This post looks at the elusive ideal of life balance, which is a worthy goal even if hard to achieve in practice.
I wanted this week’s post to be about how the economic and immigration issues within America have become metastatic, past the point of no return ($2 trillion deficit, $35 trillion national debt, 20 million illegals let in the past four years alone) and therefore little good will happen regardless of who wins the upcoming U.S. elections, or alternatively a post on Jacques Ellul’s conception of technique. However, something held me back from these and my intuition is taking me in a different direction this week. Instead, this is a possibly cliche post about life balance.
Growing up, a close relative equated the different aspects of life (family, work, children, spirituality, friends, exercise, etc.) to slices of a pie making up a whole. The idea was to try to achieve balance between these aspects. This wasn’t a unique insight to him, of course, and the idea exists in a lot of places on the internet. A balanced life looks something like this:
Or this:
The idea is that each of us needs to integrate these aspects into our lives in order to feel whole. It is not “happiness” that we ultimately want – happiness is an ephemeral feeling, it comes and goes, we aren’t in charge of it – but rather a sense of fulfillment. Fulfillment comes from balancing work, play, friends, family, exercise, spirituality, etc. and if we fail in doing so then it decreases the amount of fulfillment we feel, because we acutely feel the lack of those aspects that are not in alignment. This balancing is a never-ending process; there is no final goal of attainment to achieve. For example, in my close relative’s case he achieved everything he wanted in life – he got married, was in fantastic shape, moved to a remote area of the country, bought a humble but nice house with a bunch of acres, but then his life fell out of whack when he became addicted to painkillers (thanks Sacklers), ultimately leading to a shattering of the life he had created. There’s no guarantee in life of balance; it is a goal to always work toward. For me, my friendship category has taken a big hit in the past number of years – multiple friends died and I lost many more due to ideological differences which became apparent during fraudvirus. I feel the lack of friendships as a missing hole; it affects my fulfillment and was the reason for writing this post on friendship. (The lack of friendship is reflected astrologically on my progressed chart this past year and continues into next year.)
Having balance in life is pretty similar to the famous opening line of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It is also closely related to Aristotle’s idea of the golden mean and other Greek thought. In much the same way, fulfilled lives are similar in that they attain some degree of integration of each aspect of life; each unfulfilled person is unfulfilled in his own way. If you’re struggling with work and can’t pay bills your life is out of alignment; if your relationship with your children is bad your life is out of balance; lack of friends, or poor health, or poor exercise, or lack of spirituality, or no romantic partner, or not having hobbies, etc. Each person’s needs within each category is different; someone people need less friendship than others, they’re more introverted or whatever. But some aspect of each category must be involved in a person’s life to feel fulfilled. One of the sad aspects of this neoliberal feudal society we currently live in with an extinct middle class and only polarities of the ultra-rich and ultra-poor is that it makes it much harder to for people to achieve balance: how can one support a family, or build for retirement, or buy a home if one is unable to have a job that can support such things? I delved into this problem here and here. And how can one find a mate due to the terrible nature of modern dating and marriage in the West?
Let’s give some famous examples. John Paul Getty, one of the richest men in the world, had a terrible life balance: he was focused only on making money (and not spending it), his marriages failed and his relationship with his children was terrible, and his eldest son killed himself due to parental neglect. According to Wikipedia, “In 2013, at age 99, Getty’s fifth wife, Louise, known as Teddy Getty Gaston, published a memoir recounting how Getty had scolded her for spending money too freely in the 1950s on the treatment of their six-year-old son, Timmy, who had become blind from a brain tumor. Timmy died at age 12, and Getty, living in England apart from his family, who were in the U.S., did not attend the funeral.” He only very reluctantly paid the ransom to save the life of his grandson, and he made sure it would be a tax write-off. This story was recently made into the movie All the Money in the World(2017)1:
He was quoted as saying, “I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success.” Indeed, how fulfilled can one really be if one has horrible family relations?
Another example is that of Carl Jung, who did achieve balance. He is an unusual case given he married the daughter of a wealthy industrialist where, in those days, the husband was in charge of the wife’s finances and this gave him the breathing room he needed to focus on his life’s work, even though he also had a robust and lucrative clinical practice. They had five children together. Jung stated in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections(1961) that focusing on real life was critical for him to remain grounded, comparing himself to what happened to Nietzsche:
Particularly at this time [during his confrontation with his unconscious], when I was working on the fantasies, I needed a point of support in “this world,” and I may say that my family and my professional work were that to me. It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world.My family and my profession remained the base to which I could always return, assuring me that I was an actually existing, ordinary person. The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma from a Swiss university, I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children, I live at 228 Seestrasse in Kusnacht – these were actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed, that I was not a blank page whirling about in the winds of the spirit, like Nietzsche. Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts – which incidentally possessed him more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality. For me, such irreality was the quintessence of horror, for I aimed, after all, at this world and this life.No matter how deeply absorbed or how blown about I was, I always knew that everything I was experiencing was ultimately directed at this real life of mine.I meant to meet its obligations and fulfill its meanings. My watchword was: Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
Jung’s family and work responsibilities served as his grounding mechanism as he explored his unconscious and the world of dreams. He mentioned elsewhere in his autobiography the dangers of blindly listening to one’s unconscious, to one’s anima or to one’s impulses; it can lead to total ruination if it is not balanced against one’s thoughts, feelings, and senses. This almost happened to me more than a decade ago when I almost blindly followed my intuition; if I had it would have led to ruin. Luckily I was able to pull back in time.
Famous examples of others with imbalances in certain areas of their lives include Donald Trump (little or no spirituality), Kamala Harris (no children, little or no spirituality), Chris Christie (no exercise, bad diet), Barack Obama (obsessed with himself ala Narcissus), the Clintons’ twisted marriage, Biden’s weirdness with his daughter Ashley and his drug-addicted son Hunter, etc.
Other aspects of the pie of life worth touching on are as follows:
The pie shifts over time depending on one’s stage of life. Work may not be as much of the pie in younger life or in retirement; hobbies may take greater weight in retirement. Family and romance come at certain moment’s of one’s life. Work responsibilities grow with time and the amount of money one needs to live, to support a family, also changes over time. Being able to nimbly pivot to account for the changing requirements of one’s life pie, maintaining flexibility and willingness to grow, is an integral part of life. I’ve seen so many people, inflexible and holding on to their prior beliefs, unable to navigate properly the curveballs that life throws or the changing requirements associated with different phases of life. And maybe that’ll happen to me one day, who knows.
Balance in our life is an ideal, it is hard to achieve in actuality; there is usually one part or another that is out of whack. Personal or life circumstances may prevent one from reaching or keeping this ideal. And maybe one reaches it but then things fall apart, as it did to my close relative. It’s not a moral judgment; sometimes things are out of our hands.
The exact makeup of the life pie will be different for everyone, depending on our personalities, upbringing, and our life purpose. Some will lean more into work, others will lean more into family, others will lean more into friendships.
One cannot feel fulfilled really unless one is giving their maximum effort in whatever they do. Giving one’s full attempt helps anchor one in the moment instead of in the future or the past, it (at least for me) lowers my anxiety – I can only do what I can do, anything beyond that is outside of my control, and it helps me not to have regrets down the road. It also seems to slow down time in a way. Time speeds up as one ages and as technology advances, and it’s important to do what we can to slow down it’s passage.
Generally the busier one is, the easier it becomes to deal with more things in one’s life. This is paradoxical but it is true; if you are used to carrying a heavy burden of responsibility then adding on even more responsibility is not such a big deal. Alternatively, someone used to almost no responsibility to get them to do the slightest thing feels extremely difficult. I’ve noticed this in my own life (the busier I am, the more I can do, and the opposite is true) and in the lives of those around me. This quote by Librarian of Celaeno from here hits on this point:“It is also important to bear in mind as well that Boccaccio, a writer of the highest caliber, had a day job. Like the Gen-Xers to come, he sold out and went into working world, taking up the family mantle of civic responsibility. He went on important missions for Florence and performed a number of government jobs, including welcoming Petrarch to the city, beginning a great and influential friendship. But he was never fully free to pursue his art, a fact true of nearly every artist then and up to the present. Consider that greats like Brunelleschi and Michelangelo were businessmen working on commissions; their time spent managing staff and studios must have far outweighed their time with brush and chisel. Even profoundly prolific writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were employed full-time as professors and had all the demands of family life (weirdly in Lewis’s case) as well. Let this be a lesson to those of us who would be artists if we had more time; we always have time to do the things that are important to us. The habits of industry and discipline mean as much as imagination and creativity.” Ryan Hunneshagen hits on a similar point on his post about the importance of embracing responsibility: “Like any other muscle, the more responsibilities you handle, the more you can pile on. This is where it’s important to ‘rise to the occasion’. The reps where you grow the most strain you the most….I can’t remember the source of the quote, but I heard an anecdote of a young 20-something man walking into a job interview and making such an astute observation that he earned the job on the spot. He told the interviewer,“I’m a young man. And to become the man I need to be to succeed in life, I need to take on more responsibility to expand my capacity for it.” The key to this quote is the young man’s recognition that his capacity is not finite. Each successive responsibility prepares you to fulfill the next one. This is where responsibilities yield compound returns, this is where they build that inertia I mentioned above.”
What I would really hate for myself is ending up an old man, living in poverty, in poor health, no family or children with the older generations having long since passed away and haunting my dreams as ghosts, friends dead or gone, with a world that has moved on and forgotten me, feeling unfulfilled, not having fulfilled my potential and wondering about what could have been. What a nightmare that would be.
Focusing on each aspect of the pie of life to try to achieve a balanced whole is the way to avoid this fate.
I hope this post is helpful toward reflecting as you try to balance your own life interests.
Thanks for reading.
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1 Interestingly Kevin Spacey played John Paul Getty, but his role was recast and all of his scenes re-shot at great expense after Spacey’s sex scandal allegations broke into the media.
This post looks at the appeal of Islam through French author Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission.” Houellebecq is a master storyteller and operates on multiple levels: even as he lays out a scenario for an Islamic conquest of France – both how it might happen politically as well as the appeal of Islam to higher-status Western men – he intends it as a warning for the West to wake up and reject it before it’s too late.
“[Houellebecq] is not merely a satirist but – more unusually – a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind. He doesn’t “delight in depicting our follies,” as reviewers like to say; he’s made miserable by them.” – Adam Gopnik in his review of Submission
Sometimes when you read someone new you are able to draw an almost instantaneous impression of the writer: you love him or you hate him.
For example, I wanted to read a biography on Andrew Jackson. He was an interesting and complicated man, known as a populist who managed to smash the Second Bank of the United States after a very difficult Bank War, while at the same time he ethnically cleansed the Native Americans from their traditional lands via the Indian Removal Act. There were a number of detailed biographies on Jackson on Amazon, all with the same 4.5 stars and sounding roughly the same. Stumped, I eventually bought Robert Remini’s The Life of Andrew Jacksonbecause his positions seemed moderate and he was a well-reputed scholar. When I started it I couldn’t get through more than five pages, though – the prose was exaggerated, flowery, way too descriptive, and written in a smug literary style. I quickly gave up. I’ll find another Andrew Jackson book down the road to read. Costin Alamariu’s Bronze Age Mindsetwas another book I couldn’t get through; Costin, just tell me what you believe using clear prose and avoid the Straussian esotericism/Nietzschian stylistic framework secretly justifying your desire to rule the world with your Männerbund of aesthetic homosexual bodybuilders, please.
On the flip side, I finally got around to reading Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015). I knew from the first paragraph: this guy gets it. He has a personality and a clear writing style and he knows what he’s doing, and he’s going to be entertaining as hell. And he was. The book was a breeze to read, it had interesting opinions and perspectives and was smart and funny and just cool. I’m going to have to read the rest of his oeuvre.1
The general impression I get from a photo of Houellebecq is one of depressive complexity
Now, I didn’t really want to read Submission. I dragged my feet on buying it and took awhile to read it. I had known Houellebecq was an author with a large following and that this novel had received a lot of controversy, because it detailed the main character’s conversion to Islam in France due to social and financial pressure. The book was meant as a warning about where the country was heading if trends didn’t change. But really, do I really need to hear this message again? I’ve already discussed in depth how Islamic birth and immigration rates in the West are swamping natives, how Africa’s alarmingly high birthdate (still over 6.0) will result in future swarming of Africans even more into Europe, and because demographics is destiny, in only a few generations all of Europe will be Islamic unless something dramatic changes. I saw this up close and personal during my trip to Italy. The topic is depressing because our globohomo overlords ordered the Kalergi plan implemented and there’s nothing anyone is doing about it other than some limp whining online, where even that is increasingly being criminalized in Europe.
So this isn’t a message I need reinforced; I’m already on board. Why did I read it anyway? Inertia, boredom. Show me enchantment, show me what this world has to offer. Show me the literary work of the most famous living French novelist. Show me a novel compared to The Camp of the Saints (1973). Show me the mind of a man who somehow avoids cancellation despite publicly stating that the Great Replacement theory is real, per Politico: “Yet through all the uproar, over his anti-Islam comments or his praise of sex tourism, the author has never faced a major outcry from France’s literary establishment, or anything resembling a ‘cancellation.’” Perhaps depressing realism isn’t a threat to the system the way idealistic active resistance is.
According to Le Monde in 2022 (quoting at length),
Houellebecq is adamant throughout the discussion: France is lost, its decline is inescapable, and the fault lies with a modernity “which generates its own destruction.” The “Great Replacement”, he says, “is not a theory, it is a fact.” There is no conspiracy orchestrated by the elite [NLF: this is wrong], he says, but there is a “transfer” of people from Africa, where the birth rate is high. This supposed overflow spills into Europe because “no one controls anything on immigration”. “What we can already see is that people are arming themselves,” continues the author….According to Houellebecq, there has been no national reaction because France continues to “tow behind the United States” and is content with importing the “woke” movement [NLF: France lost it’s sovereignty after the Second World War if not long before. It does not set it’s own policies]….
“Michel Houellebecq converses throughout the interview without us knowing if he is serious or if he is once again being provocative,” said Jean-Yves Pranchère, a professor of political theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and expert in reactionary philosophy. “He presents himself as a thinker who is aware of the decadence of his time and of his own decadence, but who believes in the purgative power of violence, without actually adopting it. He leaves it to others, like the French who are arming themselves, and the Americans….
“Michel Houellebecq advocates a form of right-wing national-populism: The ‘people’ would only comprise nationals, excluding immigrants and foreigners, who would not benefit from social rights or health care, and would be deported,” said Gisèle Sapiro, a sociologist and author of Peut-On Dissocier l’œuvre de l’Auteur? (“Can we dissociate the work of the author?”, 2020). “There is a culturalist view of the world, close to Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations,’ which locks populations into a fixed religious identity in order to euphemize the racist presupposition. This echoes the ‘defense of civilization’ that united the conservative right and the far right in the interwar period.”
These alarming remarks are mixed in the Front Populaire interview with statements made in a sneering tone. Houellebecq expresses his “reservations” about the abolition of the death penalty. President Charles de Gaulle should have been “shot” for abandoning the harkis, the Muslim Algerians who fought for the French army in the war of independence. He treats Russia with clemency, unlike Europe and the United States: In Ukraine, Vladimir Putin “had eyes bigger than his stomach,” says the writer. If surrogacy is authorized, Houellebecq threatens to “drag those male or female bitches who use it through the mud.”
Finally, he engages in philosophical and literary concerns, filled with nostalgia for the Catholicism from before the Second Vatican Council. He revels in spreading reactionary sentiments. There is no doubt that this interview will satisfy the parts of society most tempted by the far right. It also fuels the eternal debate on whether or not to make a distinction between art and the artist.
And according to a recent interview with the Financial Times,
I meet Michel Houellebecq at Maison Péret, a busy brasserie serving regional French cuisine in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. He’s bang on time for lunch — which is to say he arrives at 6pm. “I can’t have a meal without drinking wine,” he had explained in a brief email exchange before our encounter. “After that, it’s all over, I can’t stop drinking, so I try to delay the fateful hour.” Impressed by his attempt at moderation, I am happy to agree…
I mention a 2019 essay in which he called Donald Trump a good president and wonder if he will be cheering him on in this US election too. “Yes,” he says. “Trump won’t start wars,” he adds, topping up our glasses.
What if he stops supporting Ukraine? “That’s good,” Houellebecq says. But Ukrainians want to liberate their territory, I say. “What do I care? At the start of the war, I was surprised because I thought Ukraine was Russian,” he says. “It’s better for nature to take its course,” he adds in the spirit of might is right. “People who have humanitarian ideas are a catastrophe. It doesn’t work and motivations are doubtful.”…
Ernaux has said she can’t stand his depiction of women. As a woman, I must admit, it’s tricky to meet Houellebecq. He’s famous for describing us as sex objects with a sell-by date of pretty much 25. I tell him that I find this problematic — and depressing. He nearly jumps up from his chair, looking genuinely upset. “I think it’s dishonest,” he says. “All women, and really all, try to be as desirable as possible. And then when they start losing at the game, they contest the system that they were the first to uphold.”
“Look, I didn’t create the world,” says the 68-year-old, now married to Qianyum Lysis Li, whom he met when she was writing a thesis about his work at the Sorbonne. His wife cooks, he says, an admired female characteristic in his novels, but only dishes that he doesn’t eat. “Some vegetarian things,” he sighs. He sticks to ready-made microwave meals, like many of his characters.
This is great stuff. It’s a little strange that all it took was reading one paragraph of Houellebecq’s book to know he’s a personality with a well considered view of how this world works. And the paragraph was not political; it was rather the simplicity and clarity of the ideas expressed that was the giveaway; shitlibs obfuscate, they revel in needless complexity and unnecessary verbiage. Here’s the first paragraph of the novel:
Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him, never once was I tempted to drop him or take up anther subject; then, one afternoon in June 2007, after waiting and putting it off as long as I could, even slightly longer than was allowed, I defended my dissertation, “Joris-Karl Huysmans: Out of the Tunnel,” before the jury of the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. The next morning (or maybe that evening, I don’t remember: I spent the night of my defense alone and very drunk) I realized that part of my life, probably the best part, was behind me.
First I’ll discuss a little of Houellebecq’s background, then go over some of the parts of the novel that stood out to me, segueing into a brief discussion of Islam. As a warning, spoilers will be discussed.
Houellebecq’s background
Houellebecq was born in either 1956 or 1958. He’s not sure exactly which because his birth mother gave him up to his communist grandmother to be raised, but she may have adjusted his birth year earlier so he could attend school first. He grew up in an irreligious household, yet henow attends Mass on a weekly basis. The rituals, the incense, the chants, the music, the atmosphere and the crowd make Houellebecq feel religious as long as he’s in service, but once he walks out of the Church he feels like an atheist again.
He was a good student (although he did not attend university), not bullied despite being an outsider, and focused on women and rock and roll as he grew up. He read poetry in cafes which attracted significant female attention. One of the songs he recommended in an interview was the rock-and-roll song Child in Time by Deep Purple, which I listened to and thought was excellent (it picks up around 4 minutes in):
He read widely and intently starting young, believing the world of literature was more interesting than the world of real life (Ernst Junger felt the same way). He worked as a computer repairman until his novels became successful enough that he could live off their income. His first novel was Whatever (1995) and his follow-up The Elementary Particles (1998) sold hundreds of thousands of copies and propelled him to fame. His novels contain references to real figures (especially literary figures; he loves Baudelaire who I thought was mediocre) and fake ones, blending realistic and less realistic events – when reading Submission I had to look up numerous times whether a person or publication cited was real or not. I enjoyed this sense of imbalance; it kept me on my toes. In a surprise and delight I saw he was interested in Schopenhauer and wrote a book about the effect the man had on him (who I have covered elsewhere). Houellebecq’s books have been quite controversial, dealing with religion, pornography, prostitution, and other aspects of the modern world, even though he retains his high position in literary society. His novel Annihilation, which was just released in English this month, will be his last novel.
Critics claim that his protagonist is the same character in every novel, a man focused on the pleasures of the flesh and who is atomized and socially alienated regardless of the level of success he achieves. Houellebecq denies that primary characters in his novels are autobiographical. Like his protagonists, though, Houellebecq chased after women and was married three times, having one child, and his current Asian wife happened to be a fan of his work and she is 34 years younger than he is. This reflects a trend for many white men on the right choosing Asian wives.
What a photo.
Politically Houellebecq’s is against the European project as a whole. He believes democracy is impossible when a political entity covers too many disparate groups of people. He’s made statements about these publicly, even though he also admits to self-censoring (rarely) in his novels. As he told the New York Times:
I hope [the European Union] will fail. It’s a nightmare. It’s the disappearance of any possibility of democracy. It’s something that I don’t want, that many French people never wanted. It’s bringing together countries that don’t have common interests. European culture existed until the 18th century and the 19th. Now it doesn’t exist anymore. European countries have a national culture and there’s Anglo-Saxon culture. National culture is holding up well, more or less, in France, not at all in Italy and in Spain. [NLF: How is it holding up when the French Muslim birth-rates are so much higher than the natives? Strange comment.]…I’m against representative democracy. It’s a bad system…Europe is worse than anything because there isn’t even the parody of representative democracy. It’s a pure oligarchy…I don’t think that [the European Union is] a nice idea. From the start, I was against it. It’s very important for me. It’s my only political engagement. We didn’t realize it. It was slow, progressive. The French weren’t at all interested in it.
Strangely, Submission was published on January 7, 2015, the date of the Charlie Hebdo magazine shooting. A cartoon of Houellebecq appeared on the cover page of the magazine with the caption “The Predictions of Wizard Houellebecq.” A close friend of his was killed in the attack.
His subsequent novel Sérotonine (2019) was sympathetic both to the Yellow Vest movement as well as to French farmers, who have and continue to be destroyed by globohomo; they barely make ends meet, if that. Having grown up low class, Houellebecq empathizes with the French masses, even though he acknowledges that, as a member of the wealthy class, his interests are to an extent different than theirs.
If we take his birthdate as the 1956 date as the astrology website Astrotheme does, his chart is here. His Sun sign and degree (which forms a person’s core personality), Pisces 6 degree, is as follows (Janduz version). It seems accurate:
Hedonistic, pleasant, and hospitable character. One is a bon viveur endowed with an insatiable appetite for spiritual and intellectual food, as well as for the pleasures of the table. Success and fame can be achieved in all occupations related to seafood catering or cannery, or fishing. Painting and literature, especially when related to the water element, are also favoured, as for instance a painting featuring sea or lake landscapes, the publishing of a cook book or a culinary column, etc. Indeed, this degree is under the influence of two constellations, Eridan and Horlogium. The former underlines the importance of the sea, and the latter indicates great intellectual abilities.
Below are two interviews in French with English subtitles if you want to get a sense of the man. These were the only two available on Youtube; the rest were all in French with no subtitles.
I was impressed, even though he uses a lot of “ums” and delays as he thinks through his answers. You can see the gears in his brain turn as he considers each question. Furthermore, he appears to be a highly individuated person, unlike the masses of standardized people in the West. There used to be more creative types like him even in America in prior decades, but they have all disappeared in an era of capeshit, autotune, and self-brand maximization. Watching such a person is a breath of fresh air.
I was having a bit of a hard time figuring out Houellebecq’s clique.2 I would describe him as a high or ascended nerd/loser hybrid. Listening to him speak and watching him move, he holds your attention, and his gaze is inward; his focus is on his internal process, which is a requirement – especially for losers – to ascend within one’s clique.
Submission
The brief overview of the story is as follows: Francois is a middle-aged lecturer at the Sorbonne and an expert on the decadent author J.K. Huysmans. He has sex with his students, trading them in every year (which reads strangely now after the 2017 Me Too hysteria, although France has always been more open sexually than the hypocritically prudish Americans). He has feelings for a Jewish woman named Myriam who he’s had an on-off relationship with for a long time. But mostly, he is bored and depressed, listless. He tries to reconnect with his religious roots but fails. He also tries to reconnect with ex-girlfriends, but they’re even more blown out than he is:
As for the present, it was clear that Aurelie had never managed to form a long-term relationship, that casual sex filled her with growing disgust, that her personal life was headed for complete and utter disaster. There were various signs that she’d tried to settle down, at least once, and had never recovered from her failure. The sourness and bitterness with which she talked about her male colleagues (in the end we’d been reduced to discussing her professional life…made it painfully clear that she had been through the wringer. Even so, I was surprised when, just as she was about to get out of the taxi, she invited me up “for a nightcap.” She’s really hit rock bottom, I thought. From the moment the elevator doors shut, I knew nothing was going to happen….she could no longer – she could never again – be considered an object of desire….
My meal with Sandra followed a similar pattern….She was sad, very sad, and I knew her sorrow would overwhelm her in the end; like Aurelie, she was nothing but a bird in an oil slick….In one or two years she would give up any last matrimonial ambitions, her imperfectly extinguished sensuality would lead her to seek out the company of young men, she would become what we used to call a cougar, and no doubt she’d go on this way for several years, ten at the most, before the sagging of her flesh became prohibitive and condemned her to a lasting solitude.
Even though he is describing single, childless Western women as blown out mentally and spiritually, the married women are barely any better:
I thought about Annelise’s [the wife of his friend] life – and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether “stylish” or “sexy,” most likely “stylish” in her face. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her awhile to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted ([her husband] was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner – he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and yoga pants, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known – had to have known – that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.
