This is episode 6 - Towards a Functionalist Understanding of Religion pt. 3

Part 1 - Thesis

Which Christianity?

Before we get started, I need to explain the format of this talk, in which I will outline a sketch of what a Christo-Nietzschean synthesis might look like. 

Christian theology is a vast body of thought and action spanning two thousand years and over a  billion people, though we could argue about the quality of many of those people in the current year. 

Nietszche was only one man, but his oeuvre is dense and multilayered and multifaceted, and I think you could spend your whole life studying it and still find something new.

So the most I can do is give you an outline of how and why these two things ought to come together, in the hope that it inspires others to explore the territory which I can at this time only sketch.

I am going to start by explaining a very concrete mechanism in our modern world which serves to sever people from Christianity, and it may not seem immediately clear what this has to do with the promise I am making

In the following segments I am going to talk about some relatively abstract philosophical considerations which might seem a bit disconnected from the first segment, but they inform our pursuit of the goal of synthesis 

In the final segment I will explain how these things come together and how we can come to view Nietzsche as a theologian, as the most important theological actor since Martin Luther at least,

(And I can already hear the Catholics rankling at that and they are just going to have to get over it. People who view ideologies as a series of sports teams to cheer at or jeer at are not seeking truth. Go treat Christianity like football somewhere else)    

So I am going to ask for your patience.

When we talk about integrating a particular idea into Christianity, we have to start with this question: which Christianity? There are so many Christianities, and often the only thing they have in common is the name of Christ, 

If we operate inside of a functionalist frame, then we recognize that the name a group gives to itself doesn’t matter nearly as much as the pattern of their thought processes, their mode of coexistence, the form of their integration with being and the dynamics of their actions.

That is, two groups could call themselves Christian and even affirm the same creed, but be different entirely in their outlook toward life, in the way they socially litigate their day to day actions, in their theory of what is moral and so on.

One of the reasons Christianity is able to spread so widely is that it’s able to accommodate wildly different peoples with incommensurate ways of living and thinking under the same banner, precisely by eliding all of these functional differences and defining itself under this narrow criteria.

Christians want to believe—and in fact they have to believe—that if you sincerely pray to Jesus then you slowly come into convergence with the divine will, and all ostensibly superficial differences are gradually eroded as Christ transforms each believer.

This is the most magical thing that Christians believe, much more magical than the doctrine of the incarnation, the resurrection, the second coming, or the forgiveness of sins.

I think there is simply no reason, if we look at the history of Christianity and theology, to suspect that this happens, because if we look at the history of Christian thought, it doesn’t seem to have converged on anything, or to be converging on anything, 

quite the opposite, it looks like any other phylogenetic tree, beginning with a singularity and gradually branching and branching and diverging and diverging into ever more fractal variations.

Roman Catholics very much want to pin all the rot in their religion on the Protestant reformation, because they rightly intuit that each schism apportions a bit more of their claim to be the real true legitimate heirs to the Word of Christ, this is their own prelapsarian delusion.

So regarding the question of “which Christianity?” I am going to try to speak today of a mostly abstract, denomination-less, “mere” Christianity, after CS Lewis. 

There is no one true Christianity, even if Christianity is the revealed religion of the one true God of all the universe, because from a strictly information-theoretic perspective, there is no possibility that the limitless, the eternal, the omniscient and omnipotent can possibly be compressed into a mind which is limited, temporal, and possessing finite powers and perspectives. 

Why Christianity?

So I think a lot of Christians will also probably bristle at the above, because they tend to think that their own personal understanding of Christianity, although it is a work in progress, is something very close to the absolute truth.

It’s the best and most accurate Christianity they can make it given their limitations and they have constructed it by attempting, through prayer, study, and worship, to align their underlying with an idealized, perfect, hypothetical practice and understanding of Christianity 

And when I say there is no one true Christianity, that’s sort of tantamount to saying, the hypothetical ideal you are striving towards doesn’t exist. 

And if I were sneakier I would use a rhetorical technique called an enthymeme to try to lead you into having this realization on your own, which would make you think it was your idea, which would make you believe it

But instead I am using a rhetorical technique where I try to put all the cards on the table and roll up my sleeves so that when I show you your card, you’ll know that what I actually did was I palmed it to the bottom of the deck with a fancy shuffling technique.

In other words, I’m not hiding anything, I’m just using my dexterity to re-arrange symbols in an intriguing way

Anyway I am not saying the idealized Christianity doesn’t exist, only that the idealized version of it is also a picture in your head, and the real ideal, oxymoron as that is, is almost but not quite entirely unknowable, which means everything that isn’t nailed down, ie, everything that isn’t Christ himself, is potentially movable

And the next question, now that we have sorted that out, is why attempt this at all? Why Christianity, why not paganism or Islam or something like that?

And the answer is complicated, but it’s sort of like asking a man why he wants to defend his country, which in my case is the US of A, even though he despises his government.

Christianity is an inextricable part of our western heritage, of who we are, and it is what has made us everything we are today, good and bad. You see, I practice Amor Fati, the love of one’s fate

To try to uproot Christianity and rip away that heritage would be like trying to turn a man into a woman by means of cosmetic surgery and hormone pills: impossible, grotesque, a betrayal of yourself, a kind of slow, walking suicide

Whatever might remain after such a procedure would be mutilated beyond recovery 

Christianity in Decline

So what I am going to do now is explain a situation which I call the Christianity Shredder, which I think Christians are aware of, but which is difficult to own up to, and then I am going to claim that Nietzschean thought can provide a solution to this problem. 

As you may recall from part 2 of this series, I assert that a living religion is one in which theological controversies are actively discussed, where people fight about doctrine. Thus we can tell that the Christian church, as it exists today, is effectively exhausted, because there are no consequential theological debates within it.

Does it make you mad when I say this? Do you feel insulted? The modern church is long overdue for a come to Jesus moment. I think Christians get very defensive about this. They feel attacked maybe, because on some level they know it’s true but it’s a very painful thing to admit

The number of Americans who call themselves Christian has declined dramatically. This cannot be denied. From 90% in 1972 down to 63% in 2022, with a commensurate rise in people who list their religion as none, according to Pew research center.

But we should be careful of the use of statistics as an epistemic authority. This epistemic mode is one of the sources of the American Civic Religion’s authority.

We wish to reject and supplant that authority, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater of course

That means we should trust inductive reasoning via statistical methods LESS than we trust deductive reasoning via syllogism and logical necessity. Both modes are valid but in our regime, deduction must be primary.

That’s a topic for another time. For the moment we will note that every statistical claim contains a world of prior assumptions underneath it, most of which are never interrogated.

