $6.66 per migrant curiously) and he even has crosses removed from events so that Muslim migrants won’t be upset. All while he washes and kisses their feet:

The Catholic Church along with various Jewish, Lutheran and other religious organizations have been up to their eyeballs in assisting the CIA/State Department to import ~20 million illegal immigrants in the past 3.5 years alone; see here and here.

Meanwhile, the Pope purged non-globohomo Cardinals like Cardinal Burke in November 2023, stripped him of his salary and kicked him out of his apartment after he criticized the Pope’s pro-homosexual stance. In the same month he dismissed Bishop Joseph Strickland for the same reason, and also because he refusal to implement Vatican directives to restrict the use of the old-style Latin Mass. During COVID he removed a Bishop who was anti-COVID mandate and also publicly argued that getting force-vaccinated was a “moral obligation”. He also removed conservative Cardinal Robert Sarah as head of the Vatican’s office for liturgy.

These developments should be understood in the context of Catholicism’s doctrines of papal infallibility and papal supremacy, where when the Pope speaks ex cathedra he is preserved from the possibility of error on doctrine. But these recent moves by the Pope are mere manifestations of his long-held radicalism. In 2013 he assured atheists that you don’t have to believe in God to go to Heaven. In 2017 he quietly reduced sanctions against pedophile priests.

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The state of the Church

According to the wonderful Archbishop Vigano, the Pope is a globohomo shill and there exists a deep Church pushing “heresy, sodomy, and corruption.”  He states:

“There is a very strict relationship between the doctrinal crisis of the Church and the immorality of the clergy, that scandalously reaches up to the highest levels of the hierarchy. But it is also apparent that this crisis is being used by the ultra-progressive wing not only to impose a false morality together with a false doctrine, but also to irremediably discredit the Holy Church and the Papacy before the faithful and the world, through the action of its own leaders.”  Viganò added that a “gay lobby” has “infiltrated into the Church and that is literally terrified that good pastors will shed light on the influence that it exercises in the Secretariat of State, in the Congregations of the Roman Curia, in the Dioceses, and over the entire Church…[Pope] Bergoglio has surrounded himself with compromised and blackmailed personalities, whom he has no qualms about getting rid of as soon as they risk compromising him in his media image.” Viganò said that “these three elements – heresy, sodomy, and corruption – are so recurrent that they are almost a trademark of the deep state and of the deep church.”

The question becomes: how exactly did globohomo skinsuit the Catholic Church? When did it happen and why? For the answer we turn to Guido Giacomo Preparata, whose brilliant work “Conjuring Hitler” I previously covered and which turned the common understanding of the causes of World War 2 on its head (another good review is here). In his 2023 book “Empire & Church” he traces the behind-the-scenes battle between the Church and globohomo in the aftermath of World War 2 and how the latter came to dominate the former. Poetically written, the book is at an advanced level and requires a developed understanding of the structure of the modern world (i.e. as a slave colony to the central bank owners) before it can really be appreciated.

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The Church as a corporation

Agreeing with the point made at the start of this post, Preparata believes that the Catholic Church was crafted to stem the radical egalitarianism at the heart of Christianity. It became a temporal rival to Empire but in doing so it lost the original message of Christ:

At an even deeper level, for the Ghibellines [i.e. those supporting the supremacy of state over Church], the ultimate insidiousness of Catholicism lies in its anarchistic core. It is thus to hide her occult nature, that, purportedly, the Church has traditionally resorted to presenting a facade of “mediocrity, compromise, ritualistic aestheticism, and prudence,” which has enabled her to develop a formidable capacity for adaptation and absorption within a highly hierarchized yet externally impersonal structure. “The preaching of Christ,” Evola contends, “was never aimed at constituting a new form of associative life or even a new religion. Such a preaching was at heart anarchistic, anti-social, defeatist, and subversively hostile to any rational order of things.” Therefore, in order to retrain its insubordinate animus, and to begin to fashion itself as a viable organization, Catholicism has had to “incorporate the popular customs of the pagan world, to round off the more extreme and anti-political facets of its primitive complexion, and to avoid with colorless circumspection the logical conclusions of Protestantism [on the irrefragable impossibility of free-will] and mystical delirium.” In the final analysis, the secret recipe of Christianity’s success is its exclusive, quasi-monopolistic rapport with the “mass of cosmopolitan desperadoes.”

Thus, from the moment it structured and militarized itself in hierarchical form, not only did Christianity betray its hallowed principle of peaceful equality but it also became ipso facto a rival of the Empire; as such, since there can only be one source of power, [to the Ghibellines] the Church must be either supplanted, defeated, and hollowed out, or at the very least subordinated, subjected and absorbed.”