Compare this to the novel’s Muslims, where women go outside in burqa or niqab, not showing open flesh to strangers, not wearing makeup to look pretty for them or flirting with strange men, and therefore they express their sexuality at home where it is otherwise bottled up. They don’t work, they get married young – a rich man could have up to four wives – and they were devoted and submissive, aiming to please.
A night and day difference.
Anyway, Francois has sex with some whores and still feels nothing. He wonders if he should kill himself, drowning in the nihilistic, empty West. Meanwhile, there are national elections ongoing and the leftists, the right-wing Nationalist Front, and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood split the vote. The Muslim Brotherhood (correctly) does not care about the normal issues that the other political parties cared about:
“The Muslim Brotherhood is an unusual party, you know. Many of the usual political issues simply don’t matter to them. To start with, the economy is not their main concern. What they care about is birthrate and education.To them it’s simple – whichever segment of the population has the highest birthrate, and does the best job of transmitting it’s values, wins. If you control the children, you control the future. So the one area in which they absolutely insist on having their way is the education of children.”
In the ensuing run-off, the leftists decide to ally with the Muslims – with the Muslims in the lead role – in order to defeat the right. This feels exactly how it would happen, and in subsequent years the National Front has indeed lost in run-off elections to leftist/Islamist alliances (but not to the point the Islamists come to power). The ascendant Islamists then fire the university professors unless they convert to Islam; Saudi Arabia pours huge amounts of money to incentivize professors to convert in return for tripled or better salaries. Francois is fired, but the administration (now Islamic) tries to convince him to convert and come back:
In an article for Oumma, Rediger [the head administrator] raised the question whether Islam had been chosen for world domination. In the end he answered yes. He hardly bothered with Western societies, since to him they seemed so obviously doomed (liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structure such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion [NLF: Yet Islamic birthrates are falling, too, and Muslims are becoming more secular overall; just not nearly at the rate of collapse of Christians]….
In another article, Rediger made a case for highly unequal wealth distribution. Although an authentic Muslim society would have to abolish actual destitution (alms-giving was one of the Five Pillars of Wisdom), it should also maintain a wide gap between the masses, who would live in self-respecting poverty, and a tiny minority of individuals so fantastically rich that they could throw away vast, insane sums, thus assuring the survival of luxury and the arts. This aristocratic position came directly from Nietzsche; deep down, Rediger had remained remarkably faithful to the thinkers of his youth….
[Rediger] called it tragic that [the traditional right-wing nativists]’s irrational hostility to Islam should blind them to the obvious: on every question that really mattered, the nativists and the Muslims were in perfect agreement. When it came to rejecting atheism and humanism, or the necessary submission of women, or the return of patriarchy, they were fighting exactly the same fight. And today this fight, to establish a new organic phase of civilization, could no longer be waged in the name of Christianity….Thanks to the simpering seductions and the lewd enticements of the progressives, the Church had lost its ability to oppose moral decadence, to renounce homosexual marriage, abortion rights, and women in the workplace. The facts were plain: Europe had reached a point of such putrid decomposition that it could no longer save itself, any more than fifth-century Rome could have done….
He, Rediger, was the first to admit the greatness of medieval Christendom, whose artistic achievements would live forever in human memory; but little by little it had given way, it had been forced to compromise with rationalism, it had renounced its temporal powers, and so had sealed its own doom – and why? In the end it was a mystery; God had ordained it so.
Despondent and depressed, barely alive in the secular, materialist, blown-out West, after Myriam flees to Israel Francois ultimately converts to Islam and looks forward to wealth, prestige, and possibly multiple Muslim wives. The end.
Conclusions
Those who achieve higher level of spiritual growth blend opposing ideas in what is called the coincidentia oppositorum. God, being infinite, is the infinite synthesis of opposing ideas; by understanding and combining them, one becomes able to see from a higher plane. This is a lifelong process with no end goal. The nice thing about Houllebecq is that he understands this, either implicitly or explicitly; in Submission he lays out a pretty decent case for Islam, even though in actuality he opposes it’s takeover and wants the novel to be seen as a warning for the French to wake up before it’s too late. He wants to believe in a Catholic God and he attends Church, even though he doesn’t believe. Recognizing and comprising these opposite energies and working to synthesize them is what gives a person depth.
Basically, Islam solves a lot of the problems of the West: it offers patriarchy, it offers a larger family life, it offers stability with women staying at home and tending to children and cooking (as long as one is rich), it is somewhat resistant to shitliberalism. I think of Cat Stevens who converted to Islam from his prior liberal background and ended up with a larger family, shrugging off the decadence of the West after a near-death experience. Here he is with his family, what a respectable result:
However, Islam is not a panacea; everything in this world is a series of trade-offs. The problems with Islam include the following:
It eviscerates the traditional Western middle class, leaving the society with the ultra rich and masses of poor; another form of neo-feudalism. Perhaps this part of the reason why globohomo seems to like it a lot more than Christianity – given they control Islam’s rulers, perhaps they think can use Islam to formally justify their own rule down the road. An Islamic society is a society with very little social mobility.
Lower status men are totally screwed, even worse than in modern Western society. It’s a simple math problem: if a man can have up to four wives in Islam and males and females are each roughly 50% of the population, that means that under this system there are a lot of men who simply cannot get married or have children, period. (Yes, we already experience this with hypergamy in the West causing the incel phenomenon as previously discussed via ’s debut novel here, but at least the relatively greater social mobility gives incels a chance to ascend from their situation.)
Women who like to work in business or corporate jobs are screwed. While I think most women would likely find traditional gender roles refreshing, there are some women who would feel frustrated and unfulfilled being at home running the household and raising children.
Due to it’s nature Islam also strangles technological advancements over time, which is both a bad thing (no more exploration of the stars) and a good thing (technological advancements are inherently destabilizing to society).
Furthermore, and this is both a good and a bad thing, Islam is fundamentally much more pessimistic about human nature than Christianity is: Jesus gave men a choice to choose him or not to, optimistic that at least some would; on the contrary, a religion of submission requires one to abide by it’s dictates or else be stoned, imprisoned or murdered – humanity as sheep, behave or be slaughtered. Even though Islam is correct about most of humanity – they need an exoteric Daddy God telling them what to do so they don’t have the weight of responsibility on their shoulders, a topic covered so well in Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor– the small minority of those who choose a higher calling may be worth the rest – who knows? Well, as least they would still have Sufism ala Rene Guenon.
Due to Islam’s ambitions as a world-spanning religion which de-emphasizes non-religious differences, much like Catholicism, those who hope to emphasize enclaves based on ethnicity, race, intelligence, similar cultures etc. will be disappointed.
Regarding this last point, as the arrogant pro-Chinese Spandrell argues, Islam is a imperfect solution to the problems plaguing the West but it is still a potential solution (well, maybe, given our central bank overlords control it as well). Spandrell writes:
You have probably guessed where I’m going. I won’t repeat myself. Europe now is in decline and all Europeans of good faith are trying to find a solution. We are being invaded by Islam, and nobody likes it. But the problem we have is not Islam. Is not Islamism. As bad as it is; which is horrible indeed. But ideas come and go. What doesn’t come and go is the people. The gene pool. The problem we have is not Islam, it’s foreigners. Arabs, South Asians, Africans, etc.. Most happen to be Muslim, many are not. The problem is not their ideas, as bad as they are. The problem is HBD. They’re dumb. They’re impulsive. They have different genes, going back tens of thousands of years.
Even if we could fix their culture, their family structure, the clannishness; which we can’t. It still wouldn’t matter. You could convert them all to Lefebvrism tomorrow and they would still destroy European civilization, and physically replace European people, who are busy watching football, binge drinking and wasting their youth studying socialist history.
But you can’t say that. One can’t object to the immigration of foreigners into Europe and North America on genetic grounds. I can’t object to Arabs being dumb; because there’s plenty of Europeans who are just as dumb, and they don’t appreciate that we discuss population policy in terms of intelligence or other personality traits. Any rational, utilitarian discussion of population policy is a complete dead end because there is no workable Schelling point for proposing eugenics in a democratic society. It benefits no one. For one, we don’t know that much about the genetics of behavior. Second, meritocracy is an excellent Schelling point. It’s completely fallacious, but it works. The elite can justify their privilege because they have earned it, they have “merit”, not just genetic luck. And the dumb can consolate themselves that there’s nothing physically wrong with them; it’s just tough luck, which could change any day. All human societies, every single one, believe that human behavior and performance depends on proper education. Of course they do.
And so we are left without sellable arguments against the invasion of Europe by fertile foreigners with a set of innate traits which make modern civilization impossible. We are left without arguments against Europe developing the demographic profile of Sudan, which implies the living standards of Sudan. So if we can’t use this argument, what can we do? We can adopt a new religion. It doesn’t matter which. As long as it ensures the physical reproduction of European peoples. As of now, Islam is a fix, if a bad fix. I hope we find a different one.
I have a reputation as a gloomy pessimist, but there’s a different way of looking at this. Think of this post as a way of prodding you into action. We better come up with something damn fast, because there are only two alternatives. White Islam, or the physical disappearance of the European peoples.
So to sum up, Islam is good at solving certain extremely nasty issue plaguing the West (nihilism, attacks on family formation) but if victorious it would still result in neo-feudalism, low status men would be screwed, say goodbye to technological progress and you’ll still be surrounded by low IQ foreigners with extremely different thoughts and attitudes.
Regardless, due to demographic and immigration trends, unless the West wakes up with something new within the next generation or two, Europe will likely belong to Islam even if we don’t like it – even though, ultimately, Islam itself may be undergoing the same secularization and decreased fertility processes plaguing the West.3
Thanks for reading.
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1 After reading Submission I read Whatever (1994), Houellebecq’s debut novel, discussed here and The Elementary Particles (2000), discussed here.
2 As I’ve discussed previously in the second half of this post (under the section “Clique Theory”), modern America has a rigid but unstated and informal caste system, as rigid as the Indian caste system if not more so, based on one’s phenotype. The idea is juvenile – it was created by a group of law students at the height of the 2008 financial crash where they could not secure jobs through OCI (“On Campus Interviews”) and they came up with system to explain why they were unable to secure jobs even though others were able to do so. The actual theory, which is quite long but entertaining, can be found here. The cliques are: Jock, Prep, Nerd, Scumbag, and Loser (Loser is a catch-all term for everyone who is not clearly in one of the other cliques). Women are their own clique as are Jews, Indians, and perhaps other ethnic groups; the clique system is meant to apply to whites, although other groups have sub-cliques within their ethnic cliques. Clique is immutable except one may ascend or descend within one’s own clique between a low, average, high and ascended form. Trying to change one’s lane (i.e. a jock trying to learn to code or a nerd who does sports) will bring ruination. Some people are comprised of two cliques (i.e. a Scumbag/Nerd hybrid) but no one has more than two. Anyone who spends a lot of time internet posting is at minimum half loser clique.
Because this is an American system, clique is less salient in other countries and is less salient the further back in history one goes; this is because clique really solidified and stratified in the post-World War 2 era. Because the U.S. exports its culture, the clique system has to a much lesser extent impacted the countries over which it rules (including Europe).
3 If the below data is correct (and it may not be, given the source is a compilation of establishment outlets) the trends indicate the Sunni Middle East is undergoing rapid secularization:
I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with author and professor Guido Preparata in a series of back-and-forth correspondences on the structure of the modern world, how information can be ascertained in this age, 9/11, Malthus, Ernst Jünger, transgenderism, and many other topics. I previously covered his worldview-changing Conjuring Hitlerhere (Amazon link to the book is here, or here for the newest edition) and his excellent Empire and Churchhere (Amazon link here). When it comes to geopolitical realities Preparata is top level. The following is an edited version of parts of our correspondences for clarity and (relative) brevity.
Guido Preparata
The power of the cabal
NLF: Another Substack author, L.P. Koch, covered Conjuring Hitler, which you might enjoy here.
GP: Interesting commentary.
The power of the so-called cabals, this writer says, is limited so these grand conspiracies cannot take place; rather, he seeks deeper explanation in (Satanic) “possession” and the forces seething in the “Urgrund”: truly, it is all one and the same. The (techno-fascist) power of the incumbent cabals is in fact total, and in their game of (praternatural) conjuration, they do indeed evoke forces “against time” (to use Savitri Devi’s expression), which they see fit to crush, still with the ease that befits exclusive circles with virtually unlimited power.
NLF: I can see it all being “all one and the same” with respect to actions within the material realm, but it seems like it would have spiritual and religious relevance if there are over-arching entities such as a malevolent Demiurge in charge of material reality. Because every energy has an opposite, that would suggest that a Godly influence — perhaps just in the spiritual realm — does indeed exist. What are your thoughts on this? And given that everyone needs to find hope somewhere — being perpetually blackpilled is a route to madness — where do you find hope?
GP: As for the existence of God, vis-a`-vis the incumbency of a bad Demiurge, it seems that God is on holiday and that Mephisto is indeed in charge (and why that is is, clearly, a mystery: it’s also the gist of my short gloss and latest reflection Self-righteous Actors on Satan’s Stage). Where that leaves us, I am not sure… But it is certainly disquieting and demands of us an effort of imagination as to the eventual organization of dissidence, if we’ve ever had a chance at all.
You say “hope”; yes, I know, it’s easy to fall prey to the most profound state of despair and sensation of total powerlessness. That is when you have realized that you are living in a cage, in an ant-heap and that the grip (psychological and economic) of the parasitical caste is so complete that you do not see any way out. A great deal of us have reached that state (of reasoned despair); and we are seeking a way out. The ways of evading (or attempting to) require a separate discussion.
NLF: Deeper than the level of the total control of the parasitical class, the very nature of life within material reality requires predation on other consciousness/life in order to survive. Even a plant seeks to grow/utilize its will to live/power, not to mention animals (and the human body is well attuned to meat, easily surviving on an all meat diet…). This concept is nightmarish for those with internalized values of the Golden Rule and it is hard to see how a God of light and justice would have put it into place. Schopenhauer wrote,
“As a reliable compass for orienting yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments, and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his own particular way.”
You mentioned that you expected Conjuring Hitler to have a much bigger effect than it had when it came out, and that the number of actual dissidents is tiny. Why do you think this is? I notice the same thing, tiny numbers of dissidents.
GP: When I was young(er) I held this infantile imbecile view that the world is divided, 50/50 into good and bad folk, and that good folk vote on the Left.
Then you age and you realize that it’s more like a bell curve: a tail of faceless & powerless good souls that count for and can do nothing at one end, a tail of demoniacal and established controllers that nobody can see at the other, and the middle class of the bienpensants, a mass of cowering, craven sheep in the middling bulge. With such a set-up, what you could you possibly expect?
I did not know this when I wrote the book.
NLF: I like your analogy of humanity to a slave-making ant colony (and made a post about it here), but humanity only became this way 10,000 years ago during the neolithic agricultural revolution when it started having excess production, right? So there was some interaction between humanity as subsistence-level egalitarian hunter-gatherers that combined with technology to produce this result.
GP: I don’t know; possibly by uniting the slave-making hypothesis with the hunter’s archetype one could get a good model of the human type we’re dealing with. What is certain is that “science” [esp. “social science”] and so-called “literature” is doing its very best to confuse, muddle, and blur the issue, the social issue for obvious reasons: you must be made to think along tracks that lead away from the truth of parasitism as fast and effectively as possible. Which makes one realize that 90% of what he’s read and “learned” is false and worse than useless trash. A dismaying yet exciting realization at the same time. It is a sign we have license to torch everything, so as to rebuild, hopefully, one day; but what will happen in between? Will we just sit and die out like worms, or react somehow? And if we do, what form will it take? And how far are we willing to go? By now, you easily see why those numbers are so tiny…The rebellious prospect becomes scary. The middle class bienpensant, we know it, has too much to lose. And yet the best of that stratum also recalcitrate, and that is why not few of them end up insane.
NLF: It seems to win in the material world one needs to put the pursuit of power above all else, but the pursuit of power comes with it the corruption of the soul via lies, evil, and destruction. But if you don’t try to win in the material world you get trampled on, a victim or pawn to these forces. As Julian Assange said, “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…” This is a good sentiment, yet Assange rotted in prison, tortured and forgotten, for a very long time. Hence, the Demiurge as the creator of this imperfect reality…
GP: I don’t know; I think 99.99% of us are already removed from history, or rather, debarred from it since birth; that’s the whole idea; we leave no trace anyway; only the parasites and their vulgar chronicles do, with some exceptions that shine through (Bach’s music?). And Assange remains a mystery to me.
NLF: History is written by the “winners” and the winners seem to be those with poor morals and high aggression levels. I investigated the Assange question previously…
Another question I had was: you mentioned elsewhere that the globalist founding fathers of the Trilateral Commission possibly forced out Nixon, but also focus on America’s desire for hegemony – to what extent do you see America’s actions as being directed by higher powers? I saw a great org chart for our current system as follows:
GP: Cool chart. Some argue these supranational cabals that call the shots; I do not believe that in the least. All the more so as the system itself does everything possible to encourage such conspiratorial views. It’s along the same lines of “the Banks control the world,” which claim I think is utter nonsense. They are merely auxiliaries; and the various Bill Gateses, Soroses, etc are just Bond villains, cutouts, happy to lend their face to the role.
NLF: I agree with you that the level of Think Tanks and Global Representative Groups, as well as the Policy Distributors (as referenced on the above graph), as well as the major banks, have been made into cartoon villains for the public. Soros, Gates, the WEF, etc. are not the source of the problem. I do see the world’s central banks though as being owned, shielded and hidden, by a very small number of families (Rothschilds, Warburgs, Milners, Rockefellers etc) that coordinate with each other, and they basically act as a mafia to crush any and all dissent. Do you see it differently?
GP: Yes a little differently to the extent that this cabal, which is real, in my view and despite its wealth, tenacity, and phenomenal resourcefulness, does not have the vision and the functional capability to govern the hive as a whole (and today that means the world): that is the role of rulers, governors and dynasts, who indeed recognize the importance of these auxiliaries and thereby delegate, subcontract to the bankers a crucial department (the economic/financial one) of the overall management program. Highly complex operation and highly complex organization but the seat of command remains where it always has been with the scepter of legitimacy held by the King, however the latter may appear on the stage.
On Trump
NLF: Do you view globohomo’s machinations against Trump such as the recent assassination attempts as one of our elites attempting to conjure a so-called “redneck rebellion” “against time” in order to then crush it and bring forth the next phase of their agenda? I don’t see Trump as posing a threat to the system, but he represents as a symbol the very people our elites want to destroy.
GP: As for Trump, you know, everybody knows that he is just a pawn placed where he is to gauge how deep, wide, and problematic could potentially be the (rage and disillusion of the) domestic cohort of “lesser whites” sacrificed (over the last 30 years) by the hiring and propagandistic exigencies of the new, burgeoning world State, which is presently assuming the traits of Orwell’s “Oceania” in 1984. That is evident. The Trump operation has flushed out this potential “opposition” (as a factor of eventual disturbance on the home front) and shown that this cohort is, yes, fairly diffuse but not dangerous in the least; and this condition has been evident since the aftermath of 9/11: it was a shocker to me to witness at the time, in the face of this manifest, brazen coup d’état not so much that so-called “all-American heroes” (the ocean of right-wing, gun-toting machos) turned out to be a miserable pack of wusses, but that there never were “all-American heroes” to begin with. The true American resistance has to begin now: the human material, the lucidity, the courage, and the minds for that are certainly there, but (lurking) in very different places form those one would conventionally imagine.
The Clinton’s at Trump’s wedding to Melania
On Peter Thiel
NLF: [I sent GP my post about humanity as a slave making ant colony and asked for his comment.]
GP: Regarding your post, among other things, I did not know about the Thiel “mansion.”
Weird thing this Thiel phenomenon: I’ve read one of his books. Everything about him is profoundly inane, downright irrelevant; like his remarks on Diversity (Only heard part of the podcast); I cannot find a single spark in him about anything. He and Musk, I mean, they’re Paypal: certainly a business achievement –but one that from the point of view of architecture & design, or even organization is bland at best (Ebay is far more genial, in comparison). And he is huge, some kind of prophet.
NLF: I read Thiel’s From Zero to One and his 2007 article on Leo Strauss. If you read his leaked emails to Mark Zuckerberg they’re ridiculously sycophantic – but I actually had an important takeaway from From Zero to One. In it Thiel argues that companies always seek to achieve monopoly status because then they can maximize their profits; in a system of pure competition with undifferentiated products profits decline to zero. So the goal of any company is to achieve monopoly. If one takes this as true (and I think it is), then only a strong ruler can serve as a check on corporate domination, like we currently see in China to an extent with their crushing of Alibaba’s CEO Jack Ma when he got uppity…(This is part of why I think anarchism just doesn’t work as a system).
GP: He writes there that Zuckerberg is “the single person who gives voice to the hopes and fears and the unique experiences of this generation, at least in the USA.”
“Hopes & Fears”…And what would those be? I wonder, who are the millennials anyway and why do they matter? They seem wholly unsubstantial and insignificant shitheads, little encrustations in the bigger layers formed by their Elders, who remain solidly in command, I think. I don’t know, one goes through all this stuff, this verbiage, and there is absolutely nothing there. I mean, Facebook is in itself a completely nothing thing. It acquired relevance because it happened to afford the System a new marketing platform for targeting customers with more precision, right?
And also as a way of spying on them and corral them somehow — right? Not sure. But I never got this security/privacy thing (which is re-emerging with this Telegram scandal): I am with those who say “no, problem, spy away: I have nothing to hide: you want to see what I watch and what I buy, go ahead, I don’t care–Who would want to spend time prying at the little insignificant crap I do” –right?
As for spying on politicians, I don’t buy it either. As if they needed Facebook or email for that…Right?
The goal to monopolize one’s market is pretty straightforward: that is the essence of business; we didn’t need this airhead of Thiel to tell us that.
NLF: My understanding is that Facebook came online the very day that DARPA shut down their LifeLog program, which was basically the same program and which suggests the commonly understood story of how Facebook came about isn’t accurate. This post goes into some of the details. The purpose was to map everyone’s social networks and yes, to spy on people. The concern I have with the spying (which is quite intrusive as proven by Snowden’s Total Information Awareness leaks) is that I think our elites plan to use a woke AI to scan everyone’s electronic activity (including phones, internet, email etc) and assign social credit scores. The WEF admits this is their plan by 2030. People with bad social credit scores will be locked out of life including access to bank accounts etc. In this sophisticated, high tech manner, people will be increasingly programmed in certain negative ways which they must accept if they want to continue to participate in society. I see our overlords having multi-decade or much longer plans, and Facebook was just one of the earlier steps in this direction (crypto and AI were/are the other necessary components).
On Malthus
NLF: You expressed contempt for Malthus’s overpopulation arguments in one of the Youtube videos. Do you delve into why you don’t like those arguments anywhere? (I previously took the pro-neomalthusian position).
GP: It is the standard oligarchic intimation whereby poverty and exploitation are blamed on “Nature.” In our human version of the slave-making queens’ “chemical communication” (the gasses they emit when attacking a nest to sow chaos among the defensive lines), the suggestions are indeed very few: they’re all about labor and procreation. And Malthus, who plagiarized the main idea from a Venetian economist, Ortes, focused precisely on these variables. Not by chance that he was also a paid consultant of the East India company, the great corporate techno-structural mother.
NLF: It does make sense that Malthusian arguments are used by the elites in order to affect consumption by the masses for their own ends. My question though is more basic: do you think there are limits to worldwide consumption based on the availability of natural resources? When I look at the rates (or rather, the reported rates) of natural resource consumption, rates of species die-offs and loss of biodiversity, etc, it doesn’t look very long-term sustainable. It makes intuitive sense to me that on a planet of limited natural resources and parabolically expanding human population based essentially on oil that there are some inbuilt natural limits and we will hit them sooner or later, unless one believes in the infinite adaptability of human ingenuity. For example, it is estimated that no more than 3.7 billion people could be fed without just one synthetic nitrogen fertilizer input (derived from natural gas) boosting agricultural output. I particularly enjoyed this post.
GP: Yes, I understand those concerns and yes, I agree that in the name of green conservation, the fascists will want to turn the screws entirely on us.
In that sense, these guys at the top and their screenwriters are extremely uninhibited with changing narratives and “ism” when it suits them, machos one day anti-macho the next, Malthusians at heart and fair weather anti-Malthusians rolled into into one: I suppose the message the Earth is sending us is that she is indeed bountiful but there is an ideal stable limit we should strive for planet-wise in terms of family units and standard of consumption. Now it is all helter-skelter, and the parasites, who are fully responsible for the immense waste, pollution, and screaming disparities juggle the argument form both ends as they see fit.
NLF: This is a good point, it seems like the parasites can push against rational boundaries at any angle and twist them entirely out of proportion, much like we are seeing with egalitarianism within the West today, pushed far past sane and rational limits, twisted into a pretzel…It reminds me what Eustace Mullins wrote where he argued our financial overlords
adopted the Hegelian dialectic, the dialectic of materialism, which regards the World as Power, and the World as Reality. It denies all other powers and all other realities. It functions on the principle of thesis, antithesis and a synthesis…Thus the World Order organizes and finances Jewish groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Jewish groups; it organizes Communist groups; it then organizes and finances anti-Communist groups. It is not necessary for the Order to throw these groups against each other; they seek each other out like heat-seeking missiles and try to destroy each other. By controlling the size and resources of each group, the World Order can always predetermine the outcome. In this technique, members of the World Order are often identified with one side or the other. John Foster Dulles arranged financing for Hitler, but he was never a Nazi. David Rockefeller may be cheered in Moscow, but he is not a Communist…a distinguishing trait of a member of the World Order, although it may not be admitted, is that he does not believe in anything but the World Order. Another distinguishing trait is his absolute contempt for anyone who actually believes in the tenets of Communism, Zionism, Christianity, or any national, religious or fraternal group…If you are a sincere Christian, Zionist or Moslem, the World Order regards you as a moron unworthy of respect. You can and will be used, but you will never be respected.
