THE REACTIONARY'S ROUNDUP - 4 JUNE 2023

The best writing on (and off) Substack: Nature gazes back. AirSpace as the modern aesthetic. Pot and the nightmare of Plato. And more!

This is the roundup that would have gone out on May 28th, but did not… because the man who was meant to write this was not around.

Dear reader, the present author went on holiday somewhere in the South China Sea and came back with a treasure greater than even the fabled One Piece; I returned with a fiancée. It is still a surreal experience as I have not historically been a man of the marrying sort, but the Maker has in His great foresight decided that after all, I should experience the trials and joys of married life. So I am back, and after a hectic few days of catching up on work, here is this week’s Reactionary Roundup.

Enjoy.

Moderns Against Modernity

Opening this week is yet another broadside against the Modern disenchantment of the world by John Michael Greer. Greer has been foundational to my understanding of the state of the modern world, and so far he has been eerily prescient in his predictions of where we are likely to go next. It has been quite fascinating to follow him down the rabbit hole as he explores a process central to the sterile nature of our industrialized world – namely, the Disenchantment of the world.

Humans used to live in a world of phenomena, what Owen Barfield referred to as ‘original participation.’ The industrialization of the world came in tandem with the stripping of personhood from things like the woods, the rivers and even the Sun. Moderns like to point to indigenous people who believe that trees and animals have spirits and pooh-pooh at how quaint or superstitious they are, then go back to their dead and sterile pods and stuff themselves with fake food and antidepressants. Curious! This is no trifling thing, as in the process of reducing Essence to Substance we have created the conditions for anomie and nihilism to thrive.

The curious thing about Nature, though, is that just like the abyss, when we gaze into it too long, Nature gazes back. The closing paragraphs are a brilliant summation of how disenchantment leads to depersonalization of nature, animals, phenomena… and now other humans, relating the process back to Martin Buber’s concepts of I-You and I-It relationships (if you’re unfamiliar with these termswhy do you not study Buber? Pick up a copy of I & Thou now!). I’ve quoted the relevant passages below. Emphasis mine.

Central to the historical cycle we have been discussing, in fact, is a gradual shift over time from I-you relationships to I-it relationships. The feudal systems central to dark age societies are governed by I-you relationships from top to bottom—the foundation of the social structure is the personal bond between lord and vassal—and the same pattern of relationships extends outward from the human sphere into the realms of nature and spirit, which are experienced as part of the great community of persons making up the world. Over time, these personal relationships give way to more abstract and arbitrary interactions, personhood slowly bleeds out of the world, and in due time you end up in a situation where only human beings are considered persons.

Then the process continues, excluding more and more phenomena from personhood, until the vast bureacratic systems that run every dying civilization erase the personhood of the population, and the ruling elites of society fall deeper and deeper into the habit of thinking of themselves as the only subjects in a world full of passive, meaningless objects.  That’s where we are in the modern industrial world. What happens after that is the decay and disintegration of the society, as people outside the elite classes shrug and walk away from a system that no longer even makes a pretense of meeting their needs.  We’re starting to see the first stirrings of that, too—and we’ll see more of it as modern industrial civilization stumbles onward through the fog its own consciousness has conjured into existence, blind to the way that human and nonhuman persons alike are responding to its actions.

Cask-strength stuff! I look forward to the continuation of this series. In the meantime, click on the link and read the whole thing.

Maoyong Liu

The ancients created many wonders of art and technology that have been lost to time. Loathe as I am to give them the traffic, this article by the Washington Post actually does a good job discussing how Mayan cities and architecture are both older than we previously thought, and better designed than we knew. Do give it a read.

JM Smith at The Orthosphere has a short piece of political philosophy that neatly sums up one of the key obstacles in our fight against the New Babylon, namely that we are fighting against an iron triangle. What is an iron triangle, you ask?

