How far is far enough

Posted by Spandrell on

A while ago I wrote a post on tax law, proposing some ideas that I thought could plausibly make for a better existence if implemented by a sane government.

Reactions to that were mixed. It was, admittedly, an uncharacteristic post. I am not a "policy wonk", I'm usually more interested in deeper questions of history and human psychology as it applies to our political environment. As such, some people said that that sort of piece, proposing some tweaks to tax policy or this or that law is not just beside the point, it's actively harmful. The problems of modern society are, they would have it, not something that can be fixed through the legal political process. And talking as if the state could just tweak this or that law to make our existence better is to be guilty of cuckservatism, if not something worse.

On the same topic, Chris Nahr posted a translation of an article by some right-wing Austrian writing about this problem. "Full Speed into the Void", it's titled. Reminds one of the "Flight 93 election" essay in 2016. Austria has, by modern White standards, a fairly large and successful far right political party, who has managed to get into the government now and then. That article says that vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Politics is completely pointless, even if we manage to get one of our guys in the government. Even if we managed to get all of our guys in the government, it wouldn't work. Why? Many reasons.

  • The sort of people who man a political party are just dumb and not deep thinkersEven if you manage to conquer the executive, the judiciary is against you, the bureaucracy is against you, the media wants you dead, foreign countries will sabotage you, and you'll never get big enough majorities in parliament to do anythingYou gotta follow existing law, so people become incrementalists, never daring to do any radical changes.Eventually the Iron Law of Bureaucracy prevails and the very far right parties become led by bugmen cucks of one kind or another.

What do we need? A Profound Social Transformation, he says. We might as well call it PST. And how do we achieve PST? Not through politics, but out in the streets. We need a grassroots movement which builds a new world, "a spiritual preparation for a new European myth that binds us to our oldest past and reconciles us with our future."

He could have just said We Need a New Religion. Which I've been saying for 8 years now myself. Unfortunately the guy is also hyping the Nouvelle Droite, famous for French uber-dork Alain de Benoist who used to sell Nazi Crystals by mail and has a following of about a dozen people and his dog. Hardly encouraging.

The question this guy is posing is not a new question. It's a very basic question, and even in our circles it was debated very early on. Are politics useless? Should we be in politics? Moldbug's answer was a definite No. We can't win there, for exactly the same reasons the Austrian guy is saying. The Cathedral is too strong, it is everywhere. The paths for formal power open to the democratic process are but a small fraction of the whole. Donald Trump has more power than any European government, and yet all he has been able to do is whatever neocons would have done anyway.

That said, there are things that seem to be possible. Trump has slowed things like H1B, seems to be getting somewhere with Mexico in the southern border, and is royally fucking with China. In Europe, Hungary's Orban is a thing, a right-wing guy who has managed to capture all levers of power. In Italy, Matteo Salvini stopped all illegal immigration and is now steadily moving to fuck with the EU financial policy. All of these are good things, some of them very good things, and all were achieved through the legal political process.

Will they last? I don't know. Salvini had a 15% support when he was elected; now he has 35%. Orban isn't going anywhere. Things aren't looking too good in places like France or Germany, but not even Macron is talking about bringing more Africans to Europe. So it seems some degree of engagement with the mainstream can achieve marginal gains.

The real problem here is not whether doing politics works or not. Effectiveness is not a binary concept. Almost everything has some effect on the margin. That effect can be big or small, and the size of the effect might make the time and effort put to it worthwhile, or not. That is the real question: is time spent in setting up a political party, making election campaigns and legislative work worthwhile for our cause?

Well that depends on what your cause is, of course. You might be a cuck and just want a 4 year respite from leftism, to Stand Athwart History and Yell: Stop! But Stay There. If so, you can very much achieve your goals by going into politics. Happens all the time.

You might also be a white nationalist, and just want Liberalism Without Foreigners, as the Austrian guy put it. Then it gets rather trickier, as a big part of the modern political structure all across the West is hellbent on preventing white countries from preserving the demographics of 1970. But on the face of it, it shouldn't be impossible to kick out all foreigners while keeping everything else in place. The videogames, the drugs, the promiscuity, Instagram, gaymarriage, bullshit jobs. Just get the foreigners out. You could even do that more or less legally if you put yourself to it.

It wouldn't be easy, though. Some political problems are coup-complete problems, things that you can't possibly achieve unless you run an outright coup d'etat and suspend the legal system for a time. The more you want to cut out into the Cathedral's network of patronage and spread of degeneracy, the more you're going to need more than just electoral support.

To be honest, most of the ideas of my tax policy post are coup-complete problems. There's no freaking way we could get any of that passed through a parliament without some judge somewhere shutting it down as unconstitutional, or no way to deal with it against a hostile bureaucracy dragging its feet in "resistance".

Some other causes, though, aren't achievable even with a coup d'eat. That's what I think people complaining about my very talking about taxes were talking about. And what this Austrian guy is talking about with his Profound Social Transformation. An important neoreactionary tenet is that Culture is downstream from Power. You can and do get Profound Social Transformations by seizing a government. Happened all the time in history. The French Revolution. The Meiji Restoration. Communist China. But we shouldn't oversell this. Power is also downstream from Culture. This thing is not a river, it's a Yin-Yang sort of thing. The people in Power are humans too, and they inherited a culture themselves. So to the extent that people in Power set their minds to achieve a Profound Social Transformation, they tend to do it only in one direction. On rails. Mostly accelerating trends which are already ongoing (the French Revolution), or adopting mores from foreign countries which are readily available (Meiji Japan).

What is much harder is to achieve a Profound Social Transformation which goes against the flow. Fighting Globohomo, fighting feminism, fighting technology-addiction, fighting atomization, fighting dysgenics. That's not a coup-complete problem. That's a jihad-complete problem. You don't need a well run coup d'etat to achieve all those goals, you need a full-fledged religious war of all against all. And I'm not talking Muhammad scale here, I'm talking Dune's Butlerian Jihad scale. We Need a New Religion, and one armed to the teeth.

So if your cause is a jihad-complete cause, then sure, tax policy isn't going to solve it. A far-right political party with an Executive Committee and Local Assemblies full of normies isn't going to solve the problem. If the very existence of a state apparatus manned by bureaucratic managers is incompatible with your goals for society, then you better have an army of camel archers or Fremen worm riders up to the gills on spice.

Is the state going to go anywhere though? Are we going to do away with large-scale organizations with middle management bugmen? The only way I see that happening is after a massive collapse of civilization and a new (a third) Dark Ages. So it seems to me what PST-advocates are betting on is on start to build a new civilizational package to be deployed once the Third Dark Ages get started.

Which is not a too unreasonable bet. But I'm not sure it's a winning bet. At any rate, some people choose a a cause, an end, and then take whatever method, whatever means, are appropriate to that end. Other people choose means, and accept the end which those means are likely to bring about. We should all make clear what it is that we are doing.