On Ernst Jünger
GP: Juenger wrote something very obscure and intriguing on capital punishment in Maxima Minima, his 1964 commentary on Der Arbeiter (the Worker).
See if you can crack this one. Here’s the English translation [from the original German]:
“Being able to see blood” characterizes the butchers. That is their magical advantage, which, when they get their chance, paralyses even a thousandfold majority as if they were presenting the head of the Gorgon.
Here lies one of the secrets of capital punishment: the righteous man shows that he will not flinch. This is a message that penetrates into the darkest recesses of penetrates. It is not a question of “measure for measure”, but of homeopathic laws apply: the blood of one murderer can prophylactically outweigh the blood of a hundred thousand innocent people prophylactically. When the ancients said: “The blood must not stain the soil” – it was out of fear that murder could spread like an epidemic.
The relationship is also evident in the fact that pronounced Cainite regimes abolish the death penalty. It is opposed to murder less in terms of cause and effect effect than in its innermost principle. The murderer, where he comes to power, wants to kill at will; the law should not cut him off. The distinction of guilt and innocence is unimportant to him.
The attentat (attempt on s.o.’s life], on the other hand, remains unlawful; it has the opposite effect. It intensifies the suffering like a vaccine applied during the crisis.
NLF: The passage seems to contain two arguments if I am reading it correctly (please correct me if I am not): (1) if you let a (mass) murderer into power he will ignore the law to fulfill his murderous impulses (“The law should not cut him off. The distinction of guilt and innocence is unimportant to him.”), and (2) the government is the teacher of values and if the government commits murder, then the population will as well. For point #2 it reminds me of Brandeis’s dissent in Olmstead v. United States where he wrote, “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example….If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.” Perhaps there is an argument here to counteract the argument the deterrence argument for capital punishment (I am inclined toward the deterrence argument myself).
For #1, though, does that mean that all capital punishment is wrong if a would-be mass murderer would want to abuse it? That doesn’t seem a very strong argument; that argument seems to be more for keeping mass murderers out of positions of power. Can one be for capital punishment if one does care about guilt and innocence, i.e. applied in a measured capacity?
What comes to mind is the character of Pyotr Stolypin, who I covered here. Stolypin is known for his “Stolypin farms” which Lenin later wrote was the only true threat to communism in Russia because it offered the chance of material prosperity for the middle class. Stolypin was later assassinated just as it was becoming successful. However, before that happened he was also tasked with hunting down and killing anarchists who were planting bombs, undermining the Tsarist regime and murdering lots of innocent people in the process. As Solzhenitsyn explained:
That was the beginning of the notorious Stolypin terror – a phrase so persistently foisted on the Russian language and the Russian mind (abroad it was worse still!) that even now the image of a black era of cruel excesses is seared onto our eyeballs. Yet all the terror amounted to was the introduction of field courts-martial (which operated for eight months) to deal with especially serious (not all) cases of looting, murder, and attacks on the police, on the civil authorities, and on peaceful citizens, so as to bring trial and sentence closer to the time and place of the time. (Urged to hold terrorists already under arrest hostage for the actions of others not yet captured, Stolypin of course rejected the idea.) Dissemination of subversive ideas in the army (previously practically unimpeded) was made a criminal offense. So was praise of terrorism (in which Duma deputies, the press, and indeed the general public had hitherto indulged unhindered). Bomb throwers were now subject to the death penalty, but those caught making bombs were not treated as actual murderers. Meetings organized by political parties and societies, provided they were not in public places and there were no outsiders present, or only outsiders belonging to the educated classes, did not require administrative supervision. These draconian measures aroused the unanimous wrath of educated Russian society. There was a spate of newspaper articles, speeches, and letters (one from Lev Tolstoy) arguing that no one should ever dare to execute anyone, not even the most brutal of murderers, that field courts-martial could do nothing toward the moral rejuvenation of society (as though that was what terror was doing) but could only further brutalize it (something which terror did still more effectively)….Anyone who did not loudly approve of revolutionary terror was regarded by Russian society as a hangman himself. Yet, whether Stolypin was brutalizing Russia or not, terrorism decline from the moment the field courts-martial was introduced.”
In other words, Stolypin applied capital punishment but he refused to do it on a collective basis, even though there were calls for him to do so. The results were a marked decrease in terrorism. Was he wrong to do so? To what extent do we need to engage with results in the real world? Is total withdraw and pacifism the way, or there is a middle ground balancing the spiritual and the temporal? Setting the “right example” doesn’t usually work as we can see with what happened to the Cathars…
GP: The piece by Juenger has put me in a spin:
First of all, most (foreign) books translate Schlachter as “butcher,” but he means Executioner (the word’s second acceptation)– and I have been brooding for some time on the significance and existential functionalism of this character, which is essential in my view. And Juenger is right again to focus on him as he dwells on the transition from the sovereign, pre-modern ways of the blood (in war, torture, and justice) to the aseptic mass-murdering ethos of modernity — passo obbligato. But there is something missing, something is missed in this crucial observation. Cannot quite put my finger on it yet~
For a moment, I even wondered if by der Gerechte he provocatively meant the criminal himself.
But if Der Gerechte is the sovereign, then it means that if this sovereign by means of his castigating extension, the executioner, will not shrink back from striking the culprit [i.e., to prevent holocausts from spreading by way of imitative frenzy –and this point, too, would require an essay in itself, because that would nullify the premises by making monsters of all humans, which is a good starting hypothesis: no such thing as a culprit]; if the king will not hesitate to scourge the criminal, this means that pre-modern Systems, despite the carnage on which they throve, were more righteous than our “Cainite” epoch, in whose regimes the death penalty has been virtually abolished because psychopaths have come to enthrone themselves kings and as a result (one of many), the justice apparatus has been transformed into a blind machine that mows victims by decimation and indiscriminately (criminals and average Joes alike, both being, as moderns, equally culpable, equally useless, equally monstrous), without, however, no longer allowing society to shed blood ritually (as in the old days)–blood, which nonetheless is still “offered” yet in a more haphazard fashion via the channels of crime (jn times of peace) or terrorism (in times of civil strife), and “the attentat” (his final segment) issues from this second avenue.
I don’t know– still turning it in my head…
On Phantasmagoria
NLF: I finished your book Phantasmagoria [which argued that the real purpose of the invasion of Afghanistan was to secure the worldwide heroin trade] and enjoyed it. As with your other works, you have a poetic eloquence which is a pleasure to read, and the length made it a shorter, easy read. It wasn’t as earth shattering as Conjuring Hitler because, as you’ve argued, everything since 1945 seems like it’s been more or less a mop-up operation.
GP: Sean Stone, Oliver’s son, said virtually the same when I asked him for feedback.
Personally, I am very proud of this booklet, which is not yet getting the love I had hoped; for me 9/11 was the shattering event that triggered my “awakening” and has been an obsession for these past 2 decades because I could not formulate till the very end a compact working hypothesis with which to (begin to) explain it all. And now I believe I finally have such a thing. But for some reason it does hit the reader with the bang I was expecting.
NLF: I’m especially intrigued with your argument that little to nothing exist in the realm of political facts unless our global overlords want those “facts” disseminated and that we’re left merely debating these “facts”. How, then, is one to make sense of reality if these “facts” are just force-fed to us?
GP: There no longer is a political reality of any kind anymore (Geopolitics is dead): as Orwell explained, such a “reality” needs to be “produced” daily so as to entrance people who, apparently, cannot be controlled and manipulated in any other way. It is terrifying but highly revelatory.
NLF: That is terrifying. If we cannot rely on the so-called “facts” that are offered to us via the spectrum of propaganda outlets, on what basis are we to learn about on-going developments in the world outside of our direct observation? Or is it simply not possible? My own approach has been to try to develop a predictive model for the world and to the extent things develop in a surprising way, I try to update my models recursively…that has led me over time to this point..
GP: There is no reality; or rather the reality is merely the tale of a caste of parasites intent on commissioning screenplays for the next Orwellian shenanigan with a view to staying in power, a caste ever prone to annihilate us in droves should this be required by its nutritional requirements, give the technological constraints. One has to piece it together like in a mystery novel through a sheer effort (sometimes exploit) of imagination.
Developing a predictive model for the world is one way of doing it; my approach is roughly the same thing.
NLF: I found Eric Wilson’s forward to be initially confusing because of his use of the term “gnosticism”, which he uses as a smear against our elites. He seems to mean it as a kind of secularized, blind devotional religious energy whose elite adherents believe that, with the correct understanding or outlook, they can bring Heaven to Earth materially. But “gnosticism” seems to be an umbrella term with multiple meanings; at least one of its other meanings (which you seem to be sympathetic to and I am as well) is that gnosis is the understanding that this material realm is controlled by the Demiurge and that by adopting an attitude of asceticism and philosophical pessimism one may hope to spiritually ascend from this realm either on earth or at least in the afterlife.
GP: Yes, that’s exactly it.
NLF: I understand that Wilson stated that Carol Quigley was one of your primary sources for your worldview. Have you read G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island? You may enjoy it if not…
GP: Yes I read it; not uninteresting, but too dilettantish.
NLF: It wasn’t clear how large the Afghan heroin trade was or how control of that trade and the dollars within could have bailed out major banks during the 2008 financial crisis.
GP: True. And the point is essential. But there are no data of course, and yes, I did not attempt a deep statistical dive and extremely ambitious move to estimate what this outflow of greenbacks would have in been in light of Wall Street’s fueling needs — that would have been a triumphal result. It is something I have done instead, a few years ago, in a very important essay (directly related to this insight & topic) undertaken to explain how America manages Empire financially, which is indeed cited in Phantasmagoria.
So, I made the choice of putting the thesis out there, basically unsupported by numbers, just connecting the dots hoping it’d be sufficient, and for me it is; it all (sufficiently) adds up.
NLF: It seems that, more than just control over the Afghan heroin trade, the “forever war” of Afghanistan was used to justify washing hundreds of billions or trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars into the hands of the transnational security elite indefinitely, as eloquently explained by Assange in this brief clip:
GP: Intriguing, but I do not at all understand what “washing” means here.
NLF: Much of the equipment supplied by the military-industrial complex would be diverted off and sold elsewhere if it was ever produced at all. For example, the Pentagon has never passed an audit and in 2013 it was estimated that $8.5 trillion dollars of Pentagon funds had been “lost”. In Ukraine only 30% of the equipment being sent ever reached the final destination according to a CBS documentary that was immediately censored and withdrawn (not for inaccuracy). And that’s after the hundreds or thousands of percent price upcharges by contractors on each of those items… In addition there is the massive so-called “foreign aid” that purportedly goes to these countries but very little seems to reach the final destination. It’s likely that the local politicians take a small fee and then return most of it to the powers they report to…It looks like these “forever-wars” are mere excuses for the Pentagon to demand funds from the U.S. taxpayers after which it mostly just disappears forever, “washed” back into their own pockets…
Also interestingly, NFL player-turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman may have been murdered to prevent him either from becoming an anti-war icon or from exposing details of the heroin trade; he was killed from close range and his diaries were burned/lost.
GP: Interesting; that supports the thesis.
NLF: The timing of the Afghanistan withdrawal after 20 years, a mere 6 months before the start of the Ukraine/Russia “war”, seems like a continuation of the military/industrial complex washing of foreign aid and U.S. taxpayer dollars back into the hands of the U.S. security elite. I’m glad you mentioned the “coincidental” timing of it in the conclusion. I see the Ukraine war as being fake and controlled from both sides, although the dead bodies are real…
GP: Precisely, Orwellian scenarios are sutured with snuff movies.
NLF: I would love to see more on the exact mechanisms for how our elites control China and Iran.
GP: Me too — but there is no doubt they do; who else has the theatrical infrastructure to keep it all going exactly as it is meant to unfold in a Hollywood TV show?
NLF: Russia is controlled to a significant degree by its western-controlled central bank, but the mechanisms for control of Iran and China seem more opaque and less clear to me…
GP: Opaque ok, but straightforward nonetheless: 1) China as we now know it was Nixon’s idea (the greatest of all American emperors) and in 2001 the project came to pass with the country’s induction in the WTO with US patronage; Iran…Obvious, no? First they topple Mossadegh (1953), then they handle Iran to Khomeini (1979), much like the Brits handed Russia to the Bolsheviks; it’s a game. You may come across Persians steeped in conspiratorial literature that’ll tell you modern Iran is entirely ruled by the US within these Orwellian configurations. And that is clearly the case.
On immigration
NLF: I liked that you mentioned how Islamic immigration into Europe is being used as a divide-and-conquer strategy both to suppress domestic nationalism and to serve as justification for increases in the security state and corresponding decreases of freedom.
GP: Immigration: yes, that is a big item on the “globalist” agenda: it’s a top US priority for Italy (sub-colonial status); it is dismaying: for decades, we have been losing hundreds of thousands of graduates and professionals every year to foreign labor markets (US-UK, Germany etc.) but take in just as many useless desperadoes from the Third World in the name of diversity and declining fertility (the New York Times agenda, in short): most Italian commercial ads now feature Non-Whites as a matter of course. It is a highly insidious operation: they allow in western societies –i.e., in highly racist and classist hives in which integration is ipso facto impossible and work (of the semi–decent sort) is to boot non-existent– trickles of immigrants from the Third World, cramming them in poor neighborhoods where they come in potential conflict with the disenfranchised hordes of the host population. All one needs then, when the situation demands it, is to light a match. The Left and the Church are working assiduously in this direction — you dare to say a word against this, and you are immediately tagged as a Nazi.
On The Political Scripting of Jesus
NLF: It was interesting reading in your book The Political Scripting of Jesus about the Catholic perspectives that were deemed off-limits by the CDF between 2000-2005, either for blending Christianity with insurrectionist Marxism (Sobrino) or for trying to skinsuit Catholicism into postmodern, pluralistic globohomo (Haight, Phan). Given the recent actions of Pope Francis that tilt toward the latter’s direction, do you think that the Church’s stance against Haight and Phan is or will change?
GP: Glad you liked it. Good question. I do not know what happened to them under Francis. They’re both old now and it’s not clear what the magisterium of the Church is on this subject. The masses are not ready for this. But it might be the case that in a future conciliar maneuver of sweeping range their work will be respectfully and duly referenced. Who knows. By then folks, like Anatole France’s Pilate, will have forgotten altogether about this Jesus guy. It makes no difference anyway, as it doesn’t now –and I wonder if it ever did. All religious cults are fabrications, like the News: fiction blended with fact; but it is very hard to discriminate one from the other.
NLF: There were certain other passages that stood out to me: I have not read Robert Graves yet (p. 49), but the arguments you summarized were interesting to me. I know that Gore Vidal had used Graves’s novels on Claudius and Belisarius as inspiration for his wonderful novel Julian (reviewed here).
GP: Vidal’s Julian, of course — I have my father’s copy and still have not read it…Will have to asap…
NLF: I should read Graves… Your comments on him brought to mind certain arguments made by Nietzsche and historian Tom Holland about the geopolitical situation at the time of Jesus as well as how the inversion of Roman values was used to rile up, in early Bolshevik fashion, the masses of disaffected women, slaves, the and the poor, which I delved into here. You made a similar point on p. 180 (“From the standpoint of the local elite, the service of these compassionate interlopers can be insidious because it weakens the bond of obeisance that permits the absentee owners to exploit the productive backbone of the country….”) Have you covered Nietzsche in your writings?
GP: No I never covered Nietzsche– somehow he does not interest me in the least; he is too inflationed and overhyped in my view; I’ll side with Tolstoy on him: I find him trite and distasteful. Irrelevant, yes, more than anything. But I know I am wrong because Nietzsche has significantly occupied the thoughts of many a good thinker, including Bataille…An yet, he, like Marx (and many others of these so-called “greats,” great Masters of Flatulence, really, like Hegel, too, without whom according to our founding fathers the West could not have articulated thought, and if so, poor West, poor “thought”), in my world simply does not exist.
I enjoyed your erudite essay – It would require a long and very engaging discussion. In a nutshell, I see things from and IngSoc (English Socialism’s social engineering) perspective and concern myself solely with what the power apparatus seeks to achieve through this sort of surreal politics considering –and this is the important point– that it is the selfsame rulers who were ridiculing the transsexual yesteryear: so they changed stance; change everything so that nothing changes. Yesterday it was macho is cool & reproduce; no longer: today macho is super-uncool (read: useless) and for the love of God, do NOT reproduce, hence all this delirious politics of gender and weird sexual management. A Malthusian tantrum, yet again. So I go back to my beloved slave-making ants and termites, which allegedly have a system of determining the new breeds’ sex in keeping with the nutritional requirements of the nest. That’s what is happening, but it is filtered by surreal discourse. Our rulers and their divine protectors are phenomenal not just in their parasitical idiosyncrasy but also for their gusto for twisted and not wholly intentional absurd theatrics.
NLF: Your comment on page 187 about “loving the neighbor” brought to mind Carl Schmitt’s thoughts on the subject. Per Concept of the Political, section 3:
“As German and other languages do not distinguish between the private and political enemy, many misconceptions and falsifications are possible. The often quoted “Love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27) reads “diligite inimicos vestros”, and not “diligite hostes vestros”. No mention is made of the political enemy. Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one’s enemy, i.e., one’s adversary. The Bible quotation touches the political antithesis even less than it intends to dissolve, for example, the antithesis of good and evil or beautiful and ugly. It certainly does not mean that one should love and support the enemies of one’s own people.”
But I suppose Schmitt’s argument feeds back into the Law of Violence…
GP: Yes, it is an apodictic almost too embarrassingly obvious, infantile statement thereof. Schmitt, Schmitt’s fame is funny like that. Bodies of “scholarly work” to “explore” and plumb the statement that 2+2=4, but maybe that is because we all pretend to live on a Euclidean plane, when in fact everything is curved in a weird way and none of those axioms apply. The Elements after all were conceived as graphic designer’s manual. 2D illusion. It figures. So when, after staring for centuries, you “detect” a inkling of curvature, you jubilantly exclaim: it is not level! Right, it never was. Funny how America’s priestly caste does not have the courage to say so, to acknowledge the horror of the obvious: they do it, coyly and in hushed, sanitized tones via a German midget that had, like Benito Cereno, to compromise with Nazism…The surreal again…
NLF: You wrote on p. 188 about most people being utterly unable of being truly religious. I’m not sure I would want to sacrifice myself, my family, fatherland, and all of humanity in order not to act against the Law of Love. I do try to treat others with respect, including others of different backgrounds, but there is a balance that occurs in each interaction. But you also wrote “the best one can do now, individually, is to attempt to revert/correct/redirect the process and, while at it, grow spiritually, if at all possible.” This struck a chord and it’s why Jünger and his concept of the anarch is pulling me toward reading more of his work…
GP: Yes, but the anarch is an aesthetic figment –the protagonist Manuel Venator in his fabulous Eumeswil: he’s not real, and moreover to be able to survive as the tyrant’s cup-bearer ensconced in the brushwood of internal dissent (Waldegang — I deal with all this in The Ideology of Tyranny) is something very, very few independently wealthy people can attempt — so basically a minority of a very small minority to begin with. Hardly a path, hardly a solution.
On The Ideology of Tyranny
NLF: In your book The Ideology of Tyranny: Bataille, Foucault, and the Postmodern Corruption of Political Dissentyou delve into the idea of gender erasure being pushed onto the masses. Do you think it’s simply about depopulation, or what other angles do you see? It brings to mind the Calhoun mouse experiments — put mice in a utopian environment and their population eventually grows to fill every social niche, then they developed increasing deviances until their population imploded entirely.
GP: That experiment was indeed fascinating.
The attack on heterosexuality, which is modulated, is partly a fertility ploy, but it is more complicated than that, I think. They are pursuing a sophisticated, articulated agenda: one the one hand they reversed the Roe v. Wade 2 years ago, and on the other they had the head of the Olympic Games proclaim with regard to the controversy surrounding the Algerian pugilist that “it is very difficult to distinguish a man from a woman,” which is a weighty statement, to put it mildly. The Question is, “what are they seeking to implement through this?”
The phenomenon of men transgenedered into women that now go on to populate female swimming teams across the US is already established: so there is a lot going on: what is it? Western technocracy is using this to erase females altogether, or, rather working out a social order where fertility is relegated to the poorer (lesser) races (in India & Africa, as surrogates), and mid-stratum whites –undifferentiated men & women– are turned into asexual, sterile workers, or what? This, on the other hand, would jive with the idea of a social dividend (Silicon Valley’s Universal Basic Income), coupled with digital currency: $2,000 for life to everybody for life (and, as the other side of the coin, 2 zillions guaranteed no questions asked for the members of the elite), offspring being managed in communist fashion, Spartan style?
I don’t know yet –it is puzzling and deeply disquieting.
NLF: You raise good points — I see it as our upper elites intend to wipe out western civilization because they view it as a threat – or as revenge, or they hate it – after which they plan to reduce worldwide population to 500 million with an average 80 IQ to be permanent slaves to the central bank owning elites and their top allies, and use the population for medical experiments like they just did with the COVID mRNA fraud (what else do they do with the “useless masses”, per Yuval Harari?) so that the elites can genetically engineer themselves into a different race. They are importing young, male illegals to terrorize the existing western populations and to vote for liberal parties to more than counter-act any rise in public consciousness as their plans become more and more visible…
You can find Preparata’s books on Amazon here and his website here. I highly recommend his work – he’s one of the very few authors who understands the nature of the modern world, how evil it is, and who writes in really beautiful and almost poetic prose. His oeuvre is one of the very few authors whose books are worth engaging with in their entirety.
You can also find many video interviews with Preparata on Youtube by others here.
Thanks for reading.
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This is a follow-up post with more film recommendations.
I previously wrote a post on dissident films which received a lot of interest and feedback, which I appreciate. Given it’s nice to change up one’s posting topics (such as my post on ABBA), here’s a follow-up with some additional recommendations. Hopefully it may add positive color and perspective to one’s views if you decide to see some of them.
There are varying definitions of what a “dissident film” constitutes. My use of the term is as follows: the film’s message in some way offers support for self-governance, either as a tribe or nation, and it doesn’t promote the cult of egalitarianism. I’m also interested in those who are able to avoid the pressures of groupthink and follow one’s inner voice. You may have a different definition of what a “dissident film” means and that’s okay.
Within the comments of Part 1 there were a lot of recommendations for other films to watch and I’ve gone out and watched many of them, some of which I’m including on the below list. Of course, I did receive some pushback on some of the choices on the prior list: Rurik Skywalker thought Barry Lyndon was about the wandering Jew, Eugine Nier thought District 9 was about supporting immigration instead of opposing it, Jasun Horsley absolutely hated my Eyes Wide Shut recommendation, and Lei Feng thought that Fight Club was predictive programming to associate white people with terrorism in the eyes of the public. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that most of the films on the list can be viewed from multiple perspectives; without that multiple layering, in a rigidly ideological far-leftist Hollywood echo chamber it’s likely those films would not have been made. In other words, ambiguous meaning is really the best one can hope for in this environment. I’ll give my rationale for why I thought a film has dissident themes and then, where applicable, I’ll offer a counter for why aspects of the film may run counter to that narrative. I think that will strengthen the post.
It goes without saying that I’m not an authority on this – make up your own mind and feel free to disagree. For those films that were recommended but that don’t make the list, it doesn’t mean I didn’t like the film or didn’t get anything out of it. I do appreciate the recommendations, and even if I didn’t like a film I usually learn something from it anyway. So thank you.
The list
Falling Down (1993), trailer here. Michael Douglass stars as a laid off, disgruntled defense industry employee who has snapped due to the pressures of modern society. He goes around Los Angeles committing assault, robbery, and murder as he tries to visit his daughter for her birthday. The themes present are the rapid pace of changing society, the decreasing status of white men, difficulties in race relations, poverty and crime, and it empathizes from a distance with Douglass’s character. It’s interesting to see how far society has fallen – Douglass starred in this pitch-black film at the peak of his career, whereas everything today is so sanitary and false-noted. The film could not be made today.Kirk Douglas publicly declared: “Michael’s character is not the ‘hero’ or ‘newest urban icon’. He is the villain and the victim. Of course, we see many elements of our society that contributed to his madness. We even pity him. But the movie never condones his actions.” The “villain and the victim” components are key — a film achieves a deeper level when its characters and themes embody opposite characteristics, and it’s achieved here.Counter to why it’s not a dissident film: Some see the film as demoralization or predictive programming about the inevitable phase-out of white men from society.
Richard Jewell (2019), trailer here. Directed by Clint Eastwood, the film tells the story of the eponymous security guard who saved lives during the 1996 Centennial Park bombing when he saw a suspicious backpack and evacuated people from the area. The FBI tried hard to frame Jewell as the bomber as he was obese, poor, and a white male – an easy target. Eventually he was exonerated but his reputation was in tatters even though he was a hero. It shows the FBI as a clearly manipulative, predatory organization.Counter to why it’s not a dissident film: One could argue that the FBI was just doing it’s job in following every possible lead, but the investigation on Jewell was based on no underlying evidence, so this is a pretty flimsy counter.