An aspiring cultural elite enjoys no particular advantage when it has truth on its side.  What it needs on its side are moneymen, politicians, and celebrities.  It needs the real advantages that can be purchased with cash, compelled by law, and conjured by  glamor.  An aspiring cultural elite needs the advantage, the overwhelming and irresistible advantage, of being taken up into the iron triangle by the economic and political elite.

[…]

We are up against an iron triangle of moneymen, politicians and propagandists, and this aristocracy grows daily more pitiless and energetic in its use of persecution.

Mr Smith goes too far, I say! There is no evidence that the Left has any sort of monopoly over the banks, the corporations, and the politicians. Not even a shred of an iota of influence. In other news, the sky is green and I did not have breakfast this morning.

Niccolo Soldo

has his Saturday column, as usual. Do give it a read.

Saturday Commentary and Review #126

The Notorious J.I.M. on war and game theory. Emphasis mine.

Know your enemy, know yourself, you will prevail in every battle, know yourself but not the enemy, you will lose half the time, know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will lose every time. The Taliban knew America better than globohomo did, but globohomo had absolutely no idea what the Taliban was about, despite the Taliban attempting to tell them loudly and clearly in excellent idiomatic English on every channel that they could. The Global American Empire wanders into wars with no idea what is on the table, or what the enemy intends, for not only is the enemy’s beef with them unspeakable and unthinkable, their beef with the enemy is also unspeakable and unthinkable.

After a long and hard war, peace makes the victors complacent. Weak. Soft. The 20th century Pax Americana has created a world order run by soft power, and in this self-styled rules-based order the American hegemon has wilfully ignored any questions or critiques of how it runs its business.

Leading to the present scenario where those in charge have not just forgotten the rules of war and Realpolitik, they can not even imagine a world of war and Realpolitik. It’s all Marvel movie morality with these people, such is the potency of their medicine. A word to the wise: Those who create potent propaganda should not, under any circumstances, get high off their own supply.

This calls to mind another reason I am highly skeptical that the shadowy figures that so-called conservatives like to bash are actually in charge. The adults left the room a long time ago and now we are left with an senile, out-of-touch clueless elite that has self-selected against admitting anyone competent enough to take the reins and steer civilization back on track.

In other words. What if the elites aren’t malicious galaxybrain bastards? What if we are attributing hyper malice and hyper competence to overgrown children who sincerely believe in the Marvel morality their forefathers fed the world? Huh.

Megha Lillywhite

at Classical Ideals has some thoughts on how public art has a real metaphysical impact on its people. Here is a choice excerpt for you, this captures the main thrust of her essay:

What is the effect of displaying in the centre of town, a strong and virile young man, gifted his strength from the grace of God. Every time people pass by the sculpture, they will think about the value of strength and that it belongs with goodness. They will be in awe of the beauty yes, but they won’t be able to avoid thinking about the role of a virtuous young man in saving society. Young men. will aspire to be him. Young women will be reminded of that they admire and need. It is not merely a work of art that is pro-man, it is pro-strength, beauty and virtue.

When David was selected to be put in the center of the Piazza del Signore in Florence, it replaced the sculptire of Judith and Holofernes by Donatello. Judith and Holofernes was moved elsewhere because Florentine officials believed that it was bad for society if a woman beheading a man were to be portrayed at the centre of society.

And yet, what do we find at the centre of New York City but Medusa, beheading Perseus? It is a nefarious and dark reversal of Cellini’s Perseus beheading Medusa.

I was going to park this essay under Arts & Letters, but that would be to miss the point here that art is not always just art. Art is downstream from culture and power. The opposite also holds true. Art is reflective of the stories a society tells (or does not tell) itself. For that, Megha earns this week’s Honorable Mention.

And finally, what do we do when there’s nothing less to conserve?

