Leftists tend to commodify everything, and once they extract the commodity from an experience, they learn how to game reality to access the commodity directly, without any consideration for the stuff they throw away.
Love and connection are viewed as commodities, and any way of accessing these states are measured in their efficiency and reliability of accessing these states. Hard drugs like MDMA are more valid than marriage because they are better at accessing a state of euphoria. Circling is de facto good because it feels good, full stop.
Beyond that, leftists have zero regard for Chesterton's Fences. Actually, that's not true. A good leftist is a Fence Terminator, programmed to seek and destroy every fence in sight. Monogamy? Destroy. Marriage? Destroy. Family? Destroy. Gender roles? Destroy.
Anyone inclined to uphold the faintest hint of tradition is the enemy. That is in essence what gets one labelled far-right. And the more the progressives strip away culture and tradition, the more inclined I become to protect it.
Anyways, wonderful essay. There's a lot more there than meets the eye.
Tremendous post — maybe the quality of a State can be glimpsed from the quality of boyfriends and wives and friendships among the regime's people. Virginities lost in Hoxha's defunct bunkers, Romanian orphanages, leftover women, incels & roasties, ISIS sex slaves, hikkikomori. Where are the least dysfunctional marriages the most common?
Hassidim and Mexican Pentecostals seem to have good marriages. I'll bet a lot of Muslims do too. Brooklyn Muslim women seem pretty happy to me. They gather in large groups with their many children on the lawn in the park, like gardens of dark mushrooms.
OMG - that must've been the longest 2 months of your adult life. I've been happily married for 21 years as of yesterday. Boy, it's gone fast. The key to its success has been to call each other out on our bs & to have a deep commitment to ensuring that the highest values that each of us embraces is at a minimum respected & more often than not supported. Of course, it helps that I think we were both mature emotionally before we got married & our philosophy is very similar even if our personal interests are very different.
To the young men & women on this board, if a relationship is hard, it's not the right relationship. Sure, you will have hard times, but day to day, it should be easy not a challenge.
100% agreed. My first marriage failed. She had.. problems. And we weren't good for each other. Even before marriage, things were rocky and I thought, "this is just how relationships are: they're hard. You have problems; you work through them." Then we split up after 4 years and got divorced.
A few months later, I met someone. She was raised in a different religion than me, but she was based, and that turned out to be more important that whatever I thought was important before. Things have been great ever since, we had a kid a month ago, and we're happy. Life's good.
Your 1st paragraph rings true based on distant memory. The thought of persevering because that's what solid people do. Yeah - marriage is work, but it shouldn't be constant conflict or drudgery.
Are normal people okay with having others "call them out on their bs"? Is it abnormal to see someone's "I'm calling you out on your bs!" as "I dislike you because you're abnormal and you'd better get normal or I'll do everything in my power to destroy you"?
Maybe I'm not sure what "bs" means here. Doesn't it usually mean phoniness? I've always felt that women who find fault with my personality-expressing behavioral patterns just want me to be phony like them and almost everyone else. The same with employers, which is why I've lost forty or fifty jobs during the past thirty-five years.
I think mature adults in a committed relationship understand that they need feedback. Ofc, I wouldn't be critical without really getting to know the person. When they deviate from my 'model' & more importantly their 'model' I believe a response is required & an exchange follows either with a clarification of their course of action or a recognition on the other person's part that they crossed a line.
If you are only affirming people, how can they possibly grow up? Well, I think we've seen the consequence of people being infantilized into their 30s with all the 'positive' reinforcement. And, don't even get me started about employee reviews where I've 'exceeded expectations' for 15 years & haven't really done much different year to year. LOL.
When it comes to relationships, I'm about as far from New Age as you can get. It would take too much effort to go through all the psycho babble. So, in my marriage, we don't let stuff fester. Something bugs me, the point of contention is generally broached pretty quickly. Then again, after 25 years together, you don't really need to figure out what bugs the other person :)
My ex tried to rope me into some of this stuff. We had a healthy great thing going and it just dissolved when she started getting more involved in these types of experiences. She was/is paying for an unlicensed therapist, a business coach, and a life coach doing multiple sessions every week. all of these sessions resembled one-on-one circling. then we broke up because she believed we didn't have a deep enough connection go figure.
