That last paragraph made me check out the ratings - and apparently this newsletter has thousands of subscribers. Looks like we're finally big enough to be seen as a threat boys.
Off topic from this chapter, but I recently re-listened to Yarvin's interview with Hermetix and it sparked some questions.
In that interview, Yarvin discussed the idea of how leftwing energy waxes and (especially) wanes over time. So for example, while the communists of 1930’s Czechoslovakia were ready to kill or be killed, the ones of the 1950’s had less of that fire, and by 1980 their hard-to-justify targets were anti-communist rock and roll bands. Additionally, by 1980 the penalty for being publicly anti-communist was basically the same as today’s Western penalty for being publicly anti-woke—potential loss of employment and income.
However, I wonder if this analysis is missing something important—the fact that A) the United States was actively funding anti-communism throughout the Soviet empire including in Czechoslovakia, and B) the West served as a very prominent example of a competing Ideology whose relative successes could not be denied by 1980, especially in regard to material goods.
I have heard Yarvin state B) in an interview. I don’t know how successful A) truly was. While I think it would be hard to come to any strong conclusions either way, it appears reasonable to believe that Western anti-communist efforts likely had some positive effects.
So, in 2021, who is going to fund anti-woke causes? China? Woke religion doesn’t exactly enhance western productivity nor western social cohesion, in fact it is a classic Divide and Conquer ideology. Any smart rival would encourage it with every means at their disposal, and I’m sure their intelligence services do.
And who is going to serve as a legitimate Ideological Rival to Woke ideology? Singapore? Dubai?
A little while ago on twitter, Eric Weinstein asked why there are no 11 or 12 figure billionaires who are funding intelligent sense-making and free speech measures.
The answer appears to be obvious- because most of them are too busy funding sense-deranging and hate speech measures. Last year, the Soros foundation teamed up with the Koch brothers to fund an organization dedicated to combating online “hate speech”. The billionaire Berggruen’s foundation recently had one of their activist-employees call for the death of Michael Anton with zero repercussions.
Undoubtedly there are some billionaires who privately dislike the new Western fundamentalist religion. But private dislike won’t change anything. There needs to be a visible counter-elite, with counter-elite institutions, foundations, and organizations.
Looking around, I see the Claremont Institute and its publication American Mind, which is good. American Affairs is high quality. First Things is decent from the trad caths.
And Yarvin knows well this barren landscape. He has explicitly said so. So what am I missing? If a true counter-elite is elected in 2024 or 2028 with broad public support (which would be challenging given that I fully expect the DNC to import as many voters as possible in the next four years) where is this counter infrastructure going to come from?
Or could it be built very quickly?
In terms of historical periods, the Great Wokening maps well onto the Reformation in certain respects. During that period, elite aspirants had to adopt the dogma and ideology of the elites in their region if they wanted to rise and not be destroyed. But there were (at least) two major competing powers throughout the West.
Today, Western elites appear to be all onboard the Woke religion train. Yes, the support is very shallow. But there is no current rival, and there’s not even any potential source that would have any incentive to fund a serious rival. Woke religion is great for billionaires and it’s great for China.
I would love to hear some more optimistic insights.
Finally, with the collapse of traditional Western religion, young people are being raised in a deracinated, vacuous, nihilistic landscape that provides no meaning. The adults have abdicated responsibility, and in fact many look to their children to tell them what to do. Woke fundamentalism is the only game in town that puts forward a “positive” meta-narrative. It creates a simplistic good guys versus bad guys story, and it’s extremely easy to understand and to teach.
Any successful Counter-reformation absolutely requires a competing positive vision that is “religious” in its underlying structure, one that confidently puts forth its own narrative embodying deeper meaning, purpose and ethics, and one that (ideally) has the strength to tolerate a wide range of beliefs under its umbrella. Historically, emerging religions have recycled pieces of older religions while adding new wrinkles.
Perhaps Christianity can undergo a reboot, perhaps Islam will take over Europe per Houllebecq’s visions, perhaps a form of Buddhism/Taoism/Confucianism can emerge.
Obviously this is a huge ask, as most human minds appear to default to rigid fundamentalisms.
