This is a post about the trends toward meaning or decadence throughout the history of western civilization.
In this context, meaning means western civilization offering a worldview to the people within it that provides a satisfactory explanation for man’s place in the world, a reason for his suffering (man can bear almost any suffering so long as it is perceived as meaningful) and a guide for living a fulfilling life.
Decadence means that society has lost discipline to achieve its values or has lost interest in the values themselves. Laws are not enforced, standards are lowered, difficult things are not attempted. There is a perceived decay in standards, morals, dignity, religious faith, honor, discipline, or skill at governing among the members of the elite of a very large social structure. More importantly, decadence relates to the inability of a society to maintain a worldview which provides meaning which people need to function cohesively in the world. Decadence signifies a loss of faith in the existing paradigm. The most serious form of societal decadence is nihilism, where decay reaches a point that society believes that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. Decadence goes hand in hand with material success; the richer and more powerful a culture is, the more decadence follows.
I recently read Richard Tarnas’s 1991 book “The Passion of the Western Mind” which investigated these trends. Passion became a bestseller, increased Tarnas’s stature and, according to Christopher Bache, it is “[w]idely regarded as one of the most discerning overviews of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to postmodern thought.” Joseph Campbell called it “the most lucid and concise presentation of Western thought. The writing is elegant and carries the reader with the momentum of a novel… A noble performance.”
Tarnas looks quite a bit like Jordan Peterson, unfortunately
This post will look at the fluctuations between meaning and decadence historically using Tarnas’s book as a guide.
Tarnas traces the development of philosophy from ancient Greece through the modern era, summarizing how man’s ideas about the world evolved over time. Philosophers built on the work of those who came before them in an ongoing dialectical process, whereby competing ideas and internal contradictions within an era ultimately resulted in the production of a synthesis, a Kuhnianparadigm shift and a new perspective, which in turn resulted in new contradictions or “anomalies” of its own. Knowingly or unknowingly, directly or circuitously, the impact of philosophers was to either reinforce the existing meaning paradigm, to weaken it leading to increased decadence, or, in rare situations, to push for new sources of meaning.
Since the complete victory of Catholicism by the 10th century AD, there has been an ever-increasing trend toward shedding its faith-based worldview in favor of reason — first with Scholasticism, then via the reintroduction of Aristotlean reason, followed by the increasing dominance of that reason over faith, then from attacks on the hierarchical structure of Catholicism via the Protestant Reformation, then from the supreme ascendancy of reason crystallized in the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, followed by philosophical attacks on the reliability and objectivity of our senses and our reasoning abilities (most notably by Kant) and to what extent we can even know anything real about the world. All of this has led to a ubiquitous nihilism after the “death of God” as prophesied by Nietzsche. There is only one thing we have held onto throughout these changes, gripped white knuckled for dear life: our belief in the egalitarian core values that permeate every aspect of society which intensify over time via the egalitarian ratchet effect. This is the final hurdle, the last thing that must be overcome, before society can be reborn…if it can be at such a late stage as civilization hurtles into the abyss.
With that said, let’s begin.
Meaning at the beginning
Religion originally arose among hunter gatherers as a form of ancestor worship. Gods were a part of everyday life and they were just like humans, only more powerful, with their own personalities and whims. These religions were shamanistic in character in that they involved intense ceremonies led by charismatic, right-brain-dominant, chaotic practitioners who attempted to unite small groups of people in focused, high-energy, altered consciousness rites.
Hunter gatherer mythological narratives involved stories where everything has meaning, which served as a forum for action for how everyone should act in their own lives. Humans were generally well integrated between their thoughts and their instincts because they had naturally selected for this nomadic lifestyle for millions of years. Life was meaningful, and there was not an excess of food production that arose during the neolithic agricultural revolution which created the opportunity for inegalitarianism, the rise of non-productive elites who ruled with an iron fist, and ultimately decadence.
Peasant farmers in a neolithic grain field
In Greece in the eighth century BC spectacular myths arose:
The values expressed in the Homeric epics, composed around the eighth century B.C., continued to inspire successive generations of Greeks throughout antiquity, and the many figures of the Olympian pantheon, systematically delineated somewhat later in Hesiod’s Theogony, informed and pervaded the Greek cultural vision. In the various divinities and their powers lay a sense of the universe as an ordered whole, a cosmos rather than a chaos. The natural world and the human world were not distinguishable domains in the archaic Greek universe, for a single fundamental order structured both nature and society, and embodied the divine justice that empowered Zeus, the ruler of the gods. Although the universal order was especially represented in Zeus, even he was ultimately bound by an impersonal fate (moira) that governed all and that maintained a certain equilibrium of forces. The gods were indeed often capricious in their actions, with human destinies in the balance. Yet the whole cohered, and the forces of order prevailed over those of chaos—just as the Olympians led by Zeus had defeated the Giants in the primeval struggle for rulership of the world, and just as Odysseus after his long and perilous wanderings at last triumphantly achieved home….
For both archaic poet and classical tragedian, the world of myth endowed human experience with an ennobling clarity of vision, a higher order that redeemed the wayward pathos of life. The universal gave comprehensibility to the concrete. If, in the tragic vision, character determined fate, yet both were mythically perceived. Compared with the Homeric epics, Athenian tragedy reflected a more conscious sense of the gods’ metaphorical significance and a more poignant appreciation of human self-awareness and suffering. Yet through profound suffering came profound learning, and the history and drama of human existence, for all its harsh conflict and wrenching contradiction, still held overarching purpose and meaning. The myths were the living body of that meaning, constituting a language that both reflected and illuminated the essential processes of life.1
What followed these ancient myths included Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers who deepened the Hellenic understanding of the world. Plato came up with the idea of idealistic dualism which later so heavily influenced Christianity, while Aristotle’s dealt more with a scientific, materialistic understanding of the world which would later inform the scientific method. But both still saw the world in a classical framework.
The School of Athens with Plato and Aristotle represented in the center, by Raphael
When Rome conquered Greece it absorbed its culture. However, it could be argued that Greece actually conquered Rome because the Romans continued to operate within the Greek intellectual framework. The Romans copied the Greek masterpieces and brought them into the Latin language with Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Livy, and the Greeks remained the leaders in philosophy, literature, science, art, and education. But Roman military expansion came at a cost to society:
Although nobility of character often evidenced itself in the turmoil of political life, the Roman ethos gradually lost its vitality. The very success of the empire’s inordinate military and commercial activity, divorced from deeper motivations, was weakening the fiber of the Roman citizenry. Most scientific activity, let alone genius, radically diminished in the empire soon after Galen and Ptolemy in the second century, and the excellence of Latin literature began to wane in the same period. Faith in human progress, so broadly visible in the cultural florescence of fifth-century B.C. Greece, and sporadically expressed, usually by scientists and technologists, in the Hellenistic age, virtually disappeared in the final centuries of the Roman Empire. Classical civilization’s finest hours were by then all in the past, and the various factors that brought on Rome’s fall—oppressive and rapacious government, overambitious generals, constant barbarian incursions, an aristocracy grown decadent and effete, religious crosscurrents undermining the imperial authority and military ethos, drastic sustained inflation, pestilential diseases, a dwindling population without resilience or focus—all contributed further to the apparent death of the Greek-inspired world.2
In other words, Roman success – its wealth and the pacifying luxury it afforded – led to decadence (especially for the upper class) and loss of meaning, reminiscent of the G. Michael Hopf quote, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” Decline began in the first and second centuries BC, was interrupted by the short-lived ‘Restoration’ under the emperor Augustus (reign 27 BC – AD 14), then it resumed. In the process of decline, the Roman religion embraced emperor worship, the ‘oriental cults’ and Christianity as symptoms of that decline.
The famed historian Edward Gibbon argued, “…The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.” Gibbon thought that, in its quest for world dominion, Rome had created a situation that intensified despotism, loss of public freedom, and allowed the universal dominion of their Pax Romana to cause the deterioration of virtue.The Roman Empire included many different nations and cultures, and Rome assimilated them recklessly. The citizens of the world-empire “received the name without adopting the spirit of Romans”. This led to what Gibbon saw as an obliteration of what it meant to be Roman.”
The success of Christianity, regardless of the questionable motivations of Paul of Tarsus, transformed society on a fundamental level. Instead of polytheistic Hellenic Gods who provided templates for how people could act in the world, themselves subject to a more unknowable Unmoved Mover, Christians inverted the Roman warrior values into priestly values valuing the ascetic ideal, an all-knowing God spying and judging your every move, turning believers against their baser instincts, providing incentives of Heaven/Hell, and demonstrating extreme intolerance of all other religions (as well as other Christian sects) except to an extent for Judaism.
Even though Gibbon believes that Christianity weakened and had a major role in destroying Rome by sapping its fighting spirit and esprit de corps, there is no doubt that the ascetic ideal prepared believers for hard living during the decline of Rome. It offered a comprehensive worldview which placed man at the center of the universe and gave him a reason for his suffering, removing the decadence felt from the height of Roman materialist success.
Tarnas explains Christianity’s turn inwards toward the ascetic ideal:
With the rise of Christianity, the already decadent state of science in the late Roman era received little encouragement for new developments….The world as a whole was understood simply and preeminently as God’s creation, and thus efforts at scientifically penetrating nature’s inherent logic no longer seemed necessary or appropriate. Its true logic was known to God, and what man could know of that logic was revealed in the Bible.…
The scriptural testaments were thus the final and unchanging repository of universal truth, and no subsequent human efforts were going to enhance or modify, let alone revolutionize, that absolute statement….Truth was therefore approached primarily not through self- determined intellectual inquiry, but through Scripture and prayer, and faith in the teachings of the Church, and only the hope of recovering that lost spiritual light motivated the Christian soul while detained in this body and this world. Only when man awakened from the present life would he attain true happiness. Death, as a spiritual liberation, was more highly valued than mundane existence. At best the concrete natural world was an imperfect reflection of and preparation for the higher spiritual kingdom to come. But more likely the mundane world, with its deceptive attractions, its spurious pleasures and debasing arousal of the passions, would pervert the soul and deprive it of its celestial reward. Hence all human intellectual and moral effort was properly directed toward the spiritual and the afterlife, away from the physical and this life. In all these ways, Platonism gave an emphatic philosophical justification to the potential spirit-matter dualism in Christianity.
Monks living the ascetic ideal
Christianity went from strength to strength against its Hellenic opposition and competing heresies such as the Arians and the various gnostic sects: from surviving the various Roman crackdowns, to growing the religion’s following, to the conversion of Constantine, to the Edict of Milan, the Council of Nicaea, the establishment of Constantinople, the conversion of Augustine and his Confessions and City of God, through the Frankish conversion under Clovis to Christianity, through the outlawing of Hellenism and the gradual disappearance of “pagans” until they were forgotten (along with their philosophy, engineering, architecture and and science), toward the end of the 1st millennium Catholicism stood alone, more or less unopposed throughout Europe. It’s paradigm was the paradigm of the West, and the prior Hellenist, polytheistic, tolerant warrior beliefs were nothing but a memory.
Visualization of the spread of Christianity.
Christianity provided meaning to man’s life regardless of its actual metaphysical validity:
Viewing now in retrospect the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its glory in the high Middle Ages—with virtually all of Europe Catholic, with the entire calendar of human history now numerically centered on the birth of Christ, with the Roman pontiff regnant over the spiritual and often the temporal as well, with the masses of the faithful permeated with Christian piety, with the magnificent Gothic cathedrals, the monasteries and abbeys, the scribes and scholars, the thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, the widespread care for the sick and poor, the sacramental rituals, the great feast days with their processions and festivals, the glorious religious art and Gregorian chant, the morality and miracle plays, the universality of the Latin language in liturgy and scholarship, the omnipresence of the Church and Christian religiosity in every sphere of human activity—all this can hardly fail to elicit a certain admiration for the magnitude of the Church’s success in establishing a universal Christian cultural matrix and fulfilling its earthly mission. And whatever Christianity’s actual metaphysical validity, the living continuity of Western civilized culture itself owed its existence to the vitality and pervasiveness of the Christian Church throughout medieval Europe.3
St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City
Just like other religions and ideologies throughout history, having opposition to fear (the Arians, the Hellenists, the gnostics) had kept Christianity energized and invigorated, just like the omnipresent specter of white nationalism (no matter how silly the perceived threat) keeps liberals vigorous in stamping out heresy in the modern era. Threats and heresies that could undermine the nascent order might be anywhere. But by the end of the 1st millennium there was no opposition to be seen: Catholicism had conquered everything and there were no credible threats (other than the Muslims) to stand against them. Without such threats Christianity descended into complacency. And it is that complacency which led, in turn, starting with the Scholastics and then with the fortuitous reintroduction of Aristotle’s works by the Muslims (given the Christians had burned or lost almost all of it over the centuries) which began the assault on the Christian worldview.
The slow-moving assault on the Christian belief system
The rediscovery of Aristotle was probably the most impactful find in post-Roman Western history. It massively influenced the Church’s approach toward reason which had already begun shifting under the Scholastics:
In this unprecedented context of Church-sponsored learning, and under the impact of the larger forces invigorating the cultural emergence of the West, the stage was set for a radical shift in the philosophical underpinnings of the Christian outlook: Within the womb of the medieval Church, the world-denying Christian philosophy forged by Augustine and based on Plato began giving way to a fundamentally different approach to existence, as the Scholastics in effect recapitulated the movement from Plato to Aristotle in their own intellectual evolution.
That shift was sparked in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the West’s rediscovery of a large corpus of Aristotle’s writings, preserved by the Moslems and Byzantines and now translated into Latin. With these texts, which included the Metaphysics, the Physics, and De Anima (On the Soul), came not only learned Arabic commentaries, but also other works of Greek science, notably those of Ptolemy. Medieval Europe’s sudden encounter with a sophisticated scientific cosmology, encyclopedic in breadth and intricately coherent, was dazzling to a culture that had been largely ignorant of these writings and ideas for centuries. Yet Aristotle had such extraordinary impact precisely because that culture was so well prepared to recognize the quality of his achievement. His masterly summation of scientific knowledge, his codification of the rules for logical discourse, and his confidence in the power of the human intelligence were all exactly concordant with the new tendencies of rationalism and naturalism growing in the medieval West….
Islamic portrayal of Aristotle, c. 1220
The use of reason to examine and defend articles of faith, already exploited in the eleventh century by Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, and the discipline of logic in particular, championed by the fiery twelfth-century dialectician Abelard, now rapidly ascended in both educational popularity and theological importance…medieval thinkers became increasingly preoccupied with the possible plurality of truth, with debate between competing arguments, and with the growing power of human reason for discerning correct doctrine. It is not that Christian truths were called into question; rather, they were now subject to analysis. As Anselm stated, “It seems to me a case of negligence if, after becoming firm in our faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe.”4
Thomas Aquinas furthered the influence of Aristotlean reason on Catholic thinking:
The extraordinary impact Aquinas had on Western thought lay especially in his conviction that the judicious exercise of man’s empirical and rational intelligence, which had been developed and empowered by the Greeks, could now marvelously serve the Christian cause….Faith transcended reason, but was not opposed by it; indeed, they enriched each other.Rather than view the workings of secular reason as a threatening antithesis to the truths of religious faith, Aquinas was convinced that ultimately the two could not be in conflict and that their plurality would therefore serve a deeper unity. Aquinas thereby fulfilled the challenge of dialectic posed by the earlier Scholastic Abelard, and in so doing opened himself to the influx of the Hellenic intellect.5
But was this a good thing? Secularism and materialism arising within the Catholic church led to increasing decadence and disillusionment:
In the high Middle Ages, the Christian world view was still beyond question. The status of the institutional Church, however, had become considerably more controversial. Having consolidated its authority in Europe after the tenth century, the Roman papacy had gradually assumed a role of immense political influence in the affairs of Christian nations. By the thirteenth century, the Church’s powers were extraordinary, with the papacy actively intervening in matters of state throughout Europe, and with enormous revenues being reaped from the faithful to support the growing magnificence of the papal court and its huge bureaucracy. By the early fourteenth century the results of such worldy success were both clear and unsettling. Christianity had become powerful but compromised.
The Church hierarchy was visibly prone to financial and political motivation. The pope’s temporal sovereignty over the Papal States in Italy involved it in political and military maneuverings that repeatedly complicated the Church’s spiritual self-understanding. Moreover, the Church’s extravagant financial needs were placing constantly augmented demands on the masses of devout Christians. Perhaps worst of all, the secularism and evident corruption of the papacy were causing it to lose, in the eyes of the faithful, its spiritual integrity…The very success of the Church’s striving for cultural hegemony, at first spiritually motivated, was now undermining its religious foundations.6
Pandora’s box had been opened:
On the one hand, the Church was supporting the whole academic enterprise in the universities, where Christian doctrine was explicated with unprecedentedly rigorous logical method and increasingly greater scope. On the other hand, it attempted to keep that enterprise under control, either by condemnation and suppression, or by giving doctrinal status to certain innovations such as those of Aquinas—as if to say, “This far and no further.” But within this ambivalent atmosphere, the Scholastic inquiry went on, with increasingly weighty implications.
The Church had largely accepted Aristotle. But the culture’s new interest in Aristotle did not stop with the study of his writings, for that interest signified a broader, and ever-broadening, interest in the natural world and a growing confidence in the power of human reason….This new focus on direct experience and reasoning was beginning to undermine the Church’s exclusive investment in the authoritativeness of the ancient texts—now Aristotelian as well as biblical and patristic. Aristotle was being questioned on his own terms, in specifics if not in overall authority. Some of his principles were compared with experience and found lacking, logical fallacies in his proofs were pinpointed, and the corpus of his works was subjected to minute examination.7
Technological innovation during the Renaissance undermined role of Catholic church further:
As with the medieval cultural revolution several centuries earlier, technical inventions played a pivotal role in the making of the new era. Four in particular (all with Oriental precursors) had been brought into widespread use in the West by this time, with immense cultural ramifications: the magnetic compass, which permitted the navigational feats that opened the globe to European exploration; gunpowder, which contributed to the demise of the old feudal order and the ascent of nationalism; the mechanical clock, which brought about a decisive change in the human relationship to time, nature, and work, separating and freeing the structure of human activities from the dominance of nature’s rhythms; and the printing press, which produced a tremendous increase in learning, made available both ancient classics and modern works to an ever-broadening public, and eroded the monopoly on learning long held by the clergy.
All of these inventions were powerfully modernizing and ultimately secularizing in their effects. The artillery-supported rise of separate but internally cohesive nation-states signified not only the overthrow of the medieval feudal structures but also the empowerment of secular forces against the Catholic Church. With parallel effect in the realm of thought, the printing press allowed the rapid dissemination of new and often revolutionary ideas throughout Europe. Without it, the Reformation would have been limited to a relatively minor theological dispute in a remote German province, and the Scientific Revolution, with its dependence on international communication among many scientists, would have been altogether impossible. Moreover, the spread of the printed word and growing literacy contributed to a new cultural ethos marked by increasingly individual and private, noncommunal forms of communication and experience, thereby encouraging the growth of individualism. Silent reading and solitary reflection helped free the individual from traditional ways of thinking, and from collective control of thinking, with individual readers now having private access to a multiplicity of other perspectives and forms of experience.8
The widespread sale of indulgences was one of the causes of the Reformation
The Protestant Reformation led to more secularism, even though it was a reaction against the decadence of the Catholic Church:
Here we encounter the other extraordinary paradox of the Reformation. For while its essential character was so intensely and unambiguously religious, its ultimate effects on Western culture were profoundly secularizing, and in multiple, mutually reinforcing ways. By overthrowing the theological authority of the Catholic Church, the internationally recognized supreme court of religious dogma, the Reformation opened the way in the West for religious pluralism, then religious skepticism, and finally a complete breakdown in the until then relatively homogeneous Christian world view….The immediate consequence of the liberation from the old matrix was a manifest liberation of fervent Christian religiosity, permeating the lives of the new Protestant congregations with fresh spiritual meaning and charismatic power. Yet as time passed, the average Protestant, no longer enclosed by the Catholic womb of grand ceremony, historical tradition, and sacramental authority, was left somewhat less protected against the vagaries of private doubt and secular thinking. From Luther on, each believer’s belief was increasingly self-supported; and the Western intellect’s critical faculties were becoming ever more acute….
By disenchanting the world of immanent divinity, completing the process initiated by Christianity’s destruction of pagan animism, the Reformation better allowed for its radical revision by modern science. The way was then clear for an increasingly naturalistic view of the cosmos, moving first to the remote rationalist Creator of Deism, and finally to secular agnosticism’s elimination of any supernatural reality.9
Even as the West became secular, though, its ethics and metaphysics remained thoroughly Christian:
The West had “lost its faith”—and found a new one, in science and in man. But paradoxically, much of the Christian world view found continued life, albeit in often unrecognized forms, in the West’s new secular outlook. Just as the evolving Christian understanding did not fully divorce itself from its Hellenic predecessor but, on the contrary, employed and integrated many of the latter’s essential elements, so too did the modern secular world view— often less consciously—retain essential elements from Christianity. The Christian ethical values and the Scholastic-developed faith in human reason and in the intelligibility of the empirical universe were conspicuous among these, but even as fundamentalist a Judaeo-Christian doctrine as the command in Genesis that man exercise dominion over nature found modern affirmation, often explicit as in Bacon and Descartes, in the advances of science and technology. So too did the Judaeo-Christian high regard for the individual soul, endowed with “sacred” inalienable rights and intrinsic dignity, continue in the secular humanist ideals of modern liberalism—as did other themes such as the moral self-responsibility of the individual, the tension between the ethical and the political, the imperative to care for the helpless and less fortunate, and the ultimate unity of mankind. The West’s belief in itself as the most historically significant and favored culture echoed the Judaeo-Christian theme of the Chosen People. The global expansion of Western culture as the best and most appropriate for all mankind represented a secular continuation of the Roman Catholic Church’s self-concept as the one universal Church for all humanity. Modern civilization now replaced Christianity as the cultural norm and ideal with which all other societies were to be compared, and to which they were to be converted. Just as Christianity had, in the process of overcoming and succeeding the Roman Empire, become Roman itself in the centralized, hierarchical, and politically motivated Roman Catholic Church, so too did the modern secular West, in the process of overcoming and succeeding Christianity and the Catholic Church, incorporate and unconsciously continue many of the latter’s characteristic approaches to the world.
But perhaps the most pervasive and specifically Judaeo-Christian component tacitly retained in the modern world view was the belief in man’s linear historical progress toward ultimate fulfillment. Modern man’s self-understanding was emphatically teleological, with humanity seen as moving in a historical development out of a darker past characterized by ignorance, primitiveness, poverty, suffering, and oppression, and toward a brighter ideal future characterized by intelligence, sophistication, prosperity, happiness, and freedom. The faith in that movement was based largely on an underlying trust in the salvational effect of expanding human knowledge: Humanity’s future fulfillment would be achieved in a world reconstructed by science. The original Judaeo-Christian eschatological expectation had here been transformed into a secular faith. The religious faith in God’s eventual salvation of mankind—whether Israel’s arrival in the Promised Land, the Church’s arrival at the millennium, the Holy Spirit’s progressive perfecting of humanity, or the Second Coming of Christ—now became an evolutionary confidence, or revolutionary belief, in an eventual this-worldly utopia whose realization would be expedited by the expert application of human reason to nature and society.10
That secular western society retained the underlying values of Christianity even as it discarded the religion itself is exactly the point that Tom Holland made in Dominion, where he argues that no philosopher until Nietzsche understood the assumptions that went into choosing society’s core values, and that the French Revolution, the communist revolution, secular liberalism, and atheism are all mere continuations and amplifications of the underlying Christian principles. Only the Nazis tried, but failed, to transvalue the West’s core priestly egalitarianism back into inegalitarian warrior values.