This discussion reminds me of that story, “Hunters in the Snow.” A “circling” marriage is just a fat guy gorging on pancakes affirming a guy leaving his wife and kids for an underage girl, while yet another guy is dying in the bed of a pickup truck in the parking lot.
The central point about the acid rain destroying not only marriages but love and fellow-feeling reminds me of something Wendell Berry said in "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine": "Marriage has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided."
“ as a serious, respectful grownup, I had to take it seriously” - I think Curtis makes an important observation about the difference between friendship and a relationship/marriage. When you’re in a relationship, the other person is a part of you, so you can’t detach and let them do what they want the way you would with a friend.
The word "friendship" was applied for thousands of years to relationships in which "the other person is a part of you, so you can't detach and let them do what they want ...." Curtis is using the word "friend" to signify what used to be called a "buddy" or a "pal" or whatever. Old poems and stories are my evidence here. Nowadays if you want to have what used to be called a "friendship" you're seen as a homo or classified by Youtube teachers-of-evil as something out of some manual of psychiatric disorders.
Maybe he's just speaking from his own experience, which is similar to my experience. Which is that I don't have any friends I feel this way about, or even family, except for my husband and my kids.
Yeah, those poems were probably by weirdos anyway. But in a village or manor you couldn't detach from people either. I imagine that it wouldn't be a matter of the normals not letting freaks do what they want so much as the freaks having to adapt to the normals in order to survive, knowing that as long they don't act like Grendel they'll sort of fit in around the edges.
Actually, the whole issue of freaks vs. normals probably wouldn't have been a thing in a village, because there wouldn't have been any TV shows to clue people in on what counts as normal. Everyone would have had his/her cartoon-peculiarity, like Dickens-characters.
In Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge there's kind of a chorus of old people who've known each other since they were toddlers. It's not so much a matter of being friends in the Achilles-Patroclus or Roland-Oliver sense as it is of just having your life so interwoven with other people's lives that this is just taken for granted by everyone.
I agree completely there. Things were different before we moved into the cities and became just the nuclear families. But here we are, this is now our natural habitat. And it’s the same in urban USA as it is in urban Russia or urban China.
Well, I'd say "this is now our UNnatural (but perhaps inescapable) habitat" -- which is maybe comparable to the Platonic/Pauline view of our present Fallen psychic condition as unnatural, a "second" nature, an unnatural nature.
And I didn't think I could appreciate my wife more than I do already. When we started seeing each other I tried to break it off but asked her to date me the minute I saw the pain in her reaction. The goal of not hurting each other is effortless as long as we both acknowledge that's the goal, and I don't think we've ever had to acknowledge it out loud to one another. Being twice-divorced I'm obviously not the natural one at marriage. Our friends in a variety of relationship states or configurations ask us for advice and it's almost impossible for me to articulate what they should expect or foster in a partner. Some are the probably the circling type and I don't know where to start, but I think a lot of what's in this hits it squarely on the head. I don't know you past your blogs but I'm extremely sorry for your loss.
The last book chapter post was uploaded in February. Can you please continue writing the book? After all, that's how Gray Mirror was advertised: A preview of the upcoming book.
Fascinating seeing these posts since I was dragged by an ex into a bit of old Landmark-style brainwashing myself. Only after a few long weekends did I begin the horrific process of realizing I had been totally manipulated into a struggle-session emotional orgy.
The real fun begins when you see that these groups, struggle-sessions with a dash of love-bombing, or vice-versa, exist because they are familiar; they are the exact dynamics that countless experience who grew up with co-dependent/narcissistic parents. One therapist friend told me she thinks that this is presently the vast majority of American marriages.
So, I hope that the staff of the USG liquidation committee will have some good psychotherapists as well as executives.
"Co-dependent" is a label generated by those same groups; it's just a disparaging way of indicating that people (for example, one's parents) are really friends. As for "narcissistic", this is merely a term of abuse, typically applied by women to boyfriends they're annoyed at, that's pretty much equivalent to "won't submit to me".
I believe, in fact, that Curtis mentioned that his mean ex-girlfriend accused him of wanting to be "co-dependently" related to her. Didn't he mention this? I vaguely recall that he did.
The whole professional therapeutic enterprise is Satanic -- the sole objective purpose of it is to destroy families -- and if anything's going to be righteously liquidated then this enterprise should be liquidated right away.