Geography is never dead, it is literally bedrock. This will be eternal unless we literally transition from meatspace to totally digital, this is not a useful line of thought.
For example soon Google may be wishing it was in any Valley but one in California or America, even now Ft Meade is tearing itself away from their screens to look at a map, and any soldier knows that a few inches of dirt is the difference between life and death.
I do not disagree with the analysis overmuch, just the prescriptions I already have heard and know are coming.... mind you this "Yet it was geography that made the old multipolar world, and geography is dead in a ditch with a silicon bullet in its head."
But of course it isn't, why do you think there's even a struggle for America?
Because America is the richest store of resources on earth guarded by matchless geography.
I watched the video that Curtis recommended in multiple appearances called "Hitler Lives" which is a crude and vile propaganda movie made in 1945 penned by Dr. Seuss casting WW2 as part of a racial war against the German menace. It advocated never removing the boot from the German neck lest they organize once again and succumb to doing evil German things to which they are uniquely predisposed. The video warned that the children must be particularly suppressed and prevented from having power lest they act like Germans.
Curtis' point about the video was that the rationale behind the regime's past major wars is retconned into whatever supports the regime's activity today. He is completely correct about this of course. After watching the video, I had a different insight. Substitute "white" for "German" in the video and and you have the current establishment ideology in a nutshell. Anti-whiteness is the Nomos of the new order which is where the relevance to this post comes in.
I watched Hitler Lives with my brilliant teenage daughter who is woke as can be and all about LGBT stuff and anti-racism. She found the video outrageous, hilarious, and absurdly heavy handed. I agreed with her of course. I commented that the current regime of propaganda seems nearly as ridiculous to me as Hitler Lives is to both of us. If you are of a certain age and have endured several generations of propaganda, you have the perspective to note the absurdity of the current iteration. I continued that this is why propaganda is a tool employed to control the minds of the young who lack this perspective to dismiss it and part of the reason why beliefs and attitudes are generational. If you have more insight, you discover that the propaganda YOU grew up with was absurd as well. Very few people progress to the point of questioning their own generation's bullshit though.
"As Schmitt observes, this unipolar design is not just in conflict with the classical law; it is actually a resurrection of the medieval law of nations, with its concept of “just war.” Naturally it was the Vatican which decided whether a war was just"
This is not remotely accurate as a description of medieval international relations.
Did some of this get published then retracted? Or was there a #6.2 that was published for a moment, then disappeared? I vaguely seem to remember more on the myth of "international law"; and mentions of something about old leftovers of Europe such as the Order of Malta, Monaco, and Liechtenstein?
There actually exists Constitutional and legal mandates for all men to band together in local militias.
2D Amendment Mandate
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
This isn’t the individual right to bear arms, its a mandate for all men to be in a militia. This was a necessary duty we fell down on, its not about crime, self defense, or hunting. Nice GOP scam on that one NRA, an individual is nothing in war.
Legal Mandated Militia Duty
All adult males 17-45 are in the militia, if National Guard organized militia, the rest in unorganized militia – which is in no way a prohibition from organizing to be “well regulated” that is organized and trained. 10USC, Section 246-the Militia.
Nomos, published by New York University Press from 1977 through the present,[2] has included work by some of the leading political and legal theorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from a wide range of ideological and methodological perspectives, including Danielle Allen, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Jon Elster, Richard Epstein, Lon Fuller, Jean Hampton, Catharine MacKinnon, Frank I. Michelman, Robert Nozick, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Posner, John Rawls, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Judith Shklar, Cass Sunstein, Jeremy Waldron, Michael Walzer, Sheldon Wolin, and Iris Marion Young.[3] The series was edited by Friedrich for volumes I-VIII, coedited by J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman for volumes IX-XXXI, and edited by Chapman alone for XXXI-XXXV. Since then, series editors have included Ian Shapiro, Stephen Macedo, Melissa Williams, Sanford Levinson, James E. Fleming, and Jack Knight. In recent years, the series has been edited by Melissa Schwartzberg and, beginning in 2020, Eric Beerbohm.[4]
That last paragraph made me check out the ratings - and apparently this newsletter has thousands of subscribers. Looks like we're finally big enough to be seen as a threat boys.
