Amerika

As democracy enters its final stages, most of what we see out there takes the form of rationalization, or trying to explain bad outcomes as positive because we view them as fait accompli.

This takes its worst form on the Right because our essential idea of Order opposes the notion of equality, which states that each individual — whether good or bad! — gets the right to individualism, or pursuit of his own interests as a means of making his mental state feel alright.

Rightists have for years tried to “get along” with a system they fundamentally oppose. No Right-winger is an egalitarian; all Leftists are egalitarian. Democracy however is an egalitarian system, although the Murkan “republic” tried to limit that.

Obviously, those limits failed because we are back at mob rule, this time made venomous by the diversity agenda. Diversity replaces culture with anti-culture designed to accommodate all groups, and that causes people to give up on culture and pursue individualism to its ends, producing a proliferation of perversities, narrow views, and retreats.

Many on the Right currently want to engage in a new retreat. If we were honest, we would call it “White Flight 2.0” or “the slow retreat” because it amounts to running away:

I’ve been writing extensively about what I call a Parallel Society. This led one of my close friends to point out a book to me by Rod Dreher called The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. It’s a fantastic read and brilliantly captures the spirit of what I have been trying to do with Gab for over five years now.

Rod Dreher argues that the way forward is actu­ally the way back—all the way to St. Benedict of Nur­sia. This sixth-century monk, horrified by the moral chaos following Rome’s fall, retreated to the forest and created a new way of life for Christians. He built enduring communities based on principles of order, hospitality, stability, and prayer. His spiritual centers of hope were strongholds of light throughout the Dark Ages, and saved not just Christianity but Western civilization.

Many of you don’t know that I lived and worked in Silicon Valley as a Christian entrepreneur before starting Gab in 2016. Few Christians can truly understand what it means to live in the nihilistic hellhole of a post-truth, post-morality, and post-Christian world until they have lived in San Francisco among the most narcissistic, empty, and sociopathic people in Silicon Valley.

Like St. Benedict of Nursia I was horrified by the moral chaos of America’s fall as demonstrated by the city of San Francisco. So I too retreated to the forest in Pennsylvania to create a new way of life for Christians on the internet. Together and by the Grace of God we built an enduring online community grounded in the uniquely Christian value of freedom of speech.

This approach has one benefit, but it accrues only to those promoting it: it is highly saleable.

If you are a typical modern citizen, sitting in your armchair and raging at the world, you want something that you can do which makes you feel better even if it fails to address the problem.

The “parallel economy,” when boiled down to its essence, like White Flight and Buckleyite “Christian libertarian” neoconservatism, means that you buy from Right-wing companies and move away from Leftists.

In theory, this enforces a type of sorting algorithm on the population. Right-wingers gather together and seize local power, then use that to pressure the forces above them, in this model, at least on paper.

In reality? People interpret things as is convenient for them, which means they get simplified and converted into the armchair version. They buy some stuff from the Right-wingers suggesting this Benedict Option.

Then, they go back to work as usual, paying those taxes, funding big Right-wing cable networks, donating to the GOP, and raging against how terrible it all is. The Benedict Option offers insincerity cloaked as virtue.

For those who are not on the Left, there is only one sensible strategy: gain political power and undo Leftist changes to our society. Anything else is cope-hope and a distraction.

Tags: benedict option, parallel economy, white flight