Tom Holland explaining that all the major secular revolutions within the west prior to Nazism were merely extensions of underlying Christians values and metaphysics.
The descent into nihilism
In the modern era idealist metaphysics no longer commanded widespread acceptance because its ideas were not empirically testable, and therefore society focused on materialism. This intense focus on materialism has led to widespread environmental destruction and an unsustainable quality of life:
But compounding these humanistic critiques were more disturbingly concrete signs of science’s untoward consequences. The critical contamination of the planet’s water, air, and soil, the manifold harmful effects on animal and plant life, the extinction of innumerable species, the deforestation of the globe, the erosion of topsoil, the depletion of groundwater, the vast accumulation of toxic wastes, the apparent exacerbation of the greenhouse effect, the breakdown of the ozone layer in the atmosphere, the radical disruption of the entire planetary ecosystem— all these emerged as direly serious problems with increasing force and complexity. From even a short-term human perspective, the accelerating depletion of irreplaceable natural resources had become an alarming phenomenon. Dependence on foreign supplies of vital resources brought a new precariousness into global political and economic life. New banes and stresses to the social fabric continued to appear, directly or indirectly tied to the advance of a scientific civilization—urban overdevelopment and overcrowding, cultural and social rootlessness, numbingly mechanical labor, increasingly disastrous industrial accidents, automobile and air travel fatalities, cancer and heart disease, alcoholism and drug addiction, mind- dulling and culture-impoverishing television, growing levels of crime, violence, and psychopathology. Even science’s most cherished successes paradoxically entailed new and pressing problems, as when the medical relief of human illness and lowering of mortality rates, combined with technological strides in food production and transportation, in turn exacerbated the threat of global overpopulation. In other cases, the advance of science presented new Faustian dilemmas, as in those surrounding the unforeseeable future uses of genetic engineering. More generally, the scientifically unfathomed complexity of all relevant variables—whether in global or local environments, in social systems, or in the human body— made the consequences of technological manipulation of those variables unpredictable and often pernicious.11
An increasing world of trash and junk, leaving the world a ruin for future generations
So what we have seen is the faith of the Christian worldview slowly giving way to a scientific materialism that accelerated into both decadence and nihilism. Tarnas comments on the rise of the impersonal technocratic society:
As the twentieth century advanced, modern consciousness found itself caught up in an intensely contradictory process of simultaneous expansion and contraction. Extraordinary intellectual and psychological sophistication was accompanied by a debilitating sense of anomie and malaise. An unprecedented broadening of horizons and exposure to the experience of others coincided with a private alienation of no less extreme proportions. A stupendous quantity of information had become available about all aspects of life – the contemporary world, the historical past, other cultures, other forms of life, the subatomic world, the macrocosm, the human mind and psyche – yet there was also less ordering vision, less coherence and comprehension, less certainty. The great overriding impulse defining Western man since the Renaissance – the quest for independence, self-determination, and individualism – had indeed brought those ideals to reality in many lives; yet it had also been eventuated in a world where individual spontaneity and freedom were increasingly smothered, not just in theory by a reductionist scientism, but in practice by the ubiquitous collectivity and conformism of mass societies. The great revolutionary political projects of the modern era, heralding personal and social liberation, had gradually led to conditions in which the modern individual’s fate was ever more dominated by bureaucratic commercial and political superstructures. Just as man had become a meaningless speck in the modern universe, so had individual persons become insignificant ciphers in modern states, to be manipulated or coerced by the millions.
The quality of modern life seemed ever equivocal. Spectacular empowerment was countered by a widespread sense of anxious helplessness. Profound moral and aesthetic sensitivity confronted horrific cruelty and waste. The price of technology’s accelerating advance grew ever higher. And in the background of every pleasure and every achievement loomed humanity’s unprecedented vulnerability. Under the West’s direction and impetus, modern man had burst forward and outward, with tremendous centrifugal force, complexity, variety, and speed. And yet it appeared he had driven himself into a terrestrial nightmare and a spiritual wasteland, a fierce constriction, a seemingly irresolvable predicament…
The anguish and alienation of twentieth-century life were brought to full articulation as the existentialist addressed the most fundamental, naked concerns of human existence—suffering and death, loneliness and dread, guilt, conflict, spiritual emptiness and ontological insecurity, the void of absolute values or universal contexts, the sense of cosmic absurdity, the frailty of human reason, the tragic impasse of the human condition. Man was condemned to be free. He faced the necessity of choice and thus knew the continual burden of error. He lived in constant ignorance of his future, thrown into a finite existence bounded at each end by nothingness. The infinity of human aspiration was defeated before the finitude of human possibility. Man possessed no determining essence: only his existence was given, an existence engulfed by mortality, risk, fear, ennui, contradiction, uncertainty. No transcendent Absolute guaranteed the fulfillment of human life or history. There was no eternal design or providential purpose. Things existed simply because they existed, and not for some “higher” or “deeper” reason. God was dead, and the universe was blind to human concerns, devoid of meaning or purpose. Man was abandoned, on his own. All was contingent. To be authentic one had to admit, and choose freely to encounter, the stark reality of life’s meaninglessness. Struggle alone gave meaning.12
The comparison of the human impulse to live a life of meaning with modern society’s explanation of the universe as a cold, impersonal force devoid of meaning, ultimately creates spiritual conditions akin to schizophrenia in the modern man:
We have the post-Copernican dilemma of being a peripheral and insignificant inhabitant of a vast cosmos, and the post-Cartesian dilemma of being a conscious, purposeful, and personal subject confronting an unconscious, purposeless, and impersonal universe, with these compounded by the post-Kantian dilemma of there being no possible means by which the human subject can know the universe in its essence. We are evolved from, embedded in, and defined by a reality that is radically alien to our own, and moreover cannot ever be directly contacted in cognition.
This double bind of modern consciousness has been recognized in one form or another since at least Pascal: “I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” Our psychological and spiritual predispositions are absurdly at variance with the world revealed by our scientific method. We seem to receive two messages from our existential situation: on the one hand, strive, give oneself to the quest for meaning and spiritual fulfillment; but on the other hand, know that the universe, of whose substance we are derived, is entirely indifferent to that quest, soulless in character, and nullifying in its effects. We are at once aroused and crushed. For inexplicably, absurdly, the cosmos is inhuman, yet we are not. The situation is profoundly unintelligible.13
Concluding thoughts
We currently live in an era of ubiquitous nihilism; no meaning at all, an all-encompassing decadence everywhere one looks. Meanwhile, via the egalitarian ratchet effect, the parabolic rush toward enforcing total equality of outcome via white erasure continues apace. Natural resources are being vigorously consumed as the worldwide population gallops toward an unsustainable 10+ billion population, while the world also drowns in Rothschild created central bank debt slavery. Oligarchy rules everything, populist leaders have elections stolen from them and then thrown into prison on nonsensical charges, there is no freedom of speech and no freedom of association, spying on everyone is ubiquitous, mainstream media lies are unrelenting and nonstop, and everything careens down to the lowest common denominator. According to 2nd Smartest Guy in the World American suicides are at an all-time high. The lack of meaning provided by this era is Hell, despite its unprecedented levels of material prosperity.
One can argue that that the doctrine of materialism is using idealism itself as fuel for its continued propagation, turning humanity into unthinking automatons without any dignity, independence, creativity or uniqueness to benefit the Machine. But this materialist philosophy undermines itself as it consumes and destroys the world’s limited natural resources; how can materialism continue long-term without the cheap propagation of goods? After all the joy and spontaneity is sucked out of life, perhaps the whole enterprise just collapses, either from the central banker’s depopulation agenda, from a natural resource crisis, or otherwise. Perhaps humanity goes extinct. Or perhaps, like Rome when it was subsumed by decadence and lack of meaning before the rise a new Christian paradigm, there is an opportunity for a new paradigm shift toward a transvaluation of values away from egalitarianism into something different…
Here’s a crude chart, “Meaning Through the Ages”, documenting the story told in this post:
Any worldview that successfully combats nihilism will likely have a very different expression with very different values from the ubiquitous secular egalitarianism we all experience, in whatever form it ultimately manifests.
Let us hope that we can develop the wisdom, experience, and luck to discover and birth a worldview which brings forth a perspective full of meaning and hope for mankind, of life-enhancement and soul complexity, and leave this nihilist, materialist, soul-deadening world of short-sighted death, trash and blind, one-track money-chasing behind.
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1 Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, 17.
This post offers a typology of globohomo-initiated wars. An understanding of how the central bank owners own and control Western civilization is helpful background knowledge to appreciate the arguments advanced within.
Is globohomo invincible?
What a loaded question. It’s an emotionally charged question, too: a dissident with an optimistic, hopeful streak will likely instinctively react “Hell no!” and “This question is inherently demoralizing and shouldn’t even be considered – of course they’re beatable! Focus on the bright side of things, God is on our side!”
Okay, great. I am comforted, thanks for that. But it wouldn’t hurt to consider the question and then reject it after some analysis, right? Let’s give it a try.
First let’s define “globohomo” and “invincible” in the context of the question presented. We can avoid defining what “is” means, sorry Bill Clinton.
Globohomo is a portmanteau of “globalization” plus either “homogenization” or “homosexuality”. Globalism really kicked into gear with the founding of the United Nations in 1945 (after the League of Nations failed), but movement toward it has been ongoing since either:
The privately owned Bank of England was established in 1694, allowing the printing of fiat out of thin air with such funds lent to the British government at interest for the Bank owner’s benefit, or
From a wider perspective, since the neolithic agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago where history has been trending, with some hiccups, toward ever-increasing power centralization into larger and larger blocs controlled by fewer and fewer people with ever-increasing micro-managed control of governments over their populations.
The homosexual component of globohomo is a fairly recent phenomenon, gaining steam since the 1980s along with a corresponding war on masculinity.
The hyper masculinity of the 1980s is missed. Ah-nuld and Carl Weathers in Predator. Ah-nuld later became a globohomo shill and said “Screw your freedoms” during COVID.
For purposes of framing this argument, globohomo means the historical, worldwide centralization trends that the central bank owners have piggybacked off of (not created) and supercharged via their methods of control.
The question of invincibility depends on setting the framing, which requires an investigation into the goals and motivations of the central bank owners. From their world-spanning perspective, nation states are mere provinces that can be used to fight each other to achieve overarching goals. This is why Alex Soros, who is taking over Daddy’s empire, casually brags about hoping America is destroyed:
If Alex Soros thought America’s success was somehow important to the overarching goals, he wouldn’t be publicly bragging about hoping it fails.
To the ruling class, having a mere nation-state province fail can be either a good or a bad thing, depending on the context of whether it increases or decreases their control over the worldwide masses. For the purposes of defining the question, invincibility means whether globohomo, despite occasional hiccups, can be stopped from its continued power centralization along with increased control over the population over which it rules. The framing of this post does not speak to a spiritual perspective involving God’s judgment in the afterlife or whether it is all part of His plan ending in the Second Coming, Judgment Day, the Rapture, etc; it is about control on the material plane in the here and now.
The types of globohomo control
Globohomo ensures compliance through a combination of soft and hard power.
Use of power always has a cost associated with it. Soft power is less costly to use than hard power in terms of money, the impact on perceived legitimacy, the ability for the puppeteers’ to stay in the shadows, and the ability to control outcomes. Soft power includes economic pressure (sanctions, tariffs, utilizing World Bank loans enforcing the Washington Consensus), media and corporate influence, NGO support, control over interest rates and lending through the “independent” central banks, CIA sponsored activities such as color revolutions, overthrow attempts, spying, bribery, etc. The best soft power, though, was the image of America as a bastion of “freedom” and “democracy” worldwide, an image that is rapidly fading, or has already faded. Anyway, western control has metastasized worldwide — its economic system, its push for secularization and increased degeneracy, its media narratives, its fast food and big box stores, its “democracy” (aka oligarchy) are now ubiquitous. It consumes everything in its wake and leaves a gray financialized blob in its wake.1
There is very little competition for the west’s empty materialist mass consumption at this time. China’s belt and road initiative is a purely economic offering and they have no cultural soft power. The alternative media is quick to hype that Brazil, Russia, India and China are forming a currency to counteract U.S. dollar hegemony. But this is merely an illusion: the central bank owners control all of these country’s central banks. Here are just a few examples: The pro-West head of the Russian central bank, Elvira Nabiullina, was renominated to her position by Putin after sending $400 billion of Russian funds to get seized by the West at the start of the Not-War. One of the first things the president of Brazil, “Lula”, did after globohomo rigged the election in his favor was call for de-dollarization. Why would Lula do this unless it’s what they wanted? China has been controlled by the central bankers since at least World War 2, or likely after the Opium Wars. Alex Soros, as noted above, is perfectly happy with the U.S. collapsing. Edward Slavsquat regularly covers the details of the BRICS scam, which you can read about here and here. It’s not a pretty picture.
What about hard power? Globohomo as represented by America has lost numerous wars in the recent past, right? If some Afghan goat herders can beat them, can’t others as well?
This line of reasoning is the cause of much confusion, because people look at the victory conditions of wars as merely being military victory by the aggressor country, ignoring all sorts of alternative victory conditions or what motivations might inspire them. These unconventional victory conditions are not publicly broadcast because such conditions would be wildly unpopular.
There are three types of wars that globohomo engages in. Each type has its own particular objectives (which are always different than what is announced to the public) and therefore victory or failure must be assessed in terms of those unstated objectives. The strategies employed are different, the propaganda they use in support of the war at home and internationally is different, their rules of engagement are different, and the intensity of the effort as well as the length of time involved in each war is different.
The three types of wars are as follows:
Forever-wars, which are long, drawn out affairs, with no desire for outright military victory, designed both to enrich the military industrial complex as well as to bleed right-wing patriotism/enthusiasm to soften them up for the next phase of the globalist agenda. Examples of this type include Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the ongoing Russia/Ukraine war (previously covered here);
Wars to maintain the dollar’s hegemony as the world currency worldwide, as seen in wars in Libya, both Iraq wars, and ongoing tension with Iran; and
Wars against white Christian countries or communities as part of the overarching white and Christian erasure in the West. Examples include Clinton’s war on Serbia, the Syrian war against Alewite/Christian Assad, the so-called “Arab Spring”, World War 1, World War 2, the Boer Wars, ongoing racial conflicts in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and Russia/Ukraine.
Sometimes a war is a hybrid of two objectives. For example, the Russia/Ukraine war is a blend of a forever-war and a war against white Christian Russia, while the second Iraq war was conducted primarily to maintain the dollar’s hegemony, but it had the added benefit for globohomo of destroying an ancient Christianity community whose Christian population is down 90% from pre-war numbers.
There are usually other strategic considerations involved in all three types of war, such as America’s access to the victim nation’s natural resources (especially oil and gas, but also rare earth minerals, gold and silver and others), oil pipeline routes, location for future American military bases, etc., but those are usually secondary considerations.
The Rothschilds control the Federal Reserve (among other central banks); the Federal Reserve controls America; America has conquered the world
In addition to these three types of war there are also other minor types of conflicts, such as the CIA and military’s support for regular coups in Latin America, or the 1980s “War on Crime”, and other CIA-sponsored shenanigans which they conduct to increase their budgets (i.e. creating more problems to “solve” provides justification for increased spending to Congress) but those interventions are usually short, cheap (comparatively) both in money and lives killed or lost, and quickly forgotten.
Let’s go through the three types of wars.
Forever wars
Forever-wars are long, drawn out affairs, with no desire for outright military victory. They are designed both to enrich the military industrial complex on a perpetual basis as well as to bleed right-wing patriotism/enthusiasm to soften them up for the next phase of the globalist agenda. Let’s go through a couple examples.
Vietnam war
Establishment narrative: The United States fought against the North Vietnamese, who were in turn backed by the Soviet Union, to prevent communism from spreading worldwide based on domino theory. The U.S.’s total engagement lasted roughly 20 years (1955-1973), but it’s direct, heavy involvement started after the false flag Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1965 and lasted 8 years. Due to the unfavorable, difficult jungle fighting, the intransigence of the North Vietnamese, and a burgeoning anti-war movement at home, despite military and technological superiority the United States eventually lost the war.
The reality: The Vietnam war, chosen as far away as physically possible from America (halfway around the world) and utilizing extraordinarily restrictive rules of engagement (seriously, read this link if you want to understand how this war was fought), along with controlling both sides of the debate (including the hard-right nationalist John Birch society, according to co-founder Revilo P. Oliver, despite their above complaints about the war) was a major victory for globohomo, achieving the following objectives: (1) America’s loss put a major dent in the right-wing, hotblooded American populist anti-communist movement, both ideologically and in costing 58,000 lower and middle class lives, paving the way for further global integration; and (2) it cost a trillion dollars (adjusted for inflation), increasing the deficit and therefore interest that would be paid to the Federal Reserve owners.
The Afghanistan war
Establishment narrative: Due to 9/11 the Taliban were sympathetic to the attackers and sheltered Osama Bin Laden, therefore the Taliban had to be overthrown. However, given the Taliban retreated into the mountains bordering Pakistan which was a radical wild-card country full of extremists, it was impossible to fully root them out, and that is why America had to stay there for 20 years, only withdrawing in 2021, six months before the start of the next forever-war, the Russia/Ukraine war. Ultimately, the cavemen goat-herders won out against the strongest country in the world (well, twice).https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/F0necNQSj-8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0The Taliban fighters riding bumper cars in Kabul after taking the city. They also tried working out in the Presidential Palace. Wheee!
The reality: The central bank owner goals were to massively drive up U.S. debt and bleed right wing populism again, same goals as in Vietnam. It was a massively successful operation for them, costing $2 trillion and thousands of American lives. The military industrial complex carried out these orders because they got to participate in the graft of the U.S. taxpayer; they wanted a forever war as Julian Assange, who is a hero, eloquently explained in this 30 second clip:https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/_IGU_7alJ80?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0Additionally, globohomo’s control over Pakistan is and was much greater than commonly perceived. It forced out popular Imran Khan from office and then imprisoned him because he was insufficiently pro-Ukraine war (confirmed by leaked diplomatic cables). They just didn’t want to use Pakistan to rein in the Taliban.
Ukraine war
Establishment perspective: NATO is defending poor Ukrainian democracy against the ultra-aggressive Russian behemoth dictatorship led by Putin, who is almost akin to a Nazi war criminal. Alternatively, to many on the religious right Putin is standing up for white Christian values against expansionist U.S./UK/NATO forces.
The reality: The war is controlled on both sides by globohomo. The war is being conducted for many reasons, but especially as a tool for continued white genocide and trillion dollar/year funding laundered back to the military/industrial complex and paid for via the taxpayer and from U.S. debt servitude. Win/win/win. Here is a deep-dive on the topic.
On the basis of globohomo’s objectives for these forever wars, they were resounding successes even if the military outcomes of one of their subjugated national provinces “lost” or was “stalemated” in the war against another one of their subjugated national provinces. These wars resoundingly successes for globohomo’s long-term plans for worldwide centralization, consolidation, and control.
Wars to maintain the dollar’s hegemony as the world currency worldwide
Essentially, the U.S. agreed to provide a security guarantee to Saudi and other middle east nations in return for them accepting only dollars for their oil, and then the U.S. would accept those middle eastern dollars back into the U.S. as foreign investments. As part of this arrangement, other nations that threatened Saudi would have to be dealt with, militarily if necessarily (Saudi got scared by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf War). Additionally, any oil-producing nation that tried to get off the petrodollar system was a threat to the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency and therefore had to be brutally crushed. Any leader that attempts to get off the petrodollar system must be overthrown and brutally murdered or executed as a warning to other leaders not to try the same thing. The objective is not the pacification of a nation’s people per se but regime overthrow plus leadership execution, and globohomo pursues it with a singular focus. With this in mind:
The Second Iraq war
Establishment perspective: Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, Sunnis oppressing the Shiites, Saddam’s a dictator, some nonsense around those lines.
The reality: The war was primarily about destroying Saddam for threatening to get off the U.S. petrodollar system. In November 2000 Saddam Hussein decreed that all oil payments would be made in euros, as he did not wish to deal “in the currency of the enemy”, which is what cost him his life. Secondarily, the war continued globohomo’s goal of destroying Christianity worldwide; Iraq’s Christian population has declined 90% from 2003. The U.S. also continues to steal Iraqi oil, stealing $150 billion worth since the U.S.-led invasion.
Libya war
Establishment perspective: Something about Qaddafi terrorizing his population and a “civil war” breaking out during the so-called (fake, CIA backed) “Arab Spring”.
The reality: Libya had the only central bank in the world run on genuine state banking lines which exhibited the classic symptoms of full employment, zero inflation and excellent worker’s rights, and in 2010 Qaddafi announced the creation of the gold dinar as a replacement for the settlement of all foreign transactions in a proposed region of over 200 million people; this is why he was murdered.
Ongoing tensions with Iran
Establishment perspective: Iran is a rogue nation sponsoring radical Islamic extremism in the region, developing nuclear weapons and threatening Israel.
The reality: Iran ended oil transactions in U.S. dollars in 2008 and therefore provides a weakening element toward the petrodollar system; as such, it is a major factor in globohomo’s continued aggression against it, and it explains why the CIA regularly sponsors protests in Iran to try to overthrow the political system.
The establishment has done an excellent job maintaining the petrodollar system, even though Iran has successfully gotten off of it, which is a point against globohomo invincibility. That being said, Iran continues to pursue CBDCs along with the rest of the world, they fully went along with the COVID and COVID vaccine narrative, and their banking system, which supposedly is run along Islamic lines, charges interest like every other bank on earth. Therefore it is unclear how independent they actually are from the central bank owners, even though they hate two of globohomo’s national provinces (U.S. and Israel).
Wars against white Christian countries or communities, as part of the overarching white erasure in the West
These are wars that globohomo fights as part of its long-term goal of white erasure. You can see the 3-part post on the goals and motivations of the central bank owners here, but basically they believe that whites and, to an extent, Christians2 are too resistant to the horrendous, Beast-tier technological neoliberal feudalism system they are bringing into place which is based in the most abject, horrible materialism one can imagine with no freedoms, the most oppressive system in human history, and because of this globohomo wants to wipe them out.
Unlike forever wars which are deliberately fought to stalemate, and unlike wars to maintain U.S. dollar hegemony to overthrow and execute recalcitrant leaders, the wars against whites and Christians are fought on the basis of group erasure, and so they are fundamentally a different class than the other types of wars. It doesn’t mean that any particular war against whites ramps up to total genocide; it doesn’t, but these wars are fought with a very long-term view with this objective in mind, and the wars always further those ends. In such a conflict globohomo fights no holds-barred; they unleash the highest degree of propaganda, they fight the most ruthlessly and underhandedly, with a clever, creative, extreme bloodlust, more heartlessly than normal people could ever imagine – “Imperium super omnia” – “control above all” – whatever it takes for them to win, regardless of the ethical red-lines crossed or the zero rules of engagement, and regardless of the exceptions to society’s rules they need to distort (per Schmitt). This type of war cannot be compared to U.S. forever-wars or wars to punish a country’s leadership, and those that try are conducting an analysis that wildly misses the mark.