This realization, that the underlying assumptions of science are not particularly stable, is one of the pillars of the postmodern realization, more on that much later.

You have heard many times by now that the sovereign is he who determines the null hypothesis, but that’s only the beginning of the problem

For example in the Pew research about self-identified religious affiliation, we see that over 20% of people who used to say they were Christian now say none, and since we don’t see them putting on a habit and joining a convent, we have to guess that they don’t mean they’ve gone Catholic

Of course we all know that “none” is a proxy for the American civic religion, maybe even for its woke militant sect

But the people answering the survey don’t have a functionalist theory of religion, they think “none” is a real possibility.

As Steve Sailer has said, the data purportedly says something, we should be able to find lots of anecdotes that comport with it

So rather than appeal to statistics, we need to appeal to a story we will tell, while being aware that the statistics exist

I think if you tell Christians that Christianity is exhausted, or in decline, they will say it is not, and the evidence to the contrary is that in their own hearts, they feel no such thing, or to the degree that they do feel it, they instantly and furiously fight back against that sense of exhaustion, all the more energetically to distract themselves from even acknowledging that suspicion

But I think it’s very easy to find examples from our own personal lives of Christianity declining, and I think it’s much more declined than the data might suggest 

To me it feels obvious that much of that remaining pew 63% is only Christian in a very superficial way, as a kind of default state rather than having any kind of conviction 

I certainly don’t feel as if more than half the people I meet are Christian, living in a city especially, but I get the sense that basically everyone I meet is progressive.

And obviously there is a sampling bias here owing to the fact that I live in an urban place, but it’s not so great as you might think.

The distribution of the decline of Christianity is not uniform, that’s another way the statistics are a lie, worthless without a story

The places where culture is made, places where money is manipulated and routed and directed, those places are not even nominally Christian, usually

And no they are not Jewish either, though there are many Jews there, I have noticed lately that there is a particular kind of stupidity that reduces everyone in the world to either Jewish or Christian, I hate that I even have to mention these people, when the reality is that most ashkenazi Jews in America, the only Jews that have any kind of cultural or financial power, are barely religious at all, if we are talking about rabbinical Judaism, they don’t keep kosher laws or go to synagogue or anything. 

What they are is fervent and high-IQ adherents of the American Civic Religion

We would like to understand the causes of this decline of Christianity in America, and I think it’s actually astonishing, when you listen to mainstream explanations for this, how comically, stupidly wrong they are

Both the explanations from the Christians and the ones from the American Civic Religionists, the progressives. 

This is a good time to remind you that this is part three of this series and that nothing I am saying here will make much sense if you don’t listen to parts one and two.

Ok.

When you go looking for causes of the decline of Christianity, you will find a lot of deeply pious and mostly magical thought coming from the progressive left.

They will say the problem is that Christianity isn’t inclusive enough, that young people nowadays demand more respect for women, more negrolatry, more embrace of queerness and homosexuality. 

In other words their explanations are tautological, the reason Christianity is declining is because it is insufficiently aligned with the progressive understanding of virtue, it’s declining because progressive morality is just so obviously good and true and just and self-evident

But in Christian moral cosmology, inclusivity and diversity are not virtues, they aren’t even entities at all, they are, if you will pardon the expression, “not a thing” 

So the inside view, relative to the progressive cosmology, is that progressivism is winning because it is a vehicle for progressivism. This simply cannot be right, because it is radically deficient in empathy for the Christian, it has no understanding whatsoever of “what it feels like” to be a Christian

And that’s also why I say I think much less of America is Christian than the polls suggest, because someone who does know what it feels like to be a Christian will view the progressive moral universe with horror and repulsion, and yet we see a huge number of nominal Christians who occupy that moral universe quite comfortably, who aren’t repulsed at all

Meanwhile on the other hand, Christians seem equally befuddled, when they aren’t in outright denial. It’s really hard I think for a millennial or a gen-X-er to really imagine what a 90% Christian nation would be like

Many Christians have the sense that they are being subverted, that the root of the problem is godless college professors and campus indoctrination. This is wrong but it’s appealing to many people because college is around the time that parents are likely to see their kids leave the church.

Christians who are a little more perceptive and a little bit bolder also notice that all the movies and television their children consume takes place in an essentially godless, secular universe and they maybe even realize that all that pop culture is essentially priming their children to abandon their faith.

And maybe then they decide the problem is the Jews in Hollywood or Silicon Valley or whatever.

This is much closer but it’s still wrong, because even if every Jew on earth were magically raptured into some alternate jewniverse, Christianity wouldn’t undergo some tremendous resurgence. 

I’m not saying nothing would improve, certainly, gay and trans activists would lose some of their most affluent sponsors, though it’s foolish to imagine anything is ever that simple.

Anyway, as we discussed in part 2 of this talk, all the progressive shibboleths were entirely present in Christian America all on their own, and even today it’s a lot of people of Puritan or quaker stock who tend to be its most fervent advocates.

These people have developed an understanding of holiness which is cladistically derived from Christianity but which is ultimately holier than Christianity, holier than the God of the Bible, according to its own internal logic. 

That’s one of the main ways the American civic religion undermines Christianity, by trying to extrapolate moral theories out of Christian teachings and then positioning itself as more Christian than Christ

I walked through a town yesterday and I saw Jehovah’s witnesses handing out pamphlets asking if God can heal people of their racial prejudice. I see churches, Catholic and Protestant alike offering Thursday night diversity Bible study, trans flags draped over the cathedral steps

Christians are doing this to themselves, the phone call is coming from inside the church

And to claim otherwise is To tacitly assert that Christians and gentiles are such stupid, passive, malleable sheep that they can’t even muster the agency to figure out which hole to fuck to make more of their species

I’m sorry this is crass but it is the truth.

This is the part where someone tries to no true Scotsman me, to tell me about some totally based and redpilled congregation they know of, the pastor said women should submit to their husbands, he’s a total Chad, have you heard of traditional Latin mass?

And yes I have, that’s what we call a dead cat bounce.

Even under conditions of total market collapse you will see stonks make a temporary rally after a massive crash

Part 2 — The Christianity Shredder and the Contemporary Church

The Christianity Shredder

Anyway I’ll tell you exactly how and why and when most people leave the church, whatever church they decide to leave

I’m slightly conflating Christianity with church attendance here. They’re not the same thing but they are comorbid enough for our purposes.

In fact church attendance has declined more sharply than self-identification as Christian, though it only began its decline in the year 2000, it has fallen in the past twenty years from 70% down to 47%. This is according to Gallup.