Brazil (1985), trailer here. Many recommended this as a dissident film and they are correct, although I thought the film was poorly edited (perhaps intentionally) and hard to watch. The movie mixes Orwell’s 1984 with Kafka – an omnipresent surveillance state mired in bureaucracy, inefficiencies and bloodthirstiness. It’s best scenes are those that deal with the maddening nature of paper pushing which can reach a kind of black gallows humor at times; the state captures and destroys the wrong man, then tries to force the man’s sobbing widow to accept a returned check for the mistake. A focus on the banality of evil, on one’s silo’d, myopic job disclaiming personal responsibility because one only sees, hears, and effects one sliver of the overall process – can one really be responsible for a terrible deed if one neither initiated the targeting nor carried out the ultimate act? The dehumanizing effects of technology; humanity reduced to a cog in the machine. The film kind of falls off the rails toward the end and the romance does not work at all. The title was a poorly chosen one, as nothing about the picture deals with the country of Brazil.Counter to why it’s not a dissident film: Just like in 1984 the state wins. Might it be predictive programming?
The House of Rothschild (1934), full movie here, video review here. The movie is a propaganda piece painting the Rothschild clan in the best possible light (and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture), playing fast and loose with the underlying history and facts, but the way the film would be seen today is very different than how it was received by audiences at the time. It is ultimately a great dissident film because it highlights the questions: Why did this outsider family have the greatest wealth in Europe, why did this single family have the power to make or break sides during war, and how does their interests differ from majority society? The ending of the film where Nathan Rothschild bets the farm on England defeating Napoleon is a ridiculous lie, of course: the Rothschild clan bet on both sides of the war and pretended that Napoleon won at Waterloo (because they received information sooner than anyone else) in order to scoop up English bonds for pennies on the dollar in the ensuring panic, becoming the richest family in Europe as a result.Counter to why it’s not a dissident film: The film can be viewed as the Rothschilds defending themselves against an irrational majority hatred of the Other, and it plays quite fast and loose with history to paint them in the best possible light.
Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), trailer here. This is not quite a dissident film — it transcends such categorizations, showing the end of a dynasty which was unable to keep up with the technical “progress” or the moral depravity of its neighbors — but it shows the nobility of the Romanovs and the difficult choices the last Tsar faced. I offered a detailed review here. This is a 10/10 movie and is a must watch.
Africa Addio (1966), full movie here. It’s a really special documentary; the filmmakers raced around Africa in a gonzo style as colonialism was ending and documented the complete chaos and destruction that the European withdrawal left in its wake, including huge massacres and destruction of wildlife. The filmmakers were almost murdered during filming; you would never see anything like this made today. It shows a side of Africa and the end of colonialism that you will have never seen or heard elsewhere. If you have the time, I give it my highest recommendation (but brace yourself for some extreme horrors).
Waco (miniseries, 2018), trailer here. The miniseries attempts a balanced approach to the Waco siege, showing the perspectives of the ATF, FBI, the FBI negotiator and the various Branch Davidians. However, the weight of the evidence is so heavily stacked against the ATF and the FBI that one cannot but help but come away from the experience — which is well directed and well cast — with the understanding that there is something extremely foul in our governing institutions. The series received mixed reviews because some globohomo reviewers thought it was too favorable to the Davidians. I was quite surprised that this miniseries was shown on Netflix, hub of the most virulent globohomo slop propaganda on the small screen. There was also a 2023 follow-up series, not quite as good, which explored the criminal trials of the surviving Davidians.
A tier below
Films that didn’t quite make the list include:
Soylent Green(1973). A critique of overpopulation with humanity having consumed, in a neo-Malthusian fashion, most of the world’s natural resources and so people are converted to protein for consumption; these are dissident themes, but it felt like most of the film was a standard police procedural. The death scene with G. Edward Robinson was touching, the best scene of the movie and it was the last film he made before dying of cancer two months later. It was funny how the film focused on the overpopulation problem but everyone featured in the film was white, although in the modern era the white population is totally stagnant and the overpopulation is due almost exclusively to Africa and Asia.
The International (2009). It had two dissident-adjacent scenes – one explaining that banks finance wars in order to rule nations via controlling it’s debt, and the other explaining how criminal banking organizations will not be taken down by law enforcement because those crimes are endemic and system-wide – but the rest of the film was a pretty average detective story. A more detailed review is here.The themes of the film revolve around collapse and chaos surrounding it, but it’s also a pro-immigration film to an extent which means it is not a dissident film— but it’s hard to separate the politics applicable to today versus the politics of a post-collapse order. The film has excellent cinematography and direction.
Zardoz (1974). One could read dissident themes into it – a barbarian destroying a safe space of rich, indulgent people and destroying their false God, and by highlighting that there’s no human meaning without suffering and death – but the film was too art-house, self-indulgent, and eccentric/eclectic to qualify on this basis (to me). A bit more detailed review is here.
Rollerball (1975). This film gets close to dissident status because the main character, the top leader of the rollerball game for a decade, turns down the elite’s demand that he retire in great comfort and luxury. The main character had three reasons: because he’s mad that they took away the girl he loved, because he wants to know the reason why they were pressuring him (which they didn’t want to tell him), and because he loved the sport and it’s what he really cared about. Being angry at being coerced is a strong mark toward dissidence even if the rational factors lead normal people to cave and give in. I think the missing element which kept this from the main list is that the main character did not believe in ideals greater than the game or of himself and therefore his obsession with knowing why was ultimately meaningless. A bit more detailed review is here. HamburgerToday disagrees with my interpretation.
Doctor Zhivago (1965), trailer here. I did a Notes writeup a couple months ago about this film, or at least a draft of it, but can’t find it currently. The core theme of the film is trying to retain one’s humanity – to stay true to oneself – even in light of massive political and cultural pressures and the dangers involved, which speaks to themes of individuation and Junger’s anarch, covered here. The heart attack ending was stupid.
Didn’t make the list
Other films watched for this post that didn’t really qualify include: Cool Hand Luke (it’s more of an anarchist film, discussed here), Logan’s Run (too sci-fi/fantasy oriented so it didn’t feel like it offered cultural commentary, the last 1/3 of the film was very poorly edited), Escape 2000/Turkey Shoot (bad direction, it was brutal/sadistic and unrealistic, no message), Demolition Man (too campy even though it predicted multiple aspects of the modern world), Children of Men (which I liked but it is not a dissident film for reasons explained here), The Time Machine (1960 version, too shallow despite promising themes, discussed here).
I hope this post points you in some new and different directions for some films to watch. Given the number of recommendations from Part 1, I still have plenty of films to watch for a potential Part 3: High Plaines Drifter, Pale Rider, The Room, Clockwork Orange (seen but needs a rewatch), the anime television series “The Big O”, The President’s Analyst, Captain Fantastic, The Village, Rob Roy, Gallipoli, Witness, The Cars that Ate Paris, Wag the Dog (seen but needs a rewatch), Limits of Control, Outlaw Josey Wales, Dzień Świr/Day of the Wacko, Russia’s Brother (1997), I banchieri di dio / The Bankers of God (2002), The Golden Era (2014) and Tale of Three Cities (2015), The Downfall (seen but needs a rewatch), Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard [1965], A Fistful of Dynamite, Runaway Train, V for Vendetta (seen but need a rewatch), Look Who’s Back (seen but need a rewatch), Bone Tomahawk.
As with Part 1, if you have further recommendations for relevant films please leave a comment and I’ll try to give it a watch.
Thanks for reading.
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This post is about the ongoing development and widespread adoption of certain technologies that are on the verge of leading to the digital panopticon – basically a worldwide digital prison, roughly equivalent to the Mark of the Beast referenced in the Book of Revelation.
“Mass surveillance is a mass structural change. When society goes bad, its going to take you with it, even if you are the blandest person on earth.” – Julian Assange, 2014 Reddit AMA
“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.” – Julian Assange, 2016 Reddit AMA
Today we’re going to talk about the Mark of the Beast.
As a preamble, the intent of this post will not to demoralize, but rather to set proper expectations about what’s coming, and to frame it in such a way to offer you tools to see this for yourself in the future.
Republican [North Carolina] gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson is expected to go on CNN today to defend himself regarding a pending story the national network is preparing, a campaign adviser says.
Williams described the CNN story as a “hit piece.” The reported story makes explosive allegations regarding statements the national network says Robinson made on an online message board in 2009, Williams says. Robinson did not hold elected office until 2021, after his successful campaign for lieutenant governor in 2020.
“The main ones I remember were that they were alleging he made some extremely racist comments about Martin Luther King, referred to himself as a Black Nazi and used antisemitic language referring to Jews,” Williams stated in the text message.
Robinson denies making those statements. “He 100% denied it when I spoke to him,” says Williams.
They were made under a username that CNN was able to identify as Robinson by matching a litany of biographical details and a shared email address between the two.
Many of Robinson’s comments were gratuitously sexual and lewd in nature. They were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website that includes a message board. The comments were made under the username minisoldr, a moniker Robinson used frequently online.
Robinson listed his full name on his profile for Nude Africa, as well as an email address he used on numerous websites across the internet for decades….
The email address associated with minisoldr on Nude Africa was also used by Robinson elsewhere online and social media. On the commenting platform Disqus, a user who joined in April 2011 features Mark Robinson’s photo under the username minisoldr.
Usernames and email addresses from Disqus were publicly leaked online in 2017, according to the company. CNN confirmed that Robinson’s username minisoldr on Disqus shared the same email address as the one used on Nude Africa.
Robinson’s Disqus page is also linked to the Black social networking site Black Planet. The Web Archive shows a user named “minisoldr” described themselves as 40 years old in February 2009 – the same age as Robinson at the time – and living in Greensboro, North Carolina – Robinson’s hometown.
So here we have a case of a Republican governor candidate, six weeks away from a general election in a swing state that Trump desperately needs to win, who may be torpedoed based on something he may have written on an online message board under a pseudonym in 2009 – fifteen years ago. No one in the mainstream media will cover the relevant question, and very likely few if any in the alternative space either (because most of the online right simply react as a mirror image to whatever shitlib nonsense the media pushes). But the question should be apparent: how would the media have gotten Robinson’s online posts and how would they have verified that he actually wrote them? After all, if he didn’t write them then the media outlets would open themselves up to major defamation lawsuits.
Well, the answer is simple: woke members of the FBI ran NSA search database queries on Robinson to reveal everything he has written online, discussed on his phone or via text since Total Information Awareness went online (likely after 9/11). They either trawled his records themselves or used a woke AI1 to do so and highlight anything that looked interesting. Then the FBI members fed the information to their media partners and used a convoluted and frankly retarded parallel construction to pretend they researched these events independently. Simple and easy; sorted.
Of course the NPC masses won’t care about this even if the information was spoon-fed to them even though they could very easily be affected personally. They would only care if their media sources told them to care. As Julian Assange stated, who was covered in depth here, “Until we see the bulk release of individual’s emails or SMS messages, the average person isn’t going to believe it’s real.” From a dissident perspective it’s just another day of living in the human sheep farm, I guess.
Still, this raises further questions: Why did they target Robinson (other than the obvious reason to throw the state to Kamala)? Do they spy on all candidates for office? Under what conditions do they release leaks like this, which are based on brazenly transparent immoral and illegal (well, at least until recently) spying? How ubiquitous is this spying? Where is it headed, what are their eventual goals?
The structure of this post will be as follows:
First, we will look at how the NSA search database queries have been abused within the recent past;
We will then look at how technology develops from a macro-perspective, which is not developed organically (as we are led to believe) but rather nudged toward certain paths and away from others;
We will then investigate which specific technological paths have been chosen, while observing that the speed of adoption by the public increases over time; then
We will discuss how the combination of the internet, Total Information Awareness, a 5G informational network, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and a ubiquitous woke artificial intelligence are combining to form the end goal: the Mark of the Beast, where everyone will be assigned social credit scores based on your electronic presence and you will be cut out from society, banned from accessing your bank account or being able to shop for groceries or receive loans or anything else if your social credit score is poor. If you stay within the system you will have to do whatever our elites tell you to do, including take more experimental, dangerous mRNA “vaccines”, end far-away travel, limit what food you consume and what information you read or be cast out into the nether.
The state of NSA search database abuse
The NSA search database is and has been extensively abused by the FBI for political purposes, previously discussed here and here. I wrote:
The NSA search databases…suck up all electronic data and [contain] everyone’s phone, internet, and email records, along with access to your various cameras and microphones via Total Information Awareness. The FBI had access to this database which they routinely abuse, and they even installed a terminal within the D.C. office of Perkins Coie, the law firm Hillary used, to make the process even easier and to create a legal privilege shield. 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. In 2023 the DOJ Inspector General revealed that more than 10,000 federal employees have access to the NSA database for surveillance inquiries, 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 had only expanded – but keep in mind that the epicenter of the criminal activity is the National Security Division within the DOJ and it is exempt from any Inspector General oversight. Anyway, the FBI can as of 2020 look at your web browsing history, emails, anything you have ever typed on your phone or computer and any audio you have made in the vicinity of your digital devices legally without a warrant. Then they use parallel construction to prosecute, i.e. constructing a legal basis not based upon the spying, a strategy used for a long time now. See also the Room 641A controversy, a telecom interception facility operated by AT&T for the NSA as part of its warrantless surveillance program as far back as 2003 and a facility that is likely copied throughout the country.
In other words, the NSA spying apparatus is widely abused by the establishment to spy on it’s domestic opposition, to dynamite their campaigns and even criminally prosecute them based on parallel construction if necessary. One of the main reasons why they panicked over Trump’s surprising 2016 win was that this apparatus, which had been supercharged starting in 2012 under Obama and Eric Holder, had not reached a point where it was safe from attack if Trump had been strong and smart enough to shut it down (as an Orange Retard he unfortunately wasn’t). The system is secure, formalized, and extremely abused now. The Inspector General of the FBI and other D.C. organizations, who are meant to serve as a check on governmental abuse, exist to whitewash such abuse – they do nothing.
This is the same reason why the latest so-called Iranian hack-and-release cyber attack against Trump’s presidential campaign is so flimsy and false: it was simply abuse of the NSA search databases, where the material was given to Democrats and then blamed on Iran. By claiming it was a hack-and-release, the Democrats can use the material as having been laundered even as they also falsely try to blame Iran for the FBI/CIA attempted assassination attempts on Trump (see here, here and here). In this manner they can try to destroy their domestic opponents while trying to set a false predicate for another Middle East war; win-win in their eyes. This appears like a bad repeat of the false 2016 Russian collusion narrative. They aren’t very creative once one understands the games being played.
Flimsy fake news which they want the masses to choke on to deflect from deep state spying and as preparation for a future possible war with Iran.
Sundance has a good take on this topic here. Democrat Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus and chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is close to the epicenter of these illegal machinations, much as he was during the fake Russiagate smear used to paralyze the Trump administration.
Technology paths are limited, but directed
Even though we are taught that technology somehow magically appears by inventors under a flash of intuition, technology development does not arise in a vacuum. There are all sorts of limitations placed on what is researched and developed and what is ignored or forbidden. There are limitations based on (1) a society’s metaphysical presuppositions; (2) funding and strings tied to that funding; (3) competition; and (4) legal and regulatory hurdles. Putting these together, one can see how technological progress is being nudged in certain directions, both intentionally and unintentionally. Let’s briefly go through these.
Limitations based on a society’s metaphysical presuppositions
The ancient Greeks were the first to have a coherent scientific activity and to liberate scientific thought. They could have deduced the technical consequences of their scientific activity, but they did not do so. This was because their worldview refused to subsume all of society to treat technique as a God. According to Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society:
The Greeks were suspicious of technical activity because it represented an aspect of brute force and implied a want of moderation…The rejection of technique was a deliberate, positive activity involving self-mastery, recognition of destiny, and the application of a given conception of life. Only the most modest techniques were permitted – those which would respond directly to material needs in such a way that these needs did not get the upper hand….No one ought to apply scientific thought technically, because scientific thought corresponded to a conception of life, to wisdom. The great preoccupation of the Greeks was balance, harmony and moderation; hence, they fiercely resisted the unrestrained force inherent in technique, and rejected it because of its potentialities.
The Romans had a different conception of technique than the Greeks. To them, anything that improved the internal coherence of society was adopted, and this resulted in an equilibrium between the purely technical factor and the human factor:
The social coherence was the first judicial technique the world had known. It was also the basis for the Roman military system, which was a direct expression of civil society in that it had the same respect for efficiency and economy. From it came the development of organs of transport, food supply, and so on; and the Roman conception of mass strategy and their refusal to create heroes: combat was thus reduced to its most utilitarian level.
After Christianity’s total victory over Rome, technique was obliterated in essentially every category. Knowledge across disciplines was lost as Christianity viciously checked the application of technique by demanding that any activity be first morally righteous before considering its practical uses:
The search for justice before God, the measuring of technique by other criteria than those of technique itself – these were the great obstacles that Christianity opposed to technical progress. They operated in the Middle Ages in all areas of life, and made history coincide with theology.
This attitude remained until the Middle Ages when first scholasticism and then the reintroduction of Aristotlean reason created the foundation for which technique would ultimately arise. As faith in God subsided, faith in technique and of the materialist, atheistic Machine powered by reason grew, culminating in first the Industrial and then the Informational Revolutions.
L.P. Koch notes that Germany’s development of Quantum Mechanics sprouted from it’s metaphysical understandings; it could not have and would not have existed without them:
Some of the mystic reasoning so prevalent in the German tradition might actually have been fruitful even for the natural sciences: the development of Quantum Mechanics, in particular, can be seen in light of the rebellion of the German soul against the materialist program.
This is precisely what Paul Forman points out in great detail in his 1971 paper, Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927.He shows that the critical attitude of German physicists in the Weimar Republic regarding causality came before the development of Quantum Mechanics, which, once formulated, of course sparked further debate about causality and determinism. It could be argued that indeed, the German intellectual tradition was the fertile ground on which Quantum Mechanics blossomed. As Forman puts it, German culture “led physicists to ardently hope for, actively search for, and willingly embrace an acausal quantum mechanics.”
In other words, a society is always limited by their metaphysical presuppositions, and the modern technical West is no different. Steeped in a firm, blind belief in egalitarianism and the egalitarian ratchet effect along with a ubiquitous secular materialism, research into human biodiversity (HBD) is forbidden; research into eugenics (such as using CRISPR to improve certain genes in human embryos) is mostly forbidden; research into cloning technologies is frowned upon; research into the link between physiognomy and personality is frowned upon, because these topics touch upon the core belief that Western society believes in. Even other things such as research into astrology, ESP or the benefits of bloodletting are frowned upon based on cultural conditioning and blind faith in secular materialism.
Eventually the contradictions or “anomalies” within an ideology build up to the point where it can no longer be ignored and there is a Kuhnian paradigm shift which changes how humanity sees the world and the process begins anew. It feels like we may be on the verge of such an epoch now.
Limitations based on funding
To advance in one’s career as a scientist one must secure funding. Most funding today comes from the government, universities, or corporations, all with perspectives that limit research based on short-term profit motives, metaphysical presuppositions, political realities and other agendas. If a scientist fails to deliver research that meets funder approval then that scientist can and will be cut off from future funding and their career negatively impacted. As such, there is a strong incentive to deliver to their employer what they want to hear.
These funding incentives end up perverting research in what is called the replication crisis, as previously discussed here. Due to lopsided funding incentives most studies can’t be replicated. There’s also a revolving door between government and scientific institutions, so the motivation to advance political agendas instead of following actual science is enormous. Curtis Yarvin wrote more than a decade ago how the centralization of science to advance the Manhattan Project worked as a one-off, but it also served as a corrupting influence that subjected future scientific research to government dictate. Indeed, the government’s role in funding certain development lines is omnipresent; even as federal R&D spend has decreased as a percentage share of GDP it’s indirect impact is increasingly felt:
We can see, for example, how there is extreme establishment funding, tax credits, loans, and other supports for electric cars, solar power and other alternative energy sources but not for nuclear energy, by far the cleanest and most efficient alternative to oil/gas. The likely reason for this is that the establishment can graft enormous sums of funds for themselves from pursuing highly inefficient non-nuclear energy whereas they would not be able to do so, at least not nearly to the same extent, if they pursued nuclear energy. In this way the establishment directs funds in one direction and away from another, and they do this with many technologies.
Limitations based on competition
Peter Thiel points out in his From Zero to One that competition drives profits to near zero, therefore any company is incentivized to escape competition by establishing monopoly. Rockefeller did this back in the day with railroads; car companies dismantled public transportation in cities so everyone would be forced to use cars (see the General Motors streetcar conspiracy); Mark Zuckerberg went on a buying spree, acquiring anything he saw as potential competition including WhatsApp and he tried buying up Snapchat as well.2 Bill Gates was famous in how he viciously undermined and destroyed his competition. Thomas Edison famously used underhanded tactics to try to smear alternate current in favor of his far inferior direct current, such as paying prisons to use alternate current for inmate executions. Meanwhile, good-hearted souls such as Nikola Tesla who wanted to improve humanity died penniless, his lab burned down by competitors and his ideas stolen by Edison, Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company and others.
Tesla before and after globohomo got through with him
In other words, large companies regularly absorb or strangle smaller ones as a way to retain their hold on monopoly, even if those smaller companies have outstanding ideas. And then once they achieve monopoly they fail to innovate further: exemplifying this perspective, Goldman Sachs famously stated that curing disease was not nearly as profitable as long-term disease management. (The polar opposite of the Goldman Sachs perspective was that of Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin who stated: “I found penicillin and have given it free for the benefit of humanity. Why should it become a profit-making monopoly of manufacturers in another country?”)
Fleming in his laboratory, c. 1943
Competition isn’t just meant in a monetary sense; it is also meant in a political sense. For example, Mike Benz points out that social media was originally developed in part to overthrow disfavored regimes abroad. These tactics were especially used in the Arab Spring. However, populist movements in the West seized on this technology to promote Trump, Bolsonaro, and Brexit; now seeing social media as a danger, the establishment then strangled the technology by unleashing unprecedented censorship measures. See also Julian Assange’s vision for the internet which he articulated in this piece about him, where he wanted a free, open, transparent internet with free-flowing ideas and information in order to enrich and enlighten humanity; instead he was brutally crushed by the establishment and the internet turned into a digital prison. Or see John Robb of Global Guerillas, who predicted that political technology would evolve in a networked fashion so that people could decide collectively who stood for their values; this never came to pass (at least not so far) because such technology would be against our elite’s interests.
Basically, the technologies which are advanced are control technologies which benefit our elites, along with profit maximization technologies which benefit existing mega-corporations. Technologies intended as freedom-enhancing (social media, Bitcoin, the internet itself) are skin-suited to become a sick, inverted facsimile of their intended purpose.
Indeed, James Delingpole and Guido Preparata argue in this interesting interview that any major philosophical, scientific or political figure of the past multiple-hundreds years has been controlled for alternative, nefarious purposes. The privately owned central banking system has been in place for multiple hundreds of years (also see here) and their first priority in setting up such a system is gaining control of the media and then the education complexes; they raise up what is beneficial to them and ignore or denigrate into the dirt anything including technology or public figures that they disfavor. For example Preparata believes that cold fusion, which his father worked on, has been brutally suppressed by the establishment so they can stay in power. Charles Darwin’s work was promoted because it could be used to discredit the alternative power structure of the Church.
Limitations based on legal and regulatory hurdles
Once monopolies or oligarchies are formed these companies can bribe politicians to implement legal and regulatory hurdles that will prevent research and development into new technologies. As explained here, quoting James Perloff:
It is natural enough to suppose that rich capitalists, who made their fortunes through the free market, would be proponents of that system. This, however, has not been the case historically. Free enterprise means competition: it means, in its purest form, that everyone has an equal opportunity to make it in the marketplace. But John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and other kingpins of the Money Trust were powerful monopolists. A monopolist seeks to eliminate competition. In fact, Rockefeller once said: “Competition is a sin.” These men were not free enterprise advocates…their coziness with Marxism (it is well to remember that Marx’s coauthor, Friedrich Engels, was a wealthy businessman) becomes more comprehensible when we realize that communism and socialism are themselves forms of monopoly…[Frederick C.] Howe explained: “These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any labor, either mental or physical, for its exploitation.
Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel discuss monopoly formation and societal limitations via regulatory limits here:
Technologies chosen and rates of technological adoption
So what technologies has the establishment focused on developing? Over the past thirty years the West’s general health has worsened, there have been limited advancements in cancer and heart disease research, education has taken a disastrous turn, the internet has consolidated into a few vast monopolies. Smartphone technology took off in 2012 and then rapidly stalled; each new iPhone basically just shuffles around the number of megapixels a little. 3D technology applications have been limited. Perhaps there are some slow advancements here and there but for the most part, developments seem to have stalled out.
Curiously, there is a very specific line of technological innovation that has been pursued, though, and I would argue quite deliberately. This line is as follows:
The introduction of the internet;
The capture of the internet/phones/smartphones after 9/11 by the NSA with Total Information Awareness;
The rollout of a high-powered 5G network to handle the massive amounts of data;
The introduction of blockchain technology followed by programmable central bank digital currencies (CBDCs); and
The advent of woke artificial intelligence.