The Second Boer War
Let’s explore the Second Boer War as a prime example of the way in which globohomo fights these types of wars. The Boers had won the First Boer War in 1880-1881, which was a disaster for globohomo which had not lost a war since the American revolution a hundred years earlier, and South Africa gained its independence. But globohomo doesn’t take losses on the chin (see how it subverted America with the first two national banks before finally achieving victory with the Federal Reserve), and it came back with a vengeance in the Second Boer War of 1899-1902, which was supercharged because of vast amounts of gold found in the Transvaal. The Rothschilds initiated the war under flimsy pretexts (much like the Opium Wars) as they wanted total control over the newly found gold reserves.
But they found the Boers to be a surprisingly difficult enemy. Even though the British forces wildly outnumbered and out-equipped the Boers, the Boers conducted guerilla warfare and gradually wore down the British numbers. In response, the British burned down all the Boer houses, farms, and animals in a scorched earth policy, stuck the Boer women and children in concentration camps and deliberately starved them to death until the Boers gave up, which they eventually did, giving the British control over the region and it’s natural resources. Imperium super omnia.
If you want to read a good and brief summary of the Rothschild tactics in this war (which were led by their puppet Alfred Milner) check out this 26 page book “Genocide of the Boers” (it’s free online, click the link) by Stephen Mitford Goodson, a well credentialed South African central banker who turned on his masters.
155,000 women and children were imprisoned in the concentration camps, which was almost 2/3 of the entire Boer population. They were kept on starvation rations, and as a result about 34,000 or 22% of the inmates of the concentration camps died, of whom 27,540 or 81% were under the age of 16. According to Goodson, “The bankers achieved their principal aim of obtaining full control of the gold and other mineral resources of South Africa. They had financed the war in the amount of 222 million British pounds and thereby added a further 132 million to Britain’s national debt. For the Rothschilds the Second Anglo-Boer War was a consummate victory.”
Does anyone today know about what the British did here? Have they ever had to account for it in the modern era? No one knows about it, no one talks about it, no one justifies it, it’s as if it never happened. The media simply dictates what is reality for most people. But it’s an easy parallel to draw this to the hypocrisy of globohomo’s singular, loud focus on the Holocaust when they perpetrated actions like this.
Conclusions
“Imperium super omnia” – “control above all” – is the unstated motto of the world’s central bank owners. Their strategies and objectives are pursued across a multi-decade or longer horizon, and their goals are to create a worldwide population that they control to a level never seen before in human history. They occasionally suffer real setbacks that delay their plans for years – Trump’s 2016 win was not something they planned for, their defeat in the First Boer War, Hitler dramatically outperformed globohomo’s expectations for Germany during World War 2 which scared them, Andrew Jackson dismantled the Rothschild second National Bank – but they have bounced back from each of these setbacks stronger than ever because of their long-term planning and perspective, their ruthlessness and their patience.
If one looks at their actions since taking over the Bank of England if not much earlier, they have gone from victory to victory, with ever increasing power centralization, and appear, especially now when right-wing populism has been smashed and whites are 6.5% of the worldwide population, with an ultra-woke AI and freedom-denying CBDCs about to be (or already being) unleashed onto the public, that things are grimmer than ever. From this perspective they do appear to be close to invincible, at least in the material realm, unless God decides to come down and change the fundamental situation somehow. Perhaps this is a Tower of Babel scenario where humanity’s integration and consolidation happens inexorably — until it is struck down and humanity cast to the winds, shattered and confused. And who knows what such an event would look like?3
Illustration of the Tower of Babel
I will be doing a post analyzing the possibilities of a “redneck rebellion” in a future post, but for those looking at history, the three types of globohomo wars absolutely need to be taken into consideration. “Oh, the U.S. failed against a bunch of goat herders in Afghanistan, therefore a heavily armed white Christian population would have no trouble wiping the floor with a decadent, homosexual/transsexual, corrupt ruling oligarchy” is absolutely the wrong analysis and those that push this line of thinking (and there are many of them) are completely and utterly wrong. A victory or defeat can only be ascertained in the context of the pursued reasons for the war by globohomo, and Afghanistan as a “forever war” was an unmitigated success for them. In a redneck rebellion scenario those very naive men on the right would be shocked at globohomo’s extreme aggression with no rules of engagement, extreme and unrelenting propaganda and an unrelenting bloodthirstiness that would make their heads spin.
Hopefully this post provides a better context for analyzing wars in the context of globohomo’s goals, motivations and abilities.
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1 From Profiles in courage #2: Julian Assange, “America learned over a long trial-and-error process that direct military occupation and colonialism of nations around the world was not a very efficient process. It was expensive, unwieldily, had a negative impact on world opinion, led to charges of imperialism and racism and other things. Rather, indirect control was a much cheaper and sophisticated process without many of the other drawbacks that came with the former process. Indirect control came from the Washington consensus, where a country could be controlled via foreign loans, which would put pressure on the nation for deregulation, foreign investment, decreased minimum wage, i.e. strip-mining the country to benefit globohomo overlords. If a country was deemed too immature to advance the Washington consensus via democracy, it would support a strong-man in power to achieve these goals. Once the country was deemed mature enough, they would seek to cast aside the strong-man in order to institute “fake” democracy, which was seen as easier to control than the strong-man past a certain point of development. Populist movements which sought actual nationalism and self-sufficiency, i.e. to nationalize industries and plants owned by foreign powers, to default on its foreign debt obligations, were deemed anathema to foreign investment and therefore had to be rigorously stamped out using as much brutality as necessary.”
2 Despite secular egalitarianism being directly traceable to Christianity via Unitarianism and mainline Protestantism, true-believing Christians still believe in God and the imperfectability of this world, that people possess souls and are due inherent dignity. This makes them more resistant to this stage of globohomo reducing everyone to a mere widget and digits on screens. Therefore they, to an extent, serve as both an impediment and a facilitator of the globohomo vision.
This is part 2 of a reoccurring series highlighting specific individuals who have displayed true, unquestionable courage standing up to the globohomo1 behemoth against unrelenting pressures, serving as a bit of a counter to the typical grim perspective pushed on this Substack. These individuals pay a price, often a big price, for their courage, and for standing up anyway they deserve to be applauded. Part 1 covers Ian Smith, who stood up to global hysteria around the COVID narrative at its peak.
“Who am I? I fought for liberty and was deprived of all liberty. I fought for freedom of speech and was denied all speech. I fought for the truth and became the subject of a thousand lies.” – tweet by Julian Assange, April 10, 2019, the day before he was hauled out of the Ecuadorian embassy
Julian Assange is a controversial and complicated character. The globalist establishment has a special hatred for the man, which in turn makes him interesting. Given how blackly evil globohomo is, what about the man makes him dangerous to their agenda?
An interesting and idealistic but somewhat unsettling physiognomy, reflecting certain philosophical issues I have with him which will be discussed herein
I had vaguely heard about Assange as he became famous in the 2010s, and the broad strokes of his story are known by many. Originally an Australian hacker, he founded Wikileaks in order to serve as a repository for government and corporate leaks provided by whistleblowers, and then to publish them online as a journalist in the vein of Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers. Assange and his team would verify each leak — not the contents of the material, just whether they were official documents, a hard enough task — before releasing them to the public, with limited temporary redactions to protect life where necessary. Assange was always proud that his verification rate was 100% accurate and he never published fake documents in all the years that he published leaks, despite some sophisticated fakes being offered along the way. He offered leakers the very best in privacy protection, both via state of the art cryptography as well as rigid source protection protocols within Wikileaks, and he also promised to take whatever steps he could to maximize the impact of the leaks to balance the risk involved. Such impact maximization strategies required a careful understanding of the countermeasures that governments and corporations would use, and a considered approach toward pre-empting those countermeasures.
Assange’s approach was effective and he released a tremendous amount of material to the public, organized and systematized in a way that made searching it easy. The publications include revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world,extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police,2008 Tibetan unrest in China,and the “Petrogate” oil scandal in Peru. Assange’s profile rose further when Wikileaks published Bradley/Chelsea Manning leak’s, which included the Collateral murder video (April 2010), the Iraqi war logs (October 2010), and a quarter of a million diplomatic U.S. cables in what was known as Cablegate (November 2010). Later leaks included the Guantanamo Bay files leak,the Syria Files, the Kissinger cables, and the Saudi cables. By mid 2015 Assange had published more than ten million files and corresponding analysis.
As a result of his early Wikileaks activities, globohomo targeted him with false rape allegations in Sweden in 2010 in order to tie him up in legal defense, drain his limited funds, curtail his activities, and serve as a dampener on both his reputation and his work. He eventually sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition on the false rape charges.
An interesting 3-hour meeting between Assange and Google head Eric Schmidt in 2011 became the subject of an Assange book called “When Google Met Wikileaks”, which includes a transcript of their meeting. It was published in 2014, and Assange by that time had come to believe that Schmidt did not visit him as a friendly tech compatriot as research for Schmidt’s upcoming book, but rather to spy on Assange and Wikileaks on behalf of the State department and other government organizations. It’s an interesting read to see what two titans in their respective specialties discussed. One interesting point is that Assange recommended Bitcoin in this 2011 interview, because globohomo had cut Assange off from all traditional banking and financial services, creating an Schmittian exception to the rule of law2 (Assange was the canary in the coal mine for this treatment that would later spread and be applied to many more dissidents; recently Nigel Farage and Joseph Mercola experienced the same treatment, and other more controversial figures like Alex Jones and Andrew Anglin have experienced it as well). After Schmidt released his book, Assange, who had since woken up to his ulterior motivations, savaged it in a New York Times review. He also later wrote, “But in a wider sense, I think it is misguided to be looking to Google to help get us out of this mess. In large part, Google has us in this mess. The company’s business model is based on sucking private data out of parts of human community that have never before been subject to monitoring, and turning that into a profit. I do not think it is wise to try to “reform” something which, from first premises, is beyond reform.”
Eric Schmidt: lizard-like, squinting, heartless nerd physiognomy. Google retained a crushing monopoly for more than two decades before being subject to a current anti-trust action over its search monopoly. Assange: “Eric Schmidt is personably likeable in the sense that most billionaires are. You can’t get there without making friends. Obama’s also likable, but runs an extrajudicial kill list each Tuesday and has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. The problem with Google, as in the US administration is not the personalities. It is the structure, the business model and social and ideological matrix in which its decision makers are embedded.”
In July 2016 Wikileaks published leaks from the Democratic National Committee (likely from Seth Rich, who was quickly murdered by globohomo for it) and in October emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, which were bizarre and sinister. Wikileaks released these utilizing a smart, sophisticated publishing strategy to maximize impact.
These leaks had a big role in Trump’s extremely surprising election win. To be fair, Assange did state he would release leaks on any candidate, but he received no leaks on Trump.
Then in 2017 Wikileaks published the Vault 7 leaks which detailed the CIA’s capabilities and activities with respect to cyber warfare. The CIA then considered kidnapping or assassinating Assange in response. Hillary Clinton famously inquired about whether they could “drone strike” him. Instead, they kept up the legal pressure as Assange remained in the Ecuadorian embassy with a constant police presence outside, ready to nab him if he ever stepped out. His internet was cut off and he was subject to all sorts of mental and physical pressures.
Finally in 2019 a superseding indictment was filed by the United States with charges of Conspiracy to Receive National Defense Information, Obtaining National Defense Information, Disclosure of National Defense Information, and Conspiracy to Commit Computer Intrusion and the British government dragged him out in 2019 (after globohomo overthrew the rule of his benefactor in Ecuador), where he has been held in a British prison awaiting his various appeals to the United States’s extradition efforts since. The process is the punishment, though, and Assange’s conditions in prison are quite poor and akin to torture.34
Assange dragged out of the embassy. Note the smug, arrogant smile of the secret police agent who occupies central frame. What a disgusting globohomo cretin.
Trump considered pardoning Assange on his way out of office, but he ultimately did not pardon him or Snowden due to political pressure: Tucker Carlson claimed that he had heard Assange’s pardon was being blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who sent word to the White House informing Trump that if he pardoned Assange Republicans will be “much more likely to convict you in an impeachment trial.” Snowden correctly reacted to the development by tweeting that he was “not at all disappointed to go unpardoned by a man who has never known a love he had not paid for. But what supporters of his remain must never forgive that this simpering creature failed to pardon truth-tellers in far more desperate circumstances.” While Trump serves as a Schelling point for the frustrations of white Middle America, I agree with Snowden’s criticisms here and believe that he should have pardoned Assange.5 Although it’s likely globohomo would then have just killed Assange.
Anyway, there have not been very notable Wikileaks releases since Assange’s arrest. While the organization had a lot of grassroot support worldwide and many people who helped review and verify the leaks, Assange was the head of the organization and it didn’t run very effectively without him.
Assange’s beliefs
Assange acted as an idealist whose goal was and is to seek radical transparency from government and corporations worldwide, who he believed generally sought to entrench themselves in positions of power and corruption at the expense of the masses.6 In December 2006, the same month WikiLeaks posted its first leak, he outlined the organization’s strategy: use leaks to force organizations to reduce levels of abuse and dishonesty, or pay a ‘secrecy tax’ to be secret but inefficient. As he explained,
“The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive ‘secrecy tax’) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaptation.”
A spokesperson for WikiLeaks says Assange’s essay was a “thought experiment” that the organization still believes to be true. “Organizations have two choices (1) reduce their levels of abuse or dishonesty or (2) pay a heavy ‘secrecy tax’ in order to engage in inefficient but secretive processes,” the spokesperson writes. “As organizations are usually in some form of competitive equilibrium this means that, in the face of WikiLeaks, organizations that are honest will, on average, grow, while those that are dishonest and unjust will decline.”
This was a meta-philosophy that Assange had above the level of politics: transparency was good for its own sake, regardless of its ramifications and regardless of whether it applied to a democracy or a dictatorship, whether it was pro-West or anti-West. He states:
Confidential government documents we have published disclose evidence of war crimes, criminal back-room dealings and sundry abuses. That alone legitimates our publications, and that principally motivates our work. Secrecy was never intended to enable criminality in the highest offices of state. Secrecy is, yes, sometimes necessary, but healthy democracies understand that secrecy is the exception, not the rule. “National security” pretexts for secrecy are routinely used by powerful officials, but seldom justified. If we accept these terms of propaganda, strong national security journalism becomes impossible. Our publications have never jeopardized the “national security” of any nation. When secrecy is a cover-all for endemic official criminality, I suggest to you, it bespeaks a strange set of priorities to ask journalists to justify their own existence.
Why was Assange interested in reducing these abuses? As he explains to Google head Eric Schmidt:
Let me first frame this. I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world, which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts. And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. And one can ask, “What are your philosophical axioms for this?” And I say, “I do not need to consider them. This is simply my temperament. And it is an axiom because it is that way.” That avoids getting into further unhelpful philosophical discussion about why I want to do something. It is enough that I do.
In considering how unjust acts are caused, and what tends to promote them, and what promotes just acts, I saw that human beings are basically invariant. That is, their inclinations and biological temperament haven’t changed much over thousands of years. Therefore the only playing field left is: what do they have and what do they know? What they have—that is, what resources they have at their disposal, how much energy they can harness, what food supplies they have and so on—is something that is fairly hard to influence. But what they know can be affected in a nonlinear way because when one person conveys information to another they can convey it on to another, and another, in a way that is nonlinear. So you can affect a lot of people with a small amount of information. Therefore, you can change the behavior of many people with a small amount of information. The question then arises as to what kinds of information will produce behavior which is just and disincentivize behavior which is unjust?
In an interview with Spiegal International, he made a similar statement regarding his motivations: “We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work.”
According to Assange, we aren’t able to sit out of this fight. Either we are a participant of history or a victim of it: “I think first it’s necessary to have an understanding that one is either a participant in history or a victim of it, and that there is no other option. It is actually not possible to remove oneself from history, because of the nature of economic…and intellectual interaction. Hence, it is not possible to break oneself off….Because no one wants to be a victim, one must therefore be a participant, and in being a participant, the most important thing to understand is that your behavior affects other people’s behavior, and your courage will inspire actions. On the other hand, a lack of courage will suppress them.” And: “Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find.”
The first thing they can do is place a moratorium on mass surveillance. The mass surveillance of significant portions of the world’s population is an ongoing violation of rights on a mass scale. Putting an end to it – pending a full investigation into who was responsible, and who gave the orders – would be a good first step. Official channels for releasing documents exist: FOI laws, for instance, and declassification laws. I would support making these stronger and more transparent, of course. But they cannot supplant the function that a free press plays: the safety valve of secret institutions.
The key actors in society who influence its political process: publishers, journalists, dissidents, MPs, civil society foundations, if they can’t operate then you have an increasingly authoritarian and conformist society. Do not think that this will not affect you. Even if you think that you are of absolutely no interest, the result this attitude is that you have to suffer the consequences of the society your apathetic conformism helps to produce.
You’re not an island. When you don’t protect your own communications, it’s not just about you. You’re not communicating with yourself, you’re communicating with other people. You’re exposing all of those other people. If you assess that they’re not at risk, are you sure your assessment is correct? Are you sure they’re not at risk going into the future? Perhaps the biggest problem with mass surveillance is that the knowledge of mass surveillance. Fear about it produces intense conformity, so people start censoring their own conversations and eventually they start censoring their own thoughts.
It’s not enough to create fears about mass surveillance. At the same time, one has to create an understanding of how to avoid mass surveillance or an understanding that at the moment, most of the mass surveillance authorities, like the NSA and the organs it feeds are pretty incompetent. But that will change as artificial intelligence merges with mass surveillance, when the data streams from the NSA and PRISM program are fed into artificial intelligence.
He further added ominously: “Mass surveillance is a mass structural change. When society goes goes bad, its going to take you with it, even if you are the blandest person on earth.” This was nine years ago, and his prediction was powerfully correct. And it’s only getting worse…
Assange in relation to neoliberal feudalism
Reading “The Wikileaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire”, which provides an overview of the hundreds of thousands of State department cable leaks around the world, Assange and the various contributors to the book note a general pattern. Essentially, America learned over a long trial-and-error process that direct military occupation and colonialism of nations around the world was not a very efficient process. It was expensive, unwieldily, had a negative impact on world opinion, led to charges of imperialism and racism and other things. Rather, indirect control was a much cheaper and sophisticated process without many of the other drawbacks that came with the former process. Indirect control came from the Washington consensus, where a country could be controlled via foreign loans, which would put pressure on the nation for deregulation, foreign investment, decreased minimum wage, i.e. strip-mining the country to benefit globohomo overlords. If a country was deemed too immature to advance the Washington consensus via democracy, it would support a strong-man in power to achieve these goals. Once the country was deemed mature enough, they would seek to cast aside the strong-man in order to institute fake “democracy”, which was seen as easier to control than the strong-man past a certain point of development. Populist movements which sought actual nationalism and self-sufficiency, i.e. to nationalize industries and plants owned by foreign powers, to default on its foreign debt obligations, were deemed anathema to foreign investment and therefore had to be rigorously stamped out using as much brutality as necessary.
One of the reoccurring, ongoing tensions within the Western political establishment are the various factions arguing how far along the process a particular country is – is the country underdeveloped enough where it still needs a strongman to implement neoliberal policies? Or has it progressed enough to the point where they can transition to an easier to control fake democracy type? Generally speaking the Pentagon prefers the former type and the State Department prefers the latter type, but that is just a general rule of thumb.
One of the last things that Assange tweeted out before he was taken offline was the following, which shows the structure for how the higher layers of globohomo coordinate worldwide:
In addition, Assange had a very clear understanding of the financial incentives behind many of these wars. He succinctly explained the rationale behind the 20 year Afghanistan war in this 30 second clip, which I have posted a number of times:
Now, Assange is and was a brilliant man. His insights across a whole range of issues are incredible, and he reached these conclusions long before they became apparent to more of the world when the deep state revealed itself in its opposition to Orange Man. He was an early programmer with a brilliant systems-oriented mind. My issues with his approach to the neoliberal feudalism framework are three-fold:
Either he didn’t understand or for strategic reasons he didn’t speak publicly about the level of ownership above the CFR/Trilateral Commission/WEF, which is the small number of families that own the central banks of the world, which is a critically important point in order to understand their overarching plans and motivations — how could he fight back against enemies at a top level he possibly knew nothing about?,
I think Assange generally agrees with worldwide integration and intervention where necessary, so long as globalists abide by their own stated standards of egalitarianism without hypocrisy, while my impulses are much more isolationist and toward autarky, seeking an end to private ownership of the central banks of the world; and
I have a sense of ambivalence regarding his meta-strategy of transparency at all cost.
An artist protesting the Federal Reserve by painting it on fire
With respect to #3, perhaps transparency at all costs will lead to a better future for all down the road, but a non-productive elite using guile and military might to secure the excess production of farmers has existed universally since the neolithic agricultural revolution. It is simply human nature. There isn’t going to be a kumbaya moment where the masses are smart and dedicated enough to prevent this kind of elite grifting from occurring; rather, the important thing to me seems to be supporting an elite that have noblesse oblige to the masses instead of noblesse malice, that promotes values of greatness, honor, nobility, and strength of purpose instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator, and ties responsibility to power, which is only possible with a king or dictator versus an oligarchy. An oligarchy will stick figureheads in power while they operate behind the scenes to crush the population in order to suck it dry; but a king or dictator knows that ultimately they will be held responsible to the public, and therefore they will try to deliver better results to the masses than an oligarchy. By Assange pushing for transparency at all costs, I think he may have gone up against too fundamental of a drive of human nature. His naive libertarian beliefs contributed to the ruination of Libya by promoting the overthrow of Qaddafi and led to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt which would have, over time, destroyed the Coptic Christian community. What good is radical transparency if those are the kind of expected results?7 Instead of transparency at all costs as a Schelling point for the world, I think demanding public ownership of the world central banks along with strictly enforced audits would be popular with all but the small number of central banking owning families and their vassals.
Conclusions
Regardless of these criticisms, it’s undeniable that Assange possesses great courage to stand against the endless and horrific onslaught of globohomo. Assange said, “People often say, ‘You are tremendously courageous in doing what you are doing.’ And I say, ‘No, you misunderstand what courage is. Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation and keeping those things in balance.”8
Edward Snowden argued, “[Wikileaks is] absolutely fearless in putting principles above politics…Their mere existence has stiffened the spines of institutions in many countries, because editors know if they shy away from an important but controversial story, they could be scooped by the global alternative to the national press. Our politics may be different, but their efforts to build a transnational culture of transparency and source protection are extraordinary – they run towards the risks everyone else runs away from – and in a time when government control of information can be ruthless, I think that represents a vital example of how to preserve old freedoms in a new age”.
Assange was careful about not trying to hype globohomo’s power levels to Olympian heights, because he thought that would give them more power than they deserved: “All the talk of mass surveillance is very dangerous if it doesn’t come with some hope of a solution because it grants more perceptual power to a system that already has a radical, extreme and destabalising amount of it. All that is necessary to control others is the projected perception of power. That’s why we have worked hard to break that perception, for example in the race to spirit Edward Snowden to asylum vs. Washington DC’s race to arrest him, we won, demonstrating that with a few good ideas and some determination it is possible to beat this power cluster in a well defined head on contest. Solutions are going to come form the demand that organisations, governments and individuals have for protection. Don’t be dispirited; a lot of people are now working rapidly on tools and standards to counter the mass surveillance attack. There’s a great flowering in that field.”