The Church focused on the accumulation of material power and came to be run as a business, concerned with expanding and defending its domain and profits. This resulted in its centuries-long dance with secular leaders with push-pull scheming behind the scenes by both parties. “Empire & Church” was titled such because they need each other: an empire needs the Church for its moral and spiritual legitimacy, while the Church needs the Empire to defend its interests by force:

From the (primordial) standpoint of the ruled, the rulers have always had to radiate the confidence of (1) awesome warriors who (2) had the favor of the gods. Both requisites – sword and (devotional) creed – had to be satisfied. The technicalities surrounding the classic propositions of the “principle of authority” and “legitimacy” (who is entitled to rule?) stem from this condition. As eventually did [those] torrents of treaties on the divine right of kings and emperors, the temporal prerogatives of popes, – and later on, when modern bureaucracies emerged, – on “natural rights,” the sovereignty of “The People,” democratic rule, etc.”

We will see this push-pull between secular and religious forces in the lead-up both to World War 1 and 2 after which the game changed completely, catching the Church totally off guard.

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World War 1 and its aftermath

In the lead-up to World War 1 the Habsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary remained unshakably loyal to Rome, providing it, along with France, the Netherlands and Bavaria most of the Church’s funds. In 1882 Italy, Germany and Austria joined in the Triple Alliance which, if it flourished, could have created a “Catholic space” not unlike the area once covered by the Holy Roman Empire. But the Italians were bribed by the British – despite Benedict XV’s pleadings to the contrary – and switched sides in an act of Free-Masonic infamy. Tethered to the Allies, Italy helped ”win” the war but at the cost of 650,000 dead and financial collapse. Via Versailles Austria was dismembered which virtually annihilated the Church’s supply of vicarious secular might. Benedict XV called World War 1 “the suicide of Europe.”

Because Austria was destroyed the weakened Church felt forced to negotiate with Italian Fascism (1931) and Nazism (1937) in the hopes of resuming their pre-war expansion plans. The Concordat with Nazism contained secret clauses hinting at an eventual spiritual conquering by Catholicism of the Slavic world.

Despite the Concordat, the Nazis and the Catholics had sharp differences in their ideologies and approaches and, feeling their authority challenged, the Nazis unleashed a PR blitzkreig that would later be so effectively copied by globohomo:

[The Nazis] started, first, by exposing with fanfare, and very efficaciously, several (sensationally grotesque) cases of financial fraud and embezzlement that featured pious little nuns laden with cash, concealed under their robes, restlessly shuttling like mules between Italy and Germany; and subsequently – after the break-down of a patched-up truce in 1936 – the offensive was sustained by hitting the Church hardest where she was most ignominiously weakest: sex….Pioneering the tactic that the U.S. Neoconservatives via the Boston Globe would have adopted in January 2002 to discredit publicly and thus silence the Church in the ru-up to the War on Terror, Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda [unleashed] packs of reporters tasked with the failsafe assignment of unearthing from Catholicism’s clerical underground lurid stories of homosexuality, molestations, pedophilia, and sacristies and seminaries turned into bordellos. Shamefully exposed, and searingly blasted by Goebbel’s inquisitorial vituperations (“the horrifying rot” of “these monsters!…”), the Holy See, humiliated anew, retreated and capitulated by agreeing to the dissolution of all Catholic Youth Organizations in Germany. There followed the pacification of 1937-1938.

While the Church was engaged with German and Italian politics, though, it also engaged with the financial overlords of the West:

Starting in the mid-1920s, the invested patrimony of the Vatican would expand into a veritable financial empire which extended from the European portfolios of Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Britain and Switzerland to faraway stakes in Latin America, and whose key terminus was in Wall Street – or, rather, in the investment banking trust of the J.P. Morgan Company, to be specific.

The Church’s financial holding company was purportedly created in two stages: from 1929 to 1933, following the Lateran Accords, and from 1939 to 1945, on the lucrative coattails of World War 2. Counseled by the financiers of the Morgan Bank, the Holy See gained access, e.g. to the trust of Anaconda Copper and to Iraq’s oil wells. These and a plethora of other ventures ended up being so fabulously remunerative for Rome that “Pius XI would confer upon both Jack and Tom Lamont [of J.P. Morgan Company] the Grand Cross of Saint Gregory the Great.” The alarcity that the House of Morgan also displayed in helping Mussolini stabilize the Lira in 1926 and in doing good business with Fascism in general (with Washington’s blessing, quite naturally) was very much linked to this USA-Vatican entente.

The Vatican had, as part of this deal, given custody of a considerable amount of Vatican gold shipped from Europe to the managing offices of the Federal Reserve Bank. It was therefore engaging with both sides of the emerging power centers.

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World War 2

When Germany marched into Poland in 1939 Pope Pius XII did not condemn the invasion and, when told of the upcoming Operation Barbarossa, the Pope was said to have received the news with satisfaction. He looked forward to converting the East to Catholicism per the secret clause of its Concordat with Germany.