Paul Kingsnorth

at

The Abbey of Misrule

returns from a brief hiatus from writing with a 20 minute video in which he attempts to distill the essence of what he’s been writing about over the last few years. Mr. Kingsnorth and the Dark Mountain Project was one of the first writers I stumbled upon way back in 2014, when I was a naive young man who still had stars in his eyes and was still an inveterate believer in the Myth of Progress. Check it out while you’re enjoying a cup of strong coffee. It will be one of the better ways you’ll spend 20 minutes this week.

Intermission: Digging Down

Corporate Ls

Let’s have a moment of silence for the fallen profit margins of Anheuser-Busch, Target, and The North Face. My heart cries, nay, bleeds, for the grievous financial losses they’ve incurred lately at the hand of right-wing extremists who refuse to drink beer from cans emblazoned with the cringeworthy face of a man-child who thinks he’s a girl-child.

What’s that? Rough and tough blue collar men don’t like being scolded repeatedly that they’re bigots, archaic, toxically masculine? Why would they possibly have a problem with that? I mean…. They’ve never been targeted for annihilation by globalist elites. And it’s a good thing that they are. How dare they boycott these noble corporations that are only trying to pave the way toward a kinder, more inclusive world? A world where you can walk into a supermarket and buy clothes for toddlers that, erm, glorify Satan… I’m not even going to link to this stuff.

James Howard Kunstler thinks we are not even close to seeing the end of the troubles, We are in for a long trial by ordeal.

Do not forget that clown world antics like this can only happen because Western journalists, experts, academics, elites, and media tell you that it is inevitable. That this is Progress. And you should be exiled from polite society for having the gall to disagree.

Esteemed grouch

William M Briggs

therefore has a timely reminder that:

You do not hate journalists enough.

You do not hate intelligent elites enough.

You do not hate “experts” enough.

You do not hate rulers enough.

Poetic. Pithy. Sad. And true. My heart goes out to my friends stuck in the neo-gulag of the West who know too well these sorrows.

Fighting The Long Descent

Move over, Extinction Rebellion, there’s a new movement in town calling for the end of progress, and the end of industrial growth. This young punk calls itself Degrowth, and it’s jonesing for a return to something a little rougher. The movement held a conference in Europe last week. Here’s how one speaker put it:

Infinite growth on finite resources is not only a myth but it’s extractivist and ruthlessly oppressive by design. . . . We have to acknowledge what lays below our growth: white supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism.

Too easy to dunk on these dorks, just as it is low-hanging fruit to bash the midwits who defaced the Trevi Fountain and other artistic heirlooms of the Western world in the name of Mother Gaia. Even so… it’s worth digging in and examining why it’s striking such a chord with people.

For one, why has South Korea, with all its advancement, started to commit demographic suicide?

Korea abolishes itself

And why are Canadians now committing – endorsing, even – actual suicide? 

Watch this space, ladies and gentlemen. I sense that the death drive that organized religion had previously kept in check has awoken from its eons-long slumber, and the dark gods of the abyss are very hungry for souls.

First Korea, next the world. Welcome to the Depopulocalypse.

John Carter

examines the slow emptying and greying of the world through economic, biological, and sociological factors. It is quite a thorough analysis. For that, Mr Carter earns this week’s second Honorable Mention.

The present author thinks that Degrowth is just another byblow of Malthusianism with a shiny coat of paint. It is fundamentally anti-human, as its adherents seek to not only curb human population by raising the barriers to reproduction and lowering the barriers to suicide and state-sponsored euthanasia (they always say we will be better off with fewer people on the planet, but who is this “we” of which they speak, kemosabe?).

Here’s what Degrowth actually leads to: Fewer people sucking up precious resources, thus living shittier lives, consuming far less of everything, subsisting at a deliberately throttled level of technology – leaving more of Earth’s natural bounty for the globalist elite who will continue enjoying the fruits of technology, now with the added bonus of not seeing so many of our teeming masses whenever they deign to gaze out from their megatower penthouses 5 kilometres in the air.