When asked on Reddit nine years ago (2014) if Wikileaks was likely to succeed against globohomo, though, he answered, “These are cascading effects with geometric amplifiers in both directions. It’s hard to say, but at least we can say we fought and gave people a choice to know themselves and their civilization.”
And Assange has fought. Substack writers are doing what they can to make an impression, too, but Assange even back then was pessimistic about that approach: “Public commentators are obsessed with influencing the public, but the reality is the US public isn’t going to solve this. A powerful, invisible, intangible, complex, global system, with a scale only the deeply numerate can appreciate has been erected. Until we see the bulk release of individual’s emails or SMS messages, the average person isn’t going to believe its real. Until then, the pushback is going to come from technical organisations and other state’s counter intelligence units.”
We see what has happened since then. Censorship has exploded through the roof in every direction, show trials of political enemies are happening every day, NSA spying has been standardized and is used by 10,000 federal contractors to spy on white Middle Americans (which is only growing)9, Assange has been silenced and Wikileaks rendered into irrelevance. The censoring of Assange and Wikileaks closes a small but important ability to speak truth to power, and it is greatly missed as globohomo solidifies its hold on power and sticks its tyrannical boot in everyone’s face.
What’s the pessimistic scenario? Per Assange: “The negative trajectory [is] a transnational surveillance state, drone-riddled, the networked neo-feudalism of the transnational elite…How can a normal person be free within that system? They simply cannot, it’s impossible. Not that anyone can ever be completely free, within any system, but the freedoms that we have biologically evolved for, and the freedoms that we have become culturally accustomed to, will be almost entirely eliminated. So I think the only people who will be able to keep the freedom that we had, say twenty years ago – because the surveillance state has already eliminated quite a lot of that, we just don’t realize it yet. -are those who are highly educated in the internals of this system. So it will only be a high-tech rebel elite that is free.”
But perhaps there is a silver lining to this. According to Assange, “[Censorship] is always an opportunity, because it reveals a fear of reform. And if an organization is expressing a fear or reform, it is also expressing the fact that it can be reformed.” And “When organizations or governments of various kinds attempt to contain knowledge and suppress it, they are giving you the most important information you need to know: that there is something worth looking at to see if it should be exposed and the censorship expresses weakness, not strength.”
Regardless, Assange’s actions transcend the traditional right/left dynamic and in his attempt to hold truth to power and to fight back against mass surveillance and the corruption of Western elites, he deserves to be applauded. Assange’s rejection of America’s empire resonates with me, as it is founded and propagated on death, destruction, and the skulls of millions, all out of an insatiable greed. More money, more power, more control, more domination, more death and destruction and Mcdonalds on every corner and iPhones and propaganda pumped into everyone’s heads, and for what ultimate purpose? So the ultra rich in D.C. can live in giant McMansions, have vacation homes, yachts and planes, have sex with underage sex slaves, feel like lords and masters of the world and consume consume consume to their heart’s content, with no longterm planning for sustainability or a better world for the future, all while larping about racial, gender, and sexual orientation inequalities so the masses are too busy infighting to focus on their theft? What kind of garbage vision is this? It is gross and decadent and awful, some macabre nightmare from the fires of Hell.
For Assange’s attempts to make the world a better place, even with his faults, he deserves to be highlighted as a Profile in Courage.
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1 For new readers, globohomo is a portmanteau of either “globalization plus homosexuality” or “globalization plus homogenization”. It is the latter interpretation that makes the term superior to “global American empire” (“GAE”), because it references a technical, technological process that is turning the world into a kind of gray, androgynous, secular nihilistic sludge, reducing the world’s populations to hollowed-out, atomized digits with no group culture and a McDonalds and Starbucks on every corner. It is a process larger than empire.
2 “In Conversation with Julian Assange, Part II”, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Journal #26, e-flux, June 2011: “I think the attacks on us by Visa, PayPal, Mastercard, Bank of America, PostFinance, Moneybookers, and other U.S. companies – predominantly banks and financial intermediaries – is the most interesting revelation that has come out of what we’ve been doing. Like the Pentagon Papers case, the reaction and overreaction of the state and other groups involved in it will be seen to be one of the most important outcomes of the revelation itself. What we see is that the United States, in its reaction to us, behaved no differently than the Soviet Union in the 1960s toward Solzhenitsyn, and in the 1970s toward Sakharov, just in. amore modern way. Previous censorship actions in the West have been more subtle, more nuanced, and harder to see, but here we have a case of absolutely naked, flagrant, extrajudicial state censorship working through the private sector.”
3 Julian Assange in His Own Words, footnote 4, p. 8-9: “In a letter published in the British medical journal the Lancet on June 26, 2020, 200 eminent doctors around the world, representing 216 colleagues from 33 countries, decried yet again the ongoing mistreatment of Julian that they first wrote about on February 17, when they condemned the “torture and medical neglect” that since then, with the coronavirus pandemic, had exacerbated the seriousness of his situation….When United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer, along with two medical doctors, visited Julian in prison in May of 2019, they recognized clear signs of psychological torture and they called for an immediate end to such treatment. “The evidence is overwhelming and clear,” Melzer said. “Mr. Assange has been deliberately exposed for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture….In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law….The collective persecution of Julian Assange must end here and now!”
4 Julian Assange in his Own Words, 102: “The Obama administration, supported by varying degrees by its Western allies, in the last eight years has prosecuted and investigated more publishers and journalists under the Espionage Act than all previous presidencies combined…What a number of these cases have in common is not simply that they are recent, or that they are conducted sometimes without any charge, or that there are abuses in the formal process, it is that a technique has been developed in the West where the process was clearly the punishment.”
5 Vivek Ramaswamy, a character I am ambivalent about due to the fraudulent way he made his high net-worth and for multiple other reasons, although I think he is smarter than the non-Trump Republican candidates especially including Ron “Meatball” DeSantis, has said that he would pardon Snowden, Assange and Ross Ulbricht if he is elected.
6 As Caitlin Johnstone explains, “Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Understand this key point and you’ll understand why plutocrat-controlled media outlets are constantly smearing Julian Assange, why they never fail to fall in line to support a US-led military agenda, why they pay massive amounts of attention to some political candidates while completely ignoring others, and why they put so much energy into keeping everyone arguing over the details of how the status quo should be maintained instead of debating whether it should exist at all. The unelected power establishment uses its control over politics and media to determine what the public believes about what’s going on in their world in order to keep them from rebelling against a status quo which does not serve them; without the ability to effectively propagandise the masses in this way, they cannot rule.”
7 Julian Assange in His Own Words, p. 115: “I do have a political temperament, which is a combination of libertarianism and the importance of understanding. And what emerges from this temperament is holding power to account through action driven by understanding. So, if you have a libertarian temperament, then you’re temperamentally opposed to authoritarian power. And if you have a temperament that is inclined to understanding, then you want to know what power is about. These two things combined drive forth a position, an intellectual and political position, that is about understanding power to such a degree that power is not able to express its more abusive aspects.”
9 A declassified FISA report stated that the FBI ran 3.1 million illegal FISA searches on American citizens in 2017 alone, compared to 7,500 combined searches by the NSA and CIA in the same year. It later came out that the law firm Perkins Coie had its own NSA search terminal set up in its D.C. offices to spy on domestic opposition; it was placed there to provide the perpetrators protection. In 2023 the DOJ Inspector General revealed that more than 10,000 federal employees have access to the NSA database for surveillance inquiries (which show everything you have ever typed electronically on your computer or used on your phone), more than 3.4 million search queries were ran between 12/1/2020 and 11/30/2021, and approximately 30% were outside the rules and regulations that govern warrantless search, showing the pattern of illegal governmental behavior is extreme and only expanding. See here, here and here.
Many years ago I had a jarring aha moment regarding the friend-enemy distinction in a trivial interaction with someone who was at the time a close liberal friend.
The friend-enemy distinction is a concept created by German political theorist Carl Schmitt, elaborated on in his famous 1932 book “The Concept of the Political.” According to Schmitt, the political is simply the distinguishing between one’s friends and one’s enemies. Groups of like-minded people naturally form and coalesce over time, and given this world is a world of opposites, groups of people who share antithetical views to such group tends to form as well. Viewing the solidification over time of an enemy collective into an identifiable, solid mass, an individual sees a force that is diametrically opposed to him regarding an issue, dogma, or affiliation. Only by the destruction of the enemy collective is an individual guaranteed the enactment of his collective’s will and/or the preemption of the enemy’s will, and this guarantee along with the intensity of division enables the extreme possibility of physical conflict.
N.S. Lyons has an illuminating post on Schmitt’s conception of the friend/enemy distinction. With respect to the modern era, Lyons discusses how white middle America has been defined as the “enemy” of society, and how this in turn is slowly mirroring and shaping a reaction toward viewing the modern liberal technocratic state as their enemy in turn. He states:
If portions of the American right have today turned to Schmitt as a guide, it may be because they now have plenty of reason to believe the purported procedural neutrality of the liberal technocratic state is nothing but the thinnest of veils covering an existential antagonism; that in truth the crucial political distinction has now already been made for them: they have been identified, in concrete clarity, as the enemies of the state.
It happens that Schmitt in fact voiced particular unease about how he expected liberalism would tend to define its enemies. By insisting on having transcended the political through its commitment to pluralism and enlightened universal values, and therefore incapable of ever acknowledging the possibility of sinking to the level of identifying a human enemy, liberalism would, he predicted, “confiscate the word humanity,” thus “denying the enemy the quality of being human.” In such a case, for the liberal, any resulting war “is then considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity.” And, ultimately, “Such a war is necessarily unusually intense and inhuman because, by transcending the limits of the political framework, it simultaneously degrades the enemy into moral and other categories and is forced to make him a monster that must not only be defeated but also utterly annihilated.”
In a similar vein, Substack author Sanfedisti had an interesting post recently about his limits on his willingness to debate with liberals, who he believes wants to murder and destroy him. He writes:
I have never been interested in speaking to people who do not already agree with me, or at least who do not share a similar perspective. What I do not do, ever, is speak to leftists.
The left exists as an anti-civilizational force whose goal is no less than the total obliteration of your life, family, nation, history, religion, ethnos, people, and the permanent erasure of all that ever came from any of it. And you want me to talk?…
The answer cannot be to give these diabolical plots the legitimacy of civil discourse. The answer is to reject entirely the premise and the person whole-cloth.
Sanfedisti is correct in the sense that the liberal point of view, the way they see the world, is fundamentally different from the outlook of those on the right. Anonymous Conservative likens these differences to evolutionary r/k selection theory, which posits two opposing procreation strategies reflecting environmental extremes: one is better adapted to environments where resources are freely available (having lots of kids with little investment in each child) and the other better adapted to environments where resources are scarce (having fewer children with more investments in each child). These differences are hardwired biologically for most and not changeable regardless of environmental changes. For example, wonderful Lee Kuan Yew stated no matter how much richer and more successful Singapore became through his methods, about 30% of the population stubbornly remained diehard communists or communist supporters. If they aren’t even convinced by their own dramatically improving quality of life, what hope would you have to convince them of anything?
Now, I would caution Sanfedisti that liberals control every institution of power (including the military and police forces), and that pushing this talk too far could eventually lead to violent conflict — conflict I am convinced the right has very little chance of winning at this time, because success requires either institutional or foreign support, which the right has none of. When you’re around an aggressive and spiteful bully who can beat you up, tread carefully. I will delve into the potential odds of success for a “redneck rebellion” in a future post.
The “aha” moment
There was a small, inconsequential moment where I realized liberals had a completely alien perspective from my own. I didn’t really appreciate the impact of the moment at the time – I noted it with a kind of “huh” – but it increasingly reverberated with me as time went on.
The moment occurred in 2015 and was over an insignificant political matter. An unknown figure, Corey Lewandowski, was running Trump’s upstart campaign in the Republican primaries and doing a surprisingly great job, keeping the campaign focused, limber, and with limited overhead. In a crowded room at one of Trump’s press conferences Lewandowski brushed through the crowd to keep up with his boss. Michelle Fields, a reporter for Breitbart at the time, claimed that Lewandowski viciously grabbed her as he passed by. She decided to press charges. Ben Shapiro jumped in and demanded Lewandowski be fired:
“Corey Lewandowski is a thug, and Donald Trump is a thug for backing him,” Shapiro said Thursday night during an appearance on Fox News’s The Kelly File.
Unlike Breitbart management, which today shifted blame for the attack from the Trump campaign manager to the Secret Service, Shapiro is vocally backing Fields’ account.
“The fact that the Trump campaign continues to play this game, where they put out not just violent rhetoric but in this case a campaign manager engaging in violent action— and they won’t step down to apologize — is beyond disgusting, it really is,” Shapiro said. ”It’s gross.”
This was a big deal in the moment because if Lewandowski was fired it could have had a material impact on Trump’s burgeoning campaign. It felt like an attempt from some on the right (who worked for Breitbart of all places, which was the champion of Trump!) to undermine and hurt his movement. Now, nothing ultimately happened from this minor incident and Lewandowski continued in his role through the primaries. Later Trump replaced him with Paul Manafort and then Steve Bannon to navigate the Republican convention and the general election, respectively.
So why was this minor incident so clarifying? Well, the whole thing was caught on video and released to the public by the police. Let’s see what the stop-motion video shows with how it comports to Field’s and Shapiro’s takes, which took place over maybe a second:
You can see Trump starting in the center and walking toward the bottom right. Lewandowski is right behind him. Michelle Fields approaches Trump to ask a question, and Lewandowski brushes past her to keep up with Trump. It was a half second interaction, maybe a frame or two of the stop-motion video, and it looks like he didn’t even see her. You may have to watch it a couple of times to see it fully.
How was this a national incident? Why did this get blown up? Am I in crazy land here? What the hell did I just watch compared to media reports on it?
Now, at the time I was a relative political neophyte. I had always followed politics and news, but this was at the end of an era when the personal and the political were sort of distinct entities, and I didn’t really understand the process by which they were increasingly blending. During the Trump era and especially the COVID era the personal and the political blended, and now they cannot be separated. Julian Assange relates this process in 2016 to the changing nature of the internet itself:
“I see that there is now a militarization of cyberspace, in the sense of a military occupation. When you communicate over the internet, when you communicate using mobile phones, which are now meshed to the internet, your communications are being intercepted by military intelligence organizations. It’s like having a tank in your bedroom. It’s a soldier between you and your wife as you’re SMSing. We’re all living under martial law as far as our communications are concerned, we just can’t see the tanks – but they are there. To that degree, the internet, which was supposed to be a civilian space, has become a militarized space. But the internet is our space, because we all use it to communicate with each other and with the members of our family. The communications at the inner core of our private lives now move over the internet. So in fact our private lives have entered into a militarized zone. It is like having a soldier under the bed. This is a militarization of civilian life.”
The personal has become the political.
Anyway, I had a number of liberal friends at the time, which have since dwindled in number (not to zero, though), and one of them was really into politics, a very smart guy and one who had some idiosyncratic views that did not match lockstep with the liberal establishment. He was also more willing than most liberals to consider alternative views, even if he didn’t agree. I showed him this video at the time (as he had heard of the story and was enjoying the right-on-right squabble), expecting him to fully agree that the story was blown up out of nothing, but after watching the video, he said he agreed with Shapiro and Fields that Lewandowski should be fired! What!!!
I was flabbergasted. Here was a video showing frame-by-frame the interaction, and it was as one-sided and obvious as can be, and yet there was a fundamental disagreement over interpretation. If two people of different political persuasions cannot agree on the interpretation of frame-by-frame video evidence, what hope is there of achieving consensus on any matter of which there is not such evidence?
There is a fundamental difference of perception, rooted in underlying differing value and judgment systems that are irreconcilable.
Sanfedisti shares the same sentiment in this post, where he argues interpretations of direct video evidence can be narratively spun by our elites to mean anything, and that this is unnerving. The elite sentiment seems to be, not entirely without merit, “Who are you going to believe, you peasant, you plebian, you prole, you worm, the always objective media or your own lying eyes? We are the masters of all reality, we decide what is real and what is false, and who are you? A gnat, meaningless, who we grind beneath our feet, forgotten by historical records, swept away by the sands of time. We are Gods and you are nothing.”
How does one differentiate friend from foe?
Schmitt argued that the friend-enemy distinction is the most important political distinction one can make. Liberals are much better at identifying friends and enemies than conservatives are, who are much more independently minded than liberals and easily distracted/blinded by appeals to ideals and equality. In the example above, my friend correctly identified that Lewandowski represented Trump, he represented competence (given he was doing a good job), therefore he was a threat who should be destroyed. Who cares what the video evidence showed? Say whatever it takes, get rid of him. And it’s not like he thought this consciously — he was an NPC liberal, not a sociopathic liberal — but still, it was an unconscious process where he identified who his enemy was and then consciously sought to justify his underlying unconscious beliefs.
Telling friend from enemy can be difficult, though, without a proper framework (and sometimes even with one). Are anti-abortion Christians allies or enemies of the eugenic racialist right? Are corporatist leftists friends or enemies of the environmentalist left? Is the establishment right exemplified by Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, the Club for Growth, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan friends or enemies of those further to their right? What about alt-light gatekeepers like Ben Shapiro, Mike Cernovich, Ben Chowder, Charlie Kirk, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Candace Owens – are they all in the same category and should be treated the same? Where does Jeff Sessions fall, who was one of the earliest and most vocal Trump supporters yet viciously betrayed him and helped institute the Russiagate fraud?
Or what about the concepts of doomerism and demoralization generally, where those on the right who are black-pilled without offering actionable solutions may be considered just as bad as liberals? Kulak makes the argument for this here.
What, ultimately, separates friend from enemy?
Ultimately I think the distinction is a relative one and context dependent, depending on the objectives of the person making the distinction. Is the objective of the person making the determination to win an election? Then the goal should be to create as big a political tent as possible. Is the objective to monetize one’s follower base and not run afoul of the authorities, like much of the alt-light gatekeepers above? Then one should figure out an angle that will maximize that revenue stream from existing followers and generate new ones while staying away from no-go topics.
If the goal, though, is to broaden human knowledge, to push back against the egalitarian ratchet effect that is destroying western civilization and perhaps all of humanity, then the only people worth discussing things with are other dissidents, and only from a perspective of the pursuit of truth.
I offered a comment in Kulak’s post above about demoralization which is as follows:
“Where or how do you draw the line between demoralization and truth? For example, if you told Trump supporters in 2017: “Hey guys, by 2023 Trump will have re-election stolen from him with permanently instituted vote-by-mail fraud, he will have accomplished nothing meaningful, over a thousand of his most dedicated followers will be in prison, and Trump will be facing over 90 criminal charges that could easily put him away for life” everyone would have looked at you as an insane demoralization agent — yet all of this is true. How do you separate the two?”
Now, Kulak didn’t respond to this question, but I’ll give my answer to it here. It depends on the objectives being pursued. If one is trying to build a political coalition, then this truthful statement would be harmful to the objective. Therefore ignore or squash truth, build political coalition. But if one is pursuing truth for its own sake, wherever it leads, which is a layer much deeper and with much more potential for radical long-term change than merely pursuing political solutions, then this truthful statement would be helpful to the objective. This is why there is tension between the so-called doomer camp (such as Rurik Skywalker and Igor Strelkov) with that of the so-called patriotic or populist camp; the latter see the former as undermining them, while the former believe the latter cannot succeed without deeper and more fundamental spiritual and philosophical changes. (There’s also a separate type of doomerism which is essentially generalized nihilistic pessimistic passivity which I think is rightly condemned, as seen here by Asha Logos and here by Kenaz Filan). Identify the objective you are pursuing and build your community on that basis.
If pursuing truth, only engage with ideological dissidents
I previously offered a taxonomy of personality types: these classifications are based on ones physiognomy and are mostly immutable. The taxonomy offered was as follows:
Liberals, comprised of non-playable characters (the vast majority) and sociopathic types (few in number but many of the leaders). Sociopathic liberals are immutably ideologically opposed to dissidents and cannot change. NPCs unquestioningly imbibe establishment propaganda and do what they are told as herd-creatures, but if dissidents ever came to power then they would follow them just as easily;
Corporatists, who focus on making money as their top priority but who always bend to liberal pressure tactics in the hope of going back to making money;
Dissidents, comprised of non-ideological and ideological types. Non-ideological dissidents are emotionally opposed to egalitarianism, but they are not intellectual enough to eloquently verbalize their objections — they feel their opposition instead of thinking it. They are basically Fox News watchers. Ideological types are opposed to globohomo on philosophical grounds (such as opposing central bank usury), and/or religious or race based. Ideological dissidents are drawn exclusively from the Loser clique.
There are also the lumpenproletariat who are apolitical, low IQ and just focus on their job, paying bills, entertainment and sex.
If the hope is to build a new system based on a partial transvaluation of values, only ideological dissidents are worth spending one’s energies on. If such dissidents build an energetic and self-sustaining parallel system or an integrated community with a compelling, competing vision of the future, then non-ideological dissidents and system NPCs will eventually join, but they will be hanger-ons to the movement instead of forming the backbone of it. This is why globohomo crushed the alt-right movement in 2017, because they were starting to have a significant impact on the wider public’s thought processes. For those who are currently trying to build a parallel, physical economy in the real world, I am skeptical it can work given globohomo’s control over the money supply and the taxation of bartering by the IRS, which requires bartering be treated as taxable and payable in dollars, but the attempt is interesting regardless.
If one panders to non-ideological dissidents or to corporatists for popularity, then one will have to compromise one’s values. Those who are popular are the ones who tell others what they want to hear. Pandering in turn dilutes the message being conveyed and serves as a corrupting influence. Nietzsche, for example, who legitimately spoke truth to the power of the whole society in which he lived, was not popular during the active part of his writing career. Trailblazers often end up with arrows in their backs, paving the way for others to follow. Popularity will slowly and inevitably come if the conveyed message is true and solves a major problem plaguing society, but truth should be pursued for its own sake; let others if they want take up the mantle of using that truth for convincing others and for the power process.
Alexander und Diogenes by Lovis Corinth, 1894, at the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, representing the pursuit of truth versus the pursuit of power
This sense of community is what Substack currently provides given it allows free speech, for now, during their growth stage, at least.