But not even four months later the Vatican was informed by trusted sources at the highest level that the Axis powers had already irredeemably lost the war (the source Preparata cites is Lacroix-Riz, Le Vatican, pp. 515, 516, 527, 532). Barbarossa had not destroyed Russia whose manufacturing factories had been moved before the war beyond the Urals, and the outgunned and out-produced Germans were already losing critical manpower and supplies. It was over long before the public understood: in modern wars those with the greatest industrial production wins, and the Allies outproduced and outgunned the Axis by anywhere from a 3:1 to a 10:1 margin.

When it finally dawned on the Church what was happening it hurriedly pivoted to lend Washington its hand, including re-awakening the Mafia to assist logistically in the landing of U.S. troops in Sicily in 1943. If the Church had not played both sides in the lead-up to World War 2, if it had put all its eggs in the Axis basket, developments very well could have ended up destroying the Church post-war. But due to this moderate level of foresightedness it would live to fight another day — for awhile.

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The gradual skinsuiting

After the war, given both the Soviet Union and the West were controlled by the same central bank owners and the Axis had become hollowed-out vassal states, the Catholic Church remained the only significant entity that retained a degree of autonomy worldwide. But globohomo was not willing to accept any rivals for power: after all, Empire thrives in a nucleus of Church and Sword, and globohomo lacked the moral and spiritual legitimacy provided by the Church. It wanted to acquire it like a real estate deal, a real estate deal for a billion souls. A frontal attack was not needed; rather, a slow drawn-out process would be much more effective:

The rulers tolerate [“patriotic”] Catholics as a temporary and necessary evil, reasoning that the stage has not yet arrived at which one can utterly wipe out religion, and that it is better to deal with accommodating bigots than with refractory ones….The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures [i.e. by raising man, not as a “child of God’,” but as a purely social creature]. The core of the problem is to avoid galvanizing the forces of Christianity by some careless misstep. It would be an unforgivable carelessness, for example, to close the churches suddenly and prohibit all religious practice. Instead, one should try to split the Church in two. Part of the clergy must be compromised as reactionaries and “foreign agents” – a rather easy task, given the utterly conservative mentality of many priests. The other part must be bound to the State as closely as the Orthodox Church is in Russia, so that it becomes a tool of the government. A completely submissive Church – one that may on occasion collaborate with the security police – loses authority in the eyes of the pious. Such a Church can be preserved for decades, until the moment when it dies a natural death due to a lack of adherents.

This slow process has played out under the Second Vatican Council and then under the tutelage of John Paul II and his successors.

This in turn led to the Sedevacantism movement, but it is very small: tens of thousands or perhaps a couple hundred thousand of Catholics amidst 1.36 billion worldwide.

Today the Vatican has become wholly subdued to the globohomo techno-structure:

(a) The bulk of Vatican funding is American; (b) the bulk of “progressive” Catholics have become entirely subservient to the business ethos of the Liberal mainstream, which finances its parishes and schools – schools that are, by and large, posh, unaffordable establishments catering almost exclusively to the ultra-rich; (c) U.S. Catholic reactionaries have, since 9/11, rallied with ferocious exhilaration to the Neocons’ patriotic and war-mongering promise of a never-ending hyper-modern crusade against Islam(ism); and (d) Catholic “anarchists” – Evola’s, Maurras’s, and pretty much everybody else’s nemesis – who were very few to begin with, can be said to have been successfully relegated to the appendices of esoteric codices amid unicorns and faeries.

Globohomo also successfully reused Goebbel’s propaganda strategy to smear the Church with its pedophile sex crimes in 2002. The pressure and leverage from this attack was ultimately used to make their deviant, degenerate candidate the Pope:

Eventually, with the added leverage of the pedophile scandals in the 2000s, the last resistances were broken and…a faction of the Curia allegedly conspired to hand over (i.e. to sell) the “Catholic box” wholesale to Washington in exchange for the guarantee that their tenure – presently as subaltern chief officers of what was then bound to become Anglo-America’s affiliated bureau of Catholic Affairs – be confirmed.

This came to pass in the Spring of 2013 with the abdication of Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) in favor of America’s long-standing candidate, Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Francis I).

Thenceforth, I consider the match to be over: de fact, in the last two decades or so, for matters of geo-politics…the Catholic Church has mostly served as a sounding board for the Washington consensus. These last events…have merely punctuated what appears to be a foregone demise: as said, hyper-modernity is certainly not in functional need of a Catholic Church: the Anglo-American Commonwealth, whose facial traits over the years have been approximating ever more crisply those of Orwell’s Big Brother, has given the world ample proof that it can perform, solo, all duties, sacred and profane alike. It is the “New Vatican.”

Yes, the Church has not yet fully bought into abortion rights, gender theory, or the abolition of the family, but as seen under Pope Bergoglio the Church is making regular inroads against its own positions on these issues. Meanwhile the Church (and Christianity in general) is rapidly losing followers throughout the West. The continued hollowing out of the Church by its globohomo cretins has all indications of continuing apace with very little pushback.