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  • It will be interesting to see how much Orban and Salvini are able to achieve using the machinery of the existing state, which no doubt contains many globohomo devotees bent on sabotage. The Nazi regime was "worse than a crime; it was a blunder" (and the miserable failure, despite state backing, of the SS's warmed-over neopaganism should be a cautionary reminder for advocates of A New Religion), but it is interesting to consider that Hitler's pre-1933 stratgegy was successful by instead building a parallel state:

    Visiting... the national headquarters of the party, during the last years of the Republic, one got the impression that here indeed were the offices of a state within a state... Three years after he came to power,... [Hitler] explained ... “that it is not enough to overthrow the old State, but that the new State must previously have been built up and be practically ready to one’s hand. ... In 1933 it was no longer a question of overthrowing a state by an act of violence; meanwhile the new State had been built up and all that there remained to do was to destroy the last remnants of the old State — and that took but a few hours.” (Shirer, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich)
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    • i think there may be a third option which is using politics to create a resonance effect i.e. it might not be possible to use mainstream politics to break out of the system in country A but a little progress there might have a domino effect on country B which may lead to progress which has a domino effect on country C etc which eventually leads to the system shattering everywhere at once.

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      • Right-populism alone may not be the solution, but to forswear politics entirely is the wrong answer. The right sees only two options: playing politics as the designated loser or abandoning it. But you can play politics like an elite. Right populism is good because you're capturing the bottom, the people with low status and nowhere to go. Sure, many would still be low status in a white nationalist paradise, but they don't believe that. That's excellent. You've already got half of a top-bottom alliance. It's way better to have right-populists than alt-libertarians or other middle class elements. Middle class strategies are too obedient. The notion that a coup might happen and hand over power to a waiting alternative state is pure fantasy. It doesn't happen. Framing things as coup-complete problems, is not the attitude of a successful subversive. And you've got to be subversive. History marches one way, and the best you can do is make sure the weirdness marches in a eugenic, orderly fashion. Then you capture the upper middle class. If you capture the upper middle class, the upper class will follow, since so much of it is dependent on advice, and for two, the bulk of high society is upper middle class, not upper class. At the end of the day, regimes are just the shadow puppet theater of the real action, which is aristocratic opinion. Long before the Tsar fell, his nobles had already swallowed communism, and long before the end of French monarchy, the nobles had become good liberals. The seeds of the 1960s were sowed in the Yale culture wars of the late 1940s and 1950s. Any proposal which empowers the middle class must remember that the order the current middle class protects is globohomo. At the same time, any restoration *right now* must fail because the aristocracy is the origin of globohomo, and a restoration would just mean globohomo at breakneck speeds - it's better to have a stupid young 20s woman bureaucrat as your direct enemy than a family that has held high status for centuries. How do you change aristocratic opinion? You exploit their status insecurities and class behaviors. An aristocrat wants to subvert. In the absence of political consciousness, they will do things like watch the Sonic movie because it shits on the childhoods of people, and that's funny. Épater le bourgeois! But you can make them active with a particular kind of accelerationism. Any time they become aware that middle class white urban women are devout globohomos, and that those same women view themselves as higher status than them (muh self-actualization QUANGO job), it will provoke anger. Anger is the reaction you want. Secondly, you want a way to show noblesse oblige, because it allows you to impress your friends. Liberalism, Confucianism, and Communism all have great ways to show how much you care for the peasants (actual care not required). Finally, the fear of Cultural Revolution is a big one, since purges are one of the only ways bloodlines get unseated. Don't those QUANGO SJW nuts remind you of Red Guards? Most dissidents focus on the revolutions, but from my perspective, the revolution was a great time. Status was preserved and there was new decoration and new ideas to play with. It's the purges that suck. Once you have enough converted elites, they will begin to march through the institutions. The key institution is the academy. Core to the self-identities of both Western and Asian elites (the others don't exist in high enough concentrations to affect anything) is scholarship and having interesting ideas. Once you have the Ivory Tower, everything else follows. The day the culture war ended on Yale, the war was decided, decisive victory. To paraphrase Bourdieu, the university is the font of honor for high society, and from it, all status flows. The main hitch to something like this is that there is now an alternative font of honor and power base. In the old days, people used to read society pages and fawn over the upper class. This also helps teach proles good old money values, like having most of the pearls in your necklace be fake like Mrs. Astor, so that you can have extra money in case your toilet breaks. The media has redirected the innate attraction of proles to prolefeed and wealth worship to itself. Instead of worshipping high FTO, high IQ aristocrats, they're worshiping people who live in "Cribz" and blow their last dollar on solid gold rims while fucking their twelfth wife. They worship Megaproles. Throughout time, people have accrued more power in high society by breaking rules. First one English duchess kisses a baby, now everyone is kissing babies to curry prole favor. But the notion that someone can completely bypass the historical reigning elite by selling sex appeal to the masses? Unconscionable. And all too often, bureaucrats do not take their marching orders from actual studies, which would be heartening since there are already some dissident ideas in the academy, but from media talking heads and their documentaries, which are pure feelgood nonsense. But anyways, I think playing politics is wise. Even if you don't capture the imperial government, if you buy out a town, now you have a whole town for yourself in a collapse situation. If you take a imperial governorship, now you have a state. And with enough states, you win the whole burrito and can launch a coup at will. Populism is buying time for dissidents to build a power base, even if this time isn't free.

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      • I think many problems that people consider jihad-complete are actually coup-complete, though the Right has generally forgotten the existence of the state's main tool for Power influencing Culture. If the sovereign acts as the font of all honors, (in normal language, decides to wield the power to confer status as it pleases and not outsource the job), people will begin to adhere to the Sovereign's culture. It doesn't take a massive social jihad of a gnostic flavor, it doesn't even take a victory in the "free marketplace of ideas". All it takes is for the sovereign to make it obvious that one action leads to higher status, one leads to lower status, and a reasonable narrative as to why (which makes people feel like less of a hypocrite for sucking up to Power). "Trans is a mental illness" doesn't carry water for most people when it's obvious that being a tranny raises your status, but if being a tranny got you publicly mocked by those in power, if communities that didn't tolerate Pride parades were obviously favored by the state, "Trans is a mental illness" becomes the new common sense within a decade, the same way "Trans women are women" became the common sense of the coastal blue city within the same timeframe. I suspect that the reason many RW military dictatorships spring up in Latin America and soon fade away is that they fail to realize that they need to do more than the very basics of a state: ensure physical peace and provide a minimally frictional environment for trade. They failed to deal people into the system; they wielded the Sword, or in this case the helicopter, but forgot about the Scepter. Orban is a little bit smarter. Tax credits for fertility won't make people fertile, that's bugman thinking, but it's also a gesture that tells people unequivocally that Power wants you to have kids, and hints that you won't be taken seriously, won't get anywhere, unless you're a married parent.

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        • That's one way of seeing it, but there are constraints to that mechanism. It behooves us to study those constraints. Is the Hungarian birth rate improving? Why not? Saying it should improve doesn't explain anything.

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          • Hungary’s birth IS improving. See this from the end of 2018: https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy-induced-baby-boom And this from last month: https://catholicherald.co.uk/dailyherald/2019/04/25/the-west-can-learn-a-lot-from-hungarys-pro-family-policies/ Key quote: ” Likewise the national birth rate is currently at its highest in 20 years.”

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            • Call me when it's above replacement.