The discernment of values
What are the values that ideological dissidents should look for in each other? Here are a couple of heuristics:
Transparency and accountability. Q-anon was the worst kind of movement because it was built on peddling trust without accountability or verification. The result of such misplaced trust was to encourage (mostly non-ideological) dissidents to sit passively as the “good guys” behind the scenes were “fighting” for them. This was Operation Trust 2.0. A well-intentioned author should give his step-by-step process in the chain of reasoning behind his argument, linking to evidence at every step, and leave it up to the reader to make up their own determination. This is what I attempted to do in my long-form Neoliberal Feudalism essay with well over 1,000 cites documenting my chain of reasoning regarding the structure of modern society. Appeals to authority are weak in an era of decentralized knowledge; state your reasoning, give the underlying information being relied upon to reach those conclusions, and let people make up their own minds. Julian Assange has and had a similar philosophy; provide the underlying primary source materials and let the reader decide.1
An acknowledgment of subjectivity. Ben Shapiro has an infamous quote, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” In this quote he claims to be a unique possessor of “facts” that give him the “insight” to tell you what do think and how to act. It reminds me of the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”Compare Shapiro’s position with that of Nietzsche: “There are no facts, only interpretations”. Also “Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings – always darker, emptier and simpler.” Under Nietzsche’s formulation, what matters is who is offering the interpretation and from what motivation? What are the speaker’s underlying moral beliefs motivating their statements and conduct?You are aware of my demand upon philosophers, that they should take up a stand Beyond Good and Evil … This demand is the result of a point of view which I was the first to formulate: that there are no such things as moral facts. Moral judgment has this in common with the religious one, that it believes in realities which are not real. Morality is only an interpretation of certain phenomena: or, more strictly speaking, a misinterpretation of them.… [M]oral judgment must never be taken quite literally: as such is sheer nonsense. As a sign code, however, it is invaluable: to him at least who knows, it reveals the most valuable facts concerning cultures…This is such a more honest and direct approach than Shapiro’s, whose unstated objective is simply to support Israel. And his sneering “I’m the decider of the facts, listen to me” has led to him being duplicitously pro-COVID vaccine, a vocal never-Trumper, pro-censorship, and more.Always ask, cui bono? If you don’t know what your own interests are and how to advance them, how can you expect not to be fooled when someone underhandedly pushes their own interests to sucker you?
Nietzsche and Shapiro have opposite understandings of what “facts” constitute. Compare their physiognomies; intensity, directness at the seriousness of life on the left, smug arrogance and dissembly on the right.
Character of both others and yourself revealed during times of stress. The height of COVID hysteria was a great way to see the true values of people, for it revealed character during times of stress. Did someone get an untested mRNA vaccine because society pressured them to? (i.e. Jordan Peterson, who then pathetically tried to backtrack about the booster, compromising himself by agreeing to contract terms with Shapiro’s Daily Wire that muzzle the voices of their contributors, and later cried while calling Israel a moral city on a hill). What about Arnold Schwarzenegger, who famously said “screw your freedoms” when calling for you to be force-jabbed? Was someone silent about election fraud due to employer pressure? (Tucker Carlson). So many false idols were smashed under the pressures of COVID…Or how about on the other side — if you want to see a real hero, look at Ian Smith who heroically fought against COVID tyranny in New Jersey and suffered over a million dollars in fines, in addition to many other punitive measures:Ian Smith, COVID heroJordan Peterson, COVID failureIf you want to see others acting heroically under pressure and paying a large price for it, see Louis Uridel, Shelley Luther, Greg Anderson, Danny Presti, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.Seeing someone’s behavior under pressure isn’t a perfect heuristic – there are no guarantees heroic action on one issue translates to similar heroism on another – but it’s as close as one can get.
Building cooperatively instead of instigating right-on-right drama. It’s a good idea to be weary of those characters who spend an inordinate amount of time infighting in petty squabbles, regardless of their other qualities. Milo Yiannopoulos comes to mind.
The corrupting influences of money, power and influence. Writing for money serves as a potentially corrupting influence. This is because money starts bending one’s incentive structure; are you writing for yourself, or are you writing to please your audience to tell them what they want to hear so they maintain their subscription? Then you also have to become worried about how often you write. Without knowing it you may slowly become a slave instead of the master of your writing. If you are worried about the extent of your influence, are you willing to write hard truths or does the pull of pretty lies become more important? Small bloggers writing for free and documenting the full chain of their reasoning are, I think, the best spot to be in. (Of course, psychologically speaking people assign more value for what they pay for and the more they pay the more they value it (i.e. setting a higher price point for an item can often result in more demand), and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting or needing to be paid for one’s work, but still, the corrupting danger of chasing money is ever-present…)
Anyway, these are some hopefully useful heuristics, but there are no guarantees. As mentioned above, Jeff Sessions was Trump’s earliest Senate supporter, he brought on Stephen Miller who loyally served Trump, but then Sessions displayed extreme moral weakness against a globohomo coup attempt against Trump which led directly to the two year fake Mueller investigation nightmare. There was no signs of this character defect in Sessions ahead of time, and even though many of Trump’s personnel decisions were quite poor, the results of this key appointment was something that no one could have seen coming. One may use their best discernment and judgment on assessing others, but ultimately the soul of others (and to a large extent, our own) remain a mystery, and the results are known only to God.
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1 Julian Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks, p. 126: “I have been pushing this idea of scientific journalism – that things must be precisely cited with the original source, and as much of the information as possible should be put in the public domain so that people can look at it, just like in science so that you can test to see whether the conclusion follows from the experimental data. Otherwise the journalist probably just made it up. In fact, that is what happens all the time: people just make it up. They make it up to such a degree that we are led to war.”
“Every human face is a hieroglyphic, and a hieroglyphic, too, which admits of being deciphered, the alphabet of which we carry about with us already perfected. As a matter of fact, the face of a man gives us a fuller and more interesting information than his tongue; for his face is the compendium of all he will ever say, as it is the one record of all his thoughts and endeavors.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, On Physiognomy
Physiognomy (from the Greek φύσις, ‘physis’, meaning “nature”, and ‘gnomon’, meaning “judge” or “interpreter”) is the practice of assessing a person’s character or personality from their outer appearance—especially the face.
Blogger Rolo Slavsky recently made a throwaway reference to professor Edward Dutton’s book “How to Judge People by What They Look Like”, which inspired this post. Rolo was making a point regarding Russian nationalist and Donbass hero Alexander Zacharchenko, who looked like this:
Zacharchenko was assassinated on the orders of Russian oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, who looks like this:
The assassination was part of Russia’s oligarch’s goal to keep Russian nationalists and populists under heel so they could continue their unlimited graft and rape of the country.
The photo of each of these individuals says it all, doesn’t it? You can see the directness, seriousness, honesty and integrity and the serious burden of command in the photo of Zacharchenko, or in any photo of him; you can use a search engine for more. See this composite of Julius Caesar for a similar look:
And you can see the crookedness, nastiness, lack of morals and abject, scary insanity in a glance at the photo of Kurchenko; mostly in the extremely weird mouth expression along with the eyes (with apparently no eyelids) staring unfocused and blankly in two different directions. Insane congressman Adam Schiff has a similar stare:
Horrible New Jersey Governor Murphy, previously covered in this post which contrasted Ian Smith’s courage against Murphy’s craven advancement of the globohomo agenda, isn’t too far off either:
Murphy has horrendous physiognomy, a mix of a weasel with a pimple
Anyway, physiognomy is a subject that I’ve referenced in passing many times. But I havn’t delved into the topic itself yet, so now is a good opportunity.
Whether you want to acknowledge it or not, we all come to immediate judgments about other people when meeting or observing them. Are they friendly or serious looking? Do they present themselves well or look slovenly? Do they look dangerous, do they look like a criminal, are they beautiful or ugly, are they tall or short, fat or skinny, strong or weak, do they appear fat or stupid, rich or poor, healthy or sick, are they well coordinated or clumsy, are their faces and bodies symmetrical or asymmetrical? Each of these traits says something about the character of the person being judged. Someone fat, for example, would generally be presumed to have less impulse control, shorter future time-orientation, is less healthy, worse genetics, at risk of other diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, probably eats unhealthily, etc. You can make all sorts of judgments at a glance about a person, to which wonderful poet Ezra Pound agrees.1 One study shows that it only takes a tenth of a second for a person to make a judgment of another person’s personality (Willis et al., 2006). Clique theory makes the same argument where one can tell instantaneously whether a person falls within Jock, Prep, Nerd, Scumbag or Loser clique.
Now, sometimes one’s judgments are wrong; we aren’t perfect and it’s good to get to know someone before basing decisions off of gut instincts. Perhaps we were wrong in our impressions and we can grow and update our own internal models. But often times we are in situations where we do have to make a snap decision; is the person approaching us on the street in the middle of the night dangerous or not? And even though not perfect, making those instantaneous judgment calls in such situations can mean the difference between an ugly incident or avoiding trouble.
Background
Acknowledging that everyone makes instantaneous judgments of others is declasse in the modern era; it smacks of recklessly rushing to judgment, or if in a racial context it smacks of racism. So the entire study of physiognomy has been mothballed, deemed low class pseudoscience and with low or no funding directed to the study of it, at least until the modern era (which we will get into). Per Dutton:
Unfortunately, physiognomy became associated – and, perhaps, remains associated – with phrenology, [which] was the belief that the nature of a person’s character can be discerned by small differences in the shape of their skull. As the brain is an organ, and different parts of the brain have different functions, it seemed to follow that bumps or indentations in the skull would reflect similar properties in the brain. As such, people could ‘have their lumps felt’ and it would reveal a great deal about the nature of their personality; albeit based on the very limited nineteenth century knowledge of brain modules. Phrenology became hugely popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the establishment of learned phrenology societies [and as popularly mocked in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained]….Unsurprisingly, phrenology was debunked. Physiognomy found itself (intellectually) guilty by association.
It fell further out of favor after the Nazis applied the practice on a racial basis:
“The other problem physiognomy has to deal with is the obvious unpleasant consequences judging people by their appearance has when it comes to the issue of ‘race.’….The Nazis measured facial features in order to determine the archetypal ‘Jew’ and the archetypal ‘Aryan,’ giving the measurement of facial features for any broader purpose a bad name. But the actions of the Nazis are entirely irrelevant. As we will see shortly, physiognomy works, in most cases, within races.”
As the egalitarian ratchet effect continues its parabolic ascent, it has increasingly become more and more outside the bounds of discussion that people are inherently different. How mean of you to not just point out but consider in the first place that a person is short, or ugly, or dresses poorly, or seems dangerous or dumb! You should feel guilty for any judgments you make of others unless officially approved experts tell you it is okay to do so. How dare you. We are all interchangeable widgets with the exact same abilities and outlooks except for societal racisms holding back the downtrodden, okay?
Modern science
Scientific research into physiognomy has undergone a bit of a revival in the late 20th/early 21st century, according to Scientific American in an article called “How your looks betray your personality.” It states: “The field is undergoing something of a revival. Researchers around the world are re-evaluating what we see in a face, investigating whether it can give us a glimpse of someone’s personality or even help to shape their destiny. What is emerging is a “new physiognomy” which is more subtle but no less fascinating than its old incarnation.” The article continues: “First impressions are highly influential, despite the well-worn admonition not to judge a book by its cover. Within a tenth of a second of seeing an unfamiliar face we have already made a judgement about its owner’s character – caring, trustworthy, aggressive, extrovert, competent and so on (Psychological Science, vol 17, p 592). Once that snap judgement has formed, it is surprisingly hard to budge. What’s more, different people come to strikingly similar conclusions about a particular face – as shown in our own experiment (see “The New Scientist face experiment”).”
Per Schopehauer, “The study of physiognomy is one of the chief means of a knowledge of mankind, because the cast of a man’s face is the only sphere in which his arts of dissimulation are of no avail, since these arts extended only to that play of feature which is akin to mimicry.” Let’s tabulate some of the recent science of physiognomy, some of which is from the Wiki entry:
Facial features impact on power, warmth, honesty, intelligence. Per The Psychology of Personnel Selection, research in the 1990s indicated that three elements of personality in particular – power, warmth and honesty – can be reliably inferred by looking at facial features: “More recent research suggests that face-based impressions may sometimes be valid (Berry, 1991; Zebrowitz, Voinescu & Collins, 1996). Berry (1990) asked students to report their impressions of their classmates (after one, five and nine weeks of the semester had elapsed), and used these impressions as the criterion with which she compared independent evaluations of the classmates’ photographs. She found significant correlations between peer and photographs on three dimensions: power, warmth and honesty.”Other studies have used AI and machine learning techniques to identify facial characteristics that predict honesty, personality,and intelligence. In a 2006 study published in the peer-reviewed journal, Social Cognition, Ian Penton-Voak and colleagues utilized both individual and composite facial images. The composites were generated by computer software that combines multiple faces into one; you might think of it as a sort of “average” of the images. More specifically, the composites incorporated facial images of those scoring in the top ten percent for each of the Big Five personality domains. Based on their findings, the researchers concluded that there is at least “a kernel of truth” to be found in the practice of face reading. In a 2014 research article “Interpretation of Appearance: The Effect of Facial Features on First Impressions and Personality”, the authors generated artificial, extreme faces visualising the characteristics having an effect on first impressions for several traits. Conclusively, they found a relationship between first impressions, some personality traits and facial features and conclude that people on average assess a given face in a highly similar manner. The following image for each personality trait show a composite with a very low score for that trait on the left, and a very high score on the right:“For each face pair the left extreme face is predicted as being judged very low for a given trait and the right face as very high. Each face is based on the β-coefficients from the best linear regression model for that given Rating and gender. We generated the faces by multiplying each β-coefficient to either +4 standard deviations or -4 standard deviations of the matching facial component.
Bodily asymmetry affect on health and IQ. Per The Psychology of Personnel Selection, p. 16: “That said, there is currently a good deal of interest in related topics like fluctuating asymmetry and digit ratio. Fluctuating asymmetry consists of within individual differences in left- vs right-side body features (length of ears, fingers, volume of wrists, etc.). Asymmetry is associated with both ill health and lower IQ. In a recent study, Luxen and Buunk (2006) found 20 per cent of the variance in intelligence was explained by a combined measure of fluctuating asymmetry.”
Digit ratio impact on aggression. P. 16: “The 2D:4D digit ratio has been known for some 100 years and has recently attracted a great deal of attention. The idea is that a person’s hand shape – particularly the length of these two digits – is determined by physiological processes in the womb which influence the sex-linked factors (Brosnan, 2006). In line with this view, a seminal study by Lippa (2003) showed that 2D:4D determined sexual orientation (though only for men). Subsequent studies in this area have attempted to link 2D:4D to individual differences in established personality traits, notably those related to aggression or masculine behaviours. Although evidence has been somewhat inconsistent, a number of meaningful connections have indeed been found. In a large-scale study, Lippa (2006) found positive, albeit weak, associations between 2D:4D and Extraversion, as well as a negative, albeit weak, link between 2D:4D and Openness to Experience. Overall, however, associations between finger-length measures and personality were modest and variable.”
Extraversion, conscientiousness and openness via facial analysis. Per the New Scientist article, “There is, however, some tantalising evidence that our faces can betray something about our character. In 1966, psychologists at the University of Michigan asked 84 undergraduates who had never met before to rate each other on five personality traits, based entirely on appearance, as they sat for 15 minutes in silence (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 4, p 44). For three traits – extroversion, conscientiousness and openness – the observers’ rapid judgements matched real personality scores significantly more often than chance….when Little and Perrett re-ran the experiment using mugshots rather than live subjects, they also found a link between facial appearance and personality – though only for extroversion and conscientiousness (British Journal of Psychology, vol 98, p 111).”
Tendency to violence based on wider faces. “Support for this, and the kernel of truth idea, has come from a study of 90 ice-hockey players published late last year by Justin Carré and Cheryl McCormick of Brock University in Ontario, Canada. They found that a wider face in which the cheekbone-to-cheekbone distance was unusually large relative to the distance between brow and upper lip was linked in a statistically significant way with the number of penalty minutes a player was given for violent acts including slashing, elbowing, checking from behind and fighting (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 275, p 2651).” Per Slate, researchers have claimed that it is possible to predict upper body strength and some personality traits (propensity to aggression) only by looking at the width of the face. University of California-Santa Barbara psychologist Aaron Sell reported that college students could accurately estimate the upper body strength of unfamiliar men after viewing their faces alone. Sell suspects the brow ridge and jaw, two structures that are shaped by testosterone in puberty. (High testosterone has been linked with masculine looks as well as with aggression.)
Political orientation based on one’s face can be reliably predicted. In a study that used facial recognition technology by analyzing the faces of over one million individuals, political orientation was predicted correctly 74% of the time; considerably better than chance (50%), human ability (55%) or even personality questionnaires (68%).
Sexual orientation based on one’s face. In 2017, a study claimed that an AI algorithm could detect sexual orientation more accurately than humans (in 81% of the tested cases for men and 71% for women).
Eye width and perceived intelligence. Eyes are the “windows to the soul” and are often one of the first facial features people notice. For instance, there is a significant relationship between interpupillary distance (wide-set eyes) and perceived intelligence (Lee et al., 2017).
Mouth width and leadership abilities. One study noticed that the mouth width impacts people’s choice in leaders (Re et al., 2016). The study applied their findings to real leaders. The study found that mouth width correlates to the CEO’s leadership abilities and their actual leadership success. Additionally, the same study notes that people with wider mouths were more likely to win U.S. Senate elections.
Tattoos suggest sexual promiscuity. One study gathered data on 450 college students and found that tattooed respondents were more likely to be sexually active than those without tattoos (Koch et al., 2006). Another study found that people who got body modifications (tattoos, piercings, etc.) were more likely to engage in intercourse earlier in life and be sexually active (Nowosielski et al., 2012). According to the study, adults who got body modification are four times less likely to engage in religious practices.
Potential explanations
Per Kosinski (2023), the potential explanations for people’s personality traits being reflected in their physiognomy are (1) self-fulfilling prophecies, where people’s judgments on other’s looks eventually turn the subjects from repeated social interactions into what others are perceiving; (2) psychological traits may modify physical characteristics; and (3) there may be genetic correlations between certain traits being expressed, such as twin studies which have found that genes are responsible for over 50% of the variation in both facial featuresand political orientation.
With respect to the self-fulfilling prophecy possibility, it brings to mind the “Millimeters of Bone” incel meme, which argued that the difference between Chad and Melvin was only a few millimeters of bone:
It can be argued that repeated positive social interactions for the version on the right compared to the version on the left would result in much higher extraversion for the Chad, for example, because of the more positive results from such interactions. The closer one’s face is to the golden ratio, generally the more positive interpersonal connections will be. This relates to the expression, “Physiognomy is destiny”…
It is an open question the impact to which a conscious decision to think or act in new ways has on one’s physiognomy; exercise more and you’ll be in better shape, have a calmer disposition, stand straighter, weigh less etc. which will impact the way others see you. Plastic surgery may hide one’s physical attributes, while also revealing to the world via a changed physiognomy one’s underlying narcissism, shallowness, and emotional instability.
With respect to the second and third possible explanations, as covered previously, using artificial selection to select for specific traits in animals results in very specific physiognomy changes, such as domestication syndrome. Domesticated animals tend to be smaller and less aggressive than their wild counterparts, they may also have floppy ears, variations to coat color, a smaller brain, and a shorter muzzle.When Dmitry Belyayev domesticated a fox within a human lifetime via a rigorous artificial selection program, even though he only selected for one trait – tameness – selection for that trait affected other traits such as coat color, skulls shape, and ear floppiness. Given this, it makes sense that there would be a similar interplay between personality traits and physical traits in humans.
Conclusion
The point of this article is it’s perfectly natural to make snap judgments of others; we all do it unconsciously and instantaneously, and all one does by trying to deny it is create some sort of hypocritical split within us, a denial of self (which always manifests one way or another). There are circumstances in which acting on our snap judgments is perfectly legitimate and applicable, especially when in a situation where we have to make such judgments quickly; for others where we don’t have to rush to judgment, it is better to reserve judgment, talk to the person and see if one’s intuition and immediate judgments were accurate or false. In my articles you’ll often see me describe a situation and point to a person’s physiognomy as evidence in favor of the point being made, and hopefully this post does a decent job of describing why.
A .gif of deranged anti-Trump former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who spied on and tried to undermine the Trump administration. Brief movements of the man reveal him instantaneously to be a deviant, smug sociopathCompare the physiognomies of Carl Weiss, left, who assassinated populist leader Huey Long, with that of arch-criminal Andrew Weissman, who is a leader behind the scenes of overthrowing and prosecuting Trump. They look like the same person
I love the physiognomy of the represented Overman engineer in the movie Prometheus. The above scene is a deleted extended scene that should have been included in the theatrical version, and it’s an abomination that it wasn’t. For a fascinating look at how the design of the engineer was developed, which was intended to be a blend of Michelangelo’s statue of David, da Vinci’s work, the Statue of Liberty, and Elvis (lol), see this great behind-the-scenes clip here.
My favorite still from the deleted scene, where the creator Engineer judges his creationA behind the scenes still reflecting The Creation of AdamA close-up of the Engineer; what an amazing design
More fundamentally, there is an extremely deep-seated element in the nihilistic West that it is improper to follow one’s senses and gut judgments, that we must discount what we see with our own eyes in favor of believing officially designated “experts” and whatever nonsense they push. As argued previously, science has been replaced with policitized and corrupted Scientism, and one should make a conscious effort to resist this trend and to return to putting a much greater emphasis on one’s own thoughts, feelings, and worldview. The “experts” by and large do not have your best interests at heart, and you do a disservice to yourself by discarding your judgments and listening to experts at your own peril.
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1 According to Eustace Mullins, “During the 1956 elections, [Pound] called to my attention the commisar or foetus type of public official that seems to have been produced by the modern state. It is characterized by a round head, usually bald, a petulant mouth, and the formless features of a newly-born baby. In July 1959 he wrote to me, “look up Lavater, 1741-1801, ‘inventor of physiognomic studies,’ esp. criminal TYPES.””My impression that he had set almost at lowest level the foetus type…”
I promptly did some research and found, to my surprise, that a number of great leaders in recent years could be classified as the foetus type, or those who have not been fully formed in the womb. Such people seem capable, indeed fated, to cause great harm to others. These atavistic types are characterized by slight development of the pilar system, low cranial capacity, great frequency of wormian bones, early closing of the cranial sutures, and a lemurine appendix. The type is round-faced, with slight protruding eyes and a vacant grin.”
This is a post about Brett Andersen’s evolutionary psychology Youtube series, which attempts to provide an answer to the nihilism pervading society since Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God”. Andersen possesses an impressive understanding of the science of evolutionary psychology and he attempts to derive objective meaning on that basis. His recent unfortunate personal developments are touched on in addendums at the end. I suspect this post will be a niche one, but it touches on many of the themes discussed on this Substack and is worth a write-up on that basis. The next published post will be more “mainstream”.
Introduction
Nietzsche famously wrote in The Gay Science (1882) that God is dead and that we have killed him:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
What does Nietzsche mean that we have killed God? Essentially, advancements in science and technology during the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution increasingly disproved a literal interpretation of the Bible, offering an alternative hypothesis for man’s origins via Darwinian natural selection. For example, biblical cosmology believed the Heavens were fixed past the firmament and belong to the domain of God, yet it turns out they are planets and star systems subject to the same gravitational and other forces that Earth is. How does one square that knowledge with a literal interpretation of the Bible?
If the Bible isn’t literally true, then, what is true? If the Bible is only metaphorically true, which metaphorical interpretations are correct and on what basis should they be concluded? Would not the basis for such interpretive choices be open for endless debate? One can see the shakiness of faith arise…
A belief in God had sustained man for thousands of years and calmed his most basic fears of his own mortality. Every aspect of society had reinforced man’s place in the world amidst a religious construct that gave meaning to man’s suffering, and man can bear most any suffering so long as he believes there is meaning to it. The death of God equates to the death of a world with intrinsic meaning, where our actions had spiritual consequences and mattered; we became unmoored from belief as the cult of reason advanced without understanding the consequences of what we were doing. This unmooring process inevitably led to nihilism:
Nietzsche discusses Christianity, one of the major topics in his work, at length in the context of the problem of nihilism in his notebooks, in a chapter entitled “European Nihilism.” Here he states that the Christian moral doctrine provides people with intrinsic value, belief in God (which justifies the evil in the world) and a basis for objective knowledge. In this sense, in constructing a world where objective knowledge is possible, Christianity is an antidote against a primal form of nihilism, against the despair of meaninglessness. However, it is exactly the element of truthfulness in Christian doctrine that is its undoing: in its drive towards truth, Christianity eventually finds itself to be a construct, which leads to its own dissolution. It is therefore that Nietzsche states that we have outgrown Christianity “not because we lived too far from it, rather because we lived too close.”As such, the self-dissolution of Christianity constitutes yet another form of nihilism. Because Christianity was an interpretation that posited itself as the interpretation, Nietzsche states that this dissolution leads beyond skepticism to a distrust of all meaning.