With the Church skinsuited, this is the hierarchy of power in the modern world:

Ultimately, this world is controlled by the Demiurge; see Matthew 4:8-9 where Satan offered Jesus control over the nations of the world and while Jesus said no, he did not dispute that Satan had the power to do so. Those hoping for a materialist solution to the fallen nature of this world are going to be – as they always have been – sorely disappointed. There are no major institutions left within the United States or worldwide that have not experienced this hollowing out process and rot, and any attempts to change this situation have been rapidly dismantled and destroyed.

This is why a turn inward to understanding the structure of the modern world (via the privately owned central bank scam, the egalitarian ratchet effect and the real history of World War 2) and a focus on individual spiritual growth is needed at this time.

Thanks for reading.

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This is a post about the accelerating nature of time and the increasing “solidification” of the world where reality becomes more material and less spiritual at an ever-increasing rate.

Time as we experience it is not a static thing. Depending on our circumstances and perspective it can feel long (put your hand on a hot stove and it will feel like forever) or short (watch an exciting sports match, play video games, have fun with friends). The nature of time also changes as we age; for a three year old a five minute time-out can feel like eternity, while in adulthood whole years go by in a blur.

One under-discussed aspect of time is how technology accelerates it.

Take the smartphone or computer. If you have a salaried wagecuck job or your own business, you are expected to respond to texts, emails or calls at any hour of the day including weekends. The “job” transitioned sometime in the past twenty years from a 9-5 to 24/7. Even if you don’t have such a job, the smartphone is a constant temptation to pull you out of whatever you are doing in the real world to engage in the virtual world. By serving as an attack on our down-time, on the empty space between events where silence and boredom develops (which is the fertile ground where imagination is born), it serves as an attack on time itself: life blurs together and every day feels the same and you blink, waking up 50 years later with your life over.

This is a nightmare many of us are barreling towards, including myself, and we seem almost powerless to resist it no matter how hard we try.

This brings to mind a Kenny Chesney song:

This post by The Obsolete Man makes a similar point: we are frenetically speeding into the void.

It didn’t always use to be this way. Before the smart phone and the internet life was slower. There was downtime between events; one was not expected to be tethered to work outside of office hours. Each successive iteration of communications technology sped up human communications and altered the flow of time itself: from carrier pigeons to the Pony Express to the telegraph to payphones to landlines to faxes to the internet to non-smart phones to smart phones. When communication was limited to mail and ideas by book, when the family lived in small agricultural communities instead of the hustle-and-bustle of urban living, time itself was slower, and it was even slower before the neolithic agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago.

Consider travel as another example – the world shrank and accelerated as humanity brought forth the automobile, the train, the airplane, leading to a claustrophobic lack of breathing space. The horizons of the unknown shrank; the sense of adventure died. Poet Charles Upton argues that the agitation caused by technology annihilates spacial dimension:

“When we are in a state of deep calm, space is more real than time; when we are agitated, time becomes more real than space. And it shouldn’t be too hard to see how faster modes of travel, and especially the electronic media, which disturb and agitate consciousness, also annihilate space; cyberspace, in particular, is the annihilation of all spacial dimension. In these latter days, nothing has a stable form. Everything moves faster and faster, until all form – including the Human Form itself – becomes a shapeless blur.”

Paradoxically, even as our lifespans have grown in the modern era our life experiences have shortened. Did a thirty-year-old hunter gatherer have more life experiences than a sixty-year old modern man who spends his waking life staring at glowing screens, with two weeks off a year for “vacation”?

Of course it is impossible to really separate mankind from technology (defined as the creative impulses we experience to make processes more efficient). In a fundamental ways man is technology. Use a rock to split open a coconut is technology. Use fire to cook food is technology. One can’t separate man from his impulse to innovate; that’s a part of what makes us human. It’s just that technological innovation and therefore the change in the perception of time has parabolically sped up.1

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The process of solidification

It’s not just time that has sped up as technology advances. There is an increasing intensity toward “solidification” by which the material world increasingly becomes more real and the spiritual world is increasingly disconnected from life. Traditionalist philosopher (not to be confused with conservative) Rene Guenon discussed this in his The Reign of Quantity & the Sign of the Times, which is a very challenging read due to its dense and pedantic style and its reliance upon prior works, including by Aristotle, Neoplatonism and Scholasticism. You can see a summary of the book here if you like.

Guenon was a French-Egyptian intellectual who studied occultism and Hinduism before converting to Islam and practicing Sufism in Cairo until his death. He has been influential in both Islamic and far-right circles, although his name is not widely known.2

Guenon argued that this process – the speeding up of time, the solidification of the world and the disconnection of esoteric connection to the Divine – is all part of what the Hindus consider to be a cosmological cycle, and that we are approaching the end of a particular age – the final age, the Kali Yuga, before the cycle restarts.3 He assigned the following length of time to each age4:

• Krita Yuga or Satya Yuga (Golden Age): 4, corresponding to 25,920 years.
• Treta Yuga (Silver Age): 3, (19,440 years).
• Dvapara Yuga (Bronze Age): 2, (12,960 years).
• Kali Yuga (Iron Age): 1, (6,480 years).