I remember that someone commenting at Scott Alexander's blog (before I was permanently banned there) linked to her own blog, the sole purpose of which was to denounce her parents, especially her father, for being "narcissistic." My reaction was sympathy for her father and anger at her for being so nasty.
If you look at the results coming out of PTSD studies and MDMA use the results are quiet remarkable. I've used MDMA with a therapist in the past with great results (I'm here having a healthy relationship with neo-reaction aren't I!) - but as with everything and every substance its all 'set and setting'. We have to keep in mind that a lot of the reasons Psychedelic medicine and some of the more unorthodox gestalt therapies developed post-war ended up in strange and in some cases unhinged places was because of the culture wars being waged at the time and substances like MDMA and LSD being made illegal even for research and long harsh prison sentences being doled out with regularity...the intersection of the cathedral's rejection of these substances and methods as legitimate or even worthy of research combined with the right wing/so-con demonization in the 50s-90s is an interesting world to explore...
LSD was a CIA project, the purpose of which was to extinguish any sense of natural order so that a disintegrated mass of destroyed selves could be dominated by reptilian masters. The internet took over where LSD left off, as Timothy Leary noted.
When I was in college in the 80s, it was the rich kids who did psychedelic drugs and knew where to find them. This was probably because they had connections via their prep-schools with Managerium-agents. Enlightenment was supposedly achieved through something that that rich kids possessed and provided. So, when Curtis speaks of this drug Ecstasy (that's the one, right?) I think, "Where the fuck does he purchase that stuff?"
Today every Mexican and Puerto Rican kid in my neighborhood is either smoking a joint or rolling one, yet few of them seem to be earning any sort of income, and certainly not an income that would support a half-ounce-per-week (at least) marijuana-habit. So I assume that they're getting their marijuana from the government; the Managerium wants these people to stay stoned.
Curtis, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that had you met that woman when you were the same age when you met your late wife things would be different. Circling and all that shit notwithstanding.
Leftists tend to commodify everything, and once they extract the commodity from an experience, they learn how to game reality to access the commodity directly, without any consideration for the stuff they throw away.
Love and connection are viewed as commodities, and any way of accessing these states are measured in their efficiency and reliability of accessing these states. Hard drugs like MDMA are more valid than marriage because they are better at accessing a state of euphoria. Circling is de facto good because it feels good, full stop.
Beyond that, leftists have zero regard for Chesterton's Fences. Actually, that's not true. A good leftist is a Fence Terminator, programmed to seek and destroy every fence in sight. Monogamy? Destroy. Marriage? Destroy. Family? Destroy. Gender roles? Destroy.
Anyone inclined to uphold the faintest hint of tradition is the enemy. That is in essence what gets one labelled far-right. And the more the progressives strip away culture and tradition, the more inclined I become to protect it.
Anyways, wonderful essay. There's a lot more there than meets the eye.
Tremendous post — maybe the quality of a State can be glimpsed from the quality of boyfriends and wives and friendships among the regime's people. Virginities lost in Hoxha's defunct bunkers, Romanian orphanages, leftover women, incels & roasties, ISIS sex slaves, hikkikomori. Where are the least dysfunctional marriages the most common?
Hassidim and Mexican Pentecostals seem to have good marriages. I'll bet a lot of Muslims do too. Brooklyn Muslim women seem pretty happy to me. They gather in large groups with their many children on the lawn in the park, like gardens of dark mushrooms.
Covenant marriage is superior to contract marriage—the latter always has in prospect efficient breach, and so it unravels.
OMG - that must've been the longest 2 months of your adult life. I've been happily married for 21 years as of yesterday. Boy, it's gone fast. The key to its success has been to call each other out on our bs & to have a deep commitment to ensuring that the highest values that each of us embraces is at a minimum respected & more often than not supported. Of course, it helps that I think we were both mature emotionally before we got married & our philosophy is very similar even if our personal interests are very different.
To the young men & women on this board, if a relationship is hard, it's not the right relationship. Sure, you will have hard times, but day to day, it should be easy not a challenge.
100% agreed. My first marriage failed. She had.. problems. And we weren't good for each other. Even before marriage, things were rocky and I thought, "this is just how relationships are: they're hard. You have problems; you work through them." Then we split up after 4 years and got divorced.