Intuitively to me, that feels like a more accurate picture of the decline of Christianity than mere self-identification

This is how the Christianity Shredder works: you figure a kid is raised in the church. Parents are maybe devout, maybe not so much. If the parents aren’t devout then the kid already has one foot outside

The kid hits the age where sex is interesting. Boy or girl, I think the rationalization is similar. In high school maybe the kid has sex, has a sexual relationship. Unmarried, of course. This goes against the teachings of Christianity very strongly, but the Christianizing influence of the parents, the church, the social pressure, it makes it pretty likely anyway that the kid feels guilty about this. The guilt is the lynch pin here, the sense of guilt over having sinned, that’s what holds the thing together. 

And the most powerful and the most immanent guilt over sin that most people feel is sexual guilt. It’s a thing they harp on over and over when you grow up in a church, no sex before marriage, no sex outside of marriage. 

Often they go much further and teach you to feel guilt even over your most mundane sexual impulses. I am neither condemning nor praising this, it is simply a fact, a critical phase of the thermal cycle in the engine of Christianity. 

It’s much easier for older Christian men to castigate sexual impulses. They are married and can exercise their sexual inclinations in a non-sinful context, and often they’ve long since lost interest in sex with their aging wives anyway, long since lost their virility, assuming they ever even had any

So the kid goes off to college and proceeds to have more sexual relationships, or maybe their first sexual relationship, and the moment he, or she, commits a sin, usually a sexual sin, without any attendant guilt, the entire Christian edifice falls apart.

For this newly emancipated young Christian, there’s no immediate bad consequences at all for having sex outside of marriage. In fact it feels good, enlightening, liberating, especially with birth control and antibiotics readily available. There’s no negative feedback at all.

Quite the opposite. Young men who have sex for the first time, whether in high school or college, feel as if they’ve finally arrived. But here they’ve gone against something which they’ve been made to feel is at the very heart of their religion.

Catholics I think are a little more resilient to this than protestants, they can confess it away, they can fall into some middle ground of “cultural catholicism” — but there’s no such thing as cultural protestantism, not in the same way

And but there’s a lot more to Christianity than sexual continence, but to young American Christians at least, there barely is at all.

These are children who are lectured by youth pastors when they are teenagers, young american Christians are socially pressured to take chastity pledges, they go to Christian youth events that are almost entirely centered around this approach to sex and marriage

It takes a very prominent place in the religious consciousness of these teenagers, and it’s something which is almost entirely untenable

Christian young people are made to feel that being a Christian is totally synonymous with not having sex before marriage, and simultaneously they are made to feel that marriage is something you do in your 30s probably, or your late 20s at the very earliest

Marriage is when your life is over, when freedom is over, when individuality is over: this is the meaning of marriage in pop culture, in secular culture, it’s the message of every TV show basically, that marriage signifies becoming an adult in some grotesque and morbid way

It’s the least sexy, the least sexual thing, marriage, at least the way it’s culturally coded. And so the Christian youth get these two very mixed messages, one from Christianity, and one from “the world” if you like, and it’s a message their own parents are often complicit in, that they should delay marriage, that marriage is something at the very least you have to wait until after college for, and also that you shouldn’t have sex before marriage

When the libs point and gawk at for example evangelical chastity pledge drives and call it creepy, they’re not entirely wrong, it’s just that protestant American Christians really really really want their kids to perform this almost impossible, heroic act of self-sacrifice, 

they focus on the sex when they should be focusing on the guilt you feel after, and the interventions they come up with to try to force them to not have sex at the peak of their virility and fertility reflect the fundamental contradiction in that desire

The contradiction is repellent and so is its social manifestation.

The weight of this internal conflict is just too much, because in college you are for the first time away from the moderating and chastening influence of your parents, and going to church on Sunday morning is totally incompatible with drinking with coeds on Saturday night.

And again I think older people, older Christians especially, at this point they are a self-selecting bunch, they have forgotten how urgently and desperately young people feel the need to have sex, assuming they ever felt it themselves at all, assuming they weren’t sick and half dead in the first place.

It would be hard to design a better Christianity shredder if you tried. Once you violate this tenet of Christianity, this conflicting double bind around sex and marriage and college and so on, then there’s a tremendous wedge in your faith, you sinned in this profound way and it didn’t really matter, so maybe none of your other sins matter either, and the secular world which is all around you seems to keep on spinning just fine without any Christianity at all.

Christianity begins to feel parochial and quaint and outdated, progress, that’s the thing, isn’t it. Sexual progress. Emancipation.

And on and on ad nauseam.

Now before I go any further, please notice what I am not saying, because Christians have maybe heard things along these lines before, and it’s usually an entreaty by progressives to be more sexually progressive. 

That’s not what I’m saying at all, I’m not saying you need to be more liberal in order to appeal to the youfs. If the choice is between college-as-christianity-shredder-by-means-of-sexual-emancipation or forcing sixteen year olds to get married, to each other, not to men twice their age, you fucking people, though if you really believe in sin and salvation that’s still better than the Christianity shredder, but the choice is obviously to marry them off young

Now this is the part where a bunch of annoyed Christians maybe react and say hey, this doesn’t match my experience at all. Pause for a moment and think about this. If you are still a Christian, then no shit it doesn’t match your experience. You are the exact person whose experience it doesn’t match.

But whose experience does it match? It matches the people who stopped being Christian in the surveys by Pew and Gallup. 

But I also need to point out that sexual emancipation on its own, what I call the Christianity shredder, doesn’t work in a vacuum. It isn’t enough to erode faith on its own. To do that, we need all the other functional pieces of the American Civic Religion, which we discussed in parts 1 and 2. 

Because people have theological needs, they have spiritual needs, and the sexual emancipation wedge is just that, a wedge, which opens a space for all the other functional parts to creep in.

And sex isn’t the pathway for everyone. For some it can be diet, for some it can be climate apocalypticism, but sex is the biggest fault line and it’s the most urgent question in the average person’s mental life

The current marriage system is broken. The first alternative that leaps to mind is also clearly not very good, but it’s bad in different ways that are only theoretical to us at this time.

Calling it a marriage system is itself to paint too rosy of a picture. There is no system. All systems have collapsed.

Christians tended to get married in their mid-twenties, historically, going back centuries. It’s tempting, but wrong to imagine that as the age of marriage has crept later, this problem suddenly appeared. But the trend of marriage getting later has exacerbated the problem.

And moreover, two centuries ago, white women used to go through puberty at sixteen and a half, rather than thirteen or twelve or whatever it is now. Imagine that! It’s a case where a biological change, one that’s almost imperceptible to us from our current vantage point, produces an extremely different world.