Off topic from this chapter, but I recently re-listened to Yarvin's interview with Hermetix and it sparked some questions.
In that interview, Yarvin discussed the idea of how leftwing energy waxes and (especially) wanes over time. So for example, while the communists of 1930’s Czechoslovakia were ready to kill or be killed, the ones of the 1950’s had less of that fire, and by 1980 their hard-to-justify targets were anti-communist rock and roll bands. Additionally, by 1980 the penalty for being publicly anti-communist was basically the same as today’s Western penalty for being publicly anti-woke—potential loss of employment and income.
However, I wonder if this analysis is missing something important—the fact that A) the United States was actively funding anti-communism throughout the Soviet empire including in Czechoslovakia, and B) the West served as a very prominent example of a competing Ideology whose relative successes could not be denied by 1980, especially in regard to material goods.
I have heard Yarvin state B) in an interview. I don’t know how successful A) truly was. While I think it would be hard to come to any strong conclusions either way, it appears reasonable to believe that Western anti-communist efforts likely had some positive effects.
So, in 2021, who is going to fund anti-woke causes? China? Woke religion doesn’t exactly enhance western productivity nor western social cohesion, in fact it is a classic Divide and Conquer ideology. Any smart rival would encourage it with every means at their disposal, and I’m sure their intelligence services do.
And who is going to serve as a legitimate Ideological Rival to Woke ideology? Singapore? Dubai?
A little while ago on twitter, Eric Weinstein asked why there are no 11 or 12 figure billionaires who are funding intelligent sense-making and free speech measures.
The answer appears to be obvious- because most of them are too busy funding sense-deranging and hate speech measures. Last year, the Soros foundation teamed up with the Koch brothers to fund an organization dedicated to combating online “hate speech”. The billionaire Berggruen’s foundation recently had one of their activist-employees call for the death of Michael Anton with zero repercussions.
Undoubtedly there are some billionaires who privately dislike the new Western fundamentalist religion. But private dislike won’t change anything. There needs to be a visible counter-elite, with counter-elite institutions, foundations, and organizations.
Looking around, I see the Claremont Institute and its publication American Mind, which is good. American Affairs is high quality. First Things is decent from the trad caths.
And Yarvin knows well this barren landscape. He has explicitly said so. So what am I missing? If a true counter-elite is elected in 2024 or 2028 with broad public support (which would be challenging given that I fully expect the DNC to import as many voters as possible in the next four years) where is this counter infrastructure going to come from?
Or could it be built very quickly?
In terms of historical periods, the Great Wokening maps well onto the Reformation in certain respects. During that period, elite aspirants had to adopt the dogma and ideology of the elites in their region if they wanted to rise and not be destroyed. But there were (at least) two major competing powers throughout the West.
Today, Western elites appear to be all onboard the Woke religion train. Yes, the support is very shallow. But there is no current rival, and there’s not even any potential source that would have any incentive to fund a serious rival. Woke religion is great for billionaires and it’s great for China.
I would love to hear some more optimistic insights.
Finally, with the collapse of traditional Western religion, young people are being raised in a deracinated, vacuous, nihilistic landscape that provides no meaning. The adults have abdicated responsibility, and in fact many look to their children to tell them what to do. Woke fundamentalism is the only game in town that puts forward a “positive” meta-narrative. It creates a simplistic good guys versus bad guys story, and it’s extremely easy to understand and to teach.
Any successful Counter-reformation absolutely requires a competing positive vision that is “religious” in its underlying structure, one that confidently puts forth its own narrative embodying deeper meaning, purpose and ethics, and one that (ideally) has the strength to tolerate a wide range of beliefs under its umbrella. Historically, emerging religions have recycled pieces of older religions while adding new wrinkles.
Perhaps Christianity can undergo a reboot, perhaps Islam will take over Europe per Houllebecq’s visions, perhaps a form of Buddhism/Taoism/Confucianism can emerge.
Obviously this is a huge ask, as most human minds appear to default to rigid fundamentalisms.
Geography is never dead, it is literally bedrock. This will be eternal unless we literally transition from meatspace to totally digital, this is not a useful line of thought.