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              • No population in the industrialized world will probably ever achieve replacement for any length of time. This is a product of urbanization, modernity and what the Marxists call Alienation from the Means of Production The first two in theory could be combated by anti urbanism, anti modernity policy but it would require a dictatorship willing and able to do that. The later will require a similar level of dictatorial effort waged on businesses and heavy wealth redistribution Even so such plans could fail Most likely TFR will stay low till either the nation is subsumed by low IQ immigrants and the system collapses since nations with an IQ above 85 or so are all close to below replacement or it will deindustrialize or undergo catabolic collapse At current levels the US for example will be essentially entirely Amish in less time than now till the War of 1812 This is obviously not going to happen but Amish TFR is 5-7 , Orthodox Jews are at that and the devout are 3-5. Everyone else is at 2 or lower

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            • Thinking aloud. It didn't take a jihad for the Left to impose the problems you call jihad-complete. It was a slow process. Therefore, it might not need a jihad to reverse them. On the other hand, there is this nasty problem that entropy isn't reversible. It is not at all clear if a similar slow reversed process can gradually fix it. The general way to deal with entropy is to make a new thing to replace the old. We cannot stop the entropy of our bodies, but we can reproduce, we can make new people. When civilizations weaken, barbarians conquer them. So it seems to me a civilization can only save itself by becoming its own barbarian. This means, among others, finding a new identity - yes, religion is identity, that is what a synthetic tribe means - that is different from the decaying old identities of the decaying old civilization. For example, national identities mean nothing today, and in this sense Salvini, Orban etc. are on the wrong train. What is the difference today between French and Italians, except for language? The smart ones mostly publish in English anyway. This is part of the old civ and dying. Now for example can White be a new identity? It is not really new. European? Or something entirely different? Muscular Christianity? One project we could try is to reformulate the essence of reactionary thought in a futuristic, new-sounding way. Not in a Landian way, it is not about replacing humans with machines. But people don't really like to hear about old books either. People listen more if you tell them you have some new ideas. Leftism is getting old. The 50000th article about racism is simply boring. I think there would be a lot of openness for ideas that are presented as brand-new now.

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              • That article says that vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Isn’t to state that vain and vanity as well? But, come to think of it, to state that stating that is vanity looks a bit vain too… And… well… Indeed, unless you have a religion other than nihilism, all is vanity. He could have just said We Need a New Religion. Which I’ve been saying for 8 years now myself. A positive religion I would say. Religions riding the mind of the masses (masses of thinkers and cultivated guys as well as “masses” as usually understood) are in the habit of doing so under the guise of “evidence” “facts” “logic” “reality”. I don’t think when you talk about power and politics — or any other matter where figures carry weight, while exceptions and outliers don’t — you can really talk of groups or classes without a religion. For some groups and classes this religion has become nihilism. For some others, their religion is still their race (it’s not a logical necessity, but the likelihood is there that you’ll find them at the front of “anti-racism” efforts…). Such religion plays on the self-preservation instinct. For still other demographics and classes their religion is envy. Or more exactly envy-based. The first of these three religions leaves people without motivations or with only shallow, narcissistic motivations. On the other hand we know the force of self-preservation, and, second to that, envy. Together with intelligence, motivation force shapes the results of groups and classes in the struggle among them. An important neoreactionary tenet is that Culture is downstream from Power. I wonder if that’s not just appearance. Culture is downstream from power… but what is power downstream from? We no longer are in the human age where group X rides group Y because of its much larger numbers, or more advanced carriages and/or cannons. Slavery of course it’s still the normal condition worldwide, but it is not a matter of chains. It is a matter of hypnosis. Now, far-sighted psychoanalysis sees hypnosis as a rapport where both parties co-operate; both have power, both want more or less the same thing (just, one of the two parties so strongly wants to not know what they want that hypnosis is the most suitable way for them to get it). So in the West presently I would say power is downstream from human nature. If I think of the actual governors of the Western Hemisphere… they are just an elite version of the type of person that will get the most support and appreciation on social media, or internet forums… it’s the type that best appeals to the most people. I would also add that religions aren’t crafted and “laid over” the people’s mind, they emerge on their own when the people’s mind has reached a certain stage, which comes with a certain set of psychological needs. At that stage (not beforehand) the group that most readily and cleverly offers a product matching the needs takes the lead. Which is not a too unreasonable bet. But I’m not sure it’s a winning bet. At any rate, some people choose a a cause, an end, and then take whatever method, whatever means, are appropriate to that end. Other people choose means, and accept the end which those means are likely to bring about. We should all make clear what it is that we are doing. None of that will really work so far as, conscious or unconscious, the religion of nihilism stalks the minds of basically everybody. Why doesn't fertility rise? Because, in the back of their minds, every “white” believes that all is nothing and is a faithful of nihilism. How to confront nihilism? That's a cute question now, isn't it. So long as it is a held faith... it is perceived like certain evidence.

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                • Marriage rates are up 43% in Hungary and the birth rate is at a 20-year high. Divorce is also down 20%. This from a relatively mild pro-family stance by an elected government which seemingly hasn't come anywhere close to monopolizing the authority to determine status; Hungary isn't anywhere near coup-complete, but its elected government did grab the scepter, and wave it around just a little, and good things started happening. The main issue I'm seeing is electoral politics. Purging your managerialist bureaucracy without a hard coup? I think the jury's still out on that one. I can't think of a good historical example from the West, tho you could probably find one in Chinese history.

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                • If the sovereign acts as the font of all honors, (in normal language \[...\] Who wants normal language when one is capable of using abnormal language, lol.

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                • People are crediting Spandrell with the origin of the phrase Coup-Complete. But the credit for that must go to Jim. We heard it first from him. Jihad-complete is merely an extension of Coup Complete. Spandrell needn't Fret, however. BioLeninism will always belong to him.

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                • You know by now pretty how pretty far you and I are apart in these things. I think your analysis is right on the money as far as the levels of the problem are concerned, however. Which isn't to say a restructuring to the level of jihad-complete is hopeless, but rather a fool's hope. Definitely not the counsels of prudence, but then the counsels of prudence got us in this mess to begin with.

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                • You listed 4 reasons why getting our guys into government won't work: 1. Politicians are dumb? Some sure, but not those at the top. Clinton, Trump, Merkel don't appear dumb. Moreover, it wouldn't take genius to follow a sensible Agenda, like close borders. 2. "•Even if you manage to conquer the executive, the judiciary is against you, the bureaucracy is against you, the media wants you dead, foreign countries will sabotage you, and you’ll never get big enough majorities in parliament to do anything." Erdogan dealt with this problem pretty successfully. Didn't he? 3."•You gotta follow existing law, so people become incrementalists, never daring to do any radical changes." History suggests something different. Hitler might serve as an example. 4. Iron law of bureocracy? There are examples to the contrary, see eg. Hitler, Erdogan, Putin. Essentially there are two ways to power in a democracy. Wining (or almost winning) an election or a military coup (up to and including civil war). Erdogan and Hitler used elections to gain power (perhaps not exclusively, but they did use the legal political process). Franco is an example of someone who gained power by coup. In my opinion, the fact that there were regular political parties that also opposed the narrowly elected government helped his coup. I doubt that the army would have dared to rebel against the government if there had been no visible popular Opposition to the government.