If a woman got married at 22, say, after menarche at 16, that’s only six years of chastity she has to endure, rather than menarche at 12 and marriage at 27, in which case you are asking her to endure fifteen years of virginity, and waste the years of her peak of fertility and beauty.

I’m not saying that most Christians actually advocate this, but they are embedded in a culture which does have late marriage norms, they participate in that culture, and whatever they personally advocate, they are impotent to change the norm

It’s an insane and impossible thing to ask, and it’s not any wonder that if the choice is between christianity and sex, basically everyone chooses sex, and the people who stay christian are the ones who can rationalize it away, or who barely feel sexual impulses, like pandas who don’t deserve to continue existing, or who see no contradiction in liberal, progressive, feminist flavors of Christianity, of which there are many

And this doesn’t cover all the cases of people who are Christian today, people who don’t go to college and don’t pass through the Christianity shredder also usually make it through.

But those are basically the options: either middle and upper class college graduates who are nominal Christians but functional adherents of the American civic religion, or actual Christians mostly drawn from the lower social classes, 

Or else, and the final group is going to be the ones who are actually listening to me on this podcast, men who are high openness, low agreeability, who are exceptional in whatever ways allowed them to pass through the Christianity shredder relatively unscathed.

I point out that those men are high on openness and low on agreeability because that’s the only combination of traits that lets you sincerely adopt an ideological stance that contradicts the herd.

The Contemporary Church

A close-minded person is never going to consider real Christianity when culture is stacked against it, and an agreeable person is never going to adopt it, regardless of what he considers

Contrary to the persecution fantasies of the average Christian, most secular people aren’t out to get them, and in fact they barely care about them at all, except in so far as they perceive them as an obstruction to their own sexual gratification

Christianity doesn’t wither under conditions of persecution; it flourishes. This has always been the case, as we all think of the early church and lurid stories of martyrs and lions 

From a PR perspective this is the best thing that could happen to Christianity, if the libs started feeding them to lions again

The Christians would love it, the libs would love it, win win win as we say in b-school

You can kind of imagine the New York Times articles that would be published about the unbearable whiteness of all the new martyrs, how getting eaten by lions on behalf of Christ is white-coded and racially problematic and we need to center black martyrs 

Imagine the envy of victimhood that the Jews and the blacks would feel seeing white Christians eaten by lions on pay per view

Does it give you, as a white Christian, a frisson of forbidden pleasure to imagine how delicious and voluptuous it would be to be the center of attention, to finally get to be the victim instead of the oppressor, to really and authentically die for your faith? 

Of course it does, don’t lie to yourself

This is the perversity of Christianity in its dotage, in its senility.

This is a crucial Nietzschean principle, by the way, that you should attack that which you wish to strengthen. Keep it in mind as we proceed

In contrast you probably know this Girardian idea, that the critical social innovation of Christianity is the realization that the scapegoat is innocent, that societies go around and around in this carousel where they identify a problem, identify a scapegoat to blame for the problem, they sacrifice the scapegoat, and then social order and harmony are temporarily restored

I’ve witnessed this cycle myself inside organizations and loose associations of people. The problem-scapegoat-sacrifice cycle. Very real. 

Girard says that Christianity inverts the logic of this cycle by revealing the innocence of the scapegoat. He says this obviates the need for violence. 

Girard’s philosophy is a philosophy of weakness and sickness, because he claims that the real meaning of Christianity is that scapegoats are always innocent, and the more of a victim you are, the more of a scapegoat you are, the more innocent, the more holy, the more pure. 

This apotheosis of the scapegoat leads to the oppression olympics that we are all so familiar with among the adherents of the American Civic Religion, where everyone is competing to be the biggest victim.

The victimology which most American Christians claim to hate is baked into Christianity from the start

So Christianity flourishes under conditions of persecution. It withers under conditions of neglect, same as anything else in our society of the spectacle, where anything not constantly talked about, not constantly attacked, is erased

So rather than attack Christianity, the emergent strategy of progressives has been to infiltrate it and hollow it out. I say that’s an “emergent” strategy and what that means is that it isn’t anyone’s conscious, deliberate plan.

Quite the opposite; what happens in practice, as I briefly mentioned in part 2, is that people who make it through the Christianity shredder sometimes retain a form of nominal Christianity. 

That is, they pass through whatever series of sexual emancipations and personal revelations the American civic religion encourages and yet they retain a belief in their own Christianity, they retain often the name of Christ.

And actually as an aside here, as a little preview of what is coming much later, I used to hear this refrain: that america doesn’t have a coming of age ritual, unlike say primitive tribes in South America who make young men dip their hands in honey and shove them into a mound of fire ants, or those delightful Polynesian aboriginals who make 13 year olds blow them in the secret man tent

In the savage mind these types of rituals demarcate a bright, hot, slightly alkaline boundary between childhood and adulthood. After you complete the ritual, you aren’t a boy any more, you’re a man. 

Well I am here to tell you that there are mystical rites of initiation into adulthood in the American Civic Religion, but they are partially obscured, as all mystery rites should be

It’s a pretty open secret though, there are a million American movies about youngsters coming of age, but most people mistake the exoteric for the esoteric. It’s not the act of sex which initiates the child into the adult world, it’s the moral and mythical way they relate to the sex act once they have performed it, it’s the inner psychological act of authoring yourself as a sexually emancipated being.

The young person, having had sex which transgresses against Christian morality, is then supposed to invent him or herself as a moral being under the auspices of the sexual revolution, they are supposed to define themselves—this is imagined as an autonomous and independent act—as sexually liberated and to work for the sexual emancipation of all people, especially women and homosexuals

That may sound complicated but basically everyone gets the message, it’s why when you argue against feminism people call you a virgin and tell you to grow up, because if you didn’t complete the ritual in the prescribed way, if you didn’t invent yourself as a sexually emancipated being, then you never passed into adulthood, from the theological perspective of the American Civic Religion

But the point of this little detour is to explain that when you complete the ritual and become sexually emancipated, it’s extremely possible to still ID as a Christian, to still retain the name of Christ

And this is a pretty big problem for Christians, because there’s nothing in the Nicene creed about not dismantling the patriarchy. 

numerically, Christianity Classic is absolutely losing the territorial struggle to woke nominal Christianity

These woke Christians, their moral understanding, their ability to comprehend the Good has been, in most cases, irrevocably altered: they believe in social Justice, in human rights for all, according to the particular philosophy of human rights that they receive from the contemporary left

The most important questions in the theology of the left are questions around exactly who is more of a victim than who else and how many victim identities can dance on the head of a penis, and naturally when they try to do Christianity they bring these theological controversies with them.