Each age is a a “fall” from the previous one, per Upton,

As the cycle progresses, or rather descends, the very nature of time and space changes. In earlier ages, space dominates; the forms of things are more important, more real, than the changes they undergo; time is ‘relatively eternal’. As the cycle moves on, however, time begins to take over, melting down space and the forms within it until everything is an accelerating flow of change.

In the Kali Yuga humanity descends from a focus on quality and connection to the Divine down to crass materialism, a focus on quantity disconnected from anything greater. It has devolved into mere consumption.

“[Guenon] explains that we have reduced work to something merely quantitative. Ancient craftsmen saw themselves as involved in something of cosmic significance. Someone who made a table for example, wasn’t trying to merely satisfy an industrial purpose of assembling four legs to a tabletop by pressing levers on a machine. The traditional table maker was rather participating in the communion of the family that would eat at this table. This communion of the family would itself fit in the communion of village, which would ultimately fit in the communion of the whole world. The table maker wanted to make it beautiful with that cosmic purpose in mind. Art and craft were one.”

The industrialization process dehumanizes workers, making them mere unthinking automaton in an assembly line. Even the corporate focus on providing “experiences” to its customers to ensure repeat business is but a form of standardizing quantity. Ektropius argues that materialism offers a better consensus mechanism than religion which is why it has caught on so strongly.

In other words, this intensifying, ratcheting cycle crushes the quality out of everything (bringing to mind the egalitarian ratchet effect), forcing materiality down to the lowest common denominator in order to turn everything into quantifiable widgets including humanity itself. During this descent the process intensifies and time speeds up faster and faster until it hits a hard limit: it can eventually speed up no more, and therefore the energies suddenly reverse themselves, a cosmic cataclysm that changes the look of heavens and earth occurs and a new cycle begins. As Upton explains:

Time, the “devourer” ends by devouring itself. At the end of time, Time will be changed into space again. […] This ultimate timeless point is simultaneously the end of the cycle of manifestation and the beginning of the next.[…] Before this ultimate transformation, in the latter days of the present cycle certain final developments must take place. Since quantity has particularly to do with matter, the Reign of quantity must also be the reign of materialism. The age of miracles ceases, the world becomes less permeable to the influences of the higher planes of reality; the very belief in such planes, as well as in the eternal and transcendent God, becomes harder to maintain.

The very heaviness of materialism, however, ultimately results in a sort of ‘brittleness’. The cosmic environment, heaving lost much of the flexibility which allowed it to be moved by the Divine Spirit, begins to crack, like an old tree that can no longer bend to the wind, and ends up being uprooted in the storm. But these cracks in the cosmic environment, in the ‘Great Wall’ separating the material world from the realm of subtle energies, first happen in the ‘downward’ rather than the ‘upward direction, letting in a flood of infra-psychic’ forces, either neutral or actively demonic….[We can all feel these Demonic, dark energies growing, can we not?]

However depressing this may sound, the truth is that such developments are entirely lawful given the lateness of the hour. The lowest possibilities of manifestation must also have their day in the course of the cycle; fortunately, since they are inherently unstable, being based not upon Truth but solely upon power, that day will be short. ‘There needs to be evil,’ said Jesus, ‘but woe to him through whom evil comes.’ And there are certain spiritual possibilities of the highest order which could never be realized except in the face of this most demonic of challenges to the integrity of the human spirit.

This last point is one that Solzhenitsyn dwelled on at length in The Gulag Archipelago: the horrors of the Gulag led to spiritual heights that would have been unobtainable in a less oppressive environment. And Evola states in Revolt Against the Modern World, p. 432 – the end of the cycle “is not even perceived as a sense of capitulation”, to the point that the “final collapse may not even have the characteristics of a tragedy”. This hints at the source of some on the far right’s accelerationism position…

I like this framing because it puts even deranged, frothing-at-the-mouth “secular” and viciously anti-white shitlibs in a frame where one may (reluctantly) accept it, perhaps: they too have their role in the cosmic game to end the cycle and start the next.

Guenon believed that humanity was close to the end of the Kali Yuga; you can see how he calculated this in 1931 here, but he arguably put the end of the cycle at either 2,000 AD or 2,030-2,031 AD although he refused to give an exact date (correctly, as everyone who’s made such a prediction has been wrong so far). Hindus believe that the end of the Kali Yuga is brought about by the return of Vishnu in the form of Kalki, the avenger. This seems similar to the Christian eschatology of the End of Days and the Messiah ushering in a new “Golden Age”, and even Nazi Savitri Devi urgently wished for the return of Kalki.5 But note Cioran had nothing but scorn for this perspective.6

In an interview with Ernst Junger at 90 years old, as recounted in Julien Hervier’s “The Details of Time”, Junger stated7:

For the moment, we are going through an era of transition, of chiaroscuro, in which sharply defined phenomena are few and far between. The ancient values no longer obtain, and the new ones have not yet been imposed. It is a world in the shade.

