Amerika

Interacting online becomes tricky because people are both exchanging information that they plan to act on and socializing, reaching out to meet others in this lonely world of “freedom.” It turns out that when everyone does whatever they want, there are few meeting places, metaphorical or literal, where people cross paths.

As a result, people cast wide nets comprised of many little signals in order to find others with the same rough instincts about life itself. They are looking for those who share their philosophies, since people usually share a background if they see life a similar way and have similar abilities, so they complement each other.

Part of this includes the Alt Right. We join up not just to act on the world failing around us, but to meet others who can show us more and make us feel less hopelessly lonely being the few who seem awakened in a world full of sleepwalking zombie robots.

Sometimes it seems as if the Alt Right — and related movements like neoreaction, anarcho-capitalism, the European New Right, traditionalism, and the old Right — simply serves as a gathering point for people who look at modern society and think, “Ick.”

Although we are surrounded by constant propaganda about how great this modern world is, that assessment addresses only the surface. We have lots of internal combustion engines, an economy that generates tons of money, plenty of gadgets and cool science, powerful militaries, and global communications.

It seems so tangible. All the buildings are solid, the machinery powerful. We read the many words of academia and government and think how permanent they sound. In our hearts, however, lurks the knowledge that it can all go away if the center does not hold.

That term comes to us from a poem by William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” that begins like this:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

This description of a society without a center addresses the changes in the West that happened after the first world war. Written in 1919, the poem describes a society spiraling out of control like its leaderless falcon, falling into uncertainty because nothing can clearly be seen as true or good anymore.

We have lived through horrors, as have our parents and great-grandparents to an exponent level high enough to be our shame. The great¹⁶-grandparents witnessed the decline, felt impotent in its path, and lost hope. They did the best that they could but ended up nonetheless in the midst of decline.

Over these centuries, we have seen a gradual takeover of our society by its lowest elements. The lower castes waged war on the higher, and they won, mainly because they could always win, but thanks to the wealth produced by the higher castes, were able to take civilization for granted and cease throwing energy into its upkeep and that of their cultures.

All other problems originate from that. Religion is rotten, politics is nothing but lies, social interactions are shallow and insincere, and people are mostly crazy. Looking further under the surface, our technology rarely works, our jobs are make-work to keep a Ponzi economy going, and our political system exists to control us and bleed us for its own profit.

The tangible parts of our world make us feel a sense of solidity and power, but when we look into what perpetuates them, we see they are in fact fragile, and people hang on to these because they fear the things which actually have power.

Those things that actually have power — understanding, intuition, tradition, values, love — cannot be controlled by the ego, or even by the social group; they are lawless but logical, like nature itself, and therefore escape the human grasp that wants to eliminate the risk of guessing wrong about how events turn out in reality.

Modernity, the era based on individualism and its political arm in egalitarianism, attempts to suppress reality by creating a social reality in which people in groups agree that what they want to hear is true. This originates in the lower castes, and is how all societies commit suicide.

The ugliness we see around us — plastic box architecture, vandalism, prole behavior, corruption, normalized insanity — is not the cause of modernity, but its result. When you insist everyone is equal, an insane fool is equal to an honorable genius, and so the latter dies out from lack of effect because there are more insane fools.

Not surprisingly, the more sensitive mental instruments in our society have been warning us for years that this individualism has created a shallower and less inspiring world, as William Wordsworth pointed out in “The World is Too Much With Us”:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

All of us who feel resonance with this poem are those who have looked at modern society and said “ick.” From that, only one step awaits, which is realizing that the root of modernity is equality, and the root of equality is the egoism of the Dunning-Kruger herd; all the bad that we see emerges from those.

If the amalgamation of ideas — tradition, human biodiversity, anti-socialism, hierarchy, aristocracy, deep ecology, culture-rule — of the Alt Right seem insensible, consider that they are merely the collection of ways to maximize life when we think outside of the idea that every human should be a king and somehow as a mob we will do right.

Tags: alt-right, individualism, modernism, william butlery yeats, william wordsworth