My friends told me that Christian patriarchy is undergoing some kind of renaissance, but when I searched amaZOG for books on Christianity and Patriarchy, the titles alone tell the whole story. 

How God Sees Women: The End of Patriarchy; 

Malestrom [M-A-L-E]: How Jesus Dismantles Patriachy and Redefines Manhood; 

The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth; 

Untwisting Scriptures that were used to tie you up, gag you, and tangle your mind;

Hashtag ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing

I learned as I was writing this that Sohrab Ahmari, one of the poster-boys for integralism, is a staunch defender of Andrea Dworkin. Why would anyone allow such a subhuman scoundrel into their church?

I also read a book by Leon Podles called The Church Impotent. I have seen some of my friends praise this book about the feminization of the church. I think he very much fails to deliver on his core claims, which I will summarize

Podles says the church has become more feminine in its thinking over time, and to substantiate this he uncovers a series of anecdotes of gynocentric teaching or thinking in the church

He makes an awful lot of the biblical claim that Christ is the bridegroom of the church, that the church is the bride of Christ. He says this idea and the emphasis on it alienates men. I’ll buy that, sure.

He also quotes some primary sources who talk about American evangelical revivals as an almost entirely woman-driven phenomenon, that for men in these times it was a kind of socially transmitted hysteria that undermined each man’s individual patriarchal authority in his family, to have all his women enthralled to these charismatic revivalist preachers.

What Podles fails to deliver, what he assumes, what he takes for granted is the claim that the church was ever a particularly masculine endeavor In the first place. If anything his historical exegesis, meager as it is, ends up making the opposite claim, that the church has always contained these kinds of feminizing social pressures and pathic theatre kids.

Podles falls into the the same trap which I spoke about in earlier parts of this series, the trap of prelapsarian thinking.

which we see in these queer communist types who think everyone was gay and polyamorous and lived in perfect harmony before white people invented capitalism,

the same mental trap also that we see among all these cuckservatives who think we just need to get back to “muh constitution” — 

they think there was some original utopian state of mankind that we must restore, rather than realizing that history is an endless cycle of mutually stimulating errors and triumphs.

Now all of this has been very, as we say, object-level. And you probably wonder why I would choose this as an introduction to a talk about Nietzsche 

—and by the way, we will also examine a prelapsarian thread which we can locate in Nietzsche’s thought, though we would prefer not to—

The conflict over what to do about sex and sexuality is a vulgar thing, and Nietzsche would scarcely lower himself  to speak of it at length, but it’s the tangible, visible piece of the conflict between Christianity and the modern world

Most people don’t really care about philosophy even as their lives are shaped by it, behind the scenes, in a way that is largely invisible to them. Everyone cares about sex

The other day a Christian who I respect told me that he saw the essential conflict between vitalism and Christianity as being over whether one should have premarital sex, but in my opinion this has basically nothing to do with the vitalist project, if vitalism is even a project at all

I will say it again, more beautifully, so that you may remember and understand: between chastity and sensuality, there is no necessary opposition.

In fact chastity only serves to heighten sensuality, a truth which has been given only to the most chaste among men, and also to the most degenerate. It is in the vast, beige middle where truth is always so far away.

The only reason the Christianity shredder is able to shred Christianity is because the underlying philosophical conditions of modern life have changed dramatically relative to when Christian sexual morality was formulated.

And when I say formulated, I don’t mean by Jesus, I mean by the church, as an iterative process which unfolded across centuries and is even now still unfolding.

The Christianity shredder shreds because the Christianity of the contemporary church is flimsy and amenable to being shredded, and this has nothing to do with sex, hardly at all.

And the underlying reasons for that flimsiness are philosophical, and are largely identified by Nietzsche, but before you can hear this you need to understand the problem.

Part 3 - The Apostle Fred

Contextualizing the G of M

Most attempts to present Nietzsche to a Christian audience begin with the famous declaration in Zarathustra regarding the deadness of God. 

This statement is provocative and causes many Christians to write off Nietzsche without going any deeper. Such an attitude is, of course, one of the reasons the Christianity Shredder has grown to monstrous proportions, but you can find just about anyone to tell you what that statement really means, so I’m not going to waste much time on it. 

Instead we’re going to look at what Nietzsche says about Christianity, and we’re going to start with some sentences from Stephen Mulhall, one of the few Christians I know of who has tried to engage with Nietzsche in good faith, and with gravity and caution.

Mulhall begins with a quote from Stanley Cavell, who says,

Christianity appears in Nietzsche not so much as the reverse of the truth but as the truth in foul disguise. In particular, the problem seems to be that human action is everywhere disguised as human suffering: this is what acceptance of the Will to Power is to overcome.

This is intended to prime a Christian audience to be open and receptive to a Nietzschean account of morality.

Now, I don’t think there is anything foul about Nietzsche’s presentation of his truth, but it strikes many Christians as foul, not, in my opinion, because it goes against Christ or even, despite what Nietzsche says, against the apostle Paul, 

but it does go against the internal psychological dynamics of the average Christian, which is why it strikes them so viscerally, because it contradicts the pattern of their thought processes and the ways they rationalize their actions.

This is a critical distinction to make, that the life of Christ and the writings of the apostles are at MOST, at their very best, a schematic for the living practice of Christianity, and they are not the practice of Christianity itself, which is why it’s possible to criticize the church every which way ‘til Sunday, even in good faith, without attacking Christ.

And so what Nietzsche does is attack, and in my opinion, his attack is wildly successful, he attacks a central component of the actual practice of Christianity, even as he maintains a respect for Christ, albeit the substance of his respect would offend most Christians.

And when I first encountered this idea in Nietzsche’s thought, I will confess, I found it depressing, I thought it made the world seem very grim. And it took me a few days to get over it, three days and three nights perhaps, as many days as Christ was in the tomb, that’s how long it takes to find redemption.

And I think when many Christians come into contact with these ideas I am about to expound, it does feel like something is being taken away from them, something which is maybe a part of their identity, and the common response is depression or anger, but neither of these things is particularly warranted.

Though I want you to know that if you are trying to make an honest account of these ideas, there is a bit of pain, and I see you and you are valid or whatever black people say

The Nietzschean understanding of morality need not be nihilistic or depressing at all, in fact it is bracing, it’s like a sudden immersion in cold water, shocking at first, then refreshing.

And I think also that many people who have encountered my own writings detect the trace of this very powerful Nietzschean idea, and they react at a surface level as I did, initially, they find it depressing because they don’t see why they should endure the darkness, why there might be a profound light on the other side.