You can observe a ubiquitous ambivalence of opinions. Some people maintain one thing, others the exact opposite: the two sides cancel each other out, even on the highest level…Let us hope that the transitional period is ending…

For the prophets: once we have crossed all the deserts, something new will eventually transpire. In all great visions, like those in the Edda, in the visions of divinity, the titans revolt against the gods, and the gods initially lose; but in the end, they return….In the hymns of the good era, [there] were still Christians who lived their faith in the full metaphysical sense of the word. That mentality is extremely rare today. People are cut off from transcendence, transcendence is vanishing. But if someone somehow still preserves this relationship to transcendence, he is “ultimately” safe from fear. He can have the feeling of participation, he can tell himself that horrible things are happening, but that behind them a great light is dawning.” (134)

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What is to be done?

Guenon believed that the best path through this process for an individual was initiation into an existing formal religion, performing consistent practice within it, while being open to intellectual, metaphysical intuition as discussed here. As Guenon explains:

“[…] initiation is essentially the transmission of a spiritual influence, a transmission that can only take place through a regular, traditional organization, so that one cannot speak of initiation outside of an affiliation with an organization of this kind. We have explained that ‘regularity’ must be understood to exclude all pseudo-initiatic organizations [such as the theosophists and the New Age movement], which, regardless of pretention and outward appearance, in no way possess any spiritual influence and thus are incapable of transmitting anything.”

But his approach seemed to only partially work for him. As Jean-Philippe Marceau writes:

In fact, Guénon himself became increasingly paranoid and deranged throughout his life. For example, he came to see himself as the victim of repeated magical anti-traditionalist attacks and accordingly chose to avoid contacts with Westerners. You can even find a lot of anecdotal evidence of people becoming insane after diving too deep into his work. One way to see it is that Guénon indeed tries to fly too high. He relentlessly demolishes our modern, ordinary epistemology, but he doesn’t manage to replace it with something viable before going crazy. He spends his time analyzing perennial religious patterns in different traditions, studying the signs of our times, but he can’t really connect it down to his own life. He disconnects his head from his own body. And even his very devout involvement in Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam, did not suffice to keep him grounded.

Guenon’s approach, then, disconnected him both from humanity and to an extent from life itself.

Instead of such extreme action, it’s my hope that one takes away from this post an understanding of the connection between time and technology use, and that if we hope to live longer via our experiences then we should be more mindful of limiting our use of technology. It’s also to note that increases in materialism and technology seem to decrease our connection to God, and to take note of the possibility of cycles where it may become “darkest before the dawn” – in other words, we may have to see the full blossoming of evil in its worst form before it can then be effectively opposed (but hopefully this is not the case): right now, at this moment, we are seeing its increasing intensification and manifestation blossoming in grotesque and shocking ways such as the transsexualism push (especially targeted to children), the increase in debt by a trillion dollars every hundred days, extreme and increasing censorship, completely open borders and funding/supporting endless foreign wars. Perhaps with this understanding we may better steel ourselves mentally and spiritually for what may be worse things to come. Or as Junger wrote in the quote above, “if someone somehow still preserves this relationship to transcendence, he is “ultimately” safe from fear.”

Thanks for reading.

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1 One may theorize this is due to the ongoing genetic changes brought about by the neolithic agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago which supercharged creativity and innovation.

2 He is most widely known for The Crisis of the Modern World about the falsehoods of so-called “democracy”, wonderfully discussed by A Forest Rebel+ here.

3 Indeed, seeing history as cyclical as others such as Oswald Spengler believed is antithetical to the Whig history-as-progress model which permeates the West. The question is one of timeframe and scope. As Junger explained in The Details of Time, 63: “If we believe, or accept the hypothesis, that a cyclical order exists, this hypothesis goes beyond the notion of progress. Progress is linear, while cyclical movements return to their starting points. One could therefore say that a kind of panic recurs once every thousand years. Around the year 1,000, people feared the end of the world. This is again the case today, when the omens are technological, while in earlier times they were religious: people are afraid of the atomic bomb. For my part, I don’t believe in any great danger.” But Guenon believed the cycles were much longer than 1,000 years.

4 Hindus believe each age lasts between hundreds of thousands to millions of years, but Guenon thought that the additional zeroes were added on so that they wouldn’t be used by the unenlightened to make false predictions. As such, he removed the extra zeroes from his calculations.