For example soon Google may be wishing it was in any Valley but one in California or America, even now Ft Meade is tearing itself away from their screens to look at a map, and any soldier knows that a few inches of dirt is the difference between life and death.
I do not disagree with the analysis overmuch, just the prescriptions I already have heard and know are coming.... mind you this "Yet it was geography that made the old multipolar world, and geography is dead in a ditch with a silicon bullet in its head."
But of course it isn't, why do you think there's even a struggle for America?
Because America is the richest store of resources on earth guarded by matchless geography.
I watched the video that Curtis recommended in multiple appearances called "Hitler Lives" which is a crude and vile propaganda movie made in 1945 penned by Dr. Seuss casting WW2 as part of a racial war against the German menace. It advocated never removing the boot from the German neck lest they organize once again and succumb to doing evil German things to which they are uniquely predisposed. The video warned that the children must be particularly suppressed and prevented from having power lest they act like Germans.
Curtis' point about the video was that the rationale behind the regime's past major wars is retconned into whatever supports the regime's activity today. He is completely correct about this of course. After watching the video, I had a different insight. Substitute "white" for "German" in the video and and you have the current establishment ideology in a nutshell. Anti-whiteness is the Nomos of the new order which is where the relevance to this post comes in.
I watched Hitler Lives with my brilliant teenage daughter who is woke as can be and all about LGBT stuff and anti-racism. She found the video outrageous, hilarious, and absurdly heavy handed. I agreed with her of course. I commented that the current regime of propaganda seems nearly as ridiculous to me as Hitler Lives is to both of us. If you are of a certain age and have endured several generations of propaganda, you have the perspective to note the absurdity of the current iteration. I continued that this is why propaganda is a tool employed to control the minds of the young who lack this perspective to dismiss it and part of the reason why beliefs and attitudes are generational. If you have more insight, you discover that the propaganda YOU grew up with was absurd as well. Very few people progress to the point of questioning their own generation's bullshit though.
https://i.imgur.com/VBfMMCa.jpg
"As Schmitt observes, this unipolar design is not just in conflict with the classical law; it is actually a resurrection of the medieval law of nations, with its concept of “just war.” Naturally it was the Vatican which decided whether a war was just"
This is not remotely accurate as a description of medieval international relations.
Did some of this get published then retracted? Or was there a #6.2 that was published for a moment, then disappeared? I vaguely seem to remember more on the myth of "international law"; and mentions of something about old leftovers of Europe such as the Order of Malta, Monaco, and Liechtenstein?
Our Common Duty
Men’s Duty is to Defend
There actually exists Constitutional and legal mandates for all men to band together in local militias.
2D Amendment Mandate
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
This isn’t the individual right to bear arms, its a mandate for all men to be in a militia. This was a necessary duty we fell down on, its not about crime, self defense, or hunting. Nice GOP scam on that one NRA, an individual is nothing in war.
Legal Mandated Militia Duty
All adult males 17-45 are in the militia, if National Guard organized militia, the rest in unorganized militia – which is in no way a prohibition from organizing to be “well regulated” that is organized and trained. 10USC, Section 246-the Militia.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246
These aren’t rights.
These are duties.
If you want to ensure our survival and a future for our children; Form Ranks.
Nomos, published by New York University Press from 1977 through the present,[2] has included work by some of the leading political and legal theorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from a wide range of ideological and methodological perspectives, including Danielle Allen, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Jon Elster, Richard Epstein, Lon Fuller, Jean Hampton, Catharine MacKinnon, Frank I. Michelman, Robert Nozick, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Posner, John Rawls, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Judith Shklar, Cass Sunstein, Jeremy Waldron, Michael Walzer, Sheldon Wolin, and Iris Marion Young.[3] The series was edited by Friedrich for volumes I-VIII, coedited by J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman for volumes IX-XXXI, and edited by Chapman alone for XXXI-XXXV. Since then, series editors have included Ian Shapiro, Stephen Macedo, Melissa Williams, Sanford Levinson, James E. Fleming, and Jack Knight. In recent years, the series has been edited by Melissa Schwartzberg and, beginning in 2020, Eric Beerbohm.[4]