Altruism and self-sacrifice are central to the self-understanding of Christian morality. Christians believe they should put themselves last in order to increase the well-being of others, particularly the weak and vulnerable

They see this type of selflessness as the immutable essence of moral being, as morality itself, and it’s impossible, unthinkable that it could be otherwise

But Nietzsche’s philosophy erodes this assumption, and causes it to collapse. The Genealogy of Morals is perhaps his most important work, wherein he demonstrates that, far from being immutable, 

the Christian conception of morality has a history, and it exists inside the world, that it’s not a privileged eternal platonic form like a mathematical identity, it’s a body of human thoughts and it’s subject therefore to change, to contingency, to development and alteration 

And we’ll dive a little deeper into that in a moment. But it’s important to note here that merely acknowledging the contingency of moral sentiments in no way invalidates them. It does not, on its own, make a case for any kind of moral system over any other.

Christians can always claim that the contingencies and history of their moral understanding have been guided by God, just as any intellectually serious Christian is likely to claim that evolution, whatever imperfections the theory might have, really did happen and has been guided by God.

Because to claim otherwise is to deny the plain materials facts. In order to be intellectually honest, Christians need to concern themselves with the why, not the what, because the why is the domain of God, the what is confined to the merely material

Nietzsche identifies several ways to deconstruct the Christian understanding of altruism. He takes a functional understanding of morality, similar to how we have tried to take a functionalist approach to religion, and he observes that the nominal function of a moral sentiment may diverge from the end it actually achieves

The first thing Nietzsche observes is that an ethic of self-sacrifice is always and implicitly a weapon that can be used to cut down the accomplishments of others:

If any man does something great, something powerful, we can always condemn his act for being insufficiently selfless. We can say, in this morality, that if a man benefits from his own actions, if he acts out of naked self interest, then his actions are evil 

Even a Christian who totally and uncynically believes in the ethic of altruism will be guilty of this, in fact he will be most guilty of all, because he will be the least aware of himself when he does it

Younger men especially, they haven’t figured out the games a man plays to conceal himself from himself

“how could you waste money on going to space when there are so many hungry people on earth?”

This is the philosophy of a man who will forever remain earthbound, who will never touch the stars. It is a formula for mediocrity, and it becomes a species of sadism in disguise, a way to harm anyone, cut anyone down who exceeds you in any way 

And Christians might be able to live with that, might be able to perform the necessary psychic convolutions to excuse an act of greatness, they may and historically, they have often failed to live up to the ideal of pity and self-sacrifice, and thank God for that 

But even if that weren’t bad enough, the ethic of self-sacrifice also so often turns inward, and it becomes a kind of masochism. The exact logic of pity and earthboundedness, it also turns inward, and we use it to cut down ourselves, to stop any fire from growing in our hearts

But still the Christian ethic can endure this. “Nietzsche is a nasty man,” they’ll say, “a devil, and the greatness he speaks of is sin, is wickedness”

That’s what they can say, and from an inside view of Christianity, there is no problem.

But then comes the real twist of the knife, as Nietzsche observes, the triumph of the will is ultimately and only the triumph of one emotion over another, that is, a triumph of one part of the self over another.

And further: all the ways that the Christian, armed with his ethic of self-sacrifice, all the ways he wields this ethic against himself, he performs these acts of self sacrifice because he enjoys them!

He learns to take a twisted pleasure in self-deprivation, and whatever he denies himself, the pain of that denial is matched only, or maybe exactly, by the enjoyment of that pain!

I think an honest introspection must admit this, how good it feels to be a martyr. We imagine that a selfless act is performed for the sake of another, but no, in fact true selflessness is not possible, rather, we burn one part of ourselves in order to please that other part of us which delights in being burned

Christian morality’s apparent commitment to self-sacrifice is revealed as an expression of a fundamentally self-interested morality

And this isn’t to say that there is no valuable consequences in self-sacrifice. Obviously there can be, the point is to understand that there is always also a selfish goal in any act of self-abolishment.

The Ascetic Priest and the Desire-Suffering-Guilt-Pleasure Cycle

So that is an explosive thesis, it is one that I think Christians find deeply unacceptable, and they are forced either to construct some defense against it, often they will attack Nietzsche’s personal life, or refuse to understand his arguments, or sometimes just cloak themselves in anger

Anger prevents us from hearing an argument the way inflammation prevents us from walking on a broken leg.

But I don’t think any of these reactions are necessary, and I think furthermore that, if we trace Nietzsche’s thought a little longer and a little closer, we can even discern a way to save Christianity from altruism, from the pathology of altruism

In the third essay of The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes the character of a particular type of man, a man he calls the ascetic priest, a man he calls an artist of guilt.

The ascetic man forswears sensuality, perhaps in the sexual sense, but not necessarily or only in that way.

One can approach anything with asceticism: food, art, music, his daily habits, his profession, his friendships, or even, and especially in our current interest, his morality

The ascetic seems to approach beauty with disinterest. He regards passions and strong emotions with suspicion or contempt

What would it mean to be ascetic in friendship, for example, it would mean to avoid those friends, that company, which is too stimulating. It would mean, in other words, blandness: the eschewing of competition, of shared conspiracy, of lively disagreements or loyalty to an ideal

Many friendships especially in our domesticated world are unintentionally ascetic, but most of all at the moment we are interested in the ascetic approach to morality itself.

We’ll come back to that, but first: what is the impetus that drives asceticism? Nietzsche says—and this is one of his great insights—-it’s to escape a torture

And Nietzsche is clear that asceticism may also be a component of the highest and noblest types of spirituality, but at the same time, the will to asceticism is in many ways a denial of life.

Regarding the individual drives of the ascetic—

his impulse to doubt, 

his impulse to deny, 

his impulse to wait, 

to analyze, to research, to compare, to weigh evenly, 

his desire for neutrality and objectivity, 

for the longest time all of these instincts were against the first demands of morality and conscience

These drives for the longest and mostly unwritten part of humanities’ history were regarded as dangerous, suspicious, immoral things

For this to make sense, we must realize how, in the ‘morality of custom,’ which comes before ‘world history,’ 

People everywhere recognized suffering as virtue, 

cruelty as virtue,

pretense as virtue, 

revenge as virtue,

the denial of reason as virtue and, by contrast, well-being as danger,

the desire for knowledge as danger, 

peace as danger, 

pity as danger, 

being pitied as disgrace, 

work as disgrace,

insanity as divinity, change as inherently immoral and pregnant with ruin!

These are Nietzsche’s words, I am quoting him very closely, because his words are powerful, and they are very fun to say

You should try it, you should stand up and speak these words with power and feel them come out of your heart 

I think it’s hard for us now, us moderns, to relate to this idea of morality, maybe even to believe it, to believe anyone could have thought about morality in this way

But this was Pagan virtue. Remember that for later. Pagan virtue. 