And this campaign must go hand in hand with the abolition of ethnic groups. The Combine cannot stand heterogeneity. All must assimilate. This explains why Degrowth types tend to also argue in favor of one-world government and abolishing the nation-state. It’s power, all the way down. To conclude I can think of no one better than

The Saxon Cross

who wrote in the post, Nation-States and Folklands:

Folk is the most important identity we have. Any other identity, or any form of government, only exists to strengthen this.

A people is a family, a folk. It is not your country, government, or even the land you dwell in.

Any government that supplants this is your enemy and is seeking your destruction.

Marxcissism is real

Harrison Koehli

at

Political Ponerology

brings a mighty shiv to the belief that left-wing people are nicer/kinder/more enlightened than right-wing or conservative folks. The data simply does not bear it out.

A few choice quotes (emphasis mine):

On the expectation for leftwing authoritarianism (LWA) to be associated with prosocial traits, interestingly, Krispenz and Bertrams found no positive connection between LWA and altruism. They were actually negatively correlated.

[…]

In Lobaczewski’s terms, a concern with social justice will be more associated with people concerned with actual unfairness or injustice (or at least the appearance of it). When actual injustice exists, altruistic people will be motivated to protest it in the hopes of bringing it to wider attention and ultimately rectifying it. However, as people with a normal emotional-instinctive substrate, they will not necessarily be particularly concerned with tearing down the entire social order, and they won’t be radically anti-conventional.

However, narcissistic and psychopathic revolutionaries ride this wave of discontent for their own reasons. They are more concerned with removing existing power structures, in which they are reviled as criminals and do not get what they want, and replacing them with one in which they hold the power and can impose their will on everyone else. After George Floyd, which the paper’s authors discuss in the context of LWA, many believed (and still do) that there is an epidemic of police killing unarmed blacks. In a country where racial disparities do exist, this creates the conditions for the narcissistic/psychopathic “capture” of any movement that springs up around these issues, like BLM.

Read the whole thing here.

Arts and Letters

Arthur Dayne

continues his chronicle of finding Christ and serenity amid the ruins of Oakland, California in Sleepless: Chapter 5.

"Sleepless" Chapter 5: "The War in the Soul"

I neglected to mention this last week Arthur also hosts the Blood and Rain podcast. If you’re new to this newsletter, please give this episode a listen. In it we discussed some deep lore into a certain anthropomorphic bison’s early life and background. This does not exist anywhere else on the internet!

Agnostic over at Face To Face continues his deep dive into America’s aesthetic contribution to the world of architecture, arguing this week that imperial competition fuels ornamental complexity, while unipolarity keeps things simple. In his own words,

the theory is that unipolar environments favor simple ornamentation, while multipolar ones favor elaborate ornamentation.

The seemingly universal (and inescapable) emergence of the minimalist/Brutalist aesthetic, elsewhere called the International Style, could only have arisen in a unipolar or imperial world order. In more recent times, this has created a curious phenomenon. where no matter which major city you go to, from London to Delhi to Seoul, every new space seems to look as if it was born in a Brooklyn warehouse. Kyle Chayka wrote a fantastic piece on this phenomenon in Welcome To Airspace. But why has this happened, you might ask? Back to Agnostic:

Why? Well, when you have multiple imperial rivals, you're not only competing over the military control of territory, or the economic trade networks, but also cultural influence. You think you can do intricate tracery? Ha! We'll make ours *even more* intricate! You can't compete over simplicity, because it has a hard boundary -- you can't get more minimal than minimal, but you can get orders of magnitude more maximalist.

This imperial cultural rivalry sparks an ornamental arms race among the competitors, as each struggles to keep up and out-do the others.

[…]

Empires in a unipolar environment don't feel such a strong pressure to keep up with others, or out-do others, so why over-do it? Keep it simple. Make it impressive, monumental, awing, etc. -- sure, but without getting sucked into a ratchet of escalating complexity. This peacefulness of cultural forms reflects the peacefulness of geopolitics when there's only one empire in the neighborhood. That doesn't mean it's free from conflict -- it expands by conquering others, but these others are not also empires in their own right always trading territory back and forth.

