The Money is in Religion

Haven't posted in a while, but everything's ok. Just been busy. Worry not, my dear readers, this blog isn't going anywhere. I might be lazy but I'm quite resilient. And I like my blog very much, so you can expect this blog to last for as long as I have fingers to type. If I go offline I'm either dead or in some hidden CIA prison for thought criminals. I expect to have good company if either of that happens.

Speaking of crimethinkers, Anatoly Karlin had a good review of the alt-internet at his blog. The conclusion is quite clear: the old far-right is quite healthy. The alt-right, defined as Kek-worship and assorted Spencerites is very small. And NrX* is just tiny. Like really tiny.

\*I'll just stop fighting the, in my opinion, lame branding and just surrender to the fact that everybody categorizes me as NrX so I might as well own it.

I've said it before, and others have said it before and better than I have. But that's how it is: there is no great media revolution. Most people still get their news from TV. To the extent people get their news from the Internet, they like their mainstream stuff first, and to the extent they like edgy stuff, they like the edgy stuff that has always been around. Stormfront is still big, fellas. Or it was until a few months ago. Think about that.

This shouldn't be something to worry about, and it should surprise anyone. For one thing, the population is getting old. Old people don't like to change, they have their old ideas, and they're hanging on to them. The paleo-right was a thing, a very fine thing, and these good ol' rednecks aren't going to jump into Richard Spencer's wagon. Trump didn't change anybody's mind. He just said what his voters had been thinking for decades.

I have a blog, so I should be sad about this. I'm supposed to want to change peoples minds through my awesome writing. And to some extent I've achieved that; but the amount of people who are open to persuasion by strangers over the internet is, well, tiny. As tiny as the total audience of NrX. This is fine, many of these people are the smart people who might end up having some influence in the world. Neoreaction has been cited in the press, not always negatively, way more often than its numbers would warrant.

But if we look at the facts, and if I'm coherent with my writing, well the fact is most people just aren't open to persuasion. Because there's no reason they should be. Ideas aren't about logic. Ideas are badges of group membership. They are Schelling points. Ideas aren't things we hold in our "minds"; ideas are things we say. To others. For a reason. A social reason. A Dunbar reason. If saying the same things that NrX says isn't going to make you more friends, well you aren't going to say it. If saying what the Alt-right says isn't going to make you more friends, well you aren't going to say it. Ask Pax Dickinson about that.

So if the purpose of ideas is to, broadly defined, "make more (or better) friends", it should be obvious that old ideas have an advantage there over new ideas. The easiest way to make friends with someone is to adopt his ideas. New ideas by definition have no adopters, so it's hard to make friends with them. Of course just adopting someone else's ideas out of the blue is also not a very smart move. It's quite boring, and they must suspect you wanting something out of them. The way to make friends is not to make something out of people, but to offer people to make something out of you.

So the good move here is to adopt people's ideas, but give them a little bit of spin. By doing so, you signal yourself as something which is potentially useful; but you also give people something to fall back on. If your spin ends up not working for them; they can always fall back to their old ideas, with nobody noticing. No embarrassment, no loss of status. Nothing happened here.

Let me be more concrete here. I'm actually thinking of somebody very concrete. Who? Jordan Peterson. He has mastered the "old ideas with a bit of spin" trick. I've been writing of Jordan Peterson's ideas for quite some time. Back then what I did was to take them at face value; but what I want to do here is to make a functional analysis. Or as Steve Sailer says of modern journalists, to make marketing criticism. I've been mildly critical of Jordan Peterson's ideas before: there's some logical errors and unclear philosophy in his speeches. But say what you will, he is a Genius marketer. With a capital G. The guy is good. How good? His Patreon is making 67k a month. That's how good he is. He's making more money than the whole alt-right and paleo-right put together. And then some.

Why is he so popular? This article gives you a hint:

Bread Pilled: Jordan Peterson turning young, Western men into Christians Again

Jordan Peterson is making a fortune (in internet politics terms) because... he's preaching. He's preaching the Christian gospel. And that's a very good business, especially in North America, which has a long tradition of innovative preachers. Now I'm not dissing Dr. Peterson. He's an insanely talented preacher. He's the best preacher I've heard in my whole life, and he's better than any of the preachers I've read about from the past. He is really good. He preaches Christianity with bits of HBD, of the manosphere, of evolutionary psychology and pragmatic philosophy. All great stuff. But this red-pill spin is not what is making him money. There's plenty of people preaching the red-pill, and they're not making a dime. It's Christianity what's making him the money.