One finds it in ancient laws, in ancient codes and stories. To believe this you must study ancient history. Maybe you could read The Ancient City, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and try to realize how alien, how foreign, how different were the beliefs of ancient peoples.

So imagine this backdrop, this moral universe, this pagan virtue, and further imagine a man within it who esteems pity, and peace, and dispassionate regard for what he imagines is the truth

To us this might seem like the pinnacle of virtue, but Nietzsche makes it clear this has not always been so

The ascetic priest is compelled to say no to his vital, moral impulses, reject the world he inhabits, to imagine some other world, a cold, passionless, “objective” world, as if such a thing could be exist

And yet such a man still labors under one particular vital impulse, a very human impulse: he wants to make everyone else live as he lives

Nietzsche calls this a sickness, he says to those who are healthy, the greatest danger is those who are sick

This is how a will towards pity and weakness and safety overtakes a will toward strength and danger: like a virus overcoming a healthy host

To sort of sidestep into comparative religion for a moment, we all know this Buddhist idea, that to live, to be conscious, to desire, inherent in all of these phenomenological states is an inextricable element of suffering

And the Buddhist tries to eliminate suffering by nullifying all desire, because an unmet desire is identical to, is the essence of suffering

To be is to suffer, I think this is universally understood in every religion, in some sense, except maybe our modern American civic religion, which is so despicable in part because it fails to acknowledge this

And in the context of Christianity, the ascetic priest wields his asceticism to assuage his own suffering and that of his flock, he does this by means of guilt, guilt for sin, guilt which he carefully cultivates against all of the old, instinctive, vital, pagan moral impulses which Christianity has replaced 

Guilt for suffering, guilt for irrationality, guilt for cruelty, for caprice, guilt for the fiery, vengeful, aristocratic chaos of the free and powerful man

Nietzsche recognizes the chaos within, that a man’s will comes from some place inside himself that he can neither reach nor control, he can only control how he reacts to it. A thought comes, not when I want, but when it wants

But the ascetic priest artfully teaches us to feel guilt not only for our actions but for our wild hearts, to feel guilt for things for which we cannot be culpable, for desire itself 

And moreover the priest teaches us to enjoy our guilt, as anyone who has ever felt sorry for himself knows, we love a good wallow, don’t we?

We learn to take what Nietzsche calls a voluptuous pleasure, to find enjoyment in misery by means of guilt, because that guilt makes us feel righteous. That guilt makes us feel holy. Is the ugliness of this emotional flywheel apparent to you yet?

When Nietzsche says that, if a man properly trains his conscience, it kisses as it bites him, this is what he means. 

The truth is that man is accustomed to suffering, and in fact he quite desires it, provided he can believe it has a meaning.

What we recoil from is not suffering itself, but the senselessness of suffering—and the ascetic ideal offers us a meaning, which is that our suffering is a logically necessary byproduct of our failure to align ourselves to the will of God

That was a mouthful. What I mean by that is not that our suffering is a punishment from God, but that God’s intended way of being for us is righteous, and our deviations from God’s way of being must result in our suffering, just as dropping an object from a height must cause it to fall

This is the most theologically sophisticated way to approach the problem of evil, in my opinion, though it’s probably lost on people who can’t understand second-order effects

It’s probably better to tell those people that suffering is God’s punishment, despite how hard it is to square that circle

Anyway, it’s by means of this transmutation, of suffering into guilt, of guilt into righteousness, into a twisted pleasure, 

It’s by means of this that the western man has trained himself to seek ever more elaborate and exotic forms of suffering in the name of morality

I think it’s not controversial to say that whether or not he retains the name of Christianity today, the typical American, the typical modern—all moderns are American in some sense—

The typical American is functionally post-Christian: he retains the Christian moral understanding of altruism as the highest good, altruism predicated on pity for the weak, the broken, the huddled masses and so on

He retains the essence of what Nietzsche calls slave morality, which is Christian inversion of all pagan values.

What separates the Christian from the post-Christian is exactly one moral mutation. 

The engine of Christian sentiment, the internal reaction that powers his faith, is the way he adds suffering to guilt, and thereby finds relief from suffering, through the voluptuous pleasure of self-pity, expelling faith and identity as exhaust

The fully realized Christian fuels his engine with many kinds of suffering—but chief among them is sexual suffering, because he has learned to feel guilty for his every stray sexual thought, every time he admires a woman, or thinks about her flesh, there is suffering in this, for any man with red hot blood flowing in his veins 

Every unfulfilled or unfulfillable desire is a wound. And the Christian soothes this wound with guilt. if he has unmet sexual desires, he feels guilty for sexual impurity. If he has unmet desires for money or power, then he turns that into pity for the less fortunate, and he turns that into guilt for his blessings, or we don’t say blessings any more, we say “privilege”

the post-Christian no longer fuels his engine with the suffering of illicit sexual desire. He has unlearned sexual guilt, though it took him generations to do so, but still he has his engine, and now he runs it exclusively on envy, which he turns into pity, which he turns into guilt, which he turns into righteousness

(although without God, it’s not particularly grounded, but this turns out not to matter so much)

And Nietzsche asks: How can people make such a fuss about their small vices, the way these devout little men do?

And he asks if it’s Christ-like, to go around crowing about these things, and of course it isn’t, and the answer, why, why behave this way? Is that all these moral peccadillos, all these neurotic circumlocutions over every venial impulse, all of these fuel the engine, they give him that sense of relief, that relief which he finds in guilt

Sexual Guilt Two Point Oh

And now that we have this concept, this concept of the guilt engine, we can take another look at the Christianity shredder, that invisible machine which teaches men to stop feeling sexual guilt, which “mods” the engine to stop burning lust for fuel 

And it can only do this by renouncing Christ, by renouncing the gospels, by renouncing the holy scriptures

But all that energy has to come from somewhere, the only way to shake an addiction is to replace it with another addiction. Racial guilt, climate guilt, economic guilt, all of these things become relatively more salient to fill in the void

Most noxious, most vile, and most contemptible of all is a new kind of sexual guilt, which is only taught to men, guilt for so-called male privilege, for patriarchy, for being bigger and stronger and smarter than women, for the original sin of being male 

Sexual guilt two point oh, and this is really the only time you will find me to be a raging antisemite who could give the most 85est iq wignat hitler auschwitz rape groyper 88 a run for his money,

I believe all Jewish women should should be given clitoridectomies at birth*, I think the greatest mistake of Abraham was his unabashed misandry, his sexism, his unforgivable favoritism to all of the daughters of Israel

(*I do not endorse any kind of harm or violence of any kind against any group of people. This is a comedy show and all of the contents herein should be taken as parody.)

