How far is far enough

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Want to find a hot aristocrat wifu? Just go see the Sonic movie!" - Le Baron

It's not Jim's either. We took it from the same source.

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.

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.”

Call me when it's above replacement.

Raise my stock prices, goy. Consume. Consume. Reproduce! Please?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Take care out there.

Yeah that's the thing about jihad-completeness.