And why would that be? Why would preaching be so profitable? Because Christians are a thing. There's hundreds of millions of Christians out there. Many of them aren't happy, they suffer from the diseases of modernity we all internet dissenters write about. The war on men. Diseases of modernity which affect organized Christianity itself. Many, I'd guess most of us here also come from Christian families; but we dropped out. However not everybody is willing to take that step, for many reasons. It's not so easy to accept that everything your family, your schools, your friends has been telling you about is a lie. Some people may have functional Christian social circles which they can't abandon. These people will never give money to Heartiste, even if they secretly agree with them. These people, these millions upon millions of unhappy Christians need something that gives them the red-pill but lets them keep being good Christians. Jordan Peterson sells exactly that. And he's brilliant at it.

They money, thus, is not in good ideas per se. The money is in religion. Good religion, and bad religion, they all make good money. Why? Because religions are, sticky, heavy social matter. Religions are designed to encompass one's social circle so that one can never leave. That keeps people civilized when the religion is good, and that makes society sick when the religion is bad, as in modern progressivism. But at any rate, the way to reach the bulk of the population is not just to sell good ideas, it's to sell a fallback. There's a hilarious amount of ways of saying this in Chinese, who understand the point very well. "To help them keep face". "To give them a step so that they can come down". "To find a slope to get down from the donkey". Nobody wants to lose status.

Any change is welcome, as long as it doesn't make people lose status. No change is welcome, no matter how good, if people feel the process involves them losing status, even a little, even just a tiny little slight embarrassment in the short term. These of course means there's a limit to what one can sell; you can only deviate so much from the status quo if you want people to buy in. But the power of compound interest is vast, if the will is there to keep on pushing.

[…] The Money is in Religion […]

Change minds? I told you the story about how your explanation of what NGOs are doing to Burma influenced what a visiting scholar from China to a U.S. public university wrote about the Chinese government's stand on private charitable organizations within their borders? And the connection was through the U.S. sponsor of said visiting scholar handing her husband a manuscript saying, "Here, you read this and tell me what you think." You must have some ancient proverb to describe this process -- you have more influence than you can imagine.

Unfortunately there is no stepladder between the status quo and survival. http://www.isegoria.net/2011/09/the-fossils-of-past-power-grabs/ The alternatives are war or the Exit drive. War means America dies. Suppressing Exit means America dies.

[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]

You think that's big? This guy's point about 'making a deer into a horse' was openly lifted by an author for "The american conservative." On top of that, I'm pretty sure that I was the vector for that through introducing NRx to my uncle, a friend of his.

No kidding. When did that happen? I'd like some details.

You should write about your view on transhumanist religions/flights of fancy, and whether they could get any traction, as an alternative to the existing menu of choices. Personally, I'm particularly intrigued about the possibilities of Russian-style cosmism.

Like you, I have arrived at the conclusion people believe whatever gets them fed, paid, and laid for obvious reasons of natural selection. The superman is someone who has some additional considerations like objective truth for its own sake that are costly and risky behaviors. I've also been thinking about where trolling fits in this equation. A random normie posts about "Drumpf" or "white supremacists" expecting to get a cheap dopamine hit when some of their friends, coworkers, and some strangers give them approval. The troll then, takes a steaming dump over that sweet, easy, low-effort reward by ridiculing them and pointing out how stupid their argument (that they don't really care about) is. The goal of trolling or even limited debate is not changing minds, but changing behaviors by imposing costs or at least reducing the feel-good rewards. People like social lubricants that maximize positive feedback while minimizing friction in the form of challenge and opprobrium.

Christianity sells because it's a good product. Going to church weekly improves your life satisfaction by the same order of magnitude as going from bottom to top income quartile, it increases life expectancy by 8 years, more kids, more friends, more income, less divorces, a civilisation, deus vult, etc., etc. There's very few things that can give you such enormous benefits. But one of these is science and rational thinking. And it's hard to make the two compatible; believing in prayers, miracles and holy spirits has scientifically measurable benefits but is otherwise completely irrational. What Jordan Peterson did was to find a reasonable argument to make the irrationality of christianity rational, and therefore allowing one to believe in both christianity and science, and hopefully reap the benefits of both.

Except for Catholics and every other sect like them who believe Reason and Faith are the two wings of an eagle. People think they're reinventing something and hearing something new, when if they were properly educated, they'd know this was all figured out centuries ago. To some extent, it's good to have a rebellious phase, even for society. People said screw Faith, we have Reason now! And then Reason starts leading to all the same conclusions as Faith (good social science is turning into the God's fact checker). And then Reason also starts showing it's full of liars and corruption and is fallible. And then people will reject that for total commitment to Faith for awhile...