Nietzsche keenly felt the onrush of nihilism in the mid-to-late 1800s; so did others like Tolstoy. These trends have only spread, deepened, and metastasized since then. Anyone reading this has been born and raised in an era steeped in a ubiquitous, pervasive nihilism touching every facet of society. But for those with a sense of history it is this era that is abnormal, untethered from the underlying anchoring religious beliefs that sustained man for thousands of years. We don’t know what such normalcy feels like, to feel like we belong in an ordered universe infused with cosmic meaning.
Nietzsche believed that nihilism was a period that western man must pass through in order to hopefully emerge on the other side, after much pain and suffering, with a revaluation of its own core values. But it was by no means certain; just as possible was a descent into permanent nihilism followed by mankind’s destruction. Nietzsche went insane before he was able to construct what such a revaluation of its core values could really look like.1
The core point of this Substack (rooted in the philosophy expressed in the companion Neoliberal Feudalism Substack) is that, after the death of God and the descent into nihilism, western civilization has retained the morals and ethics of Christianity but without the underlying belief structure. Due to the egalitarian ratchet effect, combined with this underlying nihilism and will to nothingness2, western civilization is rapidly sliding into a suicidal abyss. This makes for a very destabilizing situation. There needs to be a change; is it time to emerge from the nihilistic phase that Nietzsche predicted? If so, what should such revalued or transvalued values look like?
I have previously argued that what is needed is a partial transvaluation of values so that the warrior Roman values and the transvalued priestly Christian values would result in a balance. Whether that would come from a new religion as Spandrell argues for, or a reinvigoration of Christianity perhaps via Orthodoxy as Roosh wants, or a John Carter Christian ghost dance as Rolo Slavsky also calls for, or something else, remains up in the air. Others have tried solving this riddle as well, such as Curtis Yarvin with his vision of a techno-corporatist-dictatorship, but I think it’s a mess, divorced from reality.3 My lack of a specific positive forward vision is a weakness to my argument, because it’s far more persuasive to offer someone both a carrot and a stick (i.e. promotion of new vision simultaneously with the criticism of the old) than just the stick. But I didn’t really have a fully formed, fleshed out vision of what such a partial transvaluation of values would look like, other than it must involve a movement away from pure materialism back toward an element of idealism; it’s a process of education and learning, and the research involved in the posts for Substack, as well as feedback from readers, helps further my own process and understanding as well.
Andersen’s Substack
An off-hand comment a couple of months ago by Substack user Paul McNamara on Helen Dale’s Substack led me first to the Substack of, and then the Youtube channel of Brett Andersen, a PhD candidate in evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico, which then led to a deep-dive of his work and listening to his 22+ hour Youtube series. This speaks to the quality of his ideas generally, especially because I prefer to intake information via writing and not via audio or visual sources, but I oddly preferred his Youtube videos to his written work. Synthesizing his series into its core arguments and the various takeaways that resonated with me, as well as offering some points of constructive criticism, has been fun and challenging to write.
Andersen pictured in his Youtube series. He has a somewhat unusual physiognomy, although his left arm sleeve tattoo may be seen as either a sign of the decadence of this age, or alternatively as a feature of his self-described shamanistic, right-brain impulses
Andersen wrestles with the same issues I highlight, i.e. the attempt to derive objective meaning in an era of ubiquitous nihilism.4 But Andersen approaches the problems from an evolutionary psychology perspective and not an autistic A-to-Z, step-by-step rendering of the gradual introduction of a globohomo worldwide slave control grid and why the world has allowed this system to be put into place as I have done. His approach addresses the problem from a very different angle, but an important one that is helpful to flesh out a fuller perspective and argument.5
Andersen starts his series by discussing his personal background. He suffered a series of psychotic breaks earlier in his life, resulting in part from drug use, which had destroyed his life in multiple ways. He eventually had epiphanies while reading Jordan Peterson’s book “Maps of Meaning” (or listening to his lecture series) at 24 years old which led to his recovery, having a profound impact which set him on a journey of self-discovery.6 He has been singularly obsessed with trying to understand the meaning of life for the past seven years since then. From the moment he wakes up to when he goes to bed, he says, this is basically all he thinks about.
These routes to generalized dissent [examples including problems with dating, problems with health/nutrition, and problems with political understandings] involve an individual experiencing cognitive dissonance in their lives resulting in a prolonged period of emotional or psychological pain, followed by the desire to find an explanation to alleviate their pain, which mainstream society cannot provide given their narrative falsehoods are the primary cause of it. The lower status an individual is in the eyes of society, the more likely that person is likely to experience such psychological pain leading to cognitive dissonance. Currently white males, the most disfavored group in the United States, have much higher levels of disillusionment toward the establishment than women and minorities, because the latter are much greater beneficiaries of the system.
While Andersen would like to become an academic after finishing his PhD and would make an excellent one, he has been precluded from doing so because of the extreme anti-white wokeness pervading academia, which he has been very justifiably frustrated by and which he says he will not pay lip-service to. I suspect he will become a psychiatrist or psychologist instead, perhaps working with psilocybin therapies where legal or via clinical trials (MDMA therapy would also be worth exploring), but that is just a guess.
Andersen’s perspective
Andersen’s arguments delve into the changing environmental and cultural selection pressures that have shaped religion, morality, culture and evolutionary psychology throughout human history. His Youtube series discusses this history, offering a wide range of scientific studies and theories in support of his points which will be touched on briefly here. Other than Nietzsche and Jordan Peterson as primary influences, Andersen quotes extensively from John Vervaeke’s work.
According to Andersen, religion originally arose among hunter gatherers as a form of ancestor worship. Gods were a part of everyday life and they were just like humans, only more powerful, with their own personalities and whims. These religions were shamanistic in character in that they involved intense ceremonies led by charismatic, right-brain-dominant7, chaotic practitioners who attempted to unite small groups of people in focused, high-energy, altered consciousness rites.
Hunter gatherer mythological origin narratives involved stories where everything has meaning, which served as an inspiration for action for how people should act in their own lives. Humans were generally well integrated between their thoughts and their instincts because they had naturally selected for this nomadic lifestyle for millions of years. Tribal morality had evolved to be black-and-white, in-group vs. out-group, as a way for hunter gatherer societies to unite against their enemies, and anyone who went against the group’s morality would be cast out, which was akin to death. Counter-intuitively, according to research we feel our moral beliefs and then rationalize them, even though we all falsely believe that we arrive at our morality based on logic and reasoning.
Culture evolved as a cultural ratchet effect where humans copied each other’s behaviors, but then evolved those behaviors during times of crisis to adapt to changing environments. Tensions arose from society’s demands to conform to the group (the herd instinct) against an occasional individual’s belief in the necessity of change, which inevitably resulted in society seeing that individual as “crazy” and evoking significant pushback and hostility if or until the change was ultimately accepted. Dreams served as a way for individuals to avoid over-fitting their limited models of the world for current circumstances, giving them a creative way to see problems in a new, flexible, fluid light.
During the Axial Age between the 8th and 3rd century BC, humans transitioned from hunter gatherer societies to agrarian societies brought on by the neolithic agricultural revolution. New selection pressures resulted in a movement away from these shamanistic, high-intensity religious ceremonies and polytheistic Gods and toward left-brain, low-intensity, formalized religions based on written texts and featuring distant, inaccessible God(s). Andersen gives Jews in Israel followed by Christianity as examples. These pressures occurred because shamanistic religions were not scalable in the way that written doctrinal religions were, and doctrinal priests were focused on uniting their people to strengthen themselves against their neighbors and enemies. While shamanistic practices were decentralized and based on a leader’s charisma, priests who could read and write their religious doctrines formed hierarchical organizations that functioned like guilds. As such, wherever doctrinal religions arose their priests brutally crushed their shamanic competition, much as guilds always attempt to crush their independent competition.
Humans had great difficulty adapting to an agricultural lifestyle, where their long-honed instincts as hunter gatherers clashed with the reality of living in closer quarters in urban environments and with a much more sedentary lifestyle, and this caused a lot of problems. Doctrinal religions tried to address these conflicts with commandments by God on how one should act, although this didn’t fully solve the issue; the underlying tension with humanity’s out-of-kilter instincts regarding sex, food, war, and other basic drives remained, and remains to this day.
As part of this transition to urban environments, the meaning of God(s) evolved. God changed from serving as a forum for action based on mythological ancestor worship to a Plato-inspired material/spiritual dualism, where the material world was severed from the spiritual world. The material world served as a place of imperfect objects, merely shadows of the world of forms, and the spiritual world was the “real” world which was perfect and static.
What Nietzsche defined as the ascetic ideal came to dominate. This ideal involved values that advocated withdrawing, abstaining, or rejecting bodily, emotional, and material aspects of everyday life. In other words, they were a “will to nothingness.” Nietzsche saw the Christian motto of “poverty, chastity, humility” as an ascetic ideal because it suggests that people need to abstain from material wealth, sensual urges, and emotional or egotistical feelings. Nietzsche also thinks that many nonreligious people practice the ascetic ideal such as Schopenhauer, who he came to see as decadent.
Contrast the ascetic ideal with that of Heraclitus, who was Nietzsche’s favorite philosopher. Heraclitus believed that everything was change, nothing was static, and that the only thing that could be taken as static was the nature of change itself. He expressed this in sayings like panta rhei (“Everything flows”) and “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” Nietzsche, per Twilight of the Idols, “Reason in Philosophy”, §2: “But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that Being [as opposed to Becoming] is an empty fiction.” And in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, “Heraclitus”, p.62-63: “Well, this is the intuitive perception of Heraclitus; there is no thing of which we may say, “it is.” He rejects Being. He knows only Becoming, the flowing. He considers belief in something persistent as error and foolishness. To this he adds this thought: that which becomes is one thing in eternal transformation, and the law of this eternal transformation, the Logos in all things, is precisely this One, fire. Thus, the one overall Becoming is itself law; that it becomes and how it becomes is its work.”
If life is indeed change, and it is only the nature of change itself that is static, then the process of change, of syncretization and of growth and unity should be embraced instead of resisted. Andersen believes that the existing concepts of God cannot be resurrected by existing dualist, doctrinal religions, which have bled their meaning over the centuries in an environment that no longer favors that particular mode of thinking. Instead, there is an opportunity for the return of right-brain, shamanistic chaos energies and thinking styles which have been on the losing side for millennia. Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power provides such potential basis for objective meaning which can bridge the gap between our reason and our instinct, based on a scientific understanding of human nature without reliance on two-worlds mythology.
Under this conception, will to power does not mean “will to dominate” or Schopenhauer’s “will to life”. Rather, Nietzsche’s notes indicate it is a broader term reflecting a sort of meta-drive of all of our various instinctual drives (for sex, eating, health, safety, control), the manifestation of which arises out of the position one finds oneself in society:
The will to power appears:
a. among the oppressed, among slaves of all kinds, as will to “freedom”: merely getting free seems to be the goal…
b. among a stronger kind of man, getting ready for power, as will to overpower; if it is at first unsuccessful, then it limits itself to the will to “justice,” i.e., to the same measure of rights as the ruling type possesses;
c. among the strongest, richest, most independent, most courageous, as “love of mankind,” of “the people”, of the gospel of truth, God; as sympathy, “self-sacrifice,” etc…as instinctive self-involvement with a great quantum of power to which one is able to give direction: the hero, the prophet, the Caesar, the savior , the shepherd…”
Andersen believes that the will to power manifests psychologically as relevance realization, which is the process by which we process extreme amounts of data inputs to determine what we believe to be relevant to achieve our will to power, and therefore what we focus on instead of discard, and/or self-actualization. It is a metaphysical thesis which posits a universal process of complexification.
Under this approach, the process of complexification is defined as something increasing its differentiation into constituent parts while simultaneously increasing its integration as a whole. Complexification occurs where there are competing drives or interactions, which leads to a breaking of frame called self-organized criticality, followed by a descent into chaos, leading eventually to, if the entity doesn’t collapse or die, a higher baseline level of complexity:
How higher complexity is established, from Andersen’s Substack article here
For example, Andersen had a normal-ish upbringing, then he descended into chaos caused by his psychotic breaks, then he was able to work his way out of them to achieve a more complex and thereby more powerful understanding of himself and the world.
Andersen sees this process mirrored throughout nature (where both the world and the universe is constantly complexifying), throughout mythology as discussed in Maps of Meaning, and even in the rise of consciousness itself.8 He believes that life being rooted in the will to power solves the meaning crisis, because by understanding and acting in accordance with nature we can bridge the gap between our instincts and our thoughts and become self-actualizing. We can integrate the opinions of all those around us to help us become more complex individuals, we can integrate master and slave morality and our own competing drives to try to become the Overman, and we can help the world complexify in this non-zero sum process as well.
Under this perspective it is not a static end result that can be reached using a “good vs. bad” or “good vs. evil” moral judgments, or the will to nothingness hoping for a better world after death, but rather an understanding and embracing of the process of complexification itself that is the end goal; an acceptance of Heraclitus’s perspective of the only static thing is the nature of change itself. His is not a moral judgment per se but an objective argument for optimality – “This is the process that you participate in and the perspective you should have if you want to be psychologically healthy.” As Andersen argues:
We must come to view morality not as a static set of principles, facts, or objective truths, but rather as an ongoing process. The particular moral values adhered to by a group of people are highly dependent on the history and context of that people. Moral values evolve. This process is akin to the cultural ratcheting process that Michael Tomasello described in his (1999) book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Tomasello argued that cultural evolution requires both the conservative impulse to imitate and the progressive impulse to tinker. As I suggested in my Intimations essay, this cultural ratcheting process is only one example of a process of complexification that plays out at all levels of analysis (see also Azarian, 2022; Wolf et al., 2018). It is our participation in this process, rather than any of its particular outcomes, that ought to be understood as sacred and objectively valuable….
Morality as process means that there are no timeless rules or principles that constitute “moral facts”. Morality evolves and must continue to evolve. This isn’t to say that every change in morality is good (the conservative impulse is just as important as the progressive impulse), but it is to say that the norms governing human behavior must continually overcome themselves as the problems facing humanity and civilization change.
Andersen isn’t arguing that all values are subjective, because a replacement for nihilism must have a basis in objectivity. But he is arguing that the process of change, descent, and rising into a more complex entity (if the entity survives the descent) is the universal, objective process that ties everything and everyone in life together, and therefore what is “good” (not from a moral perspective) is what optimizes that process and what is “bad” is what downgrades the optimization of that process.
Analysis of his argument (pros and cons)
Andersen’s ability to absorb, process, and synthesize a huge amount of information speaks to both his intelligence, drive, and how obsessed he has been with this topic for the past seven years. His Youtube series has been an impressive attempt to synthesize the latest scientific research and theories along with philosophy and history, and it has impacted my views on a variety of topics, the extent of which will be felt and absorbed over time. I can only assume he wrote the series as a way of helping others on their own complexification journeys, as well as his own.
To believe [as pantheism does] that everything is perfect, divine, eternal, also forces one to believe in eternal recurrence. Question: now that we have made ethics impossible, is such a pantheistic affirmation of all things also made impossible? No: in principle only an ethical god is overthrown. Is there any sense in imagining a god beyond good and evil? Would a pantheism of this kind be possible? Can we remove the idea of purpose from the process, and yet still affirm the process? That would be the case, if something were achieved within that process and at every moment of it – and always the same … Every basic trait underlying each and every event, expressing itself in every event – if it were experienced by an individual as his own basic trait – would force that person triumphally to endorse every instant of everyday existence.
With that said, the positives of Andersen’s approach appear to me to be as follows. An adaption of his perspective would lead to
living life much more in the moment, to appreciate life for what it is, and not just wait for justice or a better life after we die;
a Buddhist or Stoic-like appreciation for pain and suffering through valuing and respecting the complexificaton fall-and-rise process itself, in the hope that it would lead to greater complexification and more power once one arises out of it;
a greater willingness to consider other sides and perspectives in the hopes of absorbing them to become a more complex and powerful person;
a greater intention of pursuing non-zero sum games to try to make the world a better place for all; and
an appreciation of the will to power underlying all things that removes a dualist perspective and ties humanity back firmly into our role within the world and not separate and apart of it.9 This in turn gives us a greater appreciation for the inter-connectedness of all things and elevates the importance of sustainability of nature, animals, and universal brotherhood.
These are all admirable traits that focus on what we can do as individuals that provide a clear route toward offering a solution toward the meaning crisis/nihilism that our society is in. It is indeed a viable and very different worldview than the nihilist perspective we are all deeply immersed in, whether we are religious or secular.
There are a couple of significant criticisms of this approach, though:
The material world seems fundamentally imbued with metaphysical evil, in the sense that every living creature can only survive by consuming other living things. Even plants have a will to power and seek to grow and expand and have defense mechanisms against predation. Andersen tries to hand-wave this away by arguing that our cognition is too limited to make moral judgments about reality, that we can either accept it as it is or not, therefore Shopenhauer’s philosophical pessimism is wrong because it presumes to know more about the universe than our limited cognition allows, but I find that to be a weak argument. We can assign moral judgment on things while at the same time recognize our limitations as finite beings and that we can be wrong, so long as we retain the willingness to grow beyond our limited judgments when confronted with evidence to the contrary;
As a corollary to #1, Andersen argues that the increasing scope of non-zero sum games provides us an opportunity to work together in this process of complexification for the benefit of all, but a naturalist or pantheist perspective in relation to the Darwinian struggle for survival just as likely leads to increased conflict as increased cooperation, because there is no reason to accept losing other than fear of punishment from the winning side.10 In other words, a dualist perspective may provide incentives for losers to accept their current arrangements in the hope of justice in the afterlife; such a slave morality may increase societal stability;
The dualist perspective offers hope of justice and fulfillment in the afterlife. Philosophical naturalism or pantheism is good so long as your complexification process is working, but plenty of times the complexification process fails or you suffer life circumstances that seem too terrible to bear. If your mind or body give out, or you are thrown in prison for life, or cherished family members die, or you suffer any of innumerable tragedies, philosophical naturalism or pantheism offers no solace or hope from this – in other words, slave morality is an objectively more functional belief system if one finds oneself in a position of permanent weakness, which could happen to anyone. It’s a cold, cruel world and universe out there, subject to blind laws and an underlying current of unifying will to power; it offers no solace to those trampled under its feet. Keep in mind that Nietzsche went insane after seeing the suffering of a horse and spent his last decade of life bedridden, whether from his beliefs or otherwise. And another proponent of pantheism, Baruch Spinoza, inhaled microscopic particles of glass through his mouth and died young and in agony. What use were his beliefs to him then? Andersen self-describes as a complete agnostic, believing that all behavior and motivations have origins that can be described from an evolutionary psychology perspective, and that he has absolutely zero knowledge or intuition about a next world and that he is fully comfortable in this perspective — I would say this makes him unusual, and that such a perspective will not be so easy to convince others of. But pantheism or philosophical naturalism only works with an assumption that material reality is metaphysically neutral; if material reality is infused with metaphysical evil (point 1), though, then the tension between base reality and this perspective will inevitably result in mental or physical breakdown.
Andersen has a view of the history of humanity, the planet and the universe as ever-increasing complexity that isn’t really proven. He mentions at one point that increasing complexification happens until there is a descent or collapse of the entity, but if his argument rests on increasing complexification as an objectively good thing in an of itself, he should explore the process of collapse better — why it happens and what the implications of collapse are to his theory, and why he thinks the overall trend is toward this progressive complexity even in light of local or regional collapses. Why does he assume that universal complexity will expand forever? With respect to humanity, there may be a total collapse due to nuclear weapons use or consuming the world’s natural resources or for other reasons, and Andersen responds by saying well we then need to take care of each other in a non-zero sum competition, but what solace does that give us if collapse happens anyway?
The world is subject to ever-increasing levels of centralization and control, and for individuals, declining freedom of movement, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression, which I would like to see emphasized in his argument. One can look at history and politics to get a better sense of this, which I try to provide in my Neoliberal Feudalism Substack, but this centralization process is forever ongoing based on the frenetic chase for increasing levels of technological innovation. Central bank digital currencies are just the latest, but very major, step for ever-increasing centralization/control worldwide which will be used to micro-manage individual behavior on a scale never seen before in human history; Russia is the first to roll it out and formally legalize it. If ever increasing levels of centralization and control occurs in the complexification process he references, does that necessarily mean it will increase human happiness or fulfillment? If not, why should we embrace it?
Tied to point 5, Andersen’s approach is very individualist focused, but if one believes that the egalitarian ratchet effect rooted in Pauline Christianity is destroying western civilization, it is questionable whether his non-dualist approach has the motivational “juice” behind it to incentivize group action to stop this destruction. The prior attempt to transvalue egalitarian values was a failed German race-based attempt at a full transvaluation back into full warrior values, promising Germans unlimitedly high status if they won; on what basis would his approach incentivize group action, if at all? [To be clear, my approach is seeking a partial transvaluation of values so that warrior and priestly energies are in balance, not to seek a return to full warrior values]. Other than the German example, though, power politics seems to revolve around doubling down on the ressentiment of egalitarianism as a weapon for a new elite to take power. Is Andersen’s objective merely to give people a scientific basis for individual stoicism against life’s troubles, or is there room in this perspective for group action and if so, under what basis? Because as much as Andersen bitterly complains in his own life about the extreme levels of anti-white wokeness in the university system, it is hard to imagine this specific phenomenon if the United States was 90% instead of 60% white like it was merely a generation or two ago. Andersen would love to expand non-zero sum games to cover all of humanity so we can all work together to address humanity’s problems, but waving away the intense drive for tribal based identity is not so easily accomplished — and it may not be possible to accomplish at all.
This is a minor comment, but Andersen focuses a lot on right-brain chaos shamanic impulses, which he sees as associated with schizotypy personalities, versus left-brain order doctrinal impulses, which he sees as associated with autism-spectrum personalities. However, from personal experience I wonder to what extent people with lopsided energies one way or the other consciously or unconsciously understand the lopsidedness of their energies and seek out ways to balance them out.An autistic personality may find itself attracted to shamanic rites as a compensatory measure. Or Andersen, who self-identifies as a chaotic shamanistic type, has spent a tremendous amount of time and energy synthesizing his beliefs into an autistic, organized, systematized argument. In a political context there is a lot of overlap in the ideas and impulses of the far-left and the far-right, to the extent that Francis Parker Yockey thought that a far-left/far-right alliance was necessary to oppose globohomo. I think it would be helpful for Andersen to address compensatory measures for those with lopsided energies, one way or the other.