5 Devi initially considered Hitler to be the return of Kalki, but following his disastrous defeat she modified her position to considering him only the precursor to his return. She elucidates her concept of “Men in Time,” “Men above Time,” and “Men against Time” using the lives of Genghis Khan, Akhnaton, and Hitler respectively, in her book The Lightning and the Sun which I didn’t think was written well. Hitler is used to illustrate a “Man against Time” who seeks to fight historical decay of the Hindu cycle. Hitler had himself leaned into type of comparison, styling himself after the figure in the painting The Wild Chase a dark, grim and somewhat unnerving portrait that depicts the Germanic god Wotan, the highest of the Germanic Gods, completed in 1889, the same year Hitler was born:

6 See Cioran, A Short History of Decay, 75: “What a preposterous notion, to draw circles in hell, to make the intensity of the flames vary in its compartments, to hierarchize its torments!… You can champion some idea or other, have a place or crawl—from the moment your actions and your thoughts serve a form of real or imagined city you are its idolators and its captives. The timidest employee and the wildest anarchist, if they take a different interest here, live as its function: they are both citizens internally, though the one prefers his slippers and the other his bomb. The “circles” of the earthly city, like those of the one underground, imprison beings in a damned community, and drag them in the same procession of sufferings, in which to look for nuances would be a waste of time. The man who acquiesces in human affairs—in any form, revolutionary or conservative—consumes himself in a pitiable delectation: he commingles his nobilities and his vulgarities in the confusion of Becoming….

To the dissenter, within or outside the city, reluctant to intervene in the course of great events or small, all modalities of life in common seem equally contemptible. History can offer him only the pale interest of renewed disappointments and anticipated artifices. The man who has lived among men and still lies in wait for a single unexpected event—such a man has understood nothing and never will. He is ripe for the City: everything must be given him, every office and every honor. So it is with all men—which explains the longevity of this sublunary hell.”

7 Also see Ernst Junger’s connective work “At the Wall of Time” (unfortunately untranslated into English as of yet, although ormulus has started), which is discussed along with a Guenon, Spengler, Evola and Herodotus connection here.

John Carter had a great comment in a post awhile back describing the wide range of views on the dissident right. He wrote: “Religiously, the right embraces an incredible variety of creeds. Tradcaths, Orthobros, prots of every description from high church Lutheran to low church Baptist, Odinists, Neo-Hellenists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Nietzschean vitalists, gnostics, New Agers, druids, and atheists are all found in varying degrees of abundance. Ideologically, you have neoreactionaries, traditionalists, foundationalists, Nietzschean vitalists, civic nationalists, ethno-nationalists, MAGA America Firsters, populists, fascists, national socialists, 4^th Political Theory Duginists, paleo-conservatives, classical liberals, post-liberals, libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, Catholic integralists, monarchists, masculinists, and (what I think is) the most recent addition, Landian effective accelerationists.”

What a large number of beliefs under the umbrella of the “dissident” label! Indeed, as Cioran argues it is in the twilight of belief in the existing paradigm that a plethora of new possibilities arise.1 Could these viewpoints be organized in a way that simplifies and clarifies? Is there an essence that can be honed in on (other than the common factor of low agreeability on the Big 5 personality test)? I think, perhaps, the answer is yes. The hope is that by organizing these views into something simpler that it will provide insight on some fundamental fault lines as well as to offer new writers for you to read depending on your reading style.

With that said, these views can be organized into two disparate values that can be expressed in chart form: (1) whether the dissident is philosophically optimistic or pessimistic and (2) on what level the writer posts at. Let’s explain what I mean:

1. Philosophical optimistic or pessimism is in relation to how a person views the world. Dissidents of all stripes believe there is a lot wrong with the world, indeed, that’s what makes them dissidents; can these wrongs be made right, can the world be perfected or, if not perfected, made much better than it is today? Dissident optimists believe the answer is yes even if their prescription is wildly different — from this approach both neo-Nazis, Z-anoners, the populist right and Christian nationalists are philosophical optimists because they believe that a change in values, beliefs, war outcomes or politics of the masses or at least the elite can or would result in a better world. Philosophical pessimists, on the other hand, see material reality as fundamentally flawed, and therefore salvation must be pursued in spiritual avenues without expectation for material betterment in this world (although that doesn’t necessarily stop one from trying).
2. On what level the writer generally posts at. Posters may sometimes make posts on different levels, but this is a generalization of where they usually write. There are three levels of posting: on the level of politics, on the level of culture and on the level of belief/metaphysics. There is a saying “politics is downstream of culture which is downstream of belief.” It is an issue of scope; metaphysics incorporates culture and politics but the same isn’t true in the other direction. Focusing on lower levels may eventually give rise to a focus on higher ones.