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                  • You're talking about places without the rock solid Cathedral infiltration that Western countries have. Of all those Erdogan has the most merit, but again Turkey has also been full of conspiracies, his was just the most skilled. And yet what has he achieved? Are the Turks breeding above replacement? Is the country getting anywhere?

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                    • If you want the cold truth, the industrialized hell the whole world is grossly overcrowded anyway and if borders were closed, population decline would an unmitigated good 80 million people in say Germany is lunacy and the UK in reality without huge energy inputs can only sustain maybe 10 million , not 6x that number! The key is just keeping foreigners out which requires controlling the economy and trade more than anything.

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                      • I'm not so much concerned about population decline as for the distribution of the few babies we do get. Every generation is dumber than the next one. People seem to think that nothing matters as long as the babies are white; but Moldova is white too. I don't want Western Europe to become Moldova.

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                        • I understand your concern but smart people nearly ended all civilization in the Western hemisphere on multiple occasions. Those same people, mostly devoid of any faith or conscience are busy researching autonomous weapons, bio weapons, fungal weapons and who knows what else , all of whom could simply kill most if not all of humanity. My main concern is the European peoples for obvious reasons but mass extermination by our own hubris is not acceptable for anyone. If the whole world has to be dumber in order to protect ourselves from these loons , so be it. Now was it you that noted that cities are IQ shredders, creating conditions in which higher IQ citizens don't reproduce ? . Cities aren't going away and as I've explained to my chums on the dissident right, if they won the culture, society would grow more urban not less since costs would be lower Didn't Singapore go to outright eugenic dating for smarties with no effect whatever. Fundamentally its simply got to work itself out, over time society crumbles, the dumb die off and the resulting stick, smarter and more vicious thrives. As noted it will be over in a few centuries which is nothing in historical time Theoretically some sort of highly dictatorial regime pushing eugenics, traditional family structures and anti urbanism, a sort of Hitler meets Pol Pot sort of thing might be able to reverse this but this would do nothing much for Europe Also it would essentially just be a subsidy program , despite what people tell you, we don't have that much need for smarts of any kind , most real problems other than aging and of course some diseases than can be solved are are essentially solved All the low hanging fruit is gone We'd essentially be subsidizing research, much of which would be useless and or contained for the common good This would exacerbate our surplus of elites problem and be a rocket train to a priest caste of intellectuals as well Best we just allow the catabolic collapse to happen though if the west wants to make a run at various sorts of ethno nationalism meets traditional conservatism with some eugeniuc thrown in I'm all for it

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                          • I happen to have children so I'm rather interested in the actual process of decline. I don't want it to be too bad, for obvious reasons.

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                          • re: your children. Of course but so long as you can keep them safe and fed, they will be fine Most of modernity is an unnecessary luxury and apparently does little to achieving the historical main goal of everyone familial and cultural continuation. if you kids grow up in a world without TV or hell electricity so long as the the family grows, you've succeeded Now sure I'd love life extension and an asteroid shield and there is a lot to like about the ease of life in the now but as Mark Steyn likes to say , the future belongs to those who show up and if we can't reform modernity because we are to stuck on stupid than so be it If you are American your Great Great Great Grandkids can fight the Amish Wars with bolt rifles and bayonets in the trenches of wherever otherwise, you'll just get poorer, the population will decline and life will go on in post industrial civilization

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                            • A.B Prosper: It's not TV. Modern healthcare matters if you want your kids to actually grow up and be healthy. With my daughter we repeated the following cycle three times right after birth: too weak to suckle -> milk production does not start -> billirubin goes up, turns yellow -> rush back to the hospital for blue light treatment -> try again. Healthcare is really why I wouldn't want to live in, say, Russia. Then again it seems sickly genes run in both of our sides. I understand that people with healthy genes don't care much about that until they get old.

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                            • 80 million people in say Germany is lunacy and the UK in reality without huge energy inputs can only sustain maybe 10 million , not 6x that number! The key is just keeping foreigners out which requires controlling the economy and trade more than anything. Maybe I'm stupid but wouldn't such a drastic reduction in population require the complete dismantling of the current capitalist system? And wouldn't that provoke a fairly extreme response, to put it mildly? Do you have some strategy for bringing about the complete dismantling of the existing economic system?

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                              • Maybe. But let's look at Switzerland. After 1945 it had similar conditions as Austria. The economic areas where about the same, albeit the Franc had much higher buying power and no industry was kaputt (if at all. Common lore is only half true on that one). There were about four million inhabitants and infrastructure was being built at a high pace as everywhere in Europe. If they decided in the 1960ies not to flood the country - and to hold that course of action indefinitely - I think we would have ended up at least slightly better than Austria today from an economic standpoint, but never at par or worse. This also is the most brought up talking point of limiting immigration, that we would "become much poorer". Well, maybe. Nobody knows. But to assume that the banks, chemical industries and SME would have gone poof in the 80ies because we did not let in (the rather okayish) Southern Europeans as "temporary" workers is to assume that today Austria is a country which doesn't exist economically. Which is rather absurd. Also the so called Strukturwandel/change of structures because of outsourcing and technological changes in the 80ies and 90ies was stemmed by a large part of the Swiss themselves, not foreign workers. At most, we would have a economic problem NOW, not then. Furthermore, if some parts of large companies were crunched in the 90ies and we would have only four million inhabitants, nobody would suffer, because now the multis located in Switzerland today nourish a complete other and sometimes genetically unrelated three million people. Our grand-parents could very well have decided that Jura and the Western Plateau belongs to farmers, while the Alps are mil playground and for the Tourism, while the big six cities grow in six story houses as they did just up to WWI. If we would have spawned "too many" Swiss about now, the cost of degrowth or adaption to what we can afford and produce here would be none. Divestment into care for the elderly and deconstruction of surplus infrastructure would happen naturally over the course of a generation. Instead of spending Billions on new highways and expensive city tunnels for the already dense rail system and welfare, we would spend some meager change on the regreening of some roads in the periphery if at all. Imagine e.g. Gstaad would not be a giant Datcha for the Jetset. Capitalism would not crumble, just because the state does not print money which goes into concrete infrastructure. You would not notice. Workers fixing stuff today would not exist. Taxes which go into the welfare system to ameliorate their family situation don't have to be paid. VAT would be either 2% or non-existent. I guess the same could be said for Germany. Productivity is linked intrinsically wich buying power: How much can you afford? If a road is permanently congested and expansion of traffic systems can't keep up, productivity goes down. Instead of investing into houses and private stuff, we spend more and more into collectively owned and expensive toys, which robs the individual worker of his agency.

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                            • Well, taking part in electoral politics will not save us. For that we need religion, possibly a new one. But the question of whether electoral politics will save us is different from the question in the post you were refering to above, namely whether it will help if we get our guys into elected office.

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                          • I don't see any scenario in which things change, at least not for many decades. America owes much of its present,past and future dominance to its Protestant cultural bedrock, so perhaps in 50-100 or so years due to democratic change and other factors, and also increased atheism, such a foundation will be weakened enough that perhaps culturally conservative Catholicism will play a bigger role.

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                            • Mainline Protestantism is rapidly going the way of the dodo and I'm guessing it will likely be finished off by the time the boomers check out as I'm sure they're the only ones really holding up those God-forsaken institutions. As for the Evangelicals prots, they aren't doing so hot either and don't really have the spirited "moral crusade" mindset of their more Puritan cousins.