A few months later, I met someone. She was raised in a different religion than me, but she was based, and that turned out to be more important that whatever I thought was important before. Things have been great ever since, we had a kid a month ago, and we're happy. Life's good.
Your 1st paragraph rings true based on distant memory. The thought of persevering because that's what solid people do. Yeah - marriage is work, but it shouldn't be constant conflict or drudgery.
Are normal people okay with having others "call them out on their bs"? Is it abnormal to see someone's "I'm calling you out on your bs!" as "I dislike you because you're abnormal and you'd better get normal or I'll do everything in my power to destroy you"?
Maybe I'm not sure what "bs" means here. Doesn't it usually mean phoniness? I've always felt that women who find fault with my personality-expressing behavioral patterns just want me to be phony like them and almost everyone else. The same with employers, which is why I've lost forty or fifty jobs during the past thirty-five years.
I think mature adults in a committed relationship understand that they need feedback. Ofc, I wouldn't be critical without really getting to know the person. When they deviate from my 'model' & more importantly their 'model' I believe a response is required & an exchange follows either with a clarification of their course of action or a recognition on the other person's part that they crossed a line.
If you are only affirming people, how can they possibly grow up? Well, I think we've seen the consequence of people being infantilized into their 30s with all the 'positive' reinforcement. And, don't even get me started about employee reviews where I've 'exceeded expectations' for 15 years & haven't really done much different year to year. LOL.
When it comes to relationships, I'm about as far from New Age as you can get. It would take too much effort to go through all the psycho babble. So, in my marriage, we don't let stuff fester. Something bugs me, the point of contention is generally broached pretty quickly. Then again, after 25 years together, you don't really need to figure out what bugs the other person :)
My ex tried to rope me into some of this stuff. We had a healthy great thing going and it just dissolved when she started getting more involved in these types of experiences. She was/is paying for an unlicensed therapist, a business coach, and a life coach doing multiple sessions every week. all of these sessions resembled one-on-one circling. then we broke up because she believed we didn't have a deep enough connection go figure.
relationship was over 2 years by the way
This discussion reminds me of that story, “Hunters in the Snow.” A “circling” marriage is just a fat guy gorging on pancakes affirming a guy leaving his wife and kids for an underage girl, while yet another guy is dying in the bed of a pickup truck in the parking lot.
The central point about the acid rain destroying not only marriages but love and fellow-feeling reminds me of something Wendell Berry said in "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine": "Marriage has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided."
“ as a serious, respectful grownup, I had to take it seriously” - I think Curtis makes an important observation about the difference between friendship and a relationship/marriage. When you’re in a relationship, the other person is a part of you, so you can’t detach and let them do what they want the way you would with a friend.
The word "friendship" was applied for thousands of years to relationships in which "the other person is a part of you, so you can't detach and let them do what they want ...." Curtis is using the word "friend" to signify what used to be called a "buddy" or a "pal" or whatever. Old poems and stories are my evidence here. Nowadays if you want to have what used to be called a "friendship" you're seen as a homo or classified by Youtube teachers-of-evil as something out of some manual of psychiatric disorders.
Maybe he's just speaking from his own experience, which is similar to my experience. Which is that I don't have any friends I feel this way about, or even family, except for my husband and my kids.
Yeah, those poems were probably by weirdos anyway. But in a village or manor you couldn't detach from people either. I imagine that it wouldn't be a matter of the normals not letting freaks do what they want so much as the freaks having to adapt to the normals in order to survive, knowing that as long they don't act like Grendel they'll sort of fit in around the edges.
Actually, the whole issue of freaks vs. normals probably wouldn't have been a thing in a village, because there wouldn't have been any TV shows to clue people in on what counts as normal. Everyone would have had his/her cartoon-peculiarity, like Dickens-characters.
In Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge there's kind of a chorus of old people who've known each other since they were toddlers. It's not so much a matter of being friends in the Achilles-Patroclus or Roland-Oliver sense as it is of just having your life so interwoven with other people's lives that this is just taken for granted by everyone.
I agree completely there. Things were different before we moved into the cities and became just the nuclear families. But here we are, this is now our natural habitat. And it’s the same in urban USA as it is in urban Russia or urban China.
Well, I'd say "this is now our UNnatural (but perhaps inescapable) habitat" -- which is maybe comparable to the Platonic/Pauline view of our present Fallen psychic condition as unnatural, a "second" nature, an unnatural nature.