"Trump didn’t change anybody’s mind. He just said what his voters had been thinking for decades." I think this is a point worth emphasizing. I grew up in an Amerikaaner household and would definitely have called myself Conservative for the first twenty-odd years of my life. We always voted Republican, and quite often went out and beat feet around neighborhoods to make sure our candidate won. I have many memories of ringing doorbells as a cute little blond boy to convince people to vote for Bob Dole/George W/Jeb (we were in Florida; he was running for governor)/etc. At the same time, this was less because of some deep philosophical agreement with the Republican establishment and more because we'd been suckered by the rhetoric - "We're the party of America" - "Elect us because we believe in good old American Capitalism and apple pie" - "We're the party of the little people" - "Those democrats are nasty and you don't want them in office, so you have to vote for us" - but nobody in my family ever liked much of what Republicans ever actually did. RINO was one of the tamer insults for the Republican establishment around our household, and it essentially meant, "These people aren't real Republicans, they don't follow what we really want - they don't follow the rhetoric." If by some horrible miracle my father became Supreme Dictator of the United States tomorrow, half the Blacks would be in Liberia and the other half on trees by next Tuesday (with maybe ten or twelve relentlessly functional Black families kept around as Magic Negroes); all umpty-million illegals would be on small boats in the Caribbean that the Coast Guard sank as soon as they reached international waters, affirmative action would cease to exist effective immediately, Harvard and Yale would be razed and the ground salted, California and DC would be nuked, and any remaining Democratic voters would be joining the aforementioned Blacks on their trees. Then we'd pull out of NATO, nuke North Korea and leave the Middle East to clean up its own damn mess (while giving full support to Israel to completely take over and govern the region as a whole). We'd get all our troops home from Europe, and probably send them off immediately to a war to get China to stop rattling its sabres. We'd either resuscitate the old African colonies (taking over British dominions ourselves) or, more likely, cut off all foreign aid and contact and just let the whole continent rot. And my father's a moderate in his social circles. He has a good job as a software engineer and isn't struggling to make ends meet because of the new progressive economy. My parents voted for Trump, because he's the first politician in a King's Age to openly say and then defend on the campaign trail even the barest hint of what they want. Privately, they think he's still WAY too far to the left; 'Clinton with some teeth in him.' The point of all this long-winded spiel is, the base of legacy Americans is well and truly dissatisfied. Very, very angry - angrier than any polls will ever show. If you want power to create a new regime, all you have to do is figure out how to tap that, and be savvy and avaricious enough to turn it into something more than a social club. And the easiest way to do that is probably to take over a large group of evangelical seminaries. Imagine if preachers suddenly became, not a brake on this anger in favor of the powers that be, but widespread agitators for regime change.

If your take on Jordan Peterson is correct, the announced death of Christianity may be very, very premature.

You've often said that we Need a New Religion. Your present post suggests that it might be easier to reform an old religion than to create a new one. I think we can hope for another Martin Luther; but not for another Jesus

I was raised Catholic, studied at a Catholic university, and the message on science always had been "Christianity is compatible with science, don't think too much about it". It wasn't really convincing. Jordan Peterson's arguments are IMHO quite novel (and probably heretical !).

It would be cool if he jumpstarted a new Great Revival, starting several new (hard-right) denominations. But that's all North America. In Europe Christianity is very dead.

I guess they count very much as New Religions; but they've never got much track, and I don't see them getting any in the foreseeable future. As for why, they just sound too bookish probably.

See Lindy's Effect

In western Europe, maybe. In east, Christianity is on the rise. In Russia establishment had semi-openly struck a deal with Orthodox church they'll support each other against progressives.

"Any change is welcome, as long as it doesn’t make people lose status. No change is welcome, no matter how good, if people feel the process involves them losing status, even a little, even just a tiny little slight embarrassment in the short term." This is why a hard confrontation with the Left is pretty much unavoidable. The common set of ideas we believe in, from NRx arcane scholars to garden variety conservatives, all spell massive loss of status for progressives if they are politically implemented. The current default mode to gain status is to push an idea further to the left. Conservatives have been constantly losing ground by banking on the existence of a limit to that pattern, assuming that the Left would marginalize itself by constantly moving toward its fringe. It never happened, mostly because the Left controls the megaphone, and it is very good at making it high status. So people can't give up on the megaphone without being at risk of losing status, even if the megaphone is spouting obvious insanity all day long. Sales matter. I have no miracle recipe to make sane social ideas high status, but that is what needs to happen if we ever are to win the large swaths of public opinion required to implement them at the political level. Compound interest is a key concept here, there is a reason why the long march through the institutions was called that way. Leftist ideas have been gently sold one after the other until modern society was almost entirely shaped by them. That slow build-up was possible because it was growing sheltered by the fundamentals of a resilient and prosperous civilization. Survival imperatives we are now facing may not leave us with such a luxury to enjoy. The Left needs to start losing status fast, and what enables it to entertain its status system needs to be relentlessly targeted and undermined.

And very hard to find information. I tried to get an book of essays in English by Fyodorov. One edition was printed in the early 90's, but fetches absurd prices if you can locate a copy.