MEDITATIONS no.8

Exiting modernity.

1. Last week I wrote about my philosophy of training. Your training should make you stronger, faster, and harder to kill.

You cannot train the body without also training the mind and the emotions. People allow themselves to be siloed neatly into one of these three, because making progress in a certain domain comes easier to people due to some quirks of genetic nature or their childhood environment.

They then turn that into their identity – you see it all the time:

“I’m an athlete and can bench 315 so it’s OK if I don’t read much.”

“I’m an intellectual, unlike those meatheads. Don’t as me why my chest is caved in. Please excuse my emotionally stunted mannerisms.

“I may not be particularly strong or smart, but at least I have high EQ! I am sooooo empathetic. ”

Once you start paying attention to what people say you begin to see this pattern all the time.

But this is a flawed approach certain to create unharmonious human beings. Because you are not just your body, mind, or emotions - you are all 3 at once. And they operate unceasingly in tandem, interacting with and reinforcing one another.

Sustainable growth requires that one cultivates a strong & fit body, while also taking time to fill one’s head with knowledge about the world (there has never been a better time to be a learner). And you must also cultivate love and thumos and wisdom in your soul if you are to live a life approaching the human ideal.

The world is going to need a lot more people embodying the human ideal, because, uh, I’m not sure if you’ve heard… but the shit has hit the fan. Modern civilization hit its peak in the 1960s-70s, plateaued until 2005-08, and now you, gentle reader, are in the crunch.

2. Do you know why all great civilizations fall?

Modernity.

Set aside your preconceived notions about history and chronology, my friend. Sit with this idea; really let this one sink in. We’re not the first people to be “modern”, not even close. We may just be the latest in a succession of human societies that have risen and fallen, and because the waves are so high and time’s march is so brutal we cannot see the ruins and high water marks of previous great civilizations.

Anyway, the condition known as Modernity has been analysed and dissected by many previous thinkers in this sphere, and if I can say anything of substance on the matter it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants. 

Here’s my pitch: Modernity if thought of as the state in which technology and technique (what Heidegger called techné) becomes the dominating paradigm, and everything becomes broken down and quantified to serve the interests of the machine.

By machine I do not refer to computers and cars (it seems unlikely that previous societies have achieved as high a level of technological artistry as we have, for better or worse). When I speak of the machine, I refer to a way of seeing the world, a set of normative assumptions and modes of thought, that replicate the cold and unfeeling logic of a mechanism. It is a manner of regarding the world that emphasises efficiency, logic, order; and is thus devoid of warmth and redundancy and mess and the happy chaos that human beings continually generate.

The proliferation of technology in the past and in the present therefore acts as an enabler, and an accelerant to the cancer which is Modernity. And this is how Modernity should best be understood: as a cancer on the body and soul of a culture. 

Why is that?

Without going into too much detail, Modernity is like a cancer in that:

• it has a will to life/power of its own and does not care for the wellbeing of its host;

• it has a terminal effect on every host it takes root in, given enough time;

• without early detection, it metastasizes and co-opts bodily functions of major organs in its host;

• once it occurs, it can only be temporarily excised, but will continue to relapse again and again until the host dies;

• it only arises in environments of poor health/dysfunction (you can think of societies as organisms. A healthy society does not “get” Modernity because it has sturdy social structures to guard against it)

Modernity is a cancer unwary cultures let in, because it is so seductive. It dangles the lure of material progress and luxury and comfort, and in return it only demands that bit by bit you hand over pieces of your mind and soul. Don’t you know that personal sovereignty is outmoded and clinging to it is an obstacle to our bright future, comrade? Come, let yourself be more legible to the techno-state: use our social credit system, use the centralized digital currency.

It'll make your life easier, we promise.

3. Civilizations fall when they brush up against the limits of reality, the underlying framing principles of reality, and choose to ignore them. 

There are immutable and non-negotiable laws of nature that all cultures across the length and breadth of time have discovered. That’s why you can call it the Tao (Way of Heaven), the will of the gods, Dharma, GNON, etc.

Different names for the same thing.

What they converge on is the idea that there are limits to what man can and cannot do, and a recurring theme is that we must know our limits, or face harsh & terrible consequences. It goes without saying that our present paradigm of infinite economic and technological growth would be roundly denounced as a transgression against these limits.

The ideology of infinite growth is the ideology of a cancer cell. Sound familiar?

A smart guy called William Catton wrote a book called Overshoot, that describes in great detail the material and physical ramifications of the process, and how it has unfolded. I strongly recommend you read.

Physical overshoot explains civilizational decay partially. But at work there is also spiritual malaise, and intellectual rot. And no effort to save civilization will succeed without addressing these two factors of the Triangle Of Collapse.

Which is another way of saying that no attempts at ‘saving’ the world, or America, or any country today, is possible. Because the physical process of decay is only the last step of the process. Like a termite infestation, the rot begins invisibly. By the time you can SEE the damage, it is already too late. You must abandon the house and tear it down, and begin anew. 

In the globalised modern supra-civilization we find ourselves in, that is where we are. The patient is terminally ill. I have nothing but respect for those who rail against the dying of the light and work to save it, but as a student of history I have seen this play out too many times to think it will make a difference. 

So, we must exit modernity. We must do it now, we must do it every day.

4. Exiting is not enough.

Only losers are content to go live innawoods with their hunting rifles and canned rations. It is not enough to flee burning cities. We must return at some point to build. Anew. Do not grieve so much that the world is in flames. The decrepit & sclerotic & corrupt must be cleansed. Only after a wild fire can the forest try again – better this time. It has always been this way.

It has taken me seven years of reading & thinking, and one year exactly to find the words to say this. I started the Better Barbarians newsletter one year ago. I’ve discussed the virtues of a life of vitality through physical training. It is not enough. Moving forward you must cultivate the life of the mind, and the life of the soul. 

Exiting modernity is just the first step towards creating a life where you can build and create and excel, not just consume and live a pathetic half-life mediated by corporations, the state, and the media.

5. An apocryphal story.

When the Mongol hordes were sweeping through China, they took special care to target and kill Buddhist monks. At one Buddhist monastery, the monks heard that the Mongols were coming, and fled to safety. Only one monk remained. When the Mongols arrived, they found the lone monk sitting in the courtyard. Their leader, a terrifying and big man, dismounted, strode up to the monk and unsheathed his sword.

He said, 

“Do you know who I am? I can run you through with this sword right now!”

And the monk replied,

“Do you know who I am? You can run me through with this sword right now!”

The Mongol commander bowed to the monk, summoned his men, and left. 

Do you understand this message?

Each and every one of us has a choice now. To be those who are scattered, or those who remain.

To be a master or a slave.

I do not refer to masters and slaves in the sense of those who own chattels, or who are bought and sold as chattels. I refer to the choice you can make, to take ultimate and final responsibility for your life and everything that happens in it; or to let yourself be a victim, forever blown this way and that by the vagaries of the world. When you are rewarded you will not feel as if you’ve earned it, and when times are difficult you will curse everyone and everything around you for this perceived ‘injustice’. 

Not a master of men, then, but a master of your inner reality.

If you cannot do that, you cannot begin to be sovereign. 

What’s it gonna be?