Amerika

Rome offers us an analogy for our current experience as seen through the historical thesis of what happened to The Roman Republic by Larry Kummer of The Fabius Maximus Blog.

Their Republic lasted almost five centuries (509 BC–27 BC), followed by five centuries of Empire (in most respects, a period of decline for the people of Rome). The story of Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire is well known. Seldom mentions is how its people retained their self-respect.

First, they pretended nothing had changed by retaining the outward forms of the Republic…Avoiding mirrors, they marched into the future behind their tyrants. Second, they hoped for a miracle that would restore the Republic. Better times are coming!

Third, they adopted philosophies of passivity and withdrawal – combinations of irony, detachment, and resignation. These became Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Hedonism.

Here’s how he translates this thesis into the decline of Modern Amerika. Are we going from Republic to Empire?

First, we’re ignoring the rapid erosion of the Constitution and the civil rights it provided….

Second, instead of beginning the hard work of reform – organizing and educating our fellow-citizens, as done by previous reform movements – we dream of better days….

Rather than organizing and working for change, we fill our minds with modern amusements: porn, video games, TV, drugs, and info-tainment (giving the middle class a sense of being engagé)…..

If we can then take the same template and accurately fit it onto The Dissident Right, then the Dissident Right isn’t dissenting. It’s quitting. Pursuing exit, joining The Yang Gang, and taking $1K a month to go sod off somewhere on opioids as the whole thing goes to hell in a bucket. So I’ll lay out a theoretical Alt-Right template for quitting vs. dissenting and you, The Constant Reader, can decide whether The Dissident Right is wanking or fighting for change.

1. Pretending nothing has changed and that they can go through traditional modes. We all do this. I endorsed, championed and voted for Trump. He became Commander-In-Chief. However, as he works within the system we have; he is completely unable to secure the US border or order the US military to withdraw from actions that are stupid, counter-productive, and which could quite possibly brand us as an agent of evil when the history of our age is written.

   I would have to conclude via ruthless self-examination that I engaged in LARPing and wasted a certain amount of time and energy believing that our current Republic could deliver meaningful and condign change. It cannot. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of an elite class of profiteers and will seek to expel anything or anybody that tries to interfere with their various corrupt rice bowls.

   Where the enemy is engaged and faced head-on, the enemy is damaged. Regardless of how funny you may think a couple of partial-birth abortions are amongst friends, you would have to admit that the Center For Medical Progress expose’s of Planned Parenthood’s organ-marketing operation has blackened their names and lowered their status. Even The Based Stickman’s Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights was better than just watching. If you do nothing, the negative first derivative remains unchanged.

   The entrenched normality has used biased media, packed courts, and genuine contempt and disdain for the very same rules that constrain decent people to defeat The Dissident Right. When that succeeds, the supposedly Dissident Right then runs for Exit. This takes various forms.

2. Personal withdrawal. Withdrawal in disgust may or may not be apathy, but it might as well be. The result of this grand personal temper-tanturm is the same as apathy. You’ve just nullified yourself. Then people begin to see the world as the world is not.

   People really believe in a “Reset Button.” Just like the one #FemaleCaligula gave to the Russians while she was Secretary of State. This won’t happen. Most of us wouldn’t be happy if it did.

   What you’ll get instead is a gradual rot that works like Leprosy. It will be what Will MacIntosh described as a Soft Apocalypse. Things will continue to degrade and most won’t notice them because they are all waiting around for the SHTF event they’ve been secretly hoping would selectively cleanse the planet of everyone they don’t particularly like.

3. Finally, they reach a certain acceptance of their own self-imposed impotence while denying that is what they are up to. According to accepted NRX doctrine we replace the mess we are in as follows.
   

   The only viable path to restoration of competent government is the simple and hard way:
   Become worthy.
   Accept power.
   Rule.
   