I think he’s on to something.

Why can’t billion dollar studios get it right? The Redditor and the Average Joe normie thinks it’s because the show writers don’t know or respect the ‘lore’ enough. However,

The Saxon Cross

believes that more sinister forces are at play, and that the degradation and wholesale destruction of much-beloved franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, and The Witcher, are prongs of a deliberate assault on Western culture, archetypes, and stories.

“Lore” isn’t the point. The original The Lord of the Rings movies are beloved despite many diversions from Tolkien’s “lore” and fictional history. They’re loved because they respect the spirit of the original material, and small diversions don’t change that.

What you need to look for in adaptions is whether the “spirit” is being respected, not “lore”. It is the spirit of a thing that we really love and connect to, the things surrounding it can be changed.

Read the whole thing.

With two posts making the cut for this week’s roundup, I hereby grant

The Saxon Cross

this week’s Silver Circle Award.

Train Everything

William M Briggs

returns this week with a rather somber update:

It Will Soon Be Impossible For You Not To Be Sick, Even If You’re Healthy

Over the last few years the medical establishment has found a lovely little hammer and now everything looks like nails.

The zeal to quantify all things, to have only Experts certify knowledge, and the irresistible urge to terrorize people into believing normal activities are potentially deadly, will only lead to tyranny. Doubt this? Then let me remind you of mandated PCR tests. Set with a sensitivity so high that it was like hearing a gnat’s footsteps.

[…]

The point to all this jollity is that these measures are all given “normal” ranges or values. Maybe you’ve seen these printed on blood tests you’ve had. If you deviate outside the normal range, the doctor pulls his chin, and may even smile, because now he has something to work on. He may even be right. But it should be obvious that the more things are checked, the more likely it is to find a biomarker “outside” the normal range.

If outside the normal range indicates ill health, i.e. a problem to be solved, then it will be almost impossible for anybody to be healthy. If you seek, you shall find.

Stay tuned and you will see the biomedical surveillance state ratchet up and go into overdrive.

Friend of the blog Raw Egg Nationalist wrote an article at the American Mind on how the seemingly innocuous legalization of pot may open the door to more sinister agendas. Remarking on how the ancient Greeks would deny meat to their helots to render them docile and compliant, and how they knew meat made men hardy and courageous, it truly is not conspiratorial thinking to wonder why so many of the elites are pushing for a meat-free future for all of us.

Combine the resulting lowered THVMOS with the psychoactive and psychotropic effects of CBD, and you have a recipe for new ways for governments, working in tandem with health ministries and food manufacturers, to ensure that the food you eat and the water you drink keeps you fat, sick, lazy and passive for ever. He asks:

Is this really what we want? Processed food that makes us even more passive and even more a slave to our appetite than we already are? One recent lab study showed that just four weeks of consuming processed food made rats lose their memory and stop displaying “anticipatory fear” in response to danger cues like the smell of a cat. Imagine an entire society of people whose cognitive power and natural intuitions were radically blunted by the food they ate, as well as being overweight and entirely dependent on medication to alleviate their chronic health problems. Imagine not just the social, but the political, consequences. Except you don’t have to imagine: it’s us. The dream of Plato’s Socrates—of a people drained of thymos by their diet—is our living nightmare.

You know what you have to do. If you’re reading this newsletter there is already a high chance you are skeptical of the cultural push these last few years to eat less meat, to eat soy/insect meal in order to “save the planet”. Reader, I kid you not when I say the malevolent midwits are already trying to establish a link between eating meat and such spurious things as toxic masculinity, racism, white supremacy, etc. Think for a minute how ridiculous that sounds and then slap a fat steak (or two) on the grill. We need more red-blooded meat lovers in this fight!

That’s all for this edition of the Reactionary’s Roundup.

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