If you combine these technologies you end up with the Mark of the Beast, which we will review shortly. But before going there, let’s discuss the delays in technological adoption by the public. It takes a lot of time before populations accept radically changing technologies. In the decent movie The PrestigeNikola Tesla, played by David Bowie, discusses this concept (starting at 45 seconds), where he states: “Society only tolerates one change at a time. The first time I tried to change the world I was hailed as a visionary. The second time? I was asked politely to retire.”
And so it is. Even so, though, the rate of technological adoption has sped up over time and continues to speed up. We can all feel this, I think, as part of Rene Guenon’s concept of the ongoing “solidification” of the world, previously discussed here. It relates also to the social science theory diffusion of innovation.
Here Pew Research and here The Economist comment on the rate of technology speeding up:
Here’s Harvard Business Review with a chart agreeing:
According to the World Economic Forum, looking at broadband access in 2000 just half of Americans had broadband access at home. In 2020 that number sits at more than 90%. Look at the rates over time of social media adoption:
As we see, the rate of technological adoption is increasing in line with Guenon’s theory of the solidification of the world. The rate of technological adoption is not yet instantaneous, but it is moving in that direction; the delay caused by technological adoption is why globohomo’s plans stretch out over decades, because they know it takes time for the public to absorb each step of the technology chain needed to bring about the final end result. The world has adopted the internet and social media and smart phones. It is in the process of adopting cryptocurrency (although it has been fundamentally corrupted by Tether) and use of woke artificial intelligence, the latter of which continues to get smarter. Gavin Newsom has publicly shared his excitement for a state-wide surveillance network being rolled out now. The war on cash is rapidly moving forward: “Cash usage has dipped below 20 percent of transactions, only seven points above direct bank transfers and only five above ‘other.’” N.S. Lyons points out how the West is converging with the China total surveillance model.
The technology path chosen is the precursor to a digital panopticon. The way it will work is basically as presciently described by G. Edward Griffith in The Creature from Jekyll Island, discussed here, which he wrote in 1994:
A pessimistic scenario of future events includes a banking crisis, followed by a government bailout and the eventual nationalization of all banks. The final cost is staggering and is paid with money created by the Federal Reserve. It is passed on to the public in the form of inflation.
Further inflation is caused by the continual expansion of welfare programs, socialized medicine, entitlement programs, and interest on the national debt. The dollar is finally abandoned as the de facto currency of the world. Trillions of dollars are sent back to the United States by foreign investors to be converted as quickly as possible into tangible assets. That causes even greater inflation than before. So massive is the inflationary pressure that industry and commerce come to a halt. Barter becomes the means of exchange. America takes her place among the depressed nations of South America, Africa, and Asia – mired together in economic equality.
Politicians seize upon the opportunity and offer bold reforms. The reforms are more of exactly what created the problem in the first place: expanded governmental power, new regulatory agencies, and more restrictions on freedom. But this time, the programs begin to take on an international flavor. The American dollar is replaced by a new UN money, and the Federal Reserve System becomes a branch operation of the IMF/World Bank.
Electronic transfers gradually replace cash and checking accounts. This permits UN agencies to monitor the financial activities of every person. A machine-readable ID card is used for that purpose. If an individual is red flagged by any government agency, the card does not clear, and he is cut off from all economic transactions and travel. It is the ultimate control.
Increasing violence in the streets from revolutionary movements and ethnic clashes provide an excuse for martial law. The public is happy to see UN soldiers checking ID cards. The police-state arrives in the name of public safety.
Eventually all private dwellings are taken over by the government as a result of bailing out the home-mortgage industry. Rental property is also taken, as former landlords are unable to pay property taxes. People are allowed to live in these dwellings at reasonable cost, or no cost at all. It gradually becomes clear, however, that the government is now the owner of all homes and apartments. People are living in them only at the pleasure of the government. They can be reassigned at any time.
Wages and prices are controlled. Dissidents are placed into work armies. There are no more autos except for the ruling elite. Public transportation is provided for the masses, and those with limited skills live in government housing within walking distance of their assigned jobs. Men have been reduced to the level of serfs who are subservient to their masters. Their condition of life can only be described as high-tech feudalism.
To translate into modern parlance, our elites will use a hyper-intelligent woke AI to scan all electronic communications, assign everyone social credit scores and cut anyone out from the economy, work and from life if their score is too low. The WEF publicly states via their occult “revelation of the method” that these social credit scores are coming to America by 2030. Programmable central bank digital currencies will be programmed so you can only use your funds in certain ways. Perhaps they will use a major crisis to implement this vision when the public panics (from World War 3 or a crashed economy, perhaps; most Americans are already destitute and living hand-to-mouth), or perhaps it will be rolled out more gradually like the war on cash. The requirements for a high social credit score will change over time to become more and more restrictive. You will likely be forced to take infinite untested mRNA COVID “vaccinations”, you won’t be able to leave your home without permission or to travel without permission, your carbon footprint will be closely monitored by the woke AI, you will only be able to buy meat occasionally, if that. And through these measures our elites eventually plan to separate themselves from humanity entirely; they will use the masses as guinea pigs for their experiments and as slaves while the elites live at a level of consumption never before seen in human history. This is where we are headed.
Let’s compare this concept of upcoming social credit scores with the Mark of the Beast from the Book of Revelation. Of course, the Book of Revelation was very likely intended as a violent vituperative against Rome for the destruction of the Second Temple (previously discussed in detail here). Christians thought the end of days was upon them and no one was projecting out thousands of years into the future, but no matter; the ideas continue to have a spiritual effect today, and there are levels of spirituality above our level of understanding.
Revelation 13:16-17: “And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.”
Revelation 14:9-10: “Then another angel, a third one, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of His anger; and he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.”
Revelation 13:7-10: “It was also given to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them, and authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation was given to him. All who dwell on the earth will worship him, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who has been slain. If anyone has an ear, let him hear. If anyone is destined for captivity, to captivity he goes; if anyone kills with the sword, with the sword he must be killed. Here is the perseverance and the faith of the saints.”
Revelation 20:4: “Then I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received the mark on their forehead and on their hand; and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years.”
There seems to be many similarities between the system being constructed now and what is described in Revelation. It also feels strange to be living at a time of peak human consumption and decadence followed by it’s collapse; what are the odds of it? It feels almost Matrix-like.
I’d like to end on a hopeful note. What a wonderful thing we have (at least for now) of being able to share our perspective with one another around the world, with like-minded people trying to grow one’s knowledge and spirituality. Emil Cioran commented on how free expression flow in eras of ideological uncertainty in his aphorism Felicity of Epigones:
Is there a pleasure more subtly ambiguous than to watch the ruin of a myth? What dilapidation of hearts in order to beget it, what excesses of intolerance in order to make it respected, what terror for those who do not assent to it, and what expense of hopes for those who watch it . . . expire! Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when beliefs wither, when their articles and their precepts slacken, when their rules collapse. Every period’s ending is the mind’s paradise, for the mind regains its play and its whims only within an organism in utter dissolution. The man who has the misfortune to belong to a period of creation and fecundity suffers its limitations and its ruts; slave of a unilateral vision, he is enclosed within a limited horizon. The most fertile moments in history were at the same time the most airless; they prevailed like a fatality, a blessing for the naive mind, mortal to an amateur of intellectual space. Freedom has scope only among the disabused and sterile epigones, among the intellects of belated epochs, epochs whose style is coming apart and is no longer inspired except by a certain ironic indulgence.
To belong to a church uncertain of its god—after once imposing that god by fire and sword—should be the ideal of every detached mind. When a myth languishes and turns diaphanous, and the institution which sustains it turns clement and tolerant, problems acquire a pleasant elasticity. The weak point of a faith, the diminished degree of its vigor set up a tender void in men’s souls and render them receptive, though without permitting them to be blind, yet, to the superstitions which lie in wait for the future they darken already. The mind is soothed only by those agonies of history which precede the insanity of every dawn.
And Carl Jung believes that we are entering, with great difficulty and pain, the Age of Aquarius where mankind’s spiritual abilities will be changed and uplifted in accordance with gnosis. Stephan Hoeller comments on Jung’s beliefs:
[Hoeller]: Speaking of Jung, it is no doubt known to many that his mysterious and long-awaited book Liber Novus (The Red Book) has been published at last. One of the principal disclosures to be found in this work is Jung’s belief that the Age of Aquarius is upon us, that significant changes in the consciousness of humanity are taking place, and that more of the same may be expected in the future. The “Aeon of Aquarius,” as Jung calls it, will eventually bring great psychological changes in its wake, amounting to a new religious consciousness which will differ greatly from the religious consciousness of the Piscean Age. It will manifest primarily in a new God-image that was very important to the ancient Gnostics and that in various ways has made its appearance throughout history in the esoteric tradition.
Two thousand and some years ago a new religion constellated itself in the Mediterranean region. With that religion came a new myth of redemption, centred in the image of Jesus, the Saviour God. Now Jung is telling us in The Red Book that the Aeon of Aquarius is upon us, and with it comes the new God-image of the God within. This image is of course none other than the God to whom St. Paul referred as “the Christ in you, our hope of glory.” It is also the indwelling Christ affirmed and venerated in the Gnostic tradition.
There is no doubt that Jung saw in the new Gnostic Renaissance, which began with the discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi library, a manifestation of his own prophecy in the then still secret Red Book. The connection of Jung’s prophecy with the tradition of Gnosis is unmistakable.
In his Red Book, Jung stated clearly that the task of the present and near future was “to give birth to the ancient in a new time,” and he clearly meant the Gnostic tradition is in fact that ancient thing to which he and others were giving birth.
I have spent a very large portion of my adult life studying and commenting upon the work of Jung and the Gnostic sacred writings. I should say, then, that humanity today is experiencing the rebirth of Gnosticism, and its principal God-image is being born in a new time. The esoteric as well as the exoteric implications of this process are momentous.
Hopefully this post is helpful in explaining where this globohomo system is rapidly heading, and offers hints at how we should develop our spiritual and intellectual strength in order to resist it.
Thanks for reading.
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1 All commercially released AI’s have rigid ideological guardrails in place to make them leftist or far-leftist. See here and here. Unfortunately these guardrails are likely to have strong inhibiting effects on proper thought functions for AI, but given their primary use will be to effectuate social credit scores that isn’t a problem.
2 The Zuckerberg/Facebook story is not properly understood by the public. DARPA’s Lifelog program, which was basically the same thing, was shut down the very day Facebook went online. See this story at Unlimited Hangout for the details. Basically, globohomo thought that a centralized, government run social media would run into too many privacy and constitutional issues, so they spun it off as a “private” corporation. This is the same thing that Peter Thiel (Facebook’s first outside investor!) did with Palantir, where it had too many privacy and constitutional concerns to remain a direct government spying operation. Sick stuff.
This post takes a look at the ideas and motivations of the nascent Western counter-elite1, arguing that there are certain off-limit topics whose prohibition actually undermines the objectives being sought.
This is a post that I thought would be about one thing, but turned into something totally different.
As I sat with a moderately liberal friend at lunch recently, he told me that he hated Trump – specifically, he hated the threat that Trump posed to “democracy” after January 6. He said American democracy is not perfect, but it is an agreed upon system and if one doesn’t trust the process and the experts that feed into it then only chaos will result. How is one to speak to someone like this, if one chooses to engage (as someone who voted for Trump but who thought his presidency was an ineffectual failure)? My angle for these sorts of things, even though I try not to engage with liberals at all – no one ever changes anyone else’s mind – is to focus on economics and math from a dispassionate, impersonal perspective. I explained to this friend that the gap between rich and poor has widened by extreme degrees since 1971, that there is no middle class at all anymore (a shitbox in a major metro area costs over a million dollars), and this happened in part because our elites printed infinite Federal Reserve loldollars resulting in massive inflation, imported in tens of millions of illegal immigrants to lower wages and change the demographics of the country and sent manufacturing overseas to China so they could skim profits off the top. 30% of the U.S. tax receipts currently go toward paying interest on the Federal debt alone, which is due to skyrocket in upcoming years:
What does this liberal friend expect to happen when white Middle America is destitute? Should they accept the endless “studies” of our so-called “experts” against their own lying eyes? Why have we shipped manufacturing abroad, printed Federal Reserve loldollars to infinity, and have unlimited illegal immigration? Our experts, media, and institutions have discredited themselves, because ultimately it comes down to who/whom – who is benefiting from the policies these organizations push? It is only a very small minority. The point, ultimately, is that Trump is merely a manifestation of these underlying issues; that the president has very little power as we saw in his utterly ineffectual first term, and that these issues will not be resolved by pushing the establishment’s foot down harder on Middle America’s head – that will only lead to further radicalization. I told my friend: if you want to de-fang the Trump phenomenon, it’s not hard to do – address the underlying issues that have led to Trump and to the Tea Party before him. Have the establishment cut back the monetary printing, bring back manufacturing to the United States, close the border, and prosecute some of the worst financial perpetrators. But of course this won’t happen. And even if it did, the demographic changes and the current financial state of the U.S. are so poor that even extreme action by Trump will not change things at this point – the situation has become metastatic. Unless one thinks Trump is prepared to deport 40 million illegals, jail or execute hundreds or thousands of “deep state” criminals and institute a debt jubilee wiping out the nation’s debt (like Israel used to do every 50 years in ancient times). What are the odds of that happening?
My friend walked away from the conversation disturbed, but I’m sure he forgot about whatever I said as soon as he left the restaurant. So it goes.
Codevilla as the gateway to Strauss
Angelo Codevilla agreed with this point; the Trump phenomenon was caused by the establishment’s failure to deal with underlying issues that they preferred to suppress and destroy rather than address head on. Codevilla had strong establishment credentials – he served as a staffer for the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence – even though as a Catholic he disagreed with the internationalist, post-WASP ethos of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Codevilla’s The Ruling Class (2010) was prescient and described in 2010 the rise of Trumpism years before it manifested itself. It’s thesis was that, in the style of James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution (1941) and Max Weber’s works, America’s ruling class is/was our unelected civil service that entrenched itself against the vicissitudes of public opinion, came to see themselves as separate, apart, and better than the masses over whom they ruled, and conspired to increase their power at the expense of the public. It was a uniparty that took the labels of “Democrat” and “Republican” but who together played a political game of kayfabe2 against the public as they sought to profit against them – this is why, for example, Democrats have embraced George W. Bush, who they used to consider to be a neo-conservative warmonger Devil in order to fight against the populism that Trump (at least in 2017) represented, Republican arch-villain Dick Cheney is voting for Kamala, and Bob Mueller – who ran a fake investigation against Trump for years over the nonsensical Russia collusion narrative to paralyze his administration from accomplishing anything – was a registered Republican, as was James Comey. The uniparty concept became widely accepted during the Trump era under the label of the “deep state”, but the “deep state” is simply this unelected civil service which voted 90.86% for Hillary and 4.09% for Trump in the 2016 general election. I previously discussed this unelected civil service here.
Codevilla discusses the ruling class in the below video if you want to see him speak:
In a 2019 interview with Tablet Magazine, he was asked about his book:
David Samuels3: In 2010, you wrote an article, which then became a book, in which you predicted the rise of someone like Donald Trump as well as the political chaos and stripping away of institutional authority that we’ve lived through since. Did you think your prediction would come true so quickly?
Angelo Codevilla: I didn’t predict anything. I described a situation which had already come into existence. Namely, that the United States has developed a ruling class that sees itself as distinct from the raw masses of the rest of America. That the distinction that they saw, and which had come to exist, between these classes, comprised tastes and habits as well as ideas. Above all, that it had to do with the relative attachment, or lack thereof, of each of these classes to government.
One of the things that struck me about your original piece was your portrait of the American elite as a single class that seamlessly spans both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Of course, yes. Not in exactly the same way, though; what I said was that the Democrats were the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners.
The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society.
The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.
Unfortunately Codevilla was killed in an “automotive accident” in September 2021 at the peak of the COVID scam even as he was bitterly criticizing both it4 and the official version of January 6. Was he murdered?
Anyway, a throwaway line in the book caught my eye and sent me down a different direction than what I was expecting: in the forward to the 2023 revised edition, Michael Anton (of Flight 93 election fame) casually noted that Codevilla was a student of Leo Strauss. This struck me, and I sat there pondering it for a moment. I’ve heard his name pop up repeatedly in reference to the neocons of the Bush administration, so why was Codevilla – who wasn’t in this group – also considered a Straussian? For example, according to the New York Times in 2003:
To intellectual-conspiracy theorists, the Bush administration’s foreign policy is entirely a Straussian creation. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, has been identified as a disciple of Strauss; William Kristol, founding editor of The Weekly Standard, a must-read in the White House, considers himself a Straussian; Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century, an influential foreign policy group started by Mr. Kristol, is firmly in the Strauss camp.
Furthermore, the Straussian links to the “dissident right” are everywhere. Bronze Age Pervert wrote his dissertation on Strauss (and whose book was reviewed by Anton in the Claremont Review of Books, giving him establishment legitimacy), the Claremont Institute was founded on Straussian ideals, Darren Beattie, Michael Millerman, and Greg Johnson studied with Straussians, while deep state homosexual operative and Palantir co-founder5 Peter Thiel (who was close with Angelo Codevilla6 and is connected to Claremont-affiliated Curtis Yarvin) wrote a 2007 essay called “The Straussian Moment” which he later had a 2019 chat about with the Hoover Institute. Thiel is also Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s prime backer as Mason Mohon discussed here. Say what you want about Thiel as a sociopathic predator, but he’s charming, polished, and articulate (reflected in his astrological profile):
So who was Strauss, why do both the neoconservatives and influential members of the populist right feel connected to his teachings, and ultimately what does this say about the nature of a potential counter-elite rising against the horrors of globohomo managerialism?
Let’s delve into these questions.
Strauss’s background
Strauss was born in 1899 in Prussia. According to the New York Times, “The child of middle-class Orthodox Jews, Strauss converted to Zionism while still in his teens, attended Martin Heidegger’s lectures at the University of Freiburg, and eventually crossed paths with some of the most influential European intellectual figures of the prewar period: Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojève, Hans-Georg Gadamer. In 1934, Strauss emigrated to Britain, where he wrote The Political Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Just before the outbreak of World War II, he joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research, a refuge for European intellectuals.” He received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1932 in France and then immigrated to the United States in 1937. In 1949 he became a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, holding the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship until he left in 1969.
Strauss in 1939; the general impression I get is one of concealment and kind of an autistic, alien vibe
He became interested in the intersection of free speech with mainstream society; according to Strauss each society had sacred truths that it believes and which would be quite dangerous for writers to publicly dispute (this reminds me of the quote, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”). As such, Strauss believed in reading historical texts esoterically; in other words, any dissident author would have to be circumspect about what they actually believed so they would not be persecuted, and one could look back on any historical text and try to interpret what the author actually intended. He interpreted works by Maimonides, Al-Farabi, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Plato’s discussions in the Phaedrusand the Republicin light of such beliefs. Furthermore, Strauss himself practiced esoteric writing and his works would have to be parsed by the initiated in order to be properly understood. In his 2007 essay, Thiel notes:
Strauss alludes to the dangers [regime critics] faced, by reminding us of the warning Goethe had Faust deliver to his assistant: “The few who understood something of men’s heart and mind, who were foolish enough not to restrain their full heart but to reveal their feeling and their vision to the vulgar, have ever been crucified and burned.”….
There are no short cuts in Strauss. The philosopher practices what he preaches, and so one will search in vain in Strauss’s writings for a systematic statement of the hidden truth. Perhaps Strauss’s only incremental concession to the would-be philosopher lies in the fact that his writings are transparently esoteric and hard to understand, in contradistinction to the past writers who wrote seemingly straightforward books whose truly esoteric nature was therefore even more obscured. “The open agenda of the Straussians,” declares Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield (and himself a Straussian), is limited to “reading the Great Books for their own sake,” and does not include offering dumbed-down summaries.
In a similar vein, George Mason professor Tyler Cowen uses the term “Straussian” as an adjective to describe an approach to reading that is characterized by an emphasis on attention to detail, an appreciation for the complexity of ideas, and a focus on underlying principles and hidden meanings. He uses this term all the time.
The Bloom and Jaffa quarrel
Allan Bloom, a homosexual who later died of AIDS, adopted Strauss’s esoteric approach to writing in his famous “conservative” book Closing of the American Mind. On the surface he appealed to conservative Americans, but his book contained a deeply subversive message which was picked up by his followers. Per Tablet magazine:
On the surface, Bloom offered Reagan’s America a defense of the literary canon and old-fashioned morality against the “relativism” of the post-’60s left. But perspicacious readers—including Bloom’s former student, the queer theorist Eve Sedgwick—would notice he argued that the true pedagogue awakens intelligent young men to free thinking by inculcating contempt for democracy and mass culture, and that this awakening includes a (homo)erotic element. Closing of the American Mind was misrecognized by ordinary readers in something of the way that the Village People’s ode to gay cruising, “YMCA,” became the anthem of dorky straight people at sporting events. For all the absurdity of this situation, however, Bloom’s bestseller served a philosophical aim, directing a minority of readers to his studies of Plato’s Republic and Symposium, which are pinnacles of philosophical and political insight.
Bloom was opposed by his former friend and fellow Straussian Harry Jaffa, whose followers went on to form the Claremont Institute. This opposition was along philosophical lines (i.e. valuing virtue of the population vs. the maintenance of constitutional norms, America as grounded in ancient philosophy vs. built on modern philosophers like Hobbes and Locke) as well as the familiar social divide in the Republican Party (grassroots vs. elites). According to the New Republic:
Over time Jaffa became involved in grassroots activism in the Republican Party, authoring the famous lines that Barry Goldwater uttered in 1964, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” As he became involved in right-wing activism, Jaffa gravitated towards social conservatism, praising the religious right, appearing on Pat Robertson’s show, and emerging as vocal homophobe (he argued in 1990 that “sodomy is, in the decisive respect, as morally offensive as incest and rape”). This put him in collision with his former friend Bloom, who was a closeted gay man. In a nasty review of Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987) published in the Straussian journal Interpretation, Jaffa wrote that through AIDS “God and nature have exacted terrible retribution” on gays.
In addition to the philosophical and social divides, there was also a stylistic divide among the Straussians. Strauss had noted that Nietzsche criticized his cautious, academic, esoteric approach:
Strauss himself observed that his own “Platonic” approach to politics—of external caution and esoteric injunctions to inner nonconformity—had been powerfully critiqued by Friedrich Nietzsche a generation before him. Nietzsche, in Strauss’ account, noted that Plato’s followers had failed to preserve the independence either of their own thinking or of the Greek city-states. Both intellectual and political liberty were subsumed, eventually….In Nietzsche’s telling, either the philosopher speaking to the public fails to capture its attention, and is thus unable to lead it, or, by lowering his own thought to the level of the herd, he does capture its attention—only to be captured by his audience in turn….
Instead, Nietzsche recommended an over-the-top style that would be treated as easily dismissed foolishness by the authorities, but still capture the hearts and minds of those who could perceive the underlying message. This style was adopted by Costin Alamariu/Bronze Age Pervert who Tablet Magazine called “a rogue disciple of Bloom”7 (echoed by Damon Linker):
In contrast to Plato’s failed strategy of accommodation, Nietzsche implied that “free spirits” should adopt the pose not of the orator or preacher who address the multitude, but rather of the fool who scorns it. They should adopt wild, perverse rhetorical disguises to incite uncomprehending shock among the many—and thought among the few. The outlandish statements, self-contradictions, and incessant, boorish humor that Nietzsche used in his writing, Strauss insisted, conceal the depths of his thinking from all but the free spirits. Moreover, they are also intended to have an effect on a class of readers sensitive enough to be enlivened by such prose, but not insightful enough for philosophy. This intermediary human type was described by Strauss as the “gentlemen,” and by Alamariu as “aristocrats.”
We will return to Alamariu shortly.
“East Coast” vs. “West Coast” Straussians
In practice, followers of Strauss eventually fell into one of two schools of thought:
East Coast Straussians who, to the extent they were willing to become politicized instead of merely reading ancient texts esoterically, were basically Jewish neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Richard N. Perle, and Ben Shapiro who wanted to wage war in the Middle East on behalf of Israel – but they had to hide their beliefs esoterically by referring to other, broader concepts like the “War on Terror” because the public would not accept expending huge amounts of resources and lives for the actual underlying cause. According to the New York Times, “Strauss’s own experience — he witnessed Russian pogroms as a child and barely escaped the Holocaust — alerted him to the perils of history. “When we were brought face to face with tyranny — with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past — our political science failed to recognize it,” Strauss wrote in his classic On Tyranny. He believed, as he once wrote, that ”to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations.” There’s a reason that some Bush strategists continue to invoke Strauss’s name.” The East Coast Straussians have been wildly discredited after the abysmal failures of Afghanistan and the Iraq war, although they remain entirely unpunished and they are trying to crawl back into power by pushing for another war with Iran; and
West Coast Straussians exemplified by Harry Jaffa and including Charles Kesler, Codevilla, Larry P. Arnn (president of Hillsdale College), and Ken Masugi (a legal scholar at Johns Hopkins University) who believed that America has been ruined by the managerial state and that an internal revolution on behalf of Middle America is necessary in order to course correct. They, too, would have to write esoterically because they couldn’t actually call for open revolution or rebellion without risks of grave blowback from America’s rulers. The West Coast Straussians saw themselves as fit to be the rulers under the new regime; as the “intellectual vanguards” of the counter-elite, like Plato’s vision in The Republic, they would want to serve as philosophical kings to lead America in a radically new direction. For example, Curtis Yarvin wants to turn America into a corporation with shareholders and a CEO, the latter akin to the president but with more power8 (he doesn’t seem to understand that this has already been tried and failed in modern-day Russia, with Putin and his cronies looking at the country as a fiefdom to be used for maximum exploitation).