And I didn't think I could appreciate my wife more than I do already. When we started seeing each other I tried to break it off but asked her to date me the minute I saw the pain in her reaction. The goal of not hurting each other is effortless as long as we both acknowledge that's the goal, and I don't think we've ever had to acknowledge it out loud to one another. Being twice-divorced I'm obviously not the natural one at marriage. Our friends in a variety of relationship states or configurations ask us for advice and it's almost impossible for me to articulate what they should expect or foster in a partner. Some are the probably the circling type and I don't know where to start, but I think a lot of what's in this hits it squarely on the head. I don't know you past your blogs but I'm extremely sorry for your loss.
The last book chapter post was uploaded in February. Can you please continue writing the book? After all, that's how Gray Mirror was advertised: A preview of the upcoming book.
At this point I would settle for a limited physical printing of UR as a way to keep everyone from getting their pitchforks out.
Fascinating seeing these posts since I was dragged by an ex into a bit of old Landmark-style brainwashing myself. Only after a few long weekends did I begin the horrific process of realizing I had been totally manipulated into a struggle-session emotional orgy.
The real fun begins when you see that these groups, struggle-sessions with a dash of love-bombing, or vice-versa, exist because they are familiar; they are the exact dynamics that countless experience who grew up with co-dependent/narcissistic parents. One therapist friend told me she thinks that this is presently the vast majority of American marriages.
So, I hope that the staff of the USG liquidation committee will have some good psychotherapists as well as executives.
"Co-dependent" is a label generated by those same groups; it's just a disparaging way of indicating that people (for example, one's parents) are really friends. As for "narcissistic", this is merely a term of abuse, typically applied by women to boyfriends they're annoyed at, that's pretty much equivalent to "won't submit to me".
I believe, in fact, that Curtis mentioned that his mean ex-girlfriend accused him of wanting to be "co-dependently" related to her. Didn't he mention this? I vaguely recall that he did.
The whole professional therapeutic enterprise is Satanic -- the sole objective purpose of it is to destroy families -- and if anything's going to be righteously liquidated then this enterprise should be liquidated right away.
I remember that someone commenting at Scott Alexander's blog (before I was permanently banned there) linked to her own blog, the sole purpose of which was to denounce her parents, especially her father, for being "narcissistic." My reaction was sympathy for her father and anger at her for being so nasty.
If you look at the results coming out of PTSD studies and MDMA use the results are quiet remarkable. I've used MDMA with a therapist in the past with great results (I'm here having a healthy relationship with neo-reaction aren't I!) - but as with everything and every substance its all 'set and setting'. We have to keep in mind that a lot of the reasons Psychedelic medicine and some of the more unorthodox gestalt therapies developed post-war ended up in strange and in some cases unhinged places was because of the culture wars being waged at the time and substances like MDMA and LSD being made illegal even for research and long harsh prison sentences being doled out with regularity...the intersection of the cathedral's rejection of these substances and methods as legitimate or even worthy of research combined with the right wing/so-con demonization in the 50s-90s is an interesting world to explore...
LSD was a CIA project, the purpose of which was to extinguish any sense of natural order so that a disintegrated mass of destroyed selves could be dominated by reptilian masters. The internet took over where LSD left off, as Timothy Leary noted.
When I was in college in the 80s, it was the rich kids who did psychedelic drugs and knew where to find them. This was probably because they had connections via their prep-schools with Managerium-agents. Enlightenment was supposedly achieved through something that that rich kids possessed and provided. So, when Curtis speaks of this drug Ecstasy (that's the one, right?) I think, "Where the fuck does he purchase that stuff?"
Today every Mexican and Puerto Rican kid in my neighborhood is either smoking a joint or rolling one, yet few of them seem to be earning any sort of income, and certainly not an income that would support a half-ounce-per-week (at least) marijuana-habit. So I assume that they're getting their marijuana from the government; the Managerium wants these people to stay stoned.
Curtis, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that had you met that woman when you were the same age when you met your late wife things would be different. Circling and all that shit notwithstanding.
Holy Shit this was an incredible read
I love what you wrote. It's not that that you inspired hope, although you may have. It's that you zeroed out loving well.
If this turns into a Nuns' bar, I'm out of here.