Conclusions
Andersen offers a thought provoking theory into what a transvaluation of values in an age of nihilism could look like. I think his argument should incorporate and try to respond to the criticisms listed above (which are meant as constructive criticism to help steel man his arguments), to the extent I am not misunderstanding or misrepresenting his arguments (which is possible). But he does an admirable job of synthesizing a great deal of information, gleaned through painstaking effort over many years, in a way aimed at trying to offer a specific path forward for humanity. What a revaluation of values should look like, overturning the nihilism brought about by 2,000 years of priestly egalitarianism, is an enormous, complicated, extremely difficult question, one that potentially drove Nietzsche to insanity before he could synthesize an answer, but it is the most important question one can ask if western civilization is to have any hope of a successful future at all, which looks increasingly unlikely. Hopefully we can all work toward trying to find a solution out of this mess together.11
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Addendum: Andersen released four posts at once on August 24 after a long publishing pause, three of which seem significantly off-tone from the rest of his sober, reasoned, scientifically minded content over the past months and years – those three posts are here, here and here, followed by 5-10 posts a day (!) in the days since. It seems like he suddenly adopted and is trying to mimic the strident, hyperbolic tone of Nietzsche, posting a bunch of Youtube links to various songs to get the reader into his frame of mind. In a footnote to one of the posts he admitted to recently starting smoking marijuana heavily after being cold-turkey for years; given his three prior mental breakdowns, this seems quite ill-advised. Marijuana induced psychosis is a very real thing, and I know otherwise high functioning, successful men who have experienced it. Brett, if you are reading this I highly recommend you cut out all marijuana use immediately. There has been a major change in tone, style, and content in these latest posts, and not to your benefit. I understand you currently think you are a misunderstood genius straddling the line between chaos and order, meant to be fought and rejected until your genius is accepted by the masses, and that you don’t care if others are concerned for you, but I hope you give these words serious consideration.
Addendum #2: And now Andersen is out with a wildly vituperative anti-Trump rant. Poor guy, he bitterly complains about not being able to find a job in academia because he’s a straight, white, non-woke male, but he can’t do a simple A + B = C in that Blormf was elected as a protest vote against this white erasure process, in spite of his personal failings and not because of them. The middle-America masses chose him because he was seen as the only option that hadn’t been co-opted by a system that hated them, not because he fooled them as a paragon of virtue (generally speaking; there is a contingent of braindead Trump worshippers who worship him as a cult of personality, and they deserve scorn like blind followers of any cult of personality. But these are a fairly small minority in my opinion). Andersen focuses his complaints on Blormf being a “cad” and not a “dad” in terms of his three wives and endless cheating, arguing he himself is so ethical and would never behave in such a deplorable way, bringing to mind Elliot Rogers (who Andersen discusses elsewhere) and how he was a “supreme gentleman”. I get a strong feeling that Andersen is currently experiencing difficulties with women.
It’s also ironic that Andersen stresses the blending of different ideas in order to achieve a higher-plane synthesis, yet rejects out of hand the feelings of half of the American population, and seems to fetishicize what he considers to be his greatly superior IQ. This is a major blind spot of his. It also brings to mind the Maurice Samuel quote about the nature of experts in his book “You Gentiles”, where he states:
There is no test or guarantee of a man’s wisdom or his reliability beyond what he says about life itself. Life is the touchstone: books must be read and understood in order that we may compare our experience in life with the sincere report of the experience of others. But such a one, who has read all the books extant on history and art, is of no consequence unless they are an indirect commentary on what he feels around him.
Hence, if I have drawn chiefly on experience and contemplation and little on books – which others will discover without my admission – this does not affect my competency, which must be judged by standards infinitely more difficult of application. Life is not so simple that you can test a man’s nearness to truth by giving him a college examination. Such examinations are mere games – they have no relation to reality. You may desire some such easy standard by which you can judge whether or not a man is reliable: Does he know much history? Much biology? Much psychology? If not, he is not worth listening to. But it is part of the frivolity of our outlook to reduce life to a set of rules, and thus save ourselves the agony of constant references to first principles. No: standardized knowledge is no guarantee of truth. Put down a simple question – a living question, like this: “Should A. have killed B.?” Ask it of ten fools: five will say “Yes”, five will say “No.” Ask it of ten intelligent men: five will say “Yes,” five will say “No.” Ask it of ten scholars: five will say “Yes,” five will say “No.” The fools will have no reasons for their decisions: the intelligent men will have a few reasons for and as many against; the scholars will have more reasons for and against. But where does the truth lie?
What, then, should be the criterion of a man’s reliability?
There is none. You cannot evade your responsibility thus by entrusting your salvation into the hands of a priest-specialist. A simpleton may bring you salvation and a great philosopher may confound you.
And so to life, as I have seen it working in others and felt it within myself, I refer the truth of what I say. And to books I refer only in so far as they are manifestations of life.”
1Per Wiki, Nietzsche had in 1886 announced (at the end of On the Genealogy of Morals) a new work with the title, The Will to Power: An Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, the project under this title was set aside and some of its draft materials used to compose The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (both written in 1888); the latter was for a time represented as the first part of a new four-part magnum opus, which inherited the subtitle Revaluation of All Values from the earlier project as its new title.
2On the The Genealogy of Morals III. 28: “Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far – and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning! It was the only meaning offered so far; any meaning is better than none at all … man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was no longer like a leaf in the wind…he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.
We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself – all this means – let us dare to grasp it – a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! … And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will.”
3 Curtis, if you ever read this, simplify your argument and make it clearer for non-tech nerds, but even then, color me extremely skeptical of a dictatorship with biometric-access guns that the dictator turns on and off with the push of a button answering to a governmental corporate board of directors and pursuing NOI at all costs somehow resulting in utopia.
4 Andersen quotes Tsarina Doyle’s work “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of the Will to Power” at around 42 minutes: “…If we are to be motivated to act according to values […] then they must be deemed to be objective in some other way that connects and subjects them to constraint by the empirical world. This alternative account of the objectivity of our values must, therefore, be a metaphysically laden one and must reflect the fundamental relationship between mind and the empirical world….Nietzsche allows for the objectivity of value by holding that values are metaphysically continuous with the dispositional fabric of reality….without this metaphysical claim, ‘Nietzsche is guilty of perpetuating the will to nothingness that informs nihilism rather than adequately responding to it.’”
6 Andersen comments at one point early in the series on Peterson’s descent into political obsession, his seeking of the media spotlight and other embarrassing decisions, which he has been very disappointed by. I have also been extremely turned off by Peterson, especially that he got the COVID vaccine which he stated was solely due to societal pressure (!), his regular public crying breakdowns, and his other moral failures. I have not read Maps of Meaning and it’s entirely possible that Peterson’s early work was much stronger than his current public persona, but I neither have much interest in mythology nor do I like Peterson’s excessively flowery writing style, so I do not plan to read his work.
7 Andersen posits that highly right-brain dominance is associated with schizophrenia, chaos, and shaman/prophet types, while highly left-brain dominance is associated with autism, order, and priest types.
8 According to Andersen consciousness arises from the complexification process and is defined as the difference in power between the output of the brain as a whole (where all the constituent parts work together as part of a non-zero sum game) versus the output of the brain broken down into its constituent parts.
And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself […] This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!
10 Tree of Woe seems to agree in a post about the errors of Ayn Rand Objectivism, where he argues: “Interactions between human beings are sometimes positive sum, but sometimes they are zero sum, and the line between them is not always clear cut. A Randian society cannot endure in the face of zero-sum behavior, but the human species cannot reproduce without such behavior. The zero-sum competition for status and reproductive success is both necessary and meaningful to our lives. Take it away and the result is not Randian man, but the hikikomori of Japan.”
11 On that note, check out ’s John Carter’s weekly compendium of Substack posts across the spectrum of the dissident right, which offers a lot of thought provoking content and provides a point of unity across a fractured space.
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” – William J. Casey, Director of the CIA from 1981 to 1987
For a change of stylistic pace, this post is in the form of a rant.
To start, I’ve been impressed with the dedication of many Substack authors who continue to highlight the deadliness of the COVID vaccines, the hypocrisy and lies of so-called “public health experts”, and the manipulation of official data since the hysteria ended. There is a regular drumbeat of posts about it; a snapshot covering just a couple of days includes here, here, here and here, although there were many more posted even during this brief time period. The consistency of these posts is a heartening thing; if we can preserve the monumental crime that was perpetrated by our globohomo overlords against the hapless public for future generations then, even if we don’t secure justice in the present moment, it will be worth it.
The puzzling thing is how liberals havn’t wanted to talk about the heart attack jab or COVID for the past year or so. When you bring it up to them in person they will give you a blank stare, be uncomfortable and want to change the topic. Complete radio silence, after obsessing about it like it was the Black Plague from March 2020 until 2022 sometime. Interesting, isn’t it? They havn’t wanted to engage about it, like the past three years never happened. Perhaps it was all just a bad dream and we imagined everything.
A throwaway line when Arnold gets the memory injection in Total Recall gives the film’s ending away, strongly hinting that he was lobotomized and the rest of the film was a fever dream. Sorry if this is a spoiler, the movie is 30+ years old.
As Mark Twain allegedly said, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” These liberals and NPCs have learned nothing from the COVID mass-forced-injection experiment. There has been no introspection or lessons learn. For the past year they just wanted to move on with life.
In effect, because they were unwilling to examine their defective train of thought and why they put such faith in the media and so-called “experts” – despite being wrong to the point of it risking their health and those of their family members – they are sure to fall for whatever the next scam is, whether it is bringing COVID back for another round of hysteria (which globohomo is field testing as you read this; Infowars claims whistleblowers have told them major restrictions will be back by October) or otherwise. It could be literally anything; as long as it is repeated hard enough by the mainstream media and so-called “experts”, they will believe it, seemingly without exception.
The NPC, from one Current Thing to the next with zero introspection, forever
Underlying their lack of introspection is a question: why do and did they believe the so-called experts? I was discussing this question in person recently with an NPC liberal, nice guy, and his attempted bleat of a response was with respect to the nature of lay person knowledge. Essentially his argument is: why do online dissidents feel like we know as much as an “expert” when they’ve been credentialed in their speciality and have spent years or decades learning their craft? The world is too complicated for us to know that much, which is why humans have specialized in a very specific, niche field vs. in the past when people were more generalists. There could never be another Aristotle or Plato generalist genius, for example, because there is simply too much information in the world for even a genius to become master of but a tiny portion of humanity’s current level of knowledge (this guy didn’t articulate his argument like this, of course, because NPCs are incapable of offering arguments that have not been mommy-fed to them by the media, but i am trying to steel-man his argument).
The response to the steel-manned NPC argument is that lay people, even though they are likely to have less specific knowledge than experts, have not been institutionally captured. During COVID the few experts that spoke out against it were cancelled — they lost their jobs, they lost their funding, they lost their reputation, they were banned from propagating their message on social media, etc. For experts who have mortgages, or kids to feed, or expenses, who want or need to further their own career, how could they ever speak up amidst the fury of globohomo attacking anyone who did? At best they sympathized with dissidents but remained muzzled and silent, but most of them knew in their gut not even to proceed that far because the cognitive dissonance it could create for them could lead to uncomfortable later decisions. So the vast, vast majority of “experts” would naturally and understandably fall into line.
And even though fraudvirus was an extreme example, these same pressures exist in every field where one becomes an “expert” and rely on not bucking the establishment line or the system to maintain their career. This is why laymen are really the only ones who can afford to speak truth to power, especially anonymous ones on the internet, and especially those comprising the loser clique, even if they may be wrong quite a bit of the time and possess less knowledge than the experts.
I actually like the constant attacks from the right on COVID, which I think has somewhat better odds (still very low) of bearing fruit than attacks on transsexualism. This is because transsexualism is rooted in the egalitarian values based in the core of Western society while the COVID issue is not, and is therefore easier to attack psychologically.
But still, even if the attacks on the COVID vaccines are accurate, it was way less deadly than advertised by the right. Most of these Substack authors highlight how many people died unnecessarily from it, what a tragedy it is, etc., but I see it from the opposite angle: why wasn’t there the promised mass vaccinated die-off so that the independent minded anti-vaxxers would inherit the earth? Very disappointing.
Does anything exist if the media doesn’t cover it?
This raises a deeper question: does anything exist if the media doesn’t cover it? The enormous toxic train spill in East Palestine, Ohio has been completely forgotten about, and it was being compared to Chernobyl with poisoned air, water, and land which could last decades. Dead silence from the media; the media doesn’t cover it for more than a couple days, and only piecemeal, so did it even happen? Has anything come from the right’s focus on the sustained fraudvirus scam? Lord Fauci has tens of millions in his offshore bank accounts or more and permanent taxpayer funded security.
Lord Fauci, COVID whisperer
Now the Maui fire with maybe 1,000 dead are being covered by the right in a similar fashion, see here and here, but there are many daily breathless Substack posts about it. How long until this too is forgotten?
Or how about on the flip side, let’s take an example in a totally different category. The song “Rich Men North of Richmond” has become a huge hit, which is supposed to be a Southern attack on the values of Washington D.C. But the whole thing is astroturfed, highlighted by the media and blown up from nothing; the singer has a fake Southern accent in the video and he was recorded saying establishment shibboleths like “diversity is our strength.” Apparently a marketing expert set the whole thing up.
It’s not that the power of the mainstream media is immense – it may be almost absolute and simply sets the parameters of what constitutes reality for most people.
If a tree falls in the woods and the media doesn’t cover it, did it actually fall?
Let’s go through a brief list of items highlighted or downplayed by the media, to their central bank owner master’s benefit:
Hurricane Katrina – Highlighted to hurt George W. Bush
North Carolina Hurricane Matthew destruction – Downplayed to hurt white people
Las Vegas shooting – Downplayed as conservative whites were the victims and to protect Las Vegas tourism
Waukesha Christmas parade attack – Same, with Muslim attacker
BLM riots – Highlighted at the time to portray Orange Man as weak on crime prevention, then deliberately forgotten
Notre Dame cathedral fire – downplayed, caused by a Muslim but never officially announced for political reasons
The 737 MAX crashes – downplayed, hurt faith in the airlines too much
The 2016 Colbert election special – scrubbed from the internet and downplayed because it made liberals look out-of-touch and foolish
Pink slime being reinstated into food – downplayed because globohomo wants you eating mass produced food
The 1970s Weatherman Days of Rage – downplayed, leading to terrorists becoming institutionalized as professors within universities
The Clinton Foundation filing a $16.8 million loss in 2018 with revenue down 90%+ after losing the 2016 election (is this not powerful circumstantial evidence of pay-for-play?) – downplayed and forgotten about
The publicly accessible video of Biden bragging about forcing Ukraine to fire its anti-corruption prosecutor or lose $1 billion dollars of aid – downplayed and forgotten about
The four years of Trump’s presidency, where every minor detail was highlighted in a hysterical fashion by the media
Just recently a Syrian Muslim would-be attacker in North Dakota, heavily armed with 1,800 rounds of ammunition, was going to shoot up a street festival. Has anyone heard of this? No, and I only did because a friend mentioned it to me. Zero impact on society. But if globohomo cared they could have easily built it up into something huge and create political change out of it.
I could go on and list another hundred things the media highlights or downplays, but the point is this: the media conducts their highlighting or downplaying, they decide how intensely to push the issue and for how long, then the globohomo-backed politicians act on that media pressure to conduct the goals of the Rothschild & co. central bank owners, and then establishment historians, teachers and professors inscribe these false narratives as facts and brainwash the next generation to believe it wholeheartedly. There is a complete, closed feedback loop from narrative creation and dissemination to political change to social shaping as the demonstration of oligarchical power, with no outside influence. The right has no such loop, nothing even slightly close to it; it can whine and point out the hypocrisy of the left or of globohomo or whatever, but because there is no path for the right toward power or money or putting their perspective into power with it (with no control over the DOJ, FBI, court system, legislature, mainstream media, Federal Reserve, universities, public schools, social media companies, etc), eventually the right gets tired of discussing it and spinning their wheels with no change and, quiet and dispirited, but not having learned the lesson, they move on to toothlessly criticizing the next globohomo narrative. A total loss, toothless and ineffective.
Yes, the built-up rage at white displacement led to Orange Man’s presidency in 2016, which was a mistake on globohomo’s part as they were too lazy to rig the election properly, a lesson they learned and will never let happen again. Globohomo isn’t omnipotent and they occasionally do make mistakes. But Trump accomplished nothing and now he’s likely going to prison, probably for the rest of his life.
Therefore, circling back, even though the right has done an impressive job of keeping arguments about the COVID death jabs alive, it seems like it will inevitably fade into a background issue (more than it has already) out of faltering energies levels due to no ways to translate those ideas into power. I guess if globohomo brings fraudvirus hysteria back for another round it will sustain the oppositional energies for awhile longer.
Now, there is a residue of truth that remains in the dead husk of lost political/societal arguments and can be found by the astute, discerning individual. But it is in the back-alley, through the low status “conspiracy theory”, and again, without any ability to translate that knowledge into power. But how did those conspiracy theories even come into existence, who passed them along? To what extent can *any* truth be ascertained today? For the Maui fires, who is pushing the various conspiracy theories and for what purpose? I don’t trust globohomo even slightly, but keep in mind the concept of cognitive infiltration. This cognitive infiltration strategy was articulated by Cass Sunstein in 2008 in an article titled “Conspiracy Theories” for the Journal of Political Philosophy, where he made a radical proposal: “Our main policy claim here is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories.”…they defined “cognitive infiltration” as a program “whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups.” Given Sunstein is so influential and we have seen this strategy employed numerous times (for example, with flat earth or aliens or Chinese weather balloons), with the purpose being to sew confusion and distract from other issues, how can we be sure the perspective fed to the right on any issue is indeed accurate? Are you yourself going out and verifying facts, and if so to what extent and how? If not, why do you choose to blindly accept the alternative set of “facts” offered to you?
Conclusion
Does anything happen on a political or cultural level unless the globohomo-owned mainstream media and their kayfabe bought-and-paid politicians say it does? And not just now, but throughout all of modern history where oligarchical-owned media set the narratives of reality (instead of in the past when dictator/kings or religious authorities would, and to a much more rudimentary extent)? I think the answer is no. They set the terms of modern reality almost entirely and we peasants merely react to it.
Insert hackneyed Matrix quote
John Swinton, editor of the New York Sun, had this to say about the profession of journalism in 1883:
“There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
The media acts as intellectual prostitutes for the Rothschild central bank owners.
The core of the matter is: without both (1) possessing a media apparatus to consistently amplify the right’s messages to the retarded public, and (2) a means by which those messages can be directed into political action (which doesn’t exist for the dissident right), it’s akin to screaming into the wind. It’s nice to figure out the truth for yourself and for other dissidents on the right for its own sake and with the intent of our own spiritual progression, but approaching the understanding of politics with the intent of influencing it is a fool’s errand at this time, and will remain so until such time when a dissident feedback loop of narrative-to-power can be established, if ever.
Ultimately politics is downstream of belief, and only a Nietzschian transvaluation of values away from materialistic egalitarianism in order to change the perspective and worldview of all events and “facts” has a chance of ever resulting in the changes that dissidents want. Retaining the underlying egalitarian values of society, in combination with the lack of any right-wing narrative-politician-cultural power feedback loop, is destined to remain a permanent failure.
We interrupt your regular scheduled programming with a post inspired by the sudden death of Wagner’s Prigozhin and Utkin, blown out of the sky today in a missile strike or bomb attack.
In February 360, Caesar Julian was faced with a terrible decision. He was in Gaul fighting the Germans, and the Emperor, his cousin Constantius II, demanded half of his troops be sent to join him in a faraway war in Persia. And not just half of his troops, but his best troops. And not just his best troops, but troops he had promised would never have to fight outside of their homeland. And there were rumors that Julian would be replaced by one of Constantius’s generals as soon as he sent his loyal troops away. And Constantius had murdered Julian’s half brother in a similar fashion. But on the flip side Julian’s troop numbers were puny, he had very little money, and Constantius had a well-earned reputation for skillfully putting down rebellions.
Julian’s troops gathered outside, rebellion in the air. They proclaimed him Emperor. What was he to do? Accept the crown, and then be overthrown and murdered by Constantius in what were horrendous odds like his half-brother was? Or reject it, and possibly be torn to pieces by the mob of soldiers gathered outside?
Julian waffled, undecided. He slept on it with the troops waiting outside for a decision. As he slept, Julian had the following dream (as told in the wonderful novel “Julian” by Gore Vidal):
I dreamed and, as often happens, I found in dreaming what I must do awake. I was seated in my consular chair, quite alone, when a figure appeared to me, dressed as the guardian spirit of the state, so often depicted in the old Republic. He spoke to me. “I have watched you for a long time, Julian. And for a long time I have wished to raise you even higher than you are now. But each time I have tried, I have been rebuffed. Now I must warn you. If you turn me away again, when so many men’s voices are raised in agreement with me, I shall leave you as you are. But remember this, if I go now, I shall never return.”
Julian awoke in a sweat, and the dream convinced him: he would accept his soldier’s demands, reject Constantius’s orders and, whatever the horrible odds, fight to the bitter end with the self-proclaimed title of Emperor.
Julian unexpectedly won the civil war against his cousin when Constantius suddenly died of a fever, and he became sole Emperor — the last Hellenist Emperor Rome would ever have.
19th century depiction of Julian being proclaimed emperor in Paris (fancifully located in the Thermes de Cluny, then thought to have been the Imperial Palace), standing on a shield in the Frankish manner, in February 360.
I go into Julian’s full story here if it interests you, but the point of conveying it here is this: in life there comes occasionally, rarely, maybe once in a lifetime, if ever, a moment where a decision has to be made, at least in a historic figure context, but probably for regular people as well: is the person all in, or not?
Cue the wildly overplayed song Lose Yourself, with the lyrics “You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow / This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo”. Eminem is a deranged shitlib, but the lyrics are fitting in this context. Or perhaps see Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent horrendous rendition.
Or the Breaking Bad episodes “Half Measures” and “Full Measures” also comes to mind.
Julian went all-in and he became Emperor from his decision, when he very likely would have been overthrown and murdered if he had shilly-shallayed or rejected the advice of the guardian spirit in his dream. (He was abandoned by the figure from his dream and murdered only a couple of years later, but that’s a different story).
Let’s give some other examples.
Consider Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, where he suddenly marched on Rome with only a single legion, causing panic in Rome and the oligarchical Senators to flee. Caesar went all-in and he won due to his daring and intestinal fortitude.
Caesar crossing the Rubicon as depicted in the HBO show “Rome”, which in my opinion is the best show of all time.
But then later Caesar showed mercy to the same Senators, enacting only half-measures, and as a result they assassinated him; how the worm turns. Octavian/ Augustus pursued full-measures in revenge, showing no mercy to his enemies at all, and he ruled in stability and prosperity for a lifetime.
Consider Ross Perot in the 1992 U.S. election. He had huge support and could have likely won as a third party candidate; however, he felt forced to drop out after globohomo came up with dirt against him or a family member. He later found his balls and re-entered the race, but the opportunity had passed; he ended up getting only 15% of the vote after the general population considered him to be weak-willed. He had one shot and he missed it.
Or consider the failed 2016 military coup attempt in Turkey; full of half-measures, what a mess and a disaster, to the point many have argued (persuasively, in my opinion) that the whole attempt was set up by Erdogan/Islamic loyalists in the first place, given they had extremely detailed lists of enemies to purge ready to go.