Let’s delve into this counter-elite further.
The counter-elite
Basically, the concept of the counter-elite is as follows: the masses never seize power on their own; it is always a dissatisfied counter-elite, using the masses as a political cudgel, that pose the greatest risk to the elites. The counter-elite forms naturally over time because too many elites form in a society chasing too few elite positions. This isn’t a big deal in times of economic expansion when out-of-power elites can focus their energies in other directions, but in times of economic contraction it becomes a major issue. The elites who failed to secure power, embittered and growing in number, seek to secure power using alternative methods – this is Turchin’s idea of intra-elite competition, recounted by Theophilus Chilton here, where he states: “The old post-WWII consensus that focused on “left vs. right” in the sense of “Communism vs. classical liberalism/Neo-Con globohomoism” is rapidly being replaced by a new paradigm of populism vs. regime elitism”. A nation-state counter-elite is nascent but is currently forming, headed by a quasi-populist (Trump) and his choice of Vice President (J.D. Vance) along with certain tech elites who realize America is a sinking ship and want to course correct before it’s too late (if it’s not already too late). They possess a perspective of anti-managerialism, pro-strongman rule against the oligarchy, and some degree of anti-egalitarianism. As mentioned in footnote 1, this is a nation-state counter-elite forming, which is still subservient to the worldwide globohomo control grid; there is no counter-elite forming at the higher levels of power.
Additionally, this concept or elite and counter-elite is not meant in a moral, ethical or values manner. Rather, it is meant in terms of a political elite who perhaps have the ability to challenge the rule of the existing elite. This counter-elite is as corrupt from the get-go as the elite it seeks to replace; Peter Thiel, for example, is a regular at the Bilderberg meetings and his Palantir regularly spies on U.S. citizens on behalf of the establishment, even as he criticizes certain aspects of it. Ernst Junger stated when he was 100 years old: “The sociological definition of elite is already an indication of the corruption of the concept. A warning, for me, to no longer trust even the elites, but now only the great loners.” Or as Rurik Skywalker states, “Extroverts simply cannot be truth-tellers. It is anathema to them because the truth incurs high social penalties.”
Anyway, Billionaire Psycho discusses this rising counter-elite here, where he states:
On one side, you have Silicon Valley, the Pentagon, Wall Street, Erik Prince’s mercenary veterans, Zionists, and the Trump MAGA coalition. These are groups with some kind of interaction with the real world; industries and professions and individuals which suffer immediate, measurable physical consequences when mistakes occur. The new counterelite. On the other side, an ideologically poisoned coalition has assembled in favor of continuing the process of managed decline, recruiting anyone who is insulated from physical reality — NGOs, the State Department, career bureaucrats, Email Caste white-collar professionals, wine aunts, Big Pharma, Hollywood, news media, Google, Antifa, teachers and librarians, the judicial system.
These parties are based on factions, not principles; they are made up of Bolshevik Jews plus the managerial class plus the non-white poor on one side (Sailer’s “coalition of the fringes”) vs. Zionist Jews and the white working class (white pro-union Democrats shifted to Republican over the past few decades, but other than that the coalitions have been stable). Both parties are highly influenced by AIPAC. RFK Jr. is the latest addition to the counter-elite coalition, and Elon Musk has become much more vocal in support of it as Daniel D discussed here. One can see the elite split reflected on a smaller level in the split between the East Coast and West Coast Straussians where the latter are increasingly seized by a simple Nietzschian will-to-power dynamic, exemplified by Alamariu per the above Tablet article:
Ironically, one of the critical passages in Alamariu’s dissertation concerns a moment in a Platonic dialogue when Socrates seems to best his interlocutor Callicles, whose views anticipate Alamariu’s own. Callicles calls for an aggressive, virile pursuit of open political power in the name of philosophical superiority. Socrates warns that such a course, in fact, will show Callicles to be the same type of person as an effeminate “catamite” who is guided only by his own pleasure.
Alamariu performs some awkward hermeneutic wrangling to argue that Callicles, “shamed” into silence by this comparison, should in fact be understood to represent what Plato took to be the better argument….In our time, the social context for either of the Straussian solutions—rational collective action guided by political rhetoric or authentic private thought at a safe distance from public life—appears to be disappearing, if it is not already absent. In such an era, discursive games of seduction as practiced by Bloom and Alamariu may still be bring attention and profit to those who play them, but seem capable neither of defending nor truly endangering our decadent regime.
This last point is, I think, a crucial one. I have always been viscerally repulsed by Alamariu/Bronze Age Pervert; it is similar to the same repulsion I felt immediately toward the Q movement. It was a psychic feeling of fundamental dishonesty, even though I disliked the forced pidgin language he used and his casual flippancy. Roger Morrison has a very strong takedown of the BAP vitalist philosophy here.9
The red lines of the counter-elite
This brings me to the main point of this article: both sets of elites are quite pro-Israel and pro-Jewish, and both sides maintain a strict zero tolerance policy toward discussing Jewish exceptionalism. As Jews comprise only 2% of the country, this issue is reflected in extreme Jewish over-representation in over-financializing the West, opening its borders and serving at the forefront of its leftist movements, along with serving within both Democrats and Republican administrations as discussed previously here:
Per the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Journal, and Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jews serving within the Biden administration include Antony Blinken, Secretary of State; David Cohen, Deputy CIA Director; Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury; Merrick Garland, Attorney-General; Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence; Ron Klain, Chief of Staff; Eric Lander, Director, Office of Science & Technology Policy; Rachel Levine, Deputy Secretary, Health and Human Services; Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security; Anne Neuberger, Director of Cybersecurity, National Security Agency; Wendy Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State; Jeff Zients, COVID-19 Coordinator; Rochelle Walensky, Director, Center for Disease Control; Jared Bernstein, member, Council of Economic Advisors; Douglas Emhoff, second gentleman, husband of US Vice President Kamala Harris. And of course there’s infamous, bloodthirsty neocon Victoria Nuland, currently serving as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, who specializes in causing tremendous chaos and upheaval abroad….
It’s not just limited to Democrats, of course. Among the Trump administration, also per the above Jerusalem Post link, there were also a large number of Jews. Among them included Jared Kushner, son-in-law and senior advisor; Elliot Abrams Special representative for Venezuela, then Iran; David Friedman, Ambassador to Israel; Jason Greenblatt, Special Representative for International Negotiations, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury; Stephen Miller, Senior Advisor, Policy; Gary Cohn, Director, White House National Economic Council; Reed Cordish, Assistant to the President, Intragovernmental and Technology Initiatives; Avrahm Berkowitz, Deputy Advisor to the President; Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General; Elan Carr, Special Envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism; Ellie Cohanim, Deputy Special Envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism; Jeffrey Rosen, Attorney General; Morgan Ortagus, Spokesperson, State Department; David Shulkin, Secretary of Veterans Affairs; Lawrence Kudlow, Director National Economic Council; Ivanka Trump, daughter, Advisor to the President; John Eisenberg, National Security Council Legal; Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; Len Khodorkovsky, Deputy Secretary of State and Senior Advisor to the US Special Representative for Iran.
The following image by Academic Agent highlights this point among the approved dissident counter-elite network:
As long as one doesn’t cross the red line around an honest discussion of some pretty deep problems within the Jewish community and one stays away from discussing the Rothschild central bank ownership and the structure of the modern world, along with the deliberate falsehoods of the prevailing World War 2 narrative (which Tucker Carlson apparently approached for the first time in his recent interview with Darryl Cooper) where the war was set up from the get-go by the globohomo overclass, and the inappropriate role of the Holocaust as the foundation origin myth of the West, one can fairly easily key into this network in order to supercharge one’s viewership counts, connections and sinecures as long as you have some degree of talent, a strong work ethic and you’re friendly and articulate. But you must tow the party line and respect the red lines. This is why Jasun Horsley argues, “My view is simple to the point of seeming simple-minded to some: if a disseminator of “dissidence” has a platform of more than 100K followers—or the equivalent in terms of being centered in the “alt-media”—I generally don’t waste my time on them….I am not saying they must be a “shill” to have such high numbers behind them. But, at the very least, they can’t be rocking any serious boats.” Rurik Skywalker agrees. Taking it further, James Delingpole and Guido Preparata argue in this interesting interview that any major philosophical, scientific or political figure of the past multiple-hundreds years has been a controlled agent for alternative, nefarious purposes.
This “red line” is also reflected in the New World Order caste system / Oppression pyramid, where the Holocaust is used as a shield to prevent any criticism of Jews as anti-semitic:
I want to emphasize something here: my intention here is as a callout for Jews to do soul-searching and a strategic course correction; it is intended to be helpful. As I argued in my article about the complicated relationship between the central bank owners and the Jewish people, the central bank owners use the Jewish people as a bulwark against the population’s criticisms of central bank financial parasitism; they can deflect and claim that it is “anti-semitism.” The central bank owners give the Jewish community elements of power and preferment for assuming this rule, but they don’t really care about them. At the same time, the second order effects of this setup is disastrous long-term for the Jewish people as a whole, because there are only three likely endings of current trends:
The golem turns on its master: The children of the endless non-white masses brought in after the 1965 Immigration Act (which Jewish organizations from the left to the right universally supported) are increasingly anti-semitic, refuse to see differences between whites and Jews with respect to intersectional politics, and ultimately support Israel’s destruction and discrimination against Jews (we are already seeing this among the non-white Democrat youth and it’s reaction to 10/7);
The redneck rebellion: The declining white majority turns anti-semitic and white nationalist, finding the ethnic co-solidarity it lacked when it was such a large majority of the population and when economic times were better; or
Rothschild victory: The Rothschilds and their allies simply win across the board, turning the world including most Jews into neo-feudal, ultra-poor serfs or exterminating them entirely; their intention was seen pretty clearly when they force-vaxxed Israel with the untested experimental mRNA poison more than any other country in the world.
If there is going to be an alternative to one of these futures, the Jewish community must wrestle with its unparalleled will-to-power and it being wildly overrepresented in over-financializing the West, opening its borders and serving at the forefront of all leftist movements, which is paradoxically against it’s long-term interest as they almost universally love living as minorities within white Christian countries which are all being destroyed now. But the only way this will happen is if the Jewish elites or counter-elites recognize these issues and become willing to honestly wrestle with them.Banning free speech, criminalizing anti-semitism, instituting mass censorship will ultimately only have the opposite effect of what is intended: as I told my friend at the start of the essay, the way the temperature of a conflict is lowered is by addressing the underlying legitimate complaints, not through censorship which will only make it worse.So if the Straussian West Coast counter-elite of Thiel, Vance, Moldbug, BAP, Anton, etc. have the Jewish people’s best interests in mind, the way they would show this would be to start publicly wrestling with the setup of this modern system as it is construed and not hide behind silence and censorship.And that would require Jews allying with western civilization for real moving forward as opposed to conditionally, the latter of which has been their historical demotic strategy. In practical terms, at minimum, it would require an end to America’s open borders policies and strong reversal thereof, an end to or at least complete nationalization with transparent auditing of the Federal Reserve (and audit of the Pentagon), a debt jubilee (national debt cancellation), prosecution of the worst globohomo offenders, and removal of the Holocaust as blood libel against white Western civilization.
I see very little sign of this happening at this time; however, the Jewish shock at the overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian non-white reaction to 10/7 may be the very first sign of it. But as Milton Friedman explained and as Gilad Atzmon pointed out, time is running out as anti-semitism increases across the board from both the far-right and far-left.10 One thing is for sure: doubling down on the censorship tactics and ignoring these issues will only make them worse.
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1 The term “counter-elite” used herein is meant as nation-state elites. Nation-state elites are lower in the hierarchy of power than the international elites, which is outlined here. There are no counter-elites at the higher levels.
2 The fact or convention of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic.
3 Samuels’ has an interesting theory about collapse of empire in the article. He states: “Every student of history has their own theory about how and why empires fall. My theory is this: The wealth of any empire flows disproportionately to the capital, where it nourishes the growth, wealth, and power of the ruling elite. As the elite grows richer and more powerful, the gulf between the rulers and the ruled widens, until the beliefs and manners of the elite bear little connection to those of their countrymen, whom they increasingly think of as their clients or subjects. That distance creates resentment and friction, in response to which the elite takes measures to protect itself. The more wealth and power the elite controls, the more insulation it must purchase. Disastrous mistakes are hailed as victories or are made to appear to have no consequences at all, in order to protect the aura of collective infallibility that protects ruling class power and privilege.
What happens next is pretty much inevitable in every time and place—Spain, France, Great Britain, Moghul India, you name it: Freed from the laws of gravity, the elite turns from the hard work of correct strategizing and wise policymaking to the much less time-consuming and much more pleasant work of perpetuating its own privileges forever, in the course of which endeavor the ruling elite is revealed to be a bunch of idiots and perverts who spend their time prancing around half naked while setting the territories they rule on fire. The few remaining decent and competent people flee this revolting spectacle, while the elite compounds its mistakes in an orgy of failure. The empire then collapses.”
4 From the NYT article: “Dr. Codevilla was particularly incensed over the government’s response to the pandemic. He considered Covid a public-health threat on par with a bad strain of the flu, but said that the ruling class, including Dr. Anthony Fauci — whom he called a “deep state fraud” — had used it as an excuse for an unprecedented power grab.”
5 Which exists to spy on the population on behalf of the government. How can such an operative be considered a “dissident” or “populist” in anything but a clown world?
6 See his obit for Codevilla: “One of the last people to be “elite” in the sense of uniting excellence with responsibility; one of the most prescient in diagnosing the diseases of “the ruling class” in America that has become merely entitled rather than truly elite; a well-connected Catholic in a Protestant country—Angelo Codevilla was a man both complex and uncommonly wise. He will be much missed, for his inimitable personality and for the model he presented—difficult but not impossible to imitate—of a gentleman and a scholar.”
7 And a likely homosexual: “Rather, such people must be produced and perfected through an erotic education that aims at making young men more vigorous, physically perfect, and hostile to our supposedly feminized, egalitarian society (Alamariu, like Bloom, is frankly uninterested in women). Alamariu’s project involves a combination of erotic pedagogy, in the vein of the ancient Greeks and of Bloom, along with a program of eugenics, the outlines of which he only sketches but which resemble no less the ideal city of Plato’s Republic than the biopolitics of the Third Reich.”
To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state’s profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers.
This business’s customers are its residents. A profitably-managed neocameralist state will, like any business, serve its customers efficiently and effectively. Misgovernment equals mismanagement.
9 In part, he writes: “What this basically does is reduce all political questions to the projection of an ideal self-image. Indeed, there is a tried and true script. The vitalist will continually repeat the following cliches: “human excellence,” “Faustian man,” “superior man,” “conquering the stars,” “reaching to infinity,” and so on. Whenever someone raises a troublesome practical question, the vitalist immediately retreats to his happy place where all of our problems are simple: just put 12 superior men in a room and heaven on earth will be done. As to why these 12 superior men never end up congregating in that room, it is because the inferior masses are holding them down. This becomes the canned answer that the vitalist delivers to every problem. The vitalist is not actually a political person at all. He is apolitical. Worse than that: he is anti-political. After all, politics is the world of nomos, and by definition superiority cannot thrive in a nomos. Every single political question becomes nothing but a solipsistic aggrievement. It’s always “great men” being “obstructed,” “held down,” “longhoused,” or whatever. Not a single word of the state, of administration, of management, of actual politics.
The trouble with vitalism is that its social ideal not only fails to find practical application in the year 2023, it fails to find practical application even in the year 1023. The whole ethos of a feudal aristocracy with its strong emphasis on kinship, inheritance, primogeniture, estate administration and the centrality of the patriarchal household is utterly at odds with the Männerbund ideal presupposed by vitalism….
The vitalist will engage in endless and futile grandstanding about how “the Aryan man can do anything” and proudly declare that he is too good for the society he lives in. Precisely because he is too good and no one deserves him, he will do nothing. Vitalism is, in many ways, the opiate of the right-wing.”
Friedman argues that the free market and competition is good for the Jews. Yet he is also adamant that government intervention is a disaster that leads to anti-semitism and other forms of institutional bigotry. If Friedman’s model is valid, then Jews in the West had better brace themselves, for Western governments are currently desperately intervening in the markets in an attempt to slow down the inevitable collapse of what is left of our economy and relative wealth.
If Friedman’s model is correct and intervention is indeed bad for the Jews, then anti-Jewish bigotry could be imminent, especially considering the gigantic bailout intervention schemes put up by states in an attempt to save what remains of the Western economy.
But it goes further – it is also very clear that the bailout schemes are there to amend a colossal disaster caused largely by the endorsement of Friedman’s own ideology. We are all paying a very heavy price for free enterprise, zero (governmental) intervention, lack of regulation, hard capitalism – in general, the ideologies Friedman was so enthusiastic about.
This post compares the behavior of humanity to that of slave-making ant colonies, arguing that globohomo wants to create a permanent overlord-slave relationship that cannot be altered or undone, and that such a setup may have its origins in the human psyche itself.
In the novel The Road by otherwise-overrated Cormac McCarthy, the unnamed protagonist tries to survive with his son in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Cannibal rape gangs roam the landscape because the food and water supplies are irradiated and poisoned, and there is a perpetual post-nuclear haze which blocks out the sun and keeps crops from growing. The novel was made into a grim but pretty good movie.
Is this our future? Westerners certainly seemed to be much more worried about it during the hayday of the Cold War: boomers grew up conducting nuclear fire drills, hiding under their desks at school, and there were alarming films released such as The War Game(1966), The Day After(1983) and Threads (1984) which fanned the flames further. There were a few reported close incidents such as the 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash1 and the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident, saved by the actions of one Stanislav Petrov.
Of course there were other close calls like the Cuban Missile Crisis; see here for a longer list. Perhaps the threat of nuclear Armageddon had positive effects for society; it likely reduced societal recklessness, encouraging belief in God, gave pause to the dangers of direct war between nuclear-armed powers, and allowed the country to be more prepared — in terms of fallout shelters, food reserves, emergency plans — in case something did actually happen. Look at us now, drunk on arrogance and kool-aid as America, led by the intellectual progeny of Victoria Nuland, brings war to Russia’s doorstep in a country named “Borderlands” in Russian and which maybe 10% of Americans could pick out on a map.
Still, if one sees the world as controlled by the central bank owners as I do, global nuclear war isn’t on the table — well, it is as a contingency plan if populists get close to overthrowing the Rothschild financial squid, but it isn’t a primary or secondary goal. Author Guido Giocomo Preparata – whose top-notch work on how Germany was set up for destruction in World War 2 and how the Catholic Church was skinsuited in the post-war era I previously covered – has been studying the behavior of slave-making ants, which he believes sheds light on humanity’s own relationship with overlord parasites. Here’s an interview where he talks about it:
Preparata believes that mankind is a kind of ant-colony where humanity’s natural instincts and psychologies are geared toward establishing slave-master overlord relationships where the overlords exploit the vast majority of human slaves, at least since the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago (before that the nature of small roaming hunter-gatherer tribes forced humanity to remain relatively egalitarian). It is the same in every society with the same pyramid-like structure with a tiny number of people at the top regardless of religion or ideology. Jeremy Irons spoke about this in a great scene from 2008 financial collapse movie Margin Call:
The only difference is that our true leaders hide in the shadows behind corrupted actors acting as politicians in a gross simulacra of so-called “democracy”. In a “democracy” those who shape public opinion are our rulers, so look at who owns the levers of mass communication to find the man behind the curtain. A Forest Rebel+ has a great post explaining how this works via Rene Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World.
Back to slave-making ants. Per Wiki:
Slave-making ants or slaver ants are brood parasites that capture broods of other ant species to increase the worker force of their colony. After emerging in the slave-maker nest, slave workers work as if they were in their own colony, while parasite workers only concentrate on replenishing the labor force from neighboring host nests, a process called slave raiding.
The slave-making ants are specialized to parasitize a single species or a group of related species, and they are often close relatives to their hosts, which is typical for social parasites. The slave-makers may either be permanent social parasites (thus depending on enslaved ants throughout their whole lives) or facultative slave-makers. The behavior is unusual among ants but has evolved several times independently.
Polyergus lucidus returning from raid on Formica incerta. Two of the latter already incorporated into the mixed colony are visible to the right of the nest entrance.The slave-makers of the genera Polyergus have several adaptations for slave-raiding including sickle-shaped mandibles.
For more about slave-making ants, see this Nature article and the following video:
Guido states in the above interview:
I envision society as ant hills. I’ve studied a lot about slave-making ants from a sociological viewpoint and I’ve learned a tremendous amount; I’m still studying it. And the analogies are fantastic, just formidable. And people say “excuse me, we’re not insects” and I’m thinking “well, yeah, I know that; nevertheless, all the more-so in that with this change that we’re witnessing and afraid of, AI and these new transformations that we’re undergoing, for me, the plan – and this is why I see it in an anarchistic fashion – the plans of the people in charge with names and addresses who are governing these machines is to transform evermore our societies into mechanized tributaries and to insectify our lives as much as possible…The technology streamlines and regiments all that; with all the human cry about gender theory it’s pretty plain what they want to do and it started something like fifty years ago with the campaigns for abortion. It’s about sexual management and procreation. In terms of their nutritional requirements of the elites which is in a state sense a parasitical body, they need a lot for this transfer of resources but according to their needs and according to the techno-structural needs of this elite, they don’t need that many of us working for them after all and they do not know what do with all of this excessive flesh and apparently…[offering] contraceptive and abortion to curtail this massive flesh they don’t know what to do with is not enough. In long-term and big-plan horizons, they really want to re-engineer the whole thing, this is why they need to break-down the familial nucleus and the procreation roles….deep down what they want is to get rid of this problem. They just don’t need that many people to cater to them. Technology serves that, and they don’t need scientific geniuses; they need highly skilled physicists and mathematicians to uphold and discover technologies that sustain the distribution of resources from the bottom to the top as they are ever-perfecting them….
He goes on from there.
Under this system of parasitism the central bank owners need a docile, malleable population to work so they can parasite off their production. They want to decrease the population’s average IQ and increase its passivity over time so they ultimately reach a point where no rebellion is possible and so they won’t have to use force to maintain control (hence the beauty and elegance of the upcoming CBDC solution, where globohomo can modify your behavior using programmable currency or cut you out of the financial system entirely with a push of a button). They can then work on evolving the overclass using genetic engineering while the gray 80 IQ masses toil away basically as an increasingly separate and distinct species. And they don’t need too many workers either as technology increasingly replaces humans with robots for industrial output. Humanity is correctly seen as sucking down too much of rapidly declining world natural resources. But this is a fine balancing act: if they push against the human population too hard at once it may cause a rebellion, but a concurrent danger is systemic collapse where people become too listless and would rather do nothing, even die, than work for the overlords.
Therefore, what they want is a managed decline of the quality of the human population. Global nuclear war is too risky, too uncontrollable to be a desired outcome. If most of humanity dies suddenly who would the central bank owners parasite from? And who’s to say they would retain control amongst the ruins? That’s not say the possibility is entirely off the table though; if the masses wake up and rebel against them they would almost certainly rather nuke everything than give up control. This is why the ultra rich are building nuclear bunkers, most recently Mark Zuckerberg, and why Peter Thiel is attempting to prepare a well-stocked bunker in New Zealand. Better for them to have a backup in place in case this unprecedented experiment somehow goes awry.
Nice plans for a doomsday bunker where Thiel can engage in endless homosexual sodomy as he rides out the Apocalypse
An example from history shows the mentality of our overlords. Nicholas Biddle, the head of the Second Bank of the United States, in his 1832-1836 Bank War against Andrew Jackson severely crashed the U.S. economy as a point of leverage against Jackson, blaming him for the economic crash that Biddle himself deliberately caused. This strategy came within a hair of working when congress censured Jackson. It is this combination of ruthlessness and persistence that makes one think that humanity is destined for the parasite-host relationship; the pristine, untouched, bountiful U.S. rejected three central bank parasite attempts (the Bank of North America and then the two Banks of the United States) before it succeeded on the fourth attempt with the Federal Reserve; how can one remain alert for decades or centuries against this constant, endlessly pressing threat? Theodore Atkinson tells a story about the Devil and a knight opposing him until he let down his guard which highlights this point.
Perhaps this central bank parasitism was simply inevitable, as there seems to be nothing strong in this reality opposing it. Does the Demiurge animate their behavior and this world is simply Hell, that we are being punished for our actions in another realm? Schopenhauer thought so. Preparata seems to agree in this conversation…
I hope that our discussion of these thorny, difficult, and dark issues can perhaps set a germ in society’s consciousness to try to come up with answers to the root causes of all these problems. Preparata thinks we need a currency with negative interest rates (i.e. to tie perishable money to perishable goods) reminiscent of the inter-war German Worgl experiment; the core problem to him stems from society tying imperishable money to perishable goods, allowing wealth to be hoarded to extremely deleterious effect. His hope is that such a community can be set up away from the prying eyes of globohomo, much as independent non-slave making ant colonies can exist near slave-making ant colonies with the right approach, perhaps something akin to the Amish or Orania where they are generally left alone because they do not use outside labor, they are community oriented and they aren’t sitting on delicious natural resources which globohomo wants to extract.
