Amerika

Every now and then, you might run into a real person, even now. Unlike the usual people, real people have not entirely externalized their minds to money, social opinion and power.

For such people, power is found within. They have the ability to do things, or to find out or discover how. They derive their self-esteem from moral and personality traits. They know what they like, and can sit alone in a silent room thinking for hours.

These were once relatively common in the upper half of the population in Western nations. Now they are rare, hunted like dogs for being total non-conformists, which is why they disguise themselves. You will find them reading television guides for synopses of shows, so they do not have to watch them in order to make conversation. Same with sports scores.

You may run into one of the remnant, perhaps at your local grocery store. They will be exiting an aisle, looking thoughtful as usual. You will be crossing their path. They notice you, look you in the eye, and step back, because it is polite and more efficient for you — the faster moving object — to go ahead. You thank them, and they look as shocked as you do.

You have encountered another real person in the wild.

It is too easy to think that the world is a total wasteland where you will meet “good people” only online. But be wary: many of those online have simply learned to game the system and appear real, when in fact they are manipulators, which means they have given their soul over to the external and now serve control.

This is not to say that our modern world is not a wasteland; it is, and the proof can be found in how it marginalizes real people by systematically destroying the things they find important. The plastic people who have externalized their souls wish to destroy the good people, because the presence of good people makes plastic people look weak, irrelevant, selfish and conceited, and they hate that, mostly because it is accurate.

Modernity is a wasteland because of this process, which is like a chain reaction out of control. Neurotics and fools form a gang to defend themselves against better judgment. They insist that stupidity and insanity be “equal” to intelligence and sanity, and they use this egalitarianism to lower standards and destroy values wherever they go.

This is why they are pathological and obsessive in their acts: to them, anything better than them is a personal insult. They reject evolution, but more importantly, they reject improvement. Lower standards conceal their ineptitude or moral and intellectual laziness. Lower standards also produce a miserable Hell which alienates real people such that most of them self-destruct, and the herd loves nothing more than a revenge fantasy.

From 1983-1994, an artistic movement known as “underground metal” swept the West. This music, a hybrid of hardcore punk and epic heavy metal, came from musicians who took the viewpoint that the world as it was, was unbearable. They saw modernity as a diseased beast rotting from within, a wasteland where masses chased trends away from realistic thoughts, and all public statements or institutions were lies designed to conceal the underlying rottenness.

To them, the end had already occurred. Nothing was what it should be, and people were vampiric and parasitic in their need to defend and pursue their own corrupt goals, or at least compulsive distraction. They viewed modern society as a psychological dysfunction, itself a mass trend which had caught most people in its grasp, so that any which became popular was a lie, and anything good was made into a popular version so it could be a lie.

In their view, we are a fallen race. This society has failed. Idiots rule and everything is broken. The end has happened, but we are just catching up, carried forward by our momentum and constant neurotic fear and anxiety. As a result, our problems are all intractable, because the assumptions we carry with us prevent us from seeing actual solutions, and poison every idea with the same blockheaded illusions.

Most of us find it hard to claim they were wrong, especially now that 25 years later the disaster has almost fully flowered. Their solutions were Nietzschean — natural selection, the smart/strong oppressing the weak, intolerance of illusion, rejection of equality — but arose from a Romanticist inspiration in nature and the ways of the ancients, especially Vikings, Pagans and Satanists. They found themselves describing industrial horizons, zombie outbreaks, genocide, war, and cruelty as both metaphor and ideal. Most if not all were nationalistic and rejected the rising tide of globalization.

Their outbreaks of fury and intensity called to mind an older slogan as used by the German National Socialists: Erwache!, or “Awaken!” — to them, modernity was the dream, and the ancient ways and nature the reality. The inner world of the moral soul and the desire for greatness and beauty was real, where the outer world of convenience and utilitarian duty, including school and jobs, was a cancerous spirit-crusher. They saw disease in the psychology of the modern West, and identified its religion — part-Christian, part-consumerist, unified in the belief in human equality — as a corrosive weakness.

Their unofficial slogans, from “Only death is real” to “The past is alive,” emphasized the solipsistic unreality of modernity and the need for a re-introduction of the type of realism and focus that war, plague and disaster force upon us. At the same time, the music had a mournful quality, as if signifying a funeral for the past and the entrance into an uncertain and atavistic future.

In this world we have inherited, it is difficult to want to awaken at all. It seems much easier to go with the flow, rationalize the decline, and compensate with whatever personal pleasures can be taken. But that kills the soul by making it subservient to the external, instead of enable to act its will upon it, mainly because the ability to tell reality from fantasy is obliterated.

And yet the only feeling of well-being comes from knowing that we have a future and can contribute to it. For this reason, our first task is always to awaken.

Tags: black metal, death metal, erwache, friedrich w. nietzsche, underground metal