The point of this is when we look at Prigozhin’s aborted march on Moscow, the guy had one opportunity. The ruling elite were caught with their pants down; Wagner was immensely popular, the military did not want to fight them, and they started their march with what looked like aplomb, shooting down a bunch of Russian aircraft with their anti-air missiles. The military stood to the side. Wagner’s beef with the Ministry of Defense under Shoigu, a globohomo puppet, was well known thanks to reporting by Rolo Slavskiy where Prigozhin aired the establishment’s dirty laundry in public. It wasn’t a certainty of victory, but there was a chance there. But what did the former chef of Putin do? He turned around and sued for peace after a day. “Sorry guys, I didn’t mean to cross the Rubicon here! Whoops! My bad!” And apparently Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, negotiated some sort of deal between Prigozhin and Putin and Prigozhin was let free, wandered around Russia with no arrest, thinking he could then turn his attention back to plunder in Africa while a bunch of Russian patriots like Strelkov and Surovikin and Popov, among others, were arrested. It made the whole thing take on a surreal nature and led some to believe that it was a false-flag operation meant to sniff out patriots within the Russian military. But the pro-globohomo elites (yes, Putin and other oligarchical leaders in Russia are controlled by the Rothschild central bank owners as I have previously documented) were indeed embarrassed at Prigozhin’s aborted march on Moscow; they slyly waited for the right opportunity for revenge, which didn’t take long at all. They took him out along with (apparently) the founder of Wagner Utkin and some (all?) of the top leaders at the same time. Bravo to them for playing their cards so well, a masterful sight to behold.
The above image is clickable for the video
Now perhaps Putin, having removed any danger from the right-of-center, will move for a humiliating Minsk-style fake “peace” with the West, with war to be resumed in a year or two followed by another humiliating loss. Or perhaps this analysis is wrong; it is so difficult to tell the motivations and strategies of the players in Russia, even if one is a native ala Edward Slavsquat who seemed quite surprised in his post here; and even harder to tell through the layers of media lies. “Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.” ― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly…
The point of this is that globohomo plays for keeps. They are utterly ruthless, amoral, and do whatever it takes to retain power, no matter the cost. If you step to them you will be destroyed, and they will do it with no compunctions, in whatever way they decide is your weakest point, and they will feel no moral qualms about it at all. When they strike they will do it suddenly, so the victim has no idea it’s even coming. Consider how poorly prepared the world’s population was to deal with the fraudvirus narrative, which was enacted as revenge against populism for the unwashed masses having the temerity to elect Orange Man and Bolsonaro and vote in favor of Brexit.
This is why I think it is best to try to retain humility despite the daily political vicissitudes; I have been embarrassed more times than I can count offering certainty over a political analysis, especially in my younger days, only to be later proven wrong. Regardless, if the hope of the right is to wrest power from globohomo, it will not be done without an equivalent level of ruthlessness, and the price to pay for that ruthlessness is selling one’s soul to the Demiurge, who controls material reality. These are the incentives within this reality; if you want a different reality, better hope that God comes down somehow and changes the rules.
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This may be the first part of a reoccurring series highlighting specific individuals who have displayed true, unquestionable courage standing up to the globohomo behemoth against unrelenting pressures, serving as a bit of a counter to the typical grim perspective pushed on this Substack. These individuals pay a price, often a big price, for their courage, and for standing up anyway they deserve to be applauded. Historical-level figures in this vein like Lee Kuan Yew and Ptyor Stolypin have been covered previously. If there were more people like these men, the world would be a much better place.
Ian Smith
You may or may not heard of Ian Smith; he was the New Jersey gym owner that stood up very early against governmental lockdown orders and later vaccine requirements during the CIA color revolution vote-by-mail-legalization-to-overthrow-Orange Man-fraud otherwise known as “COVID”. I followed his story closely at the time, was inspired by it, and continue to follow his ongoing activities. (He should have a Wikipedia page, but given Wiki is controlled by the FBI and CIA, I suppose he has been de-personed and is not considered a person of note, a very Stalin-esque tactic).
Smith at his gym
Smith recently came out with a book called “Find Your Hill: Worth Fighting For” which is available on Amazon or the book’s direct website. It offers an autobiography of Ian describing his upbringing, challenges, mistakes, things he learned along the way, along with his entrepreneurial spirit and provides a detailed account of his battle against the globohomo scumbag New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy to keep his gym open. It’s a great book, written in a simple, down to earth, very easy to read manner, and if you want to be inspired by overcoming adversity I highly recommend it.
Smith’s Story
Smith grew up like many young men do today: from a broken home. His father wasn’t in the picture at all, he lived with his mother and his step-father offered little to no guidance on life. Aimless, driftless, he engaged in lots of petty crime as a teenager and ultimately enrolled in college, where his results were mediocre. One day, at 20 years old, waking up from drinking heavily the night before, and without realizing he could still be drunk in the morning, he ran a red light and T-boned another car, killing a young man. He spent five years in prison for this, and experienced deep shame at what had happened. He said forgiveness first from the detective in charge of the case and then from the family members of the dead young man affected him deeply. The detective said as he sat before him sobbing in shame, “I know this does not make sense to you right now, but when I pulled up to the scene, I knew there were two fatalities, yet here you are. You are here for a reason. I do not know why, but that is your job to figure it out. Do not be afraid. You are going to need to find a way to forgive yourself to make sure two lives are not lost in this tragedy. Enough damage has been done. You have a responsibility to be better.” And when Smith was sentenced, a family member of the victim handed him a note that said, “We don’t hate you; we just hate what you did.” Powerful words; such forgiveness isn’t so easily imaginable in a non-Christian context…
After getting out of prison Smith enrolled and graduated from college and had various failed job experiences that left him angry and depressed, and back living with his mother. But he pulled himself up and got back to grinding, and he finally found his niche as a personal trainer, finding that he was able to grow his clients with his strong understanding of social media. He went from working people out around New Jersey (traveling to his clients) in the park with equipment from the back of his car to having his own gym with a long line of clients. That in turn led to him being given an opportunity to buy a failing nutrition store within a failing gym, and then the gym itself. Only nine months after his purchase, COVID hit…
Atilis Gym and COVID
Smith’s gym was shut down during the “two weeks to stop the spread” scam messaging at the start of the panic. After a month with no official reopening in sight, though, he saw that big “essential” business was still open and that the small mom and pop stores, which lived month to month, were going out of business. Enough was enough, he thought, and he reopened. But he didn’t do it quietly: he went on Tucker Carlson and announced he was reopening and was going to publicly defy the Governor’s shutdown order. Here’s the video of his initial appearance from May 2020.
His gym reopened to much interest and fanfare, getting both a huge amount of support as well as lots of hate comments and death threats. Governor Murphy took it as a direct challenge to his globohomo dictatorial rule, and he tried many different ways to shut down the gym – putting pressure on the city to revoke his business license, having him arrested, having his customers arrested, having the city mess with his sewer lines to lead to his toilets backing up, boarding up the door to his gym, fining him tens of thousands of dollars a day (!) trying to breach the veil of his LLC to bankrupt him personally, and having criminal contempt charges filed against him, among other pressure tactics. Here is a photo of Murphy so you can judge the physiognomy of this scumbag:
I’m not sure there are words to properly describe the instinctive reaction to this photo
The appearance on Tucker, followed by additional appearances, was both a good and bad thing: it brought him to national attention and created a huge following for himself (proving how powerful the media is; plenty of other individuals who stood up to government tyranny such as Louis Uridel, Shelley Luther, Greg Anderson, and Danny Presti did not receive the same level of attention) but he became a symbol of the anti-lockdown movement whom the government then decided to destroy. He ultimately wracked up enormous legal bills fighting the government, which had unlimited money, had his bank account funds illegally seized, and quickly racked up $1,000,000+ in fines.
Here are some of his other appearances on Tucker:
Smith was ultra resourceful and never gave up. When the city took away his business license under duress, the gym became a “recreational center” with no charges, only donations. When the government padded up the front door of the gym, he took the front door off the building. When the government made it illegal for him to operate, he brought the entire gym equipment daily outside. Wow!
He credits the huge amount of positive feedback he kept receiving for his continued defiance; if no one had cared, his business would have shut down early and he could have been thrown in prison without much of a second thought. It was the lives that he kept touching as he traveled around the country, giving speeches, inspiring others, highlighting the plight of others, that gave the reinforcement and feedback for his courage to continue to defy scumbag Murphy’s tyranny.
The Impact
According to Smith, p. 206, “The path to change is always a long series of cause and effect. One person’s actions impact the next person’s, which leads to an exponential increase in the number of people involved. What started as a couple hundred people in the gym parking lot turned into an army of supporters. The game ends when enough people are inspired to stand up, meet resistance, and stay standing, until they run out of ways to enforce their tyrannical orders. In America, if we had not hit a critical mass of non-compliance, we would all be living under the same type of COVID policies that the Chinese have submitted to.”
And p. 211: “I traveled frequently during COVID, sometimes three times a month and had to show up at the airport three or four hours early just to be harassed [as he was put on the Secondary Security Screening Selection list for refusing to wear a mask]. I continued to fight with people over masking, being removed from flights even when I had an exemption [from a doctor who was not going along with the COVID hysteria], and more. Many would say, “just wear the mask, you are making a big deal over nothing” but I was unwilling to participate in the nonsense of pretending that masks worked. If there is no resistance to what is clearly wrong, they will continue to do wrong. You might as well make these people work for it, make their lives miserable for enforcing such lunacy. Eventually the enforcers get tired of the nonsense as well, and it starts to fall apart. If everyone complies, we go further down the path of illogical control and tyranny. Was it a pain the ass? Sure. Did it make my life uncomfortable and inconvenient? Sure. Will I do it again if they ever try that again? Absolutely.”
Smith’s point reminds me of an anti-tyranny cartoon I had seen a couple of years ago, which I dug up and which is as follows:
Ian Smith: the first (who became a public) figure to defy the COVID insanity
It also reminded me of a Alexander Solzhenitsyn quote from The Gulag Archipelago about the price of inaction, p. 828 of Volume 1:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur—what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If … if … We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more— we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!…We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Remember that those who want to take away your freedom will never package their nefarious intent honestly or directly; they will always package their message as one of promoting safety, like they did with the scam Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. And a message of safety strongly resonates with the public, especially women. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty norSafety.”
The CIA, Bill Gates, Lord Fauci COVID-fraud tyranny finally ended because, even though 80% of fooled American suckers got the first Death Jab (especially 100-110 liberal Redditor-types; those at the tail ends of the bell curve were much less likely to get it, especially PhDs), only 20% received the Death Jab booster. Because so few fell for the booster, our overlords decided to shift to their next scam. (Still, I’m bitter about it; globohomo got their rigged election, permanent fraudulent vote-by-mail, shut down a tremendous number of small businesses, printed $11+ trillion in 2020-2021 alone ($6 trillion of treasures and mortgage bonds purchased and $5 trillion in CARES Act funds) and gave much of it to their friends and allies which caused massive inflation, and no one has paid at all for it. They’re off to their next scam while Lord Fauci retires with tens of millions of dollars in his offshore bank accounts, permanent private security, and laughing at all the retards he fooled. Sure, globohomo didn’t get their permanent vaccine mandates or having to show vaccine passports everywhere forever – this time – but their strategy was a runaway success regardless).
Where is Smith today?
After the fraudulent COVID scam died down, Smith eventually sold his business to his partner (who he had continued problems with) and ran for Congress, where he received about 40% of the vote in the primary against a globohomo Republican stooge. He was a political neophyte and wasn’t prepared for the nasty games that would be played; he had one drink at dinner and was pulled over and arrested for it and charged with DUI, highlighting his prior felony where he had killed a young man while drunk; after the primary, the DUI charge was dropped. Nasty games. But Smith correctly blamed himself for allowing himself to be put in that situation in the first place.
Now he is an author, entrepreneur, and he is headlining a cool event called the Freemen Forge. Here he is explaining it on Instagram, which sounds like a very cool event for like-minded people to interact, network and train together (regardless of the number of embedded FBI agents who will likely try to sneak in). The website is here if you have interest in looking at it.
The conclusion
Ultimately Ian’s story is a story of empowerment and forgiveness. He made a lot of mistakes in his life, continues to make them, yet he learned to forgive himself (and have others forgive him), and he put his head down and got to work and didn’t give up, and ultimately has had a very positive and encouraging impact on others. He ends his book on a note of optimism and encouragement, p. 221:
“What would happen with a million more people in the gym, eating healthier, showing up at town councils and board meetings, spending and saving their money smarter, opening businesses, planting gardens, spending less time on their phones and more with their families, organizing community events and charity, and showing up during the election process? What if we scaled that million people down to just your town or your city? What would it look like if a thousand or even a hundred people in your community started doing that? What problems could we solve with that type of engaged citizenship?
This country is sick with victimhood, dependency, and apathy and the cure is excellence, autonomy, excitement. it starts with the individual. It starts with you. If you do not know where that starts of what that is, then ask yourself who or what is ‘worth fighting for’ – find your hill, as I call it. That looks like something different for each of us. There is not a how-to manual, and this certainly is not an attempt to write one. This is just the story of a regular guy who did his part to remind us of how powerful we all are…We the people…”
Amen, and God bless you Ian.
Lastly, his story reminds me of the wonderful Rudyard Kipling poem “If”:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Now if you were touched by Ian’s story, go buy his damn book and follow him on Instagram here and here!
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One of my favorite quotes by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago relates to the changing nature of who we are as people over time. The quote is as follows:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
I think of this quote regularly. I’m not the same person I was two or five or ten years ago, let alone decades ago; nor will I be the same person in another five or ten years. Experiences will change me, books and ideas will change me, varying circumstances will change me. Who, then, am I, and who are you? We ascribe the whole lot, good and evil, over a lifetime to the name. Is that appropriate?
I saw in the news recently that one of Charles Manson’s lackeys is being let out of prison after serving 53 years in prison, to much chagrin by the victim’s families. And I get it, it does a disservice to the families who were robbed of these long decades with the victims; the impact is incalculable. But is this 73-year old woman the same as she was 53 years ago when she was 19? Surely not.
Is this the same person?
Is the purpose of incarceration to punish or to rehabilitate? If it is to punish, what is the point of issuing a life sentence (especially a life sentence without the possibility of parole) — why not just have flogging, hard-labor for a set period or execution and be done with it? If a crime is so heinous as deserving to deprive the perpetrator of freedom for the rest of their life, shouldn’t execution as punishment be way more widely applied? The cost would certainly be less (if one discounts the unnecessarily extremely expensive execution appeals process). What is the point of a life sentence? If the point is rehabilitation, as it is is many European countries where life sentences means a couple of decades in prison if that, then life sentences without the possibility of parole also make no sense.
Anyway, this was a digression.
If our personalities change over time due to new thoughts, world events, and new experiences, what about personality changes resulting from physical changes? When people get old they become forgetful, get Alheizmers or dementia, can no longer take care of themselves, etc. What can be said about the nature of their soul when they have become entirely different people at that stage in their life due to no fault of their own?
The favorite example I like to use to demonstrate this is the example of Phineas Gage.
Phineas Gage was a normal man in the 19th century until he suffered a work accident in 1848 and a tamping iron was shoved through his skull with extreme force. He lost an eye but miraculously survived:
Gage after the accident. He looks like a ChadThe “cone of uncertainty” for the path taken by the tamping iron. Gage’s mouth was open at the moment of the explosion, and the front and back of his skull temporarily “hinged” apart as the iron entered from below, then were pulled back together by the resilience of soft tissues once the iron had exited through the top of Gage’s head.Gage’s skull photographed in 1968 after his death. How did he even survive? He would likely have qualified for at least mild medical disability in the modern era
Harlow (“virtually our only source of information” on Gage)described the pre-accident Gage as hard-working, responsible, and “a great favorite” with the men in his charge, his employers having regarded him as “the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ”; he also took pains to note that Gage’s memory and general intelligence seemed unimpaired after the accident, outside of the delirium exhibited in the first few days.Nonetheless these same employers, after Gage’s accident, “considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again”:
The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart business man, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage.”
Kaczynski wrote in Industrial Society and Its Future, “There may or may not be an immaterial human soul, but if there is one it clearly is less powerful than the biological mechanisms of human behavior. For if that were not the case then researchers would not be able so easily to manipulate human feelings and behavior with drugs and electrical currents.”
This is the perspective of our materialist overlords, who believe humans are simply programmable meat puppets without a soul (or at least a meaningful one that can resist their dictates) and therefore without any inherent dignity in the eyes of God (who they believe doesn’t exist). Jewish homosexual atheist and advisor to World Economic Forum head-honcho Klaus Schwab Yuval Harari calls humans “useless eaters”. Globohomo has spent a tremendous amount of time and energy learning how these “useless eaters” operate physiologically, especially via endless experiments conducted via the Tavistock Institute and its affiliates.1
If our personality changes as we age, through changing circumstances, drugs, brain tumors or a metal rod shoved through our brains, who exactly are we?
Schopehauer believed that everything came down to the will: a blind, unconscious, aimless striving devoid of knowledge, outside of space and time, and free of all multiplicity. Such a will animated everything living. Nietzsche thought as Shopenhauer did but believed the will not to be aimless, but rather a will to power, and that, like Heraclitus, there were not solid states of anything but merely time-dependent processes playing out; everything was a process of becoming, of change, and nothing was static other than the process of change itself.
There’s even the astrological perspective that our character and dispositions are determined by our natal chart (position of the planets at birth) and progressed chart (how the planets move over time based on the natal chart). The West scoffs at astrology as a pseudo-science (and the vague birth-month horoscopes in newspapers are indeed trash), yet ancient civilizations that had no contact similarly cast horoscopes predicting personality and life events. Should we be so quick to dismiss something that was essentially universally accepted across the world until the modern era? And if the position of the planets determines or influences a person’s personality and evolution of that personality, what would that say about the nature of the soul, free will or of Heaven or Hell?
Regardless, most humans feel as though we possess souls; I know I feel as though there is something more than mere physical reality. Does that mean we do have souls, or perhaps it was an evolutionary advantage to feel so in order to feel less scared of death and to take more risks?
Brett Anderson argues that consciousness (which people generally think of as necessary to possess a soul) is an entirely bodily phenomenon, not subject to mind-body dualism, and that consciousness is a way to transmit information efficiently throughout the brain via self-organized criticality which arises from the interaction of competing brain processes. He believes this theory ties together Global Workspace Theory and Integration Information Theory, where consciousness is defined as the difference between the sum of the brain and its constituent parts. Under his theory it seems like he would deny the existence of a soul, or rather, deny that any knowledge of the soul from within material reality, if any, is possible.
He invited a Catholic priest, Father Anselm Strittmatter, O.S.B., to visit him for consultation. Von Neumann reportedly said, “So long as there is the possibility of eternal damnation for nonbelievers it is more logical to be a believer at the end,” referring to Pascal’s wager. He had earlier confided to his mother, “There probably has to be a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn’t.” Father Strittmatter administered the last rites to him. Some of von Neumann’s friends, such as Abraham Pais and Oskar Morgenstern, said they had always believed him to be “completely agnostic”. Of this deathbed conversion, Morgenstern told Heims, “He was of course completely agnostic all his life, and then he suddenly turned Catholic—it doesn’t agree with anything whatsoever in his attitude, outlook and thinking when he was healthy.” Father Strittmatter recalled that even after his conversion, von Neumann did not receive much peace or comfort from it, as he still remained terrified of death.
I obviously don’t have an answer to these questions (although I’ve discussed some of the difficulties with the common perspectives on religion here), and if you have any insight or perspective you’d like to share I’d be interested in hearing it. I’ve heard of various near-death experiences, many of which are quite similar with seeing approaching light, loved ones, etc, as well as astral projections and deathbed experiences where those dying see their dead relatives which perhaps gives them elements of peace, but how does one separate these experiences out from biochemical mega-dopamine releases from the body as death approaches? How does one know what is scientific biochemical reactions and what, if anything, is something more?
Stay away from the light, it’s not your time to go yet!
It would be great to firmly believe that this world isn’t it, that some aspect of us lives on to be reunited with loved ones in an environment without pain, without suffering, for all eternity. There is such a peace of mind that derives from that belief system, and it is part of Christianity’s enduring appeal. Who wants to grow old and decrepit, lose our facilities and face the black void of eternal nothingness, everyone we loved from prior generations simply gone forever with no meaning or purpose behind it, poof? Who wants to live in a purely materialist universe where globohomo summons a giant woke artificial intelligence, extracts all the world’s natural resources, kills all the animals of the world, gallops toward white genocide, rules over with an iron fist the masses of “programmable useless eaters” for exploitation in locked-down, force-vaccinated “15-minute smart cities”, and leaves a giant dead husk of a planet behind? This is why, in the face of an unrelenting, increasingly atheistic materialist horror animated by what appears to be the Demiurge, there must be a return to religious belief in whatever form it takes. As this materialist horror continues to manifest and intensify, a countervailing religiousness will grow in its shadow because worsening conditions will become too difficult to bear otherwise. Whether this is simply a coping mechanism I don’t know. The horrors of material reality may serve to highlight the materialist/spiritual dualism at the heart of reality and as emphasized by the gnostics much as, per Richard Tarnas in The Passion of the Western Mind, each era in history has served as a springboard for advancement and pushback in the next.
Ultimately, the concept of an all loving God that actively cares about us and that brings us back into His embrace upon death is a powerful belief that isn’t so easily replaced by science or materialism, which can explain how but not why. Indeed, this gross materialist Machine metaphysically uses the traditions and beliefs of humans as fuel for its continued propagation, which is why there has been such a collapse into the nihilism as prophesized by Nietzsche with the “Death of God”. At least to me, the counter to pure materialism can be summed up by the song that best approximates the feeling of a loving God, George Strait’s “Love without End, Amen”:
George H.W. Bush, an evil globohomo type who spent his life screwing over the vast majority within America, was a big fan of this song and he seemed to really love his family and children. People are complicated and strange.
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1 The Tavistock Institute, heavily funded by the foundations to the tune of billions per year, developed the mass brain-washing techniques which have been widely used on the American public by modifying individual behavior through topical psychology. Tavistock’s pioneer work in behavioral science along Freudian lines of “controlling” humans established it as the world center of foundation ideology. Its network extends from the University of Sussex to the U.S. through the Stanford Research Institute, Esalen, MIT, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center of Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown, where State Dept. personnel are trained, US Air Force Intelligence, and the Rand and Mitre corporations, along with the personnel of the foundations. Tavistock originated the mass civilian bombing raids carried out by Roosevelt and Churchill (who was so corrupt that he had to be continuously bailed out by his benefactors) against Germany as a clinical experiment in mass terror, keeping records of the results as they watched the “guinea pigs” reacting under “controlled laboratory conditions.” They were also responsible for the “experiment” in compulsory racial integration, the use of drug experiments (see MKUltra), and placing German foster children with pedophiles. The goal of their research is to break down the psychological strength of the individual and render him helpless to oppose Rothschild central bank owners. Any technique which helps to break down the family unit and family inculcated principles of religion, honor, patriotism and sexual behavior is used by Tavistock as weapons of crowd control. Ten major institutions are under Tavistock’s direct control with 400 subsidiaries and 3,000 other groups and think tanks which originate many types of programs to increase establishment control, per Eustace Mullins in “The World Order: Our Secret Rulers”, 285-288.