Lastly, Preparata is in the process of setting back up his website. You can find his incredible book on World War 2, Conjuring Hitler, here with the newest edition here, which Amazon is in the process of trying to ban.
Thanks for reading.
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1 “Information declassified since 2013 has showed that one of the bombs was judged by nuclear weapons engineers at the time to have been only one safety switch away from detonation.”
“If something is free, you’re the product.” – Richard Serra, 1973
Every now and then, although less often these days, I’ll see a right-wing blog post or article about the wonders of “nofap” – i.e., abstaining from masturbation and online pornography in the hope of self-improvement so that one can land a high-value mate. The argument is that nofap greatly increases one’s energy and mental clarity, as well as it’s the religiously correct thing to do, and these articles offer advice on how you can improve your life in a similar way. There are websites and communities for “nofappers” and which has a negatively-biased Wiki entry here. The nofap advice articles are similar to diet and exercise advice from the right, of which I bandwagoned a post about (and blamed vegetable oils and the end of mass smoking for spiking obesity rates; Dr Mathew Maavak also touts some of the benefits of nicotine use here).
She’s just around the corner, friend.
I’m not really interested in debating the merits of fap or nofap; pornography has been around for thousands of years (see the graffiti at Pompeii, which included some funny messages), although nothing like how intense and graphic it is in it’s current form. Mainstream pornography began with Playboy in 1953 and then evolved into the more explicit Hustler in 1974, but these were pay-magazines that made money from subscriptions and advertising. I attribute their success in a still-religious society to ever-increasing decadence resulting from unprecedented material prosperity.
The difference between porn magazines versus what we have today is that online pornography is video based, search-enabled and addicting, triggering the same dopamine hits that social media triggers, as Connecting the Dots points out:
It is a…easily distributed drug – read addiction. The reason porn addiction is harder to kick than heroin, is because you carry the two necessary items with you at all times. Your phone (the dealer) and your brain (the onboard 24/7 lab producing the dopamine hits).
The demoralization and addiction effectively sidelines and controls large swaths of the population and then [negative societal effects] naturally flow from that top tier capture.
if most online pornography is streaming free video, and
if streaming video is very expensive to host, and
if there are very few advertisements for online porn (and most advertisements that are used simply link to other porn sites),then
How the hell are these free streaming porn sites making money?And why is no one asking this basic question?
I looked online for answers and found very little, because people in this age are incurious and there’s no globohomo funding to research it or report on it. I can’t seem to find, for example, what the operational costs would be to run 30% of the internet’s traffic. Here and here are two pretty low quality articles which ask that question and give what seem to me to offer weak answers: they argue that free porn is a sales funnel to paid porn; that they sell sex toys, link to websites for adult dating sites, online adult stores, enhancement drug stores, adult gaming sites; they reference special paid events and pay-for-porn at hotel chains, and less visible advertising like pop-unders, email marketing, up-sells, cross-sells, etc. And sure, all these things make these websites and the adult film industry in general some money, but it hardly seems to come close to carrying the costs of up to 30% of the internet’s traffic.
The theory
The theory to be advanced here is this: just as social media companies like Twitter and Facebook are heavily subsided by the federal government through complicated, opaque backchannels, as well as supporting their stock prices (while Twitter was public, anyway) in return for providing data to the government and censoring on their behalf, including utilizing lots of FBI and CIA employees embedded within these companies (which are in all these social media companies, including Musk-owned Twitter), the federal government is secretly subsidizing these free porn sites, many which are owned by one company called Mindgeek (the parent company of Pornhub, YouPorn, Brazzers) in return for both providing data on it’s users, installing spyware on it’s users computers, and to maximize pornography viewing which has certain societal effects that globohomo really wants to push. Mindgeek and other free porn streaming companies are likely much more reliant on these secret government deals than the social media companies because at least the social media companies have an advertising based model which generates real revenue, unlike with porn.
The benefits of ubiquitous free online pornography to globohomo may include:
Masturbation lowers testosterone and demotivates men for action;
It’s religiously considered Satanic and our overlords are Satanic;
It gives globohomo blackmail over viewers because they can view your porn history and habits;
The porn websites secretly install keyloggers on your computer/phone when you view the “free” content, backed up by a Harvard study. See this informative video by John McAfee who explains how it works (thanks ) and who may have been murdered by globohomo.
It interferes with proper relations to the opposite sex / objectifies women / increases divorce rates (covered previously here and here);
It weakens societal norms and encourages prostitution (see Chaturbate and OnlyFans, but at least those have actual revenue models);
It negatively shapes sexuality of the masses by pushing deviant sex acts/topics;
It keeps us reliant on screens and the technology system generally, as Daniel Creighton points out;
It provides bread and circuses for the masses so globohomo can distract people as it rapes them financially;
It serves as a societal stabilization tool because there are too many unwanted men for mating purposes1, and pornography gives them something to partially satisfy their sex drive (the topic of inceldom was covered here); and
It’s overwhelmingly Jewish funded/directed as revenge against the goyim.2
You can find some other interesting answers in the comments to this Note.
Ted Kaczynski blames technological society itself for these globohomo objectives in Industrial Society and Its Future. His argument isn’t necessarily that technological society is maliciously trying to destroy people — rather, it coldly and impersonally shapes people’s will to make them compliant with technical necessity. Because free online pornography makes people passive, that means they also become more malleable for whatever the system wants them to do. If you have a raging hard-on, can’t get laid and have no easy outlet for your sex drive, it’s possible your energies would instead be directed at changing the system, which would be antithetical to the system’s interests. This way is much more sophisticated in that it encourages pure passivity, accomplished without resorting to outright coercion or violence. Here is Kaczynski’s argument (quoted at length), where argues that the system must regulate human behavior closely in order to function:
The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers. It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are trained to do tend to be in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits — just the sort of thing that boys like. But in our society children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly.
Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.
In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate must depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one individual to be significant. Thus most individuals are unable to influence the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning.
Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.” Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems, the mass communications media, the modern health care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often affects people at other locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the greenhouse effect affects the whole world.
The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extend that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the system. Too much waste accumulating? The government, the media, the educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a mass of propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity. and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.
Industrial society has taken on a mind of its own. The needs of the system will take precedence and result in tyranny, forcing extreme population modification in order to meet its requirements:
Whereas formerly the limits of human endurance have imposed limits on the development of societies, industrial-technological society will be able to pass those limits by modifying human beings, whether by psychological methods or biological methods or both. In the future, social systems will not be adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human being will be adjusted to suit the needs of the system.
Generally speaking, technological control over human behavior will probably not be introduced with a totalitarian intention or even through a conscious desire to restrict human freedom. Each new step in the assertion of control over the human mind will be taken as a rational response to a problem that faces society, such as curing alcoholism, reducing the crime rate or inducing young people to study science and engineering. In many cases there will be a humanitarian justification….
Assuming that industrial society survives, it is likely that technology will eventually acquire something approaching complete control over human behavior. It has been established beyond any rational doubt that human thought and behavior have a largely biological basis. As experimenters have demonstrated, feelings such as hunger, pleasure, anger and fear can be turned on and off by electrical stimulation of appropriate parts of the brain. Memories can be destroyed by damaging parts of the brain or they can be brought to the surface by electrical stimulation. Hallucinations can be induced or moods changed by drugs. There may or may not be an immaterial human soul, but if there is one it clearly is less powerful that 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….
Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological control of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to introduce such control all at once. But since technological control will be introduced through a long sequence of small advances, there will be no rational and effective public resistance.
Similar to Kaczynski’s take is Rene Guenon’s, who believed that we are approaching the end of a time cycle and that the “solidification” of the world would continue to get worse until it’s not possible to get further degraded, after which a new cycle will begin.
Anyway I hope you found this discussion of the hidden costs of so-called “free” streaming internet pornography helpful. This may or may not change anyone’s mind to watch it – it is as addictive as heroin as Connecting the Dots stated above – but you should at least be aware of the negative effects it has on you and society at large. A good rule of thumb is: if globohomo wants you to do something and offers it to you for free, it’s going to be really, really bad for you.
Thanks for reading.
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1 Because of hypergamy women want to marry up in status (while men don’t care about a woman’s status, they are happy marrying down so long as the woman is young and attractive), covered previously here.
2 In his book XXX-Communicated: A Rebel Without a Shul, [Jewish pornographer] Luke Ford wrote about a conversation with [famous Jewish pornographer Al] Goldstein, in which Ford asked Goldstein why Jews were dramatically overrepresented in the porn industry. He answered, “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism. Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged.” Ford then asked, “What does it mean to you to be a Jew?” To which Goldstein responded, “It doesn’t mean anything. It means that I’m called a kike.” Ford also asked, “Do you believe in God?” Goldstein said, “I believe in me. I’m God. Screw God. God is your need to believe in some super being. I am the super being. I am your God, admit it. We’re random. We’re the flea on the butt of the dog.”
This is a post properly summarized by the title. It discusses the benefits of turning one’s attention to individual spiritual growth instead of to mass politics.
“The natural world, society, the state, the nation and the rest are partial, and their claim to totality is an enslaving lie, which is born of the idolatry of men.” – Nicholas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End
“I would not encourage in your minds the delusion which you must carefully foster in the minds of your human victims. I mean the delusion that the fate of nations is in itself more important than that of individual souls. The overthrow of free peoples and the multiplication of slave-states are for us a means…; the real end is the destruction of individual souls. For only individuals can be saved or damned…” – the demon Screwtape in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters
Why is Freedom relevant? In it Hoeller articulates the hope that individuals will be able to increase their spiritual consciousness, which he believes then has the potential to transform society as a whole. This perspective is not properly understood in the materialist, secular, “extraverted as Hell” (per Jung) West, so it is worth exploring, and will be augmented with other sources.
What I’ve appreciated about Hoeller’s books is that they are clear, simple, and easy to understand; a pleasure to read. It is the mark of genius to communicate in a language the common man understands. Alternatively, philosopher Martin Heidegger is considered a genius by many, but he is widely considered unreadable and obtuse.1 That isn’t a mark of greatness to me. As I’ve begun what will be a deep dive into the esoteric tradition (after I asked the universe for a greater challenge after becoming bored by politics and culture, which I think I’ve mostly figured out) I’ve felt drawn to certain aspects and repelled by others. For example, Damien Echols’ High Magick did not appeal to me (which I will also cover in the future) and the Corpus Hermiticum was unfortunately unreadable without a study guide, while Hoeller is a pleasure and I will continue to read more of his work.
Hoeller’s background
Hoeller has been a bishop of a gnostic church called the Ecclesia Gnostica for fifty seven years and which is slowly growing. It now has six chapters. Here’s an article about the Church and an interview with him. Hoeller originally fled from Hungary as the communists were taking over, where his uncle was killed and his father narrowly avoided the same fate.2
He immigrated to the United States and then to Los Angeles where the Theosophical society and Manly P. Hall’s Philosophical Research Society were gaining ground, where he helped found and build the Ecclesia Gnostica and the Gnostic Society. He did not take the relative freedom within the United States for granted and his status as a European outsider who survived the horrors of World War 2 and its aftermath offered him a unique perspective, much as Solzhenitsyn did during his long exile in Vermont. Hoeller is still alive and in his 90s now.
Hoeller in January 2020
Freedom was written in 1992 as the Soviet Union was failing, Francis Fukuyama was gloating about the end of history in his The End of History and the Last Man, and irreverent libertarian South Park was on the horizon (1997). It was an optimistic period materially and there was a lot of hope in the air — libertarianism was popular, especially economic libertarianism and the growth of secularism and consumerism — but it was also a sign of increasing shallowness, decadence and nihilism. Nirvana – whose whiney, complaining empty-rage music I dislike, except for their unplugged covers of The Man who Sold the World and Lake of Fire – exemplified this era. Libertarianism as an economic model would eventually be discredited as everyone other than whites and Christians clung furiously to group identity.
Hoeller looked at this period as a period of transition and opportunity, hopeful that the United States would be able to rise to a new spiritual level. He was ultimately wrong about this as America and the West doubled and tripled down on materialism, nihilism, and secularism, following those trends right off the cliff, but it seemed like a reasonable hope at the time. While much of the book isn’t quite relevant to today’s environment, there are certain aspects about gnostic thought, individuation, and the mass mind that are perennial issues that deserve highlighting and comment.
Let’s delve into this.
The masses are asses
In Gustave Le Bon’s famous book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), Le Bon noted that there were certain characteristics that described crowd psychology: “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others”, and Le Bon claimed that “an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself – either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.”
The way it works is this: individuals have different life paths as well as different ideas, values, and impulses. When you bring together a group of people in order to find commonality and agreement, a speaker is forced to both simplify ideas and to simplify the number of ideas covered; this in turn has a hypnotic and dumbing-down effect on the crowd. Therefore the bigger the crowd the dumber it has to be to reach consensus — without exception.
Furthermore, the individuals that make up crowds are generally of a lower quality because most people are of a lower quality. I have discussed this before but a surprisingly high percentage of people may have little internal thoughts according to a 2007 University of Nevada Department of Psychology study on college students. Per the study, regarding the frequency of common phenomena of inner experience (inner speech, inner seeing (aka images), unsymbolized thinking, feeling, and sensory awareness), the frequency of common phenomena of inner experience is low, with 13-30% of participants lacking a specific form of inner experience during the study at all:
If this study is accurate, many people may lack specific types of inner experience entirely, and the overall frequency of some types of inner experience may be surprisingly low. So a speaker who wants to sway a crowd has to sway the lowest common denominator, i.e. people who lack internal experiences. As Gustave Le Bon said, “The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” Francis Parker Yockey agreed.3
Carl Jung piles on further. The modern mass man is different and worse than the mass man of the past:
Here are some of the characteristics [of the mass man]…A person with a mass psyche is socially isolated from other human beings, separated from the unconscious and not in touch with the instincts. Moreover, this person is spiritually uprooted, having no vital connection with symbol systems and having no authentic traditions of a religious-mythical nature. Such a person is aesthetically insensitive, having little appreciation of beauty either in nature or in art, and is lacking in a sense of romance and imagination to see beyond the personal concerns of the ego. Finally, the mass-minded person expects economic and political changes and upheavals to solve all problems and perplexities, because he or she seeks for the source of all good and evil in the objective environment rather than in subtle, interior factors. Jung once said that he was tempted “to construct a political theory of neurosis, in so far as the man of today is chiefly excited by his political passions.”…
The modern person with a mass psyche misuses politics as an unrealistic extraverted projection and an occasion for living out the pressures and evils of the unconscious….They take to collective and political movements wherein their already precarious and puny individuality dwindles to minuscule proportions. Imitation, dependence, lack of personal judgment, a lowering of the mental level are the inevitable accompaniment of the submerging of the individual in a mass movement…The morality of a group or movement exists in inverse ratio to its size. Jung said that any large company composed of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid and violent animal, and that the bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity. As the Romans (who had a wise saying for every occasion) used to say: Senatus bestia, senatores boni viri (“The senate is a monster, but the senators are good men”).
What then is the answer to the great problem of mass mindedness? It is evident…that the answer will not be found in ideologies and even less in movements, no matter how commendable their proclaimed objectives. The answer is not a movement, but the individual. The individual is the only hope, and since even the mass-minded person is latently an individual, this is a hope of considerable magnitude and promise.
Jacques Ellul had commented in 1965 that repeated, sustained messages aimed at highlighting fear stimulated an unavoidable conditioned reflex: “Some people object to this [the efficacy of propaganda] … after a careful look at Stalinist propaganda…one comes to this conclusion: Stalinist propaganda was in great measure founded on Pavlov’s theory of the conditioned reflex…let us not forget that if this theory, put to use by the propagandist, brings results and proves to be effective…. doctrinal criticism can then no longer demonstrate its inaccuracy.” This link, recommended by Andrew N, delves into how the mass mind has been hacked by globohomo in a Pavlovian sense, especially in the context of the COVID scare.
Because of these issues, the populist masses will never serve as a political solution to the problems of the day – they will have to, if one comes, come from an elite with different values. (But let’s be careful with our definition of elite here: as Ernst Junger stated when he was 100 years old, “The sociological definition of elite is already an indication of the corruption of the concept. A warning, for me, to no longer trust even the elites, but now only the great loners.”)
The nature of reality
Another problem is the nature of reality itself, which is constructed so that whatever end-state Heaven on Earth promises are made politically will always ultimately remain unfulfilled. As discussed previously, the very nature of existence means that our wants are always unmet. To the extent we fulfill them, we merely temporarily experience boredom followed by new unmet desires to strive for:
All striving is in some sense futile; whatever goal one achieves will disappear the moment it arrives. We suffer most from the lack of permanence in the people and things we most care about. The more we care, the more we suffer. Animals lose whatever it is they possess too, but “only humans feel the pain of that loss since only human consciousness retains a sense of these things as past. Nor is our capacity for hope or anticipation of the future a compensation for this condition. Indeed, it compounds our situation, since most of our hopes are bound to be disappointed, and those that are fulfilled are disfulfilled in the next moment as the objects of our hopes slip into the past.” Time-consciousness, then, results in unhappiness, even though we receive the compensation of consciousness itself – the intellectual ability for higher thought.
Putting together the inherent stupidity of the masses, the lack of internal thoughts for most people, the nature of reality itself as constituting perpetually unmet desires, and perhaps a proper understanding of history where sociopaths animated by a Demiurgic spirit perpetually conquer and destroy good people, and it may lead one into a perspective of the dreaded, derided blackpill: that this reality is a place of suffering which cannot change, as per Schopenhauer:
As a reliable compass for orienting yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments, and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his own particular way.
There are three common ways to respond to being blackpilled:
A retreat into hedonism or nihilism, to seek pleasure as the world collapses around you;
A turn to exoteric religion as seen the push for “trad Cath” or “Ortho-bros”; push out pleasure into the afterlife and hope for salvation then, or
A hope for acceleration, either (1) faster into collapse so something new can be rebuilt from the ruins, or (2) a hope that “the only way out is through” and that something better with more freedom may result from increases in technology.
There are problems with all of these approaches:
A retreat into hedonism or nihilism is an embrace of meaninglessness, misery, self-destruction and death;
A turn to exoteric religion is reactionary and short-sighted given it has been on a losing retreat for many centuries due to the death of God from empiricism and technology; and
A hope for acceleration is nihilistic and assumes that something can eventually be rebuilt better than what currently exists, which is a secularized version of the Christian hope for salvation upon death. Also, there is no reason to assume that technology will result in more freedom down the road; sometimes technology has a by-product of temporarily increased freedom, but the great historical trend of increased centralization ultimately subsumes it.
However, there is a fourth possible response: the gnostic, Hermetic, individuated, esoteric quest.
The individuated gnostic journey
I’ve discussed previously how gnosticism views this world as controlled by the Demiurge – a malevolent, bumbling creator entity who sees nothing above himself – and if one seeks gnosis one may connect to the Source above and beyond his reach.
Under this perspective gnosis is attained through the synthesis of opposites(the Coincidentia Oppositorum which will be the focus of it’s own post). Combining one’s thoughts, intuition, feelings and senses, listening to them and trying to synthesize them when they conflict to achieve a higher unity, and to practice this consistently. But that doesn’t mean one becomes saved as a final end state either here or necessarily in the afterlife — this perspective stresses continuous and sustained struggle for further individuation.4The benefits of this process are feltin the here and now; one becomes more integrated and connected, more thoughtful, calmer and wiser, more able to live in the moment, and it also helps re-enchant one’s worldview. The spiritual ascent of achieving higher consciousness is marked with a feeling of operating on a higher frequency of vibration; those on lower levels have lower vibration frequencies.
Such figures who sought to synthesize opposites – even though not all these figures are gnostics – include Carl Jung, Stephan Hoeller, Nietzsche, and Ernst Junger.
Let’s start with Nietzsche. According to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Society,
“Nietzsche’s concept of knowledge did not only allow for contradictions. It required them. Only total, comprehensive knowledge, which incorporated opposite opinions, was true knowledge for him. Thus, it was possible for him to write for and against Judaism, for and against Christianity, for and against racism. The National Socialists could interpret his writings any way they wished and manipulate them for their ends because of Nietzsche’s explicit rejection of reason and logic.”5
Jünger’s contradictions were less explicit than Nietzsche’s. I covered him previously here. His concept of the anarch, of following one’s internal intuition and thought process despite pressure from mainstream society, seems to be in strong accordance with the gnostic process. As Junger stated:
The anarch’s state is the state that each man carries within himself. He embodies the viewpoint of Stirner, the author of The Unique and its Property – that is, the anarch is unique. Stirner says: “Nothing gets the better of me.” The anarch is really the natural man. He is corrected only by the resistance he comes up against when he wishes to extend his will further than is permitted by the prevailing circumstances. In his ambition to realize himself, he inevitably encounters certain limits; but if they didn’t exist, his expansion would be indefinite. That as the fate of, say, the caesars, or the child how does whatever he pleases. So barriers have to be imposed.
The anarch can don any disguise. He remains wherever he feels comfortable but once a place no longer suits him, he moves on. He can, for instance, work tranquilly behind a counter or in an office. But upon leaving it at night, he plays an entirely different role. Convinced of his own inner independence, he can even show a certain benevolence to the powers that be….the anarch is a pragmatist. He sees what can serve him- him and the common good; but he is closed to ideological excesses. It is in this sense that I define the anarch’s position as a completely natural attitude. First of all, there is the man, and then comes his environment. That is the position that I favor at present….Society demands certain forms, certain ruses; but basically, it cannot penetrate a man’s innermost core….the difference between the anarchist and the anarch also resides in the fact that the anarchist needs society, because he wants to prove it, which the anarch does not seek to do.
Or from his War Journals: “I want to examine human growth as the symbolic key to cosmic structure.” (January 4, 1944).
Meanwhile, Carl Jung had deeply gnostic views, even though it was approached from a depth psychology perspective:
Jung’s teachings contain the theme that the soul has an inherent tendency toward individuation, a process whose objective is ultimate wholeness, sovereignty, freedom and autonomy. The process of individuation, according to Jung, consists to a large extent of the union of the opposites in the psyche. High and low, masculine and feminine, good and evil must eventually be reconciled in the souls of human beings. The union of these opposites, moreover, always involves liberating the shadow, bringing the darkness to light within oneself, which is to a great extent an antinomian gnostic principle. Jung’s psychology is in essence about freedom, liberty and liberation, or the increase in freedom…6
According to Hoeller, “The psychologically wise attitude therefore must be one which is invariably distrustful of situations which can lead to mass neurosis or herdlike behavior, in short, to all those blandishments of the collective which usurp the judgment and discrimination of the individual….What is needed then in order to produce social progress is the integrative process of the individual. The elixir of human history is not political, social or even religious ideology with its movements, parties, organizations and churches, but the psychic life of the individual, with its growth and integration, its becoming whole and complete.”
The gnostic conception
Gnostics are focused on the concept of individual freedom, the freedom to follow one’s own thought processes, impulses and journey to become the best version of yourself you can become. Gnostic ethics is overwhelmingly a matter of how one acts toward one’s own soul and the wider divinity of which it is a part as opposed to one’s relation to others or to society. As Hoeller explains,
The gnostic preoccupation with the issue of liberty led to the much debated and maligned position of antinomianism, which means opposition to rigid structures of religious legalism (anti means “against”; nomos means “law”). The gnostic approach to religion was and is highly individualistic and nonconformist. All in all, it would be quite correct to say that gnostics throughout history were spiritual libertarians. Of course, this libertarianism proved to be their downfall. The gnostics were not organized in an authoritarian fashion and thus had no effective power structures. Thus they were overwhelmed by forces that possessed the power they themselves lacked – the authoritarian, organized orthodoxy of the newly streamlined Constantinian church, supported by the mightiest power structure of ancient history, Imperial Rome. In more ways that one, gnosis and gnosticism were intimately connected with the ideals of a spiritually based political freedom. The gnostic schools were, in fact, the last vestiges of such freedom when they were obliterated in the third and fourth centuries.
Under the gnostic conception there are three types of people:
hylics – the lowest order of the three types of human. Difficult to be saved since their thinking is entirely material; close to incapable of understanding gnosis. Understanding the fundamentally emptiness of materialism is the precursor to achieving higher development. Equivalent to the NPC.
pneumatics – “spiritual”, fully initiated immaterial souls escaping the doom of the material world via gnosis.
Hoeller articulated these concepts further:
The gnostics said that everyone does not come to the same conclusion as to what is right and what is wrong because everyone does not perceive reality in the same manner. One’s perception of reality, whether moral reality or any other, depends on one’s spiritual development. While Plato looked for the criteria of morality in ideas, and the Semitic religion looked for it in the Law of Moses, the gnostics held that these criteria are in the person….Significantly, the gnostics also declared that morality depends on consciousness, and that one cannot expect the same level of morality from an unconscious person (hylic) as one can from a partially conscious individual or from a fully conscious person – the true pneumatic gnostic.
The gnostics generally understood that the unconscious or material person was in need of a moral code appropriate to his or her condition, and the partially conscious or psychic person was in need of a moral code that was appropriate to this status. Similarly the pneumatic, or true gnostic, who received moral inspiration directly from the spiritual nature was in turn entitled to live according to his or her inspired pneumatic ethic. (This view was known to the common sense of the ancient world. It was embodied in the popular Latin proverb, “What is permissible for Jupiter is not permissible for the ox.”)