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                            • The racial thing aside, most of the problems listed are solved by Islam and Sharia law. The solutions are not pleasant to say the least, but they work.

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                              • Yeah that's the thing about jihad-completeness.

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                                • Islam is a good religion (specially compared with idolatry) but it solves not one of the said problems. Saudia, Turkey, Malaysia, etc. are already in the negative demographic zone. Everywhere the Sharia is being circumvented: in finances and also in the public decapitation department. The East has nothing to offer for the West's spiritual malaise, we need to cure ourselves.

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                              • This is one of the clearest and most important articles to appear in the past decade, at least. You're absolutely right: our goals are impossible, and the things that are possible (through all the means you mention) are neither tenable nor even desirable. A modest plan like your tax proposal is impossible and permanently off the table, as is my belligerent waffle about shutting down the corporate chain restaurants, etc. etc. None of this is ever going to be possible, but the trouble is, if that's the case (and it is) then we're finished as a civilisation. The immigration, the economics, the bureaucratic bloat, the consumerism, the degeneracy, all of that alone or in a package leads only one way: the end of the West. In a way, everyone on the alt.right, in the Reactosphere, even in broader trad and conservative circles, has been trying to deny the essential 'black pill' of reality. I'm just a mouth-piece for boring old Carlyle but he knew in the 19th century: there's no denying reality, there's no bringing back the phoney monarchs, there's no putting the democratic genie back in the bottle, etc. etc. etc. but he also knew that we were 'shooting Niagara', and from that realisation on, he had only dire predictions of the future. We're in the same position. Spengler was basically right, in spite of his many weaknesses. The trend's set, the cancer's established, we're too far gone. Once those cosmopolitan super-cities appear on the map, that's it, game over. The philosophy and culture has already gone too far. Your closing exhortation is absolutely right: we have to declare what we're doing and then stick to it. I just quit Twitter for the fourth time, and have already abandoned blogs twice after many hours' work each time. Is that in part a petty irrelevant personal weakness? Sure of course. But it's also an acceptance: even in our circles, it's virtually impossible to agree on anything. Do we *hate* other groups? Do we want to set the markets free? Do we want to establish human rights? Etc. etc. etc. At this point, acceptance is the only course of action. It's sad, it's horrible and it's defeatist: but the world will continue AFTER Europe dies. All of it: my beloved Schumann included. In fact 'high culture' is a case in point: in an ethno-state with perfect government and perfect industry, a total lack of poz activism and all the rest, it still remains the case that the overwhelming majority *of OUR people* feel nothing when they encounter great books, great music, great paintings. Their impulse, confronted with the accidental broadcast of Beethoven, is to change the channel. We have to face up to these things. Most people - on 'our side' - ARE enthused by the callous one-liners of the cinema, the loud bangs, the flashing lights, the shitty fake food, the endless status-signaling of pointless travel. It's done. That's me out, sorry. No actually I'm not sorry. Every hour spent waffling on the internet could just as easily be spent soaking up nature or learning new music pieces. Selfish? Lazy? Defeatist? Sure, but reality is what it is, and if anything remotely worthwhile is indeed 'jihad-complete' then bugger it, I don't want that process and I'm not confident of any worthwhile outcome even given the necessary conditions, so that's it. No point LARPing for feelz. Thank you for your service. You could continue, you seem pretty secure in your position so what do you have to lose. Your honesty though is timely and valuable. Thank you and goodbye.

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                                • Take care out there.

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                                  • the overwhelming majority \*of OUR people\* feel nothing when they encounter great books, great music, great paintings. Their impulse, confronted with the accidental broadcast of Beethoven, is to change the channel. We have to face up to these things. Most people – on ‘our side’ – ARE enthused by the callous one-liners of the cinema, the loud bangs, the flashing lights, the shitty fake food, the endless status-signaling of pointless travel. Not that their past centuries equivalents would have reacted "better", would they? The fall of standards among the intelligent and learned (who aren't, still, enticed by one-liners and the rest of that) is more worth noticing, I guess. Tumblr blogs aren't what is making impossible old Europe level arts and humanities (anyway, a tour of Tumblr's blogs, done using the site's Explore function, is good to know some sides of our times and people, anyone should take one). Hours ago I was listening to music by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons and thought that only positive faith can yield that. Renaissance and Baroque music has a skyward bent that all later music doesn't.

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                                    • @IAmHereToo: If you watch 70s and even 80s British television (I'm thinking Carla Lane shows but The Two Ronnies too, or Only Fools And Horses) you'll notice it's full of references to pieces of classical music that it was just assumed people would be somewhat familiar with. Same goes for Shakespeare plays and so on. To say that's no longer the case is a bit of an understatement. I'm absolutely not imagining that in Mozart's day everyone listened to Rameau and Monteverdi, but they certainly weren't repulsed to hear some Mozart. Today the cliché is that black people respond to classical music like vampires to garlic, but it's increasingly true for whites, including conservative whites. It's obviously important not to over-state these things, but it's equally wrong to dismiss the 'dumbing down' phenomenon. Tiny example: saw a printed sign in a private business recently that misspelled words that any seven-year-old would have been absolutely expected to spell correctly even when I was at school in the 1980s. I'm not saying the specific words because I'm terrified of what's coming down the line, probably before too long, but whatever your guess is, it's worse than that.

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                                      • Sorry only just noticed the closing comment. You're right of course, but thankfully there are exceptions, Messiaen's "Des Canyons Aux Étoiles" being one.

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                                      • > This is one of the clearest and most important articles to appear in the past decade > You’re absolutely right > I’m just a mouth-piece for boring old Carlyle > We’re in the same position. > Every hour spent waffling on the internet could just as easily be spent soaking up nature or learning new music pieces. Could you be a walking meme anymore than this? 🤣

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                                        • You're at liberty to be more optimistic and I'm not going to counter-signal you for doing it. All I'm saying is they're coming for trad-conservatives' kids and they're writing all historical figures out of existence. If you don't think that trend carries physical risks for you personally well that's your business I guess. Anyhow this is the last time I'm going to be drawn. I finally managed to break the habit of responding to people on the other reactionary blog, and while this one embraces reality to a far greater extent, that's still no reason to take risks online. There really is no upside. Best case scenario, people like me who are ultra-black pilled are living in a hyper-reality bubble and reality's really not so bad: well that's reason enough to stop being 'extremely online'. (It's also a highly implausible assessment when a teenage boy was jailed for four years in this country this week for making a meme while the 'milkshaker' of Nigel Farage was given community service, presumably continuing his left-wing activism.)

