Amerika

Sometimes, it makes sense to take audience requests, or at least to address some of the email that rolls in the door. The postcards above did not contain any of this content; they were sent by an ecorealist traveling by foot through Europe.

Our first email comes to us from an angry person:

Because as much as I liked the music of black metal (yes, liked, because now I got kinda tired of it), I don’t consider myself part of that movement, neither past or present, and nor do I ever agreed with its “ideological” side (whatever the hell that is). At least not for long before I became more mature… but then again I never liked to whole “metalhead/hessian” nonsense to begin with, as I was again only purely interested in the music and the sound. Any kind of boys club is gay really, and it’s even more retarded when you’re doing it in 2019…

Finally, this means of course that I don’t want you to think I agree, or will ever agree with your viewpoints on reality and metal. This doesn’t mean I’m some kind of SJW either, as I just have my own version of common sense that happens to greatly differ from yours… which is obviously why I left anus/corrupt back then. And quite frankly, I think both the Left and Right wing politics are illusions that don’t really exist. You clearly haven’t found the red pill yet, but if you keep digging you just might find it, unless you’ve stumbled on it many times, and didn’t realize it was there… then you’re beyond redemption I’m afraid. Go figure what I mean by that.

You’ve read the whole email? Good, that’s all I wanted to get out. Don’t message me back.

It really speaks for itself, but a few points merit classification:

1. Metal is a subculture. There is a reason people in it behave differently; they do not agree with the herd.
2. Black metal is also a subculture. There is no simply taking the sound; it is an artistic movement, and you either participate in it or not. Those who talk about just liking the sound, much like fiscal conservatives, are simply afraid of the reasons why the genre made the choices that it did.
3. The mythical red pill. Apparently, it is vogue for people to say, mysteriously, “I have found the truth and you have not.” This is probably a trope from Game of Thrones or Stranger Things or some other trend. In reality, if you cannot explain it, you are just posturing.
4. Left and Right are different. Let us move from elementary school to high school, where we realize that different movements in history have different philosophies behind them, and those philosophies concern how we live. You know, sort of like the central question in The Republic, what is the best life? Right and Left different fundamentally there: the right wants order (realism + excellence), where the Left wants equality (individualism enforced by collectivism).
5. You do not see it, so it does not exist. You claim to have trouble understanding the ideological (philosophical) side of black metal; this is impossible unless you hid from it or are congenitally stupid. Black metal made it clear what it was about with lyrics, imagery, interviews, and most importantly the music itself. Then again, you said that did not appeal to you except as a production quality.

The only question remaining is why to write this email at all. The final line provides a clue: “I wanted to waste your time and mentally or emotionally harm you.” That is an interesting, if suspect, motivation. After all, it achieves nothing for you.

When you combine intended cruelty with the pretense posturing of “I know something you don’t know,” an old hipster trope, you see a defensive viewpoint which is asserting what it fears as true to be impossible so that it can feel better about itself.

I suppose my only response is: thanks for writing. Next.

The second email concerns the intuition, the metaphysical, and my insistence on describing things using words and logical analysis:

As I have often mentioned: I know something you don’t. It would seem that nobody else knows it, either.

I find myself in the position of Galileo, Magellan, Darwin, Jesus, Siddhartha: I have discovered something completely unknown, with the result that everybody fails to have any means of conceptualizing it. Thus it is discarded, downplayed, ridiculed even.

You are incapable of imagining that anything can take place outside the mind. To you, it simply can’t. But I have discovered this is not so.

Your new religion of nihilism arms you as it does with every religion for any adherent to any religion: it replaces what-is with the dogma that it-is as I believe it-is, and with you, as what you think-it-is.

No. It-is what-it-is, independently of body and/or mind.

We use the term ‘intuition’ but nobody knows what that means, what it is, or what anybody means by its use. Much like the term ‘God’.

I know something you don’t, period. Either you are interested in this, or you are not. It’s nothing to me, either way. I’ve offered it to anyone interested, and have almost exclusively found that nobody is interested. I’m done.

To be honest, I see you now as very little different from those I refer to as leftists. They, like you, are only really interested in annihilating you, and you them. You’re all humans, and being so, interested only in control, else destruction. All is ego, all is hubris.

Yes, I know something you don’t. You might have added it to your armory, by examining it with an open mind, or better yet: no mind.

But we kid ourselves to imagine this could happen.

I do not want to live what Carl Sagan termed a “demon-haunted world,” although he was inaccurate and more correctly meant a superstition-haunted world.

Superstitions are a form of neurosis, where we confuse cause and effect, and even interpret unrelated events as being the cause of something we perceive as directed at us. Narcissism, superstition, paranoia, solipsism, and neurosis have a common root in the assumption that we are the world, and not parts of the world.

To the superstitious, an event seems linked to another event which occurred at the same time merely because he was observing both. The question of a wider link is ignored in favor of placing a personal experience rooted in fear above all other data.

Our only solution to this dilemma comes when we explicitly state reasoning and thus affirm a wider view of the world, and also discipline our own minds.

For this reason, while I have repeatedly stated that intuition is the source of my address of the metaphysical, my interest focuses on restoring Western Civilization through making ourselves sane (realist) and good (drive toward arete) again.

Some, like yourself, tell me that you have a better solution, but that this cannot be explained. Forgive me for dissenting on this point: what you are doing is indistinguishable from schizophrenia or charlatanism, so people like me will not automatically roll over and accept it. This does not mean that we reject it, only that we are avoiding the form in which you present it.

Speaking of Leftists, for them egalitarianism is the only moral good and complete philosophy of the world, and anyone who refuses to adopt it is not just another opinion, but an enemy of the most vile moral evil who must be removed from this Earth.

That form of control, ironically, is different than the eugenics-based order that people like me desire. We like “good to the good, and bad to the bad,” including taking all of our defectives and sending them to Venezuela (or nerve gassing them, whichever is most efficient). Our goal is not to control how others think, but to sort ourselves away from the crazy which is the bulk of humanity.

Let us hope that we all do better than Leftists.

Tags: black metal, letters, mail, religion