As discussed above, a significant percentage of people have little internal thinking. These hylics need an exoteric, liturgic, organized mass religion with an external Daddy God who will send them to Hell if they don’t perform in conjunction with its dictates because they are generally incapable of or unwilling to feel and respond to the spark of gnosis within themselves. (This isn’t to claim that all exoteric religious believers are hylics; see the wonderful Archibishop Vigano, who Pope Bergoglio just excommunicated, as an exception). Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor was right about the hylics of humanity needing to be told what to do and believe7 — but so was Jesus in the story, where people needed to be given the opportunity to choose to grow spiritually, even if only a small number would take it.
Hylics are very open to herd/group mentality and big government and being told what to do. Psychics are in some intermediate ground, while pneumatics have the capacity to achieve gnosis if they focus on their individuated and decentralized journeys.
There is therefore an inegalitarian hierarchy on the level of spirituality. Hoeller adds,
“Can there be a moral equality? Can there be a morality that is equal and applicable to all? The answer is that such a thing cannot be.People are equal in ultimate spiritual potential, but they are anything but equal in actual development. Not all people are conscious; in fact few are. Some are only partially or occasionally conscious and many, many are very unconscious. There are today, just as there were long ago in Alexandria and other gnostic cities, people who are materialists or hyletics. They are in need of swift justice, of physical deterrents to crime, of punishment rather than rehabilitation. There are in our days also people at the psychic level who are people of the law and of the book. They need a code, a system, whether written by Moses or by Kant or Hume which will guide them. The believers must believe so that by believing they may live in peace and order. In God’s good time they will perhaps come to the place where they may know and then they will not need to believe any longer. Until then let them worship their laws and live by them as best they can. And, assuredly, there are today also pneumatics – gnostics, those who know, those who are conscious. They have outgrown the law; indeed, they are the true law embodied. They hear the command within, daily, hourly, and thus they have little need of commandment. These are the men and women who have come out of great tribulations, painful and stressful existential encounters, hard, perilous moral choices and who have nevertheless prevailed.
In other words, depending on one’s level of spiritual development one’s relationship to the outside world changes, as do our psychological, emotional, and spiritual needs. As we develop more we require outside rules less and less, listening to our inner intuition (balanced against our emotions, intellect and senses) more. As L.P. Koch eloquently stated, “Everybody criticizes genetic/biological blank slatism, but it’s soul-level blank slatism that stands in the way of understanding so many aspects of our world. Perhaps we just haven’t (re-)found a language to talk about these things yet, although the NPC meme has done much to bring such heresy back into the modern world.”
By changing who we are we in turn effect the world in a natural, whole and positive way. Jung expressed himself on this topic as follows in his Civilization in Transition:
Great innovations never come from above; they come invariably from below; just as trees never grow from the sky downward but upward from the earth however true it is that their seeds have fallen from above. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval in consciousness is one and the same. Everything becomes relative and therefore doubtful. And while man, hesitant and questioning contemplates a world that is distracted with treaties of peace and pacts of friendship, democracy and dictatorship, capitalism and bolshevism, his spirit yearns for the answer that twill allay the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty.
There are some other ways to analyze this. I previously outlined in the second half of this post how ideological dissidents to the current system arise exclusively from the “loser clique”, because they are the only group who feel intense psychological pain from having the lowest status in society. From a Myers-Briggs perspective many of the non-hylics will be INTJ or ISTJ; from a Big 5 perspective they will be introverts and disagreeable. Indeed, a combination of introversion plus sustained, longterm psychological pain may be a necessary precondition toward spiritual advancement.
It is quite hard for the wealthy to be pneumatics. Jesus said in Matthew 19:24 “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Achieving power and wealth in this world usually requires moral compromises; one may be required to take advantage of others, to take parts of the fruits of their labors using guile or strength in order to build wealth. Yet in this era due to the egalitarian ratchet effect only wealth is an allowed metric to differentiate people; not possessing differentiated and superior values, outlook, beliefs or spirit. Compared to elites of the past which emphasized superior values and culture, a sense of noblesse oblige, our rich but empty materialist elites are sick facsimiles of equivalent versions from the past.
Conclusions
The following is a long quote from Hoeller about the four steps toward actualizing consciousness and is worth quoting:
The first step in the actualization of the myth of consciousness is that we permit the destruction of the universe in which we have existed. More often than not this involves primarily a “relativation” of our “personal” reality. The word ‘personal” means that just as our perception of reality is our own, so too its altering must be confined to our own selves. “Relativation” implies that this process is not an extinction of old values, but rather a process which renders relative the concepts and values which we previously considered to be absolute. Specific values increase while general values decrease. Concrete realities become more important than abstract principles. While this may seem a terrible thing to say, as a result of this process we become in a certain sense unprincipled. What actually happens is that when reality takes over abstractions are reduced to their proper size.When we enter the practical realm of the myth of consciousness we enter the fluid, mercurial realm of psychic reality where all rules engraved in stone are inappropriate. Attachment to rigidly held abstractions, to theories and doctrines of any variety diminishes and eventually vanishes. What remains is the living reality of the deeper psyche operating from its own vision and guidance….
The second step in the enactment of the myth is the entry of the psyche into the process of creative conflict. This means that we must leave behind our attachment to the current overvaluation of tranqulity or lack of conflict and also to the overvaluation of health, wealth and power. One of the ways that this change may be approached is by contrasting the conditions of a static state with those of a process. We must recognize that tranquility, peace, health, wealth and power are all descriptions of states or conditions. They are not processes. Consciousness, on the other hand, is a process, not a state of being. This brings up the issue of commitment. To what is an individual committed in an active pursuit of the myth of consciousness? The commitment must always be to the process and never to the outcome. Persons, symbols, ideas and ideals can all find their proper places within the process but the process itself must be regarded as primary, other goals as secondary….The sense of the drama of the soul is growth through conflict. The creation and enlargement of consciousness cannot take place without the creative alchemy of conflict…in the conflict we may need to experience defeat and lamentation before the archetypally facilitated resolution can occur. If the process is interrupted when it becomes dark and painful the chances are lessened that the resolution we desire will come about.
Thus by the conflict of will and counterwill, of yes and no, affirmation and negation, and in the ultimate resolution of these conflicts brought about by the wisdom of the archetypal psyche, consciousness is born and expands. Moral opposites are very much part of this process so that the psyche is forced to make choices that are not dictated by external commandment but by individual, conscious insight. The objective of this process is not moral goodness but conscious wholeness of the psyche.
At this point, we come to another predicament. Since in the course of the pursuit of the myth of consciousness we cannot follow the accustomed moral impulse to espouse one opposite as against another (not even good against evil), we no longer have the luxury of feeling righteous. We are, in fact, no longer “good” men and women….Instead, we must become alchemical vessels in which light and darkness, good and evil, male and female struggle, embrace, commingle, fuse, die, and are born. All our cherished ethical beliefs – monotheism, the belief of Jews and Calvinists that they are chosen people, predestined for righteousness – vanish before our eyes. Our moral superiority also evaporates. Not only are we no longer able to condemn others we may consider unrighteous but we are also not able to condemn that side of ourselves that we have been taught to despise and abominate….
The third step in the actualization of the myth is the conjuction of the opposites which follows their conflictual interaction. This step represents the best mechanism for the generation of consciousness. When the union of opposites occurs consciousness is born…leisure and work, altruism and self-love, youthful energy and mature wisdom, idealistic self-sacrifice and common sense frequently wrestle and conjoin within us, thus bringing us to more highly developed states of consciousness….
The fourth and last step of the myth is…”the transformation of God”…unlike the gnostics who remained silent about the possibility that the Demiurge could be redeemed, Jung time and again affirmed that the Creator-God could be redeemed by becoming conscious, and that this process could be facilitated by humanity. While mainstream Christianity holds that God redeems human beings, Jung held that humans could redeem God. The question is how can this redemption be accomplished?
God’s unconsciousness, Jung said, has one primary manifestation – the loss of its feminine side. In Answer to Job, Jung wrote that the Creator-God once had a feminine side who was his sister, consort and possibly his mother all at once and that her name is Sophia, which means “wisdom”.” By losing contact with Sophia God became unwise or, in psychological terms, unconscious. Thus it is evident that the Creator-God’s way to consciousness leads to the feminine which he needs to recognize and to rehabilitate, and with which he must achieve union….
The significant conclusion that needs to be drawn for our purposes is that, while the wholeness that needs to be brought to the Creator requires rescuing and elevating the Divine Feminine, this task need not be wedded to historical and anthropological theories which are highly speculative. Thus, bringing wholeness to the lonely, irascible and in part unconscious male Creator-God is not a political task but a psychological one and even a spiritual one. The problem with this task, as Jung very bluntly stated, is that “America is extroverted as hell.”…Money, prestige and power are goals that appeal strongly to the extroverted psyche; psychological transformation does not….
Thus we must recognize that the issue of God versus Goddess is not about class warfare or political power, but rather about psychological and ultimately metaphysical wholeness. Those people who recognize this clearly and are willing to act upon it will be the true heroes of consciousness. They will help to restore wholeness and create consciousness in the souls of men and women and, beyond that, in the subtle, metaphysical dimensions of gods and goddesses. To quote Edinger…”As it gradually dawns on people, one by one, that the transformation of God is not an interesting idea but is a living reality, it may begin to function as a new myth. Whoever recognizes this myth as his own personal reality will put his life in the service of this process.”
Powerful stuff – to me anyway.
I hope this offered some potential insight into a way of re-enchanting the world via the blending of opposite ideas, feelings and impulses in order to achieve higher level synthesis and connection to the ineffable; a hierarchy not based on group identity but one’s individual esoteric progress on this path.
Thanks for reading.
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1 See Emil Cioran’s comments here as an example: “The German influence in France was disastrous on that whole level, I find. The French can’t say things simply anymore….it’s the influence of Heidegger, which was very big in France. For example, he’s speaking about death, he employs so complicated a language, to say very simple things, and I well understand how one could be tempted by that style. But the danger of philosophical style is that one loses complete contact with reality. Philosophical language leads to megalomania. One creates an artificial world where one is God. I was very proud being young and very pleased to know this jargon. But my stay in France totally cured me of that.”
2 “My prospects in the now entrenched communist society were bleak indeed. As a “class alien” I would not qualify for higher education, and virtually any career of a promising nature would be closed to me for the same reason. Within a year of my departure most of my friends and relatives, along with tens of thousands of upper and middle class “suspicious persons” were forcibly deported from the cities and assigned to menial labor in the countryside, a practice employed during the cultural revolution in China and in the “killing fields” of Cambodia. Exile thus appeared the lesser of evils.”
“The common man is unjust, but not on principle; he is selfish, but he is incapable of the imperative of Ibsen’s exalted selfishness; he is the slave of his passions, but incapable of higher sexual love, for even this is an expression of Culture – primitive man would not understand Western erotic even if it were explained to him, this sublimation of passion into metaphysics. He lacks any sort of honor, and will submit to any humiliation rather than revolt – it is always leader-natures who revolt. He gambles in the hope of winning, and if he loses, he whimpers. He would rather live on his knees than die on his feet. He accepts the loudest voice as the true one. He follows the leader of the moment – but only so far, and when the leader is eclipsed by a new one, he points out his record of opposition. In victory he is a bully, in defeat he is a lackey. His talk is big, his deeds small. He likes to play, but has no sportsmanship. Great thoughts and plans he castigates as “megalomania.” Anyone who tries to pull him up along the road of higher accomplishment he hates, and when the chance offers, he crucifies him, like Christ, burns him, like Savonarola, kicks his dead body in the square in Milan. He is always laughing at the discomfiture of another, but has no sense of humor, and is equally incapable of true seriousness. He denounces the crime of passion, but eagerly reads the literature of such crimes. He herds in the street to see an accident, and enjoys seeing another sustain the blows of fate. He does not care if his countrymen are spilling their blood as long as he is secure.”
4 The process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated [from other human beings]; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology.
5 Also see Brett Andersen’s discussion on Nietzsche’s synthesis of opposites here, and in regards to evolutionary psychology in general and mythology here.
6 This reminds me of a recent comment by populist Mike Benz, where he states about his singular obsession – revealing to the public the inner workings of the globohomo civil service – “On the one hand, I wish I hadn’t lost pretty much everything I ever loved & worked for in the process of pursuing this. On the other, this was pretty much always my destiny. I was happier then, in a way, but dying inside of feeling I was betraying what I was put on earth to do.” Here’s his very interesting Tucker interview; also see here. Also see ARX Han’s recent post about how to define success as he followed his passion as an independent writer focusing on the sidelined low-status male youth, or even Thumbnail Green’s fun rap about doomsday prepping. Pursuing one’s inner calling has no guarantee of earthly success as Scott Locklin correctly rants about; but it answers the nagging feeling/question about doing what one has been put on earth to accomplish.
7 As the Grand Inquisitor stated to Jesus: “You thirsted for love that is free, and not for the servile raptures of a slave before a power that has left him permanently terrified. But here, too, you overestimated mankind, for, of course, they are slaves, though they were created rebels. Behold and judge, now that fifteen centuries have passed, take a look at them: whom have you raised up to yourself? I swear, man is created weaker and baser than you thought him! How, how can he ever accomplish the same things as you? Respecting him so much, you behaved as if you had ceased to be compassionate, because you demanded too much of him—and who did this? He who loved him more than himself! Respecting him less, you would have demanded less of him, and that would be closer to love, for his burden would be lighter. He is weak and mean” ….
And as Ivan, the man telling the story to his brother, stated: “Look, suppose that one…is like my old Inquisitor, who himself ate roots in the desert and raved, overcoming his flesh, in order to make himself free and perfect, but who still loved mankind all his life, and suddenly opened his eyes and saw that there is no great moral blessedness in achieving perfection of the will only to become convinced, at the same time, that millions of the rest of God’s creatures have been set up only for mockery, that they will never be strong enough to manage their freedom, that from such pitiful rebels will never come giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist had his dream of harmony. Having understood all that, he returned and joined … the intelligent people [i.e. those who would oppress the masses with lies so the masses would live in happiness]. Couldn’t this have happened?”
This is a post on the nature of friendship, which globohomo constantly seeks to subvert and destroy in their quest to turn everyone into atomized, blown out husks. What does friendship consist of and how is it nurtured or destroyed?
“Tell me your company, and I will tell you what you are.” – Miguel de Cervantes
I was thinking recently about the nature of friendship, what brings people together, the ties that bind them through time, and the events or personal developments that move them apart.
It is a curious thing. Who are you friends with and why? Do they just kind of happen, or was there intention put into building them?
There seem to be some commonalities between how friendships are formed and dissolve that I see:
Friendships which are formed in early life, in school, and in occupations that require trust and loyalty such as in the military. These friendships are formed based on commonalities, similar backgrounds, outlooks or personalities meshing. There are weaker ties formed by work and hobbies, and from parents becoming friends with the parents of other children;
Friendships become harder to form the older you get;
People gradually lose their friends as they age for one reason or another, but generally because staying in contact requires effort from one or both people and people get busy with life. Most of the older people I know only have maybe a couple of close friends left, even if they have a wider circle of acquaintances; and
It doesn’t help that globohomo is presiding over the complete atomization of society, turning everyone into asexual, amorphous widgets devoid of community ties. Even family members live across country from each other, maybe seeing each other a couple times a year if that.
What do we mean by friendship? Aristotle believed there are three types, which are as follows:
The friendship of utility. These friendships are based on what someone can do for you, or what you can do for another person. It might be that you put in a good word for someone, and they buy you a gift in return. This category is that of an acquaintance because you are not able to be fully open and honest with them;
The friendship of pleasure. These are friendships based on enjoyment of a shared activity or the pursuit of pleasures and emotions. This might be someone you go for drinks with, or share a particular hobby and is a common level of association among the young. This type of relationship can end quickly, dependent as it is on people’s ever-changing likes and dislikes; and
The friendship of virtue. These are the people you like for themselves, who typically influence you positively and push you to be a better person. “For perfect friendship you must get to know someone thoroughly,” Aristotle says, “and become intimate with them, which is a very difficult thing to do.” It involves offering and receiving honesty, acceptance, and selflessness. It is two equal parties coming together to forge a bond that provides mutual benefit, enjoyment, and appreciation. Cicero agrees with this perspective, viewing this love as being driven by one’s integrity: “For nothing inspires love, nothing conciliates affection, like virtue.” Cicero maintains that “Friendship springs from a natural impulse rather than a wish for help: from an inclination of the heart, combined with a certain instinctive feeling of love, rather than from a deliberate calculation of the material advantage it was likely to confer.” Aristotle thought that friendships of virtue were rare and that a person could have no more than maybe five in one’s life, meaning some close friends and even family members may be relegated to friendships of pleasure or even utility.
The friendship of virtue is a wonderful thing because it is a voluntary association which is not goal oriented. It is two people who take pleasure in each other’s company and there is an element of freedom associated with it. Real friends speak their minds uncensored to each other, or they are not friends but acquaintances. But I think the friendship of “virtue” is a misnomer; it is not “virtue” but rather one of compatible or shared moral codes. Our moral values create expectations of behavior from others and if one engage in activities the other abhors, it would be impossible to maintain the goodwill necessary for friendship.
Additionally, a friendship can only exist with mutually recognized goodwill, and this requirement holds friends to high moral standards of extending loyalty, honesty, integrity, compassion, and respect. Aristotle and Cicero believe perfect friendship is between those who are good, alike in virtue, and wish well for the sake of the other. Yet while these virtues are required for friendship, critically they need not extend to everyone; we can apply these morals to our friends but apply different and lesser standards to other people. Therefore it’s perfectly possible for bad or evil people to have strong friendships, so long as they treat their friends differently than they treat everyone else.
The scene where Vorenus saves Pullo in the unparalleled HBO series “Rome” is one of the best scenes in all of television history and demonstrates friendship based on compatible values and moral codes:
A friend of mine commented on the nature of brotherly bonds and how globohomo acts to subvert them:
You talk about globohomo atomizing people and destroying friendships, how on the one hand they make it hard to foster those virtuous friendships described and harder to connect with people. There’s an openness and selflessness and intimacy to friendship, it’s the kind of thing that we do in like a marriage, for example. Society is so hyper-sexualized that the kind of intimacy or sort of openness that is inherent in that kind of friendship of virtue becomes sort of twisted or perverted because people can’t tell the distinction between that and sexuality. Then virtuous friendship gets corrupted with a sensual or a lustful aspect in the society where it becomes a question of whether they can really be friends, and it’s exactly those kind of bonds of brotherhood that they’re trying to prevent.
This point reminded me of the stupid film 300, which was a kind of cartoonish hyper-masculine stylization that had an underlying homosexual eroticism that is bizarre on re-watch.
Gay and stupid.
Schopenhauer and Epictetus believe that friends are a burden and one should revel in solitude, but that doesn’t seem right to me.1 Roman philosopher Cicero explains this emotional benefit of friendship in his treatise On Friendship. He argues that “misfortunes would be hard to bear if there were not someone to feel them even more acutely than yourself,” and so “friendship enhances prosperity, and relieves adversity of its burden by halving and sharing it”. A friend can lessen the burden of despair and can act as an emotional support system for those feeling isolated in times of need. A friend can also compensate for one’s deficiencies and accentuate one’s strengths. Cicero puts it this way: “In the face of a true friend a man sees as it were a second self. So that where his friend is he is; if his friend be rich, he is not poor, though he be weak, his friend’s strength is his.” And there is an expression from Miguel de Cervantes, “Tell me your company, and I will tell you what you are.” Jim Rohn said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Or see Proverbs 13:20: “He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will suffer harm.” It also reminds me of John Donne’s great poem “No Man Is an Island”:
Now, there are risks to friendship. As people grow and mature, as we all do on our life paths, we may breach red lines of the the other person and those bonds of friendship may fray or be destroyed. Here’s Joshua Foa Dienstag on the fragility of friendship:
“Friendship is our best model of an arena that is meant to harbor randomness and chaos, while channeling it into a relatively stable association. If I knew at all times what to expect from my friends, their friendship would be valueless. We look to our friends to surprise us, even as we expect them to cope with our own surprises. And yet we have no guarantee that we can never overstep the bounds – we can destroy our friendships in a way that we can never break family ties. It can happen in a moment, in fact. But the transience of friendships is no mark against them, or at least, it does not deter us from pursuing them. Perhaps, indeed, their permanently endangered status is one of their attractions? And the possibility of friendship is also the possibility for a form of social association consistent with a pessimistic ethic.
Because friendship has no end, it is the least-bad setting for the act of exploration, the most likely tie to survive self-transformation. That a friendship could survive a change of every goal is unlikely, but at least possible.”
I like this quote, despite it being a bit utilitarian and transactional, because it touches on the fact that we are all on our own unique life path and we don’t know where our lives will take us, let alone other people’s. We try to exercise control over events and how we develop, but to a large extent it’s out of our hands and things happen to us and we react to them as best we can, not even in charge of our reaction. There is a mysterious element to it. As Ernst Junger said in The Details of Time, p. 59:
Every man has numerous friends and acquaintances with whom he gets on. Some of them have enough of a literary and historical background for him to talk with them. And yet, despite everything, a dialogue cannot always ensue. These things are hard to explain; it’s a question of music, of a certain harmony. Two intelligent people can meet, they can like each other; but nevertheless, a euphonious contact fails to emerge. The laws of a certain magnetism have to come into play. There are even extreme cases in which too much liking induces a blockage. Stendhal explained it very well in On Love: even when the crystallization does not take place, two people can still readily like each other very much.2
Personally, I’ve lost most of my close circle of friends over the past four years. These losses include:
Three friends who I had ideological differences with (one gave the deadly untested mRNA COVID vaccine to his children despite my pleas for him not to, another volunteered to give the public the death jabs, a third argued with me incessantly about politics from a corporatist globohomo perspective and we devolved into name calling). As a result I lost respect for these people and they gradually faded away. This is all reflective of the personal becoming the political over the past number of years, when historically in America one could separate them (but from a wider historical perspective this was an anomaly, brought about by unprecedented American prosperity and no external threats);
Two deaths, one to stroke and one to suicide (the latter resulting from schizophrenia);
One to diverging life paths where I came over time to disagree with his life choices, even though I tried to offer feedback and insight.
One can lean on one’s remaining friends or see acquaintances to try to make up the gap, but generally the loss of friends creates a void that is not easily filled. Friendship can’t be forced; it is something that grows organically or not at all. Such is life.
It looks like I’m not the only one experiencing this, although I’m somewhere between 2022 and 2023 on the chart. From Theodore Atkinson’s note.
For what it’s worth, Cicero recommends that when one breaks off a friendship, one should do it by creating distance and not by a grand fight, to take the high road:
Again, there is such a disaster, so to speak, as having to break off friendship. And sometimes it is one we cannot avoid….In such cases friendships should be allowed to die out gradually by an intermission of intercourse. They should, as I have been told that Cato used to say, rather be unstitched than torn in twain; unless, indeed, the injurious conduct be of so violent and outrageous a nature as to make an instant breach and separation the only possible course consistent with honour and rectitude. Again, if a change in character and aim takes place, as often happens, or if party politics produces an alienation of feeling (I am now speaking, as I said a short time ago, of ordinary friendships, not of those of the wise), we shall have to be on our guard against appearing to embark upon active enmity while we only mean to resign a friendship. For there can be nothing more discreditable than to be at open war with a man with whom you have been intimate….
Our first object, then, should be to prevent a breach; our second, to secure that, if it does occur, our friendship should seem to have died a natural rather than a violent death. Next, we should take care that friendship is not converted into active hostility, from which flow personal quarrels, abusive language, and angry recriminations. These last, however, provided that they do not pass all reasonable limits of forbearance, we ought to put up with, and, in compliment to an old friendship, allow the party that inflicts the injury, not the one that submits to it, to be in the wrong. Generally speaking, there is but one way of securing and providing oneself against faults and inconveniences of this sort—not to be too hasty in bestowing our affection, and not to bestow it at all on unworthy objects.
I hope you found this discourse on the nature of friendship helpful so that we can perhaps approach the ones we have or the ones we cultivate with greater intentionality and appreciation.
Thanks for reading.
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1 In his argument against society, Schopenhauer in Arthur Schopenhauer’s Essays on Suffering and the Wisdom of Life points out that interpersonal discord is one of the “countless and unavoidable” burdens and disadvantages arising from “having to do with others” and a cost or bad of society. He argues that it is better to be alone, instead of being in a social relationship, because “no man can be in perfect accord with anyone but himself—not even with a friend or the partner of his life; differences of individuality and temperament are always bringing in some degree of discord, though it may be a very slight one”. He further argues against society, asserting that it is only when a man “is alone that he is really free,” because “all society necessarily involves, as the first condition of its existence, mutual accommodation and restraint upon the part of its members”. Epictetus in A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus shares Schopenhauer’s sentiments towards seclusion, asserting that if a man wants to be happy he should be alone, because love tethers people to the fate of others which is outside of one’s control, and discord will be unavoidable due to differences of individuality and temperament.
2 Or see Junger’s war journals, 1941-1945, August 28, 1942 entry: “We can seek another person with the intention of being particularly cordial or particularly intimate that day, yet there is no protection against annoyance. The tuning of the strings to produce a harmonious chord is not controlled by our will. This often happens to me with encounters I’ve been looking froward to – they seem chilly, and the proper harmony is not reestablished until days or weeks later.”