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                                      • Moldbug’s answer was a definite No. We can’t win there, for exactly the same reasons the Austrian guy is saying. The Cathedral is too strong, it is everywhere. The paths for formal power open to the democratic process are but a small fraction of the whole. Donald Trump has more power than any European government, and yet all he has been able to do is whatever neocons would have done anyway. This is not Moldbug's point at all. his case against activism includes many features, but the main point is that the Cathederal is an evolved system in which opposition political advocacy actually strengthens it. Fighting the the Cathedral through political advocacy is like trying to kill someone by giving him a smallpox vaccine. In fact, Moldbug argues, we can go further: since the Cathederal is evolved to fight conservatism activism, the removal of conservatism activism might in and of itself damage the Cathederal. The problem with MAGA is not that Trump has failed to lower immigration (indeed, he may even succeed), the failure is that he has helped to permanently radicalize liberal immigration policy and that failure is inherent in his strategy, which is a sort of distiillation of folk conservatism shorn of the semi-intellectual bs that comes out of the conservative think-tank pseudo-Cathederal. That said, there are things that seem to be possible. Trump has slowed things like H1B, seems to be getting somewhere with Mexico in the southern border, and is royally fucking with China. No Moldbuggian denies that conservative political action can achieve things. Reagan more or less did win the cold war, Thatcher beat the unions, Giuliani made New York a livable city. That's obvious, though one might differ as to how valuable these achievements are. What we deny is that it can defeat the Cathedral. Hungary’s Orban is a thing, a right-wing guy who has managed to capture all levers of power. Apples and oranges. Hungary never developed a real Cathedral system, but had one imposed artificially from the outside under the auspices of one mentally unstable (and, what perhaps proved to be just as important, comically ugly) man, that had to contend with the weird Hungarian language and other cultural quirks, and fell apart amidst a fiscal collapse. Italy is *perhaps* a better example. But best to wait and see. Even if Salvini's methods work there, though that doesn't prove they can work in a 100 year old Cathedral system.

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                                        • >Alain de Benoist who used to sell Nazi Crystals by mail What? Source?

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                                          • I was told so in Paris by French friends; I guess it was decades ago.

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                                            • "Nazi crystals" likely being code for this: https://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/alain-de-benoists-vivid-memory-part-2/#more-28863

                                              Perceiving that Benoist was still searching politically, Coston recommended he get in touch with the Jeune Nation movement and its student branch, the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN). When he arrived at Jeune Nation’s headquarters, a young woman said to him “you want to be a militant, my friend? Start by sweeping this floor!” Benoist conscientiously fulfilled the task; she took his information and said “you will be contacted.” From 1961 to the end of 1966, [recalls Benoist,] I passed a total of six years on the extreme right. It was a short time, really, but undeniably marked me for life, both because of the political situation—the end of a world—and because of my age: there is always a part of our adolescence we do not survive.
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                                          • Coup-complete vs jihad-complete is a succinct way of stating something I’ve felt for a long time. Whenever people (whom I can trust) ask me what my politics are, I have two answers. One is how I would remake society if I had complete control over the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The other is if I were God. The terms “Coup-complete” and “jihad-complete” work just fine. The archetypal jihad-complete PST is, of course, Christianity. There seems something historically unique about conquering nations not for personal fealty, but for an idea - a codified dogma and moral code. I wonder if Christianity in fact INVENTED THE CONCEPT of the PST. Subsequent successful examples would be Islam and Protestantism. Communism tried but failed. The final case is Modernity, which is unique due to its inextricability from Technology, but also appears heavily influenced by Protestantism. ALL of these PSTs are unthinkable without Christianity, and according to this view the most important man in history is either Jesus or Saint Paul. Simply by discussing the idea of laying a new moral code and worldview on society, do we not owe them an enormous debt? I struggle to think of an intellectual tradition that has done the same thing. Chinese thought seems too focused on allegiance and maintenance of order. Buddhism devolved into mere aesthetics and rituals. Only Christian-based ideas have proven their ability to truly remake society from the bottom up. If we wish to affect a PST, then, we have to either revive Christianity, or isolate what exactly made it and its descendants so powerful. It clearly isn’t Jesus himself. The last centrury suggests that it isn’t even the metaphysical. But it seems our New Religion must really be an old one.

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                                            • You're giving them waaaay too much credit. Read some Paul. He wasn't aiming for PST. He was selling the apocalypse around the corner. Christianity was an incremental change that took centuries and nobody really saw happening. Took until Augustine to figure out what was happening and tried to rationalize the whole thing. Islam did PST alright, and faster. We may need to copy the tactics, but the package can (and should) be different.

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                                              • What is your take on the BJP and Mr. Narendra Modi? He won "big" in the recent election, certainly against the conventional wisdom voiced by someone from that part of the world in a recent casual social conversation. He is called the "Trump of India", but that someone commenting on the election remarked that the BJP goes as far back as its rival Congress Party so isn't in any way a new political movement. Modi seems pretty hard core -- testing an anti-satellite weapon which is pretty much taking a squat in the international-cooperation punch bowl, supporting the Hindu equivalent of repurposing the Hagias Sophia to Christianity. But some of the BJP policy positions have this goofy aspect to them, but maybe I am missing some local perspective? Can a person outside of India join the BJP? I am thinking of doing it to get their newsletter to figure out what they are about.

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                                                • I don't think India will ever amount to anything so I find it hard to be very interested, but Modi sounds like a smart guy.

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                                                  • My take is that Modi is the third big figure of independent India, after Nehru and Indira. Indians are very nationalistic, Hindu pride is in the ascendant, so you're going to see a Hindu great power. Trump's America is a good analogy because you have a strong national leader on top of an extremely diverse and turbulent national life. Of course the ingredients are different - Trump's America doesn't have 800 million villagers belonging to a racially and religiously distinct civilization over 2000 years old. As India develops all the capacities of a contemporary great power - the space program, the modern military, the high technology sector - the past will not go away. You'll hear about how Indian astronauts grew up in some village, and watched patriotic films on the old national TV network Doordarshan. You'll have guru-futurists proposing to recreate the dharmic social order in lunar colonies. Caste will take on a modern genetic dimension. They will rewrite geology, paleontology, and history in an Indocentric way... I can't know the details in advance, but it would require some great national tragedy to prevent something like this future from coming to pass, because they already have all the ingredients to make it happen.

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                                                    • I don't see any reason to assume India will develop to that level. None at all. Average IQ in India is very low. India will be very lucky to ever grow to the level of Thailand.

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                                                      • This isn't very hypothetical. India *already has* "space program... modern military... high technology sector", even while the country remains poorer on average than Thailand. They intend to send up their first astronauts a few years from now. I cautiously didn't say there would be Indian lunar colonies, just Hindu-flavored futurists talking about them... If you wish to suppose that low average IQ will prevent the kind of mass movement out of poverty that China achieved - there must be some scope for improvement, just by reducing malnutrition; and there's always genetic modification in the long run; but if you do suppose that most Indians will remain poor - nonetheless there is already the huge Indian middle class. And here I think of Russia, which has a high technical and industrial capacity which is used for military purposes rather than commercial ones. So one could imagine an India which rivals some of China's achievements through an autarkic national network of high technology, but in which the national majority remain villagers and farmers... But again, I think that's just describing the present. Incidentally, I have been writing this with one ear turned to the Youtube video stream of Arnab Goswami's "Republic TV", which in a way is the Fox News of Modi's India, and one of the guests just said that there is now an effective one-party rule in India. So they're even emulating China in that regard. :-)

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                                                        • I bear no ill wishes towards them, so whatever improvement they manage to achieve is good news. And a Hindu single party state does sound interesting. Diversity of political forms is a good thing in my book. I just have a hard time imagining India as a "world power". I do hope they stop exporting excess population to the West, though.