   Unlike the Underpants Gnomes, they’ve neglected a step. The one where “A miracle occurs.” Becoming worthy is a malleable enough term that I could self-justify not changing a single thing. I feel extraodinarily worthy this fine day. Sign over the nuclear weapons! And those are just the ones who claim they are trying. Aaron Clarey is more honest with himself. He tells us the following:

   The “End of America?” Most likely. The “Demise of liberty?” You betcha! The “Destruction of Western Civilization?” Of course! But why let all of the above get you down? Learn to “Enjoy the Decline!” Enjoy the Decline is mandatory reading for all conservatives, libertarians, Americans, and lovers of freedom who are mourning the slow, but sure death of their culture and their country.
   

   If the NRXers are Epictatus, then Clarey is Epicurus with a highball in hand. Epictatus is considered the more philosophically rigorous, but what if Epicurus was the one more based? There is a rigorous Black Pill Logic to Clarey’s staggering, drunken career through what he views as a dystopic Amerikan zombieland. Sure, it all sucks. But a well made Tequila Sunrise tastes a whole lot better than the bitter rinds of regret.

   The difference here is the perception and desire for agency. Those who can should do. If you can’t, shut up and drink. Clarey has evaluated the odds and thinks he’ll have another. Fair enough. He doesn’t actually short-shrift the analysis before reaching for Mr. Brewski. Nor does he pretend stoicism will do anything other than ruin your shot at getting laid next weekend.

   Assuming you perceive or want agency to change our current mess, you then are faced with a pretty straight-up engineering problem. Repair or replace. Repair involves fixing the Amerikan Republic, whatever that still is. This can be a series of technocratic reforms or some sort of philosophical or religious reorientation of the populace away from being NPCs programmed by The Cathedral, Synagogue, or the Evil Eye of Sauron high-centered over Davos, Switzerland. You essentially keep the structure we run with now and chop out the rot and sarcoma. Thereafter, you apply a patch that puts Windows 10.0 to shame. Maybe doable.

If you can’t repair, and don’t feel like gargling razor blades or laying out in front of the metro bus; you then think in terms of replacement. Replacement is a four step process.

• Plan. The worst evil inflicted by the demotic revolutions of modernity involves them trashing whatever system exists and then not having a clue of what they would create 20 years hence. Nobody guillotining le petit bourgois in Paris had a clue what sort of battery acid enema France would soon receive from Napoleon Bonaparte. They were all about settling personal grudges down in the muck of selfish, street-level reality.

  Bonaparte, on the other hand, knew beforehand exactly what France’s legal, military and educational systems would look like if he ever became the big-schwingin’ you-know-what. Whatever shred of France still works is far more Napoleon than Robespierre.

• Recruit. Get a bunch of people that you can convince of your coruscating brilliance and put them to work. Promise what you need to and deliver what you can. This is successfully done via recognizable and legitimate hierarchy. Napoleon said of his army that every Private had a Field Marshall’s baton in his ruck sack. What you offer has to have a path that leads to definable rewards and a set of rules requisite to walking the path.
• Remove. Demotism won’t spontaneously implode. Madouro failed Venezuela. He still has a job until somebody fires his useless butt. Inertia dictates it will stay the same until you change it. Remove will be a messy, evil, personally-compromising step that involves wet work. Luca Brassi was a problem for the family. He had to be sent away to sleep with the fishes. That required agency that was ruthless and direct in its intent.
• Replace. What you’ve planned has to be installed. George W. Bush failed in his Iraqi adventure because he was dilatory in how he replaced. Removal is going to be invasive surgery. If Amerika is a sick patient, she will feel like she just got scraped out of a nasty car wreck after the surgery. By allowing the lights to stay out, the buildings to be looted and the roads to all be mined pot-holes, Bush II looked to the Iraquis like a disinterested foreign emperor that had just wrecked their country on a ego-drunk power binge. Anyone who removes the current Amerikan clustereff without intelligent and diligent replacement will appear to be exactly that feckless.

The Dissident Right must choose between being a serious philosophical and political attempt to change a bad metastable equilibrium or an ego-masturbatory fantasy indulged in by mirror fan-boys.

Rigorous, self-evaluating realism, combined with a willingness to accept bad, painful, not-so-good, and possibly life-terminating consequences are required to make the Dissident Right the former and not the latter. Just how much agency do you perceive or even want?

Tags: accelerationism, alt-right, dissident right, rome

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