As a preface to the below chart, please note (1) these are crude approximations (both in terms of placement and in terms of the graphics themselves; I’m not a visual artist), (2) there is no moral judgment attached to any specific placement, and (3) apologies if you were either included or not included, depending on your preference. Also, (4) while I’ve heard of all of the below Substackers, inclusion does not mean I necessarily read them or if I do that I read them often; rather, their inclusion is meant to highlight the diversity among dissidents in accordance with this grouping (thanks to John Carter for his feedback). With that said, here is the chart:

Some commonalities can be drawn from this chart:

1. You’re not going to find a gnostic as a philosophical optimist or a Christian nationalist as a philosophical pessimist, for example. There are certain identities that require one to have a certain mindset for those beliefs.
2. You’re also not going to generally find pessimists writing mainly on the level of politics because it’s too grim to write regularly “the dissident right is likely to continue to lose” without attaching metaphysical meaning to it.
3. There is no author placed at the extreme end of pessimism (including myself), because there is intrinsic hope involved in posting: the hope that spreading dissident ideals can have a positive effect in some capacity even if the extent is unknown. Indeed, the pessimists must hold out hope somehow no matter how remote or silly the odds because hope is required to make life worth living.
4. The optimists have the opposite issue: dealing with unmet or dashed hopes and expectations. Is it difficult to live in a world as a dissident where one’s hopes and dreams are regularly disappointed as globohomo continues its unrelenting march forward? How is this dealt with – with an update of worldview? A stubborn doubling down or burying one’s head in the sand? A pushing out of the expected Judgment Day? It is interesting to see.
5. There is often an underlying tension between the optimists and pessimists. To the optimists the pessimists are holding back the expected changes with unnecessary negativity; they are souring the mood and hurting the energy. To the pessimists the optimists have insufficient understanding of the base setup of reality or history which gives insufficient cause for such optimism; they are seen as naive.
6. Generally speaking, the lower the level of discourse the more popular it will be and the more followers one will have (i.e. political discussions are much more popular than metaphysical discussions). There are fewer political Substackers represented on the chart not because there are fewer such Substackers (there aren’t) but rather because I am less acquainted with them.
7. In the same vein, optimistic posters are much more popular generally than pessimistic posters.

The referenced Substacks are as follow (left to right):

Pessimists:

Edward Slavsquat: Edward Slavsquat

Rurik Skywalker: The Slavland Chronicles

Daniel D: A Ghost in the Machine

Theodore Atkinson: The Last Sage

Jasun Horsley: Children of Job

Rod Drehar: Rod Dreher’s Diary

Niccolo Soldo: Fisted by Foucault

The Good Citizen: The Good Citizen

Tree of Woe: Contemplations of the Tree of Woe

The Z Man: The Dissident Writer

Optimists:

L.P. Koch: LucTalks

Eugyppius: Eugyppius: A Plague Chronicle

William Hunter Duncan: Born on the Fourth of July

Librarian of Calaeno: The Librarian of Celaeno

Yuri Bezmenov: How to Subvert Subversion

John Carter: Postcards from Barsoom

Grant Smith: H2F Man

Morgoth: Morgoth’s Review

Morghorak: Morgthorak the Undead

Brett Andersen: Intimations of a New Worldview

Kulak: Anarchonomicon

Sanfedisti: Position and Decision

Karl Kaemers: Taboo Truth

(Kruptos): Seeking the Hidden Thing

el gato malo: bad cattitude

Robert Malone: Who is Robert Malone

Simplicius: Simplicius’s Garden of Knowledge

Curtis Yarvin: Gray Mirror

Hopefully this post offers a bit of a new way of categorizing dissidents and perhaps both offers you insight on the types of readers you like to read and maybe points you in new directions on who to check out.

Thanks for reading.

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1 The following is an optimistic perspective about the state of society (the pessimist version is that the egalitarian ratchet effect continues undisturbed): “Is there a pleasure more subtly ambiguous than to watch the ruin of a myth? What dilapidation of hearts in order to beget it, what excesses of intolerance in order to make it respected, what terror for those who do not assent to it, and what expense of hopes for those who watch it . . . expire! Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when beliefs wither, when their articles and their precepts slacken, when their rules collapse. Every period’s ending is the mind’s paradise, for the mind regains its play and its whims only within an organism in utter dissolution. The man who has the misfortune to belong to a period of creation and fecundity suffers its limitations and its ruts; slave of a unilateral vision, he is enclosed within a limited horizon. The most fertile moments in history were at the same time the most airless; they prevailed like a fatality, a blessing for the naive mind, mortal to an amateur of intellectual space. Freedom has scope only among the disabused and sterile epigones, among the intellects of belated epochs, epochs whose style is coming apart and is no longer inspired except by a certain ironic indulgence.

To belong to a church uncertain of its god—after once imposing that god by fire and sword—should be the ideal of every detached mind. When a myth languishes and turns diaphanous, and the institution which sustains it turns clement and tolerant, problems acquire a pleasant elasticity. The weak point of a faith, the diminished degree of its vigor set up a tender void in men’s souls and render them receptive, though without permitting them to be blind, yet, to the superstitions which lie in wait for the future they darken already. The mind is soothed only by those agonies of history which precede the insanity of every dawn…”

– E.M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, 80