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                                                        • india has a low IQ but they have a lot of people and are good at allocating talent through various selective schools based on test score admissions. Statistically, a country with 1.3 billion ppl and a mean IQ of 80 will will still produce a lot of smart people.

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                                                  • As I have repeated posted before. This is a primitive form of Eugenics that occurred in England: https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-nurture-of-nature.html Social mobility especially predominantly downward social mobility as well as upward social mobility for the particularly talented fostered a Eugenic situation. Aside from modern genetic manipulation. This is the most Eugenic arrangement available to us.

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                                                    • Fighting globohomo is merely coup-complete not jihad complete. The support for homosexuals the Cathedral has managed to evoke is the most NPC thing I ever saw in my life. NPCs all the sudden started supporting them overnight in 2009 or 2010 (I don't remember when exactly) as if someone flipped a switch. Pariahs one day, sacred protected class (to the point where opposing gay marriage became almost like parading in the street with a Swastika shouting that Hitler did literally nothing wrong) the next. But gain control of the state and the NPCs can easily be made to reverse course on this at least the men and women don't revolt physically... I'm convinced most men at least don't like homosexuals so easy to reverse. Jihad complete problems are more things that are so truly repugnant to modern sensibilities that if you try to touch with a ten foot pole your own coup soldiers will string you up, some of Jim's proposals are like this. Lowering the age of consent to 16 is a coup complete problem. Lowering the age of consent to 12 and legalizing marriage by abduction at such an age (I oppose this for the record) would be a jihad complete problem.

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                                                      • Is it possible that civilization is not compatible with replacement reproduction? Perhaps an NP-complete problem? The Romans failed at it and I suspect we will fail at it too bringing on another Dark Age as the author mentions. Perhaps this is the natural eb and flow of humanity?

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                                                        • China did fine demographically for all recorded history.

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                                                          • True. However, has China ever been at the forefront of anything in terms of human achievement/advancement?

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                                                            • Yes it has. They invented paper, printing and gunpowder, and were the wealthiest and most advanced civilization for a big chunk of human history.

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                                                              • Yet they seemed to not have been able to adapt against Horse Nomads adequately except against the Xiongnu. Both Mongols and Manchus over-ran China. In spite of their advanced society.

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                                                            • Except during Grand Solar Minimums. But then, everyone has population decline during those.

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                                                            • Einstein said that one doesn't scratch without a itch. What makes individuals and groups (races, who will form a culture) muse and ponder, devise and create, dream and imagine? Well... ill-feeling. The mal de vivre. Existential angst. Any non-strictly technical knowledge comes from that. You don't inquire and think when you feel well. You don't analyse what goes according to your wishes (you don't even see the rules of human social games, for example, if you are by birth decently equipped to play them). You don't imagine, and invent, when you are satisfied with what you have. So the races/cultures will be as intellectually productive and creative as bad they feel. This means the more inventive and philosophically fertile races/cultures will be those more inclined — or stalked, even — by nihilism. When all the inquiring and imagining and searching is done... and the limits of the mind are reached, it's time for such races/cultures/civilizations to disappear. Or at least go through a huge "low", because their faith in nihilism will reach full spread. Hedonism is a way to stave off nihilism-caused angst too. It's not by chance that the most susceptible to the grip of nihilism and despair are those who all others envy thinking they "have all". It's right when one "has all" that things get the toughest, because, with no pursuit left going on (and the sense of emptiness still there), what is left to do? This happens to individuals, but on the scale of entire societies as well. Even social media profiles and posts — vapid tough they are — teem with "You live only once, make the best out of it!", or "Life is short, I want to enjoy it!" statements. No reason to try to ask them how they know we live only once (or their proof for the existence of time... since the most advanced minds on earth seem to agree that time is a construct of our mind): it's the faith of their time, and like all actual faiths, it's the most sound of evidence for them. So cultural beauty is a fruit of the tree of existential angst, if you ask me, and philosophies are borne of the desire of other worlds, by people who can't get themselves to like the one we are in.

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                                                              • It’s not by chance that the most susceptible to the grip of nihilism and despair are those who all others envy thinking they “have all”. It’s right when one “has all” that things get the toughest, because, with no pursuit left going on (and the sense of emptiness still there), what is left to do? This happens to individuals, but on the scale of entire societies as well. And that's why a possible coming hyper-technological future where material plentitude will be affordable to all humans will see a never before seen of them on medication (my forecast).

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                                                                • Luckily for individuals, the pursuit of status is a neverending treadmill. Unluckily for society, something something status maximizing sociopaths.

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                                                                • Reproduction is tied to food and water availability, which we aren't near to fully exploiting as yet. That's why the push for population control.

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                                                                • Things will probably get worse before they get better but I don't believe that nothing can be done. The Left, and I see the pinnacle of the Left as Jews, have slowly but surely emplaced themselves in several choke points in various points in the society. From these points they funnel money and use judicial fiat proclamations to cause large changes in the society. If we see what some of these are we can do the same ourselves and counter them. Here's what I see as the three biggest,(in the USA). 1. Let's not pretend that there's NO alternative but full one Man, one vote Democracy. We had a perfectly good system, Republican Democracy (a Republic), and it was destroyed by the courts. In fact this is a manufactured crisis. It used to be that most States had a Senate just like the Federal government that had regional representation. The Supreme Court ruled this illegal. Destroying this regional balance in the States is causing huge friction. Friction where now it's a winner take all instead of a compromise. This can be changed by a better than 50% vote in the House and Senate to limit the Courts decision on this. The Legislature of the US can TELL the Courts what they can decide on. They can not just decide on any laws what so ever if the Legislature tells them not to. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii “…In all the other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make…” “…with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make…” The important part. The earlier part declares what powers they have but it ends with control of these functions by Congress. Congress could tell them to butt out of anything they wish too. All we need is a Congress with the balls to do so and we could turn the whole country around in months. 2.Another bad decision by the Courts was to declare that there could be no test for voting. This means no pole taxes or intelligence test. Think if we made you paying positive amount of taxes into the treasury a requisite for voting. We could turn the whole country around in months. Lots of major rioting and trouble but at some point this would calm down. Of course the Republicans when they had the House, the Senate and the Presidency could have fixed both of these, stopped illegal and corrupt voting but did nothing. They could have reigned for a decade easy and pushed for laws in Whites interest. 3. The banking system is set up to loot the whole country. The best explanation for this is this post by Charles Hugh Smith. It's worth reading because it's short and makes it abundantly clear what the situation is. http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-5-steps-to-world-domination.html Change these three things and it would a massive ripple effect throughout the whole society. The first two could be done by pigheaded Conservative legislature that refused to compromise. The third could be affected by combination with the Left who hate the bankers as much as I do. It would probably be best to take on the bankers first as they are a large part of the pozz. The idea that nothing can done is wrong and foolish. You have to find certain battles and force these to get gains later elsewhere. It makes no sense that what the Left did can;t be undone. No one thought the Commies could be defeated in the USSR but they were.

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                                                                  • Somewhere in a Buddhist text they say: the master arrives when the learner is ready. Somewhere Plato said: Those who tell the stories are those who rule society. Somewhere on this very blog it is written (with reference to deception and delusion as the most "purchased" goods in society) that if there are producers/sellers it is because they are consumers. Who or what is the real ruler of society? I used to trust that the answer was "the élite" for so long time, it seemed obvious, and the headstrongness of the common people in denying it added an edge of "amusingness" to it. For another span of time, I trusted the answer to be "the people", or more exactly the nature of people, which is what, ultimately, elects rulers to their positions (I am not speakinf of official elections, and official positions of power). Then I took other looks at the whole picture. No more than 10-15 years of continually broadcasting carefully crafted "film" and other mediatic productions at the target audience are enough to make a demographic where, say [the % don't matter in themselves and are of course arguable], 45% disliked if you called them "darling" (22.5% of them being outraged, the others simply losing interest in you), 30% were indifferent, and 25% from slightly to more than slightly pleased by it become one where 85% dislike it (65% of them getting outrage flow in their mind), the other 15% feels so ashamed for not disliking it that, on the level of self-awareness, they know they dislike it and feel insulted by it too, and 0% is indifferent to it. This is what I have come to think: the nature of (the nigh totality of) people elects the rulers; the rulers then can rule the ruled only on condition that their rule doesn't discord with their nature: however, nature-agreeing rule still leaves room for countless varied directions and uses, and within that scope the choice is the rulers'. So it's a mixed, synergic system, with the nature of (the nigh totality of) people being the ultimate ruler, and the ruling élites having ample leeway to maneuver as they prefer within the nature-drawn confines. Which is (I am replying to the talk about Unz.com in the blog post before this) I am unenthused by that site, and efforts such as American Pravda. Why would the socially (and legally, where this applies) accepted account of any war or World War, for example, be closer to truth than the socially (and judicially) account of a marriage's story as they are related by wives in courts? Why would we have history books, and university courses, more truthful than my ex wife's 1000-friend-strong Facebook profile? I remember very sharply what happened, the good people's reactions, when I stepped in and tried to tell those people what she had done to me, and how she was lying to me. How interested, and, let's say, inclined, to truth were they! Lol. All what's high up is a magnification of what happens at the root level, and can never be other.

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                                                                    • I don't mind the occasional mistyped word, but here an amendment is due. account of a marriage’s story as they are related by wives in courts? is account of a marriage’s story as they are related by wives in courts, which society as a whole, men and women alike, starting from judges and juries and parliament houses and opinion-makers, agree to collectively pretend to believe cannot be but truthful)?

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                                                                      • "...the rulers then can rule the ruled only on condition that their rule doesn’t discord with their nature: however, nature-agreeing rule still leaves room for countless varied directions and uses, and within that scope the choice is the rulers’. So it’s a mixed, synergic system, with the nature of (the nigh totality of) people being the ultimate ruler, and the ruling élites having ample leeway to maneuver as they prefer within the nature-drawn confines..." I don't believe this is our case at all and not in a lot of other countries. People DO NOT get the government they deserve. In the case of the US and most of Europe the "elite" are elite because they has access to massive amounts of cash from owning the banks and the FED and they are using sex with children and teenagers to blackmail the Legislature. I hardly call that the will of the people. Has that ever been put up for a vote???? Look at Amazon they lost money for over ten years. I think they still lose money except for renting out server systems. Those server systems are likely to be rented by the government. Same with Google. As for changing of morals they would never have been able to do this without the massive cash infusion from their monopoly. You're right morals can be changed by propaganda but I would hardly blame the general population for this.

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                                                                    • Interesting post. I have a lot of thoughts in response: mostly along the lines of 'I see where you are coming from but 'x'' sorts of things. Whether I get around to expressing them here is another matter. My views may not be relevant anyway this far down the comments. I would like to revisit the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. One wonders if, in a post modern liberal state, whether focusing on the elected component is even relevant at all. The inherent unreliability and instability of government by majoritarian tyranny leads rather handily to the conclusion that if you want to have democracy you have to have a bureaucracy to actually run things......and eventually rule things. The civil service has a great deal of practical sovereignty. If the changes that those of us desire can be affected peacefully it must be with either the connivance of the established bureaucracy or its destruction. There comes a point when the elected official will almost certainly be downstream of his civil servants. One of the many reasons why the more effective current year leaders (like Putin, Salvini, Erdogan, etc...) are able to see positive results is that their bureaucracies are stuffed with people more amenable to national traditions. (I will note that President Trump is overwhelmingly popular with the enlisted ranks of the military, moderately so with the commissioned, but not so popular with the civil service) What is so damning in the United States is that the federal government has used its employment practices to promote individuals whose interests and ideals run contrary to the historical American nation. We are often governed by aliens, who will aggressively put sand in the gears of state to prevent real or lasting restoration. The traditional societies of the West died by thousand cuts and a few hard drops. I question the possibility of decisive metapolitical battles over constant, sustained 'microaggressions' against the system in the face of an iron bureaucracy. Tangentially: The Z Man did a podcast a few weeks back, I think it was episode 94 'All About Pride', where he did a nice job talking about the degree of energetic commitment most progressive activists possess. To struggle against God and nature requires a degree of perpetual, unrelenting fanaticism (and a lot of help from the permanent bureaucracy). I believe, as many round these parts do, that our general views run in harmony with the natural and the divine. Gravity is on our side but it will still take a great deal of energetic commitment to regress 'progress'. It might be an opportunity to engage in introspection about one's own level of engagement. Anyway, take care and thanks for writing another interesting article.

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                                                                      • "We need a new religion" Do we really? The existing ones (Islam, Christianity) are already opposed to feminism, homosexuality and all that garbage. The only problem with the West is that swapped one religion (Christianity) for another (Liberalism). If anyone doubts that Liberalism is a religion, consider the hordes of brainwashed Westerners who are reciting this drivel about global warming, open borders, female power, etc. like a mantra. They didn't come up with that bullshit themselves, they have been indoctrinated. The good news is that Liberalism is friendly to Islam, and Islam will eventually suppress Liberalism in Europe, because that's what Islam does - conquer. So the lefties are being suicidal, and given enough time their sick ideology will die off with them. Another way it could go is that the economy will fall apart because of socialist policies, and when the thin veil of civilization comes off people will revert to their natural and basic instinct, such as distrusting foreigners and grabbing women by the pussy (which leftists don't do because they live in a bubble and have lost touch with reality, but they might get reacquainted with it once society collapses). Of course, by then the demographics will be a mess. I think the battle is already lost and fighting is futile. People should simply move to a better country and call it a day. Why fight for the white race, when the white race itself is responsible for this mess? Our fellow white people need no saving, they are indeed the enemy. The alternative is civil war and revolution by violent means, but we don't have the numbers. Like I said, most people seem to OK with the way things are now. Again, who exactly should we fight for? For the same idiots that embraced Globohomo? I couldn't care less. Let them all reap what they sowed. I'll be spending the rest of my life somewhere else in better company. A country is just a patch of dirt... it's the people that make the nation. And if your people go full retard, you might as well find a new place to call home. I won't shed a single drop of blood for Europe, because Europe did this to itself and they totally deserve their dystopian future. At this point, I just want out.

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                                                                        • We didn't swap it, more like Christianity itself got liberalized, becoming cuckstianity. So the issue is returning to the church with lesbian pastors and all that solves about nothing, and thus we have to choose between decucking the church or starting over.

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