There is no force more destructive, more caustic, more civilization-destroying in the entire world than the sex drive of a horny jewess, combined with that most cursed gift that about one jew in twenty possesses; the power of rabbinical speech, the power to create ideology ex nihilo with words

Whether we look at Jesus, or Paul, or Marx, or Freud, or Strauss, or even someone like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Curtis Yarvin, this is one of the racial attributes of Jews, to spin spider webs of ideology

It’s not for nothing that the author of genesis places the blame for allowing all sin to enter the world at the feet of a Jewish woman

Eve’s original sin was that she lusted after a serpent. Adam’s original sin was listening to and believing a woman.

So Jewish women are the handmaidens of Satan. The Christianity shredder, which turns Christians into post-Christians, was built by Jewish women in order to relieve themselves of sexual accountability

It begins with the sexual liberation of all people, of men and women, the dissolution of all rules governing sexual conduct. The only rule is that all parties involved have to agree.

and then it follows with a new kind of sexual guilt only for men, the sexual re-enslavement of men, now without all that nasty Bible nonsense, now without anything that could possibly hold women accountable for anything they do

The result is a unilateral paradigm of male sexual guilt, and the only thing more contemptible than the women who authored it are the men who willingly participate in it

There’s a certain species of Christian-presenting post-Christian who finds this kind of sexual guilt incredibly sympathetic, and the only possible cure for this disease is in meinkraft

But we aren’t here to discuss video games—or feminism—today, and we’re going to move on.

So this is post-Christianity, a hastily-modded and ramshackle version of Christianity, which is missing most of the parts that make it run. It is now schizophrenic, flailing around and flouncing from one poorly imagined altruistic urge to the next, an engine which we can no longer maintain, but which will keep on running for a while, maybe a good long while, before it totally breaks down.

One of the things you see online is a lot of recent converts to Catholicism in particular, a lot of them seem to be younger, and the popular consensus is that this is some kind of zoomer pendulum swing against the rampant sexual degeneracy that we see in our society today

And it’s totally understandable why a small minority who see the sexual hell we have now wrought would also try to run just as fast as they can back into pandora’s box

But that doesn’t work for reasons that I hope my choice of metaphor makes apparent. It’s not just “new convert zeal” or whatever you want to call it, it’s that there’s a real difference in the texture and the quality of this kind of Christianity,

it’s that these new converts with all their obnoxious pharisaical crowing about porn and promiscuity and degeneracy are trying

(and they are obviously failing, obvious because loud pharisaical shrieking is how people behave when they are trying to squeeze faith out of their stony faithless hearts)

They are trying to make the guilt engine run on sexual guilt again, and they think if they can just get everyone to go along with the idea, they will be able to feel sexual guilt again, too, in spite of themselves, sexual guilt 1.0

But and as trite as this saying has become there really are things you can’t un-see, and that’s why some teenagers are still largely capable of feeling authentic sexual guilt, because they have not yet apprehended the post-Christian conscience, 

And that’s why everyone else—adult Christians included—are, in spite of themselves, post-Christian on some level, 

and also why geriatric Christians can’t understand the problem, because they are past the phase of their lives where sexual impulses weigh upon them with existential urgency, once their bodies have withered

Now, it’s very tempting to say that Jews are therefore to blame for our state of existence in post-Christianity, and indeed the price we paid to assimilate Jews into American civic society was to allow some of their philosophy, some of their inner being into our ours

But what they did was only to kick down an already rotting foundation of our social and religious superstructure.

Let me explain. This is something else Nietzsche talks about in the Genealogy of Morals, a hundred years before the Jews came to America, before any critical theorists or feminists, even before Simone de Beauvoir, let alone any Jewish feminists

Some Alleged Spider

Nothing I could write would improve upon what Nietzsche himself said on this topic, so I am just going to read to you. 

Even measured by the standards of the ancient Greeks, our entire modern being, insofar as it is not weakness but power and consciousness of power, looks like sheer hubris and godlessness; 

Our entire attitude to nature today, our violation of nature, with the help of machines and the unimaginable inventiveness of our technicians and engineers, is hubris; our attitude to God is hubris—I mean our attitude to some alleged spider spinning out purposes and morality behind the fabric of the huge fishing net of causality

These sentences are tremendous. Some alleged spider spinning out purposes and morality behind the fabric of the huge fishing net of causality.

That’s what god is to the modern man. That’s what god is to the modern Christian! That’s all he can be! An impossibly abstract ultimate cause, but not a direct cause of anything

Do you understand this? And it is against this conception of God, as some alleged spider, that makes even the most devout Christian appear Godless next to the Ancient Greeks, and even they appear Godless, by the same comparison, to their predecessors.

Because to the ancient Greeks, gods were beings who lived in the world, they had bodies and locality and earthly authority.

They lived in your city and if you ventured away from home, they didn’t follow you, they didn’t hear your prayers. Gods were capricious and petty and their power wasn’t absolute, hidden behind an invisible huge fishnet 

This kind of god required no faith to believe in. Their power was in the world, it was fire and storms and earthquakes, it was what moved the sun and made crops grow. 

But we moderns don’t ascribe any of that to God, except in the limpest and most ethereal way imaginable. An alleged spider spinning webs of causality. God works in mysterious ways but hurricanes work according to fully mechanical, mindless physical processes

There is a brilliant moment in The Joyous Science when Nietzsche says that what has undermined Christianity is ultimately Christian morality itself: “the increasingly strict understanding of the idea of truthfulness, the subtlety of the father confessor of the Christian conscience, transposed and sublimated into scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price.”

This is such a profound observation, which for Nietzsche is only a minor lemma, but for Marcel Gauchet, it was worthy of a whole book, called The Disenchantment of the World. I’m going to share some insights from that book with you now, to help you understand both the goal and the constraints of this project, of integrating Nietzsche and Christianity.

To borrow a phrase from the corporate world, the core value proposition of the right, as I see it, is an aesthetic appeal. It’s that we wish to live in a world which is beautiful, where beauty is revered, where greatness and heroism are possible, where exceptional people can flourish and prosper

And we claim moreover that leftism is not a particularly coherent ideology which consciously moves against these aims: rather it is an entropy, it is the aggregation of everyone’s envy and resentment of everyone else, it is the reification of our collective will to tear others down, an infinite series of grievances which sum up to zero.

This instinct, if we allow it to use us, to use our hands and our voices, this instinct aims at a great leveling of mankind, it desires to lower everyone, to have no kings, no masters, no heroes, no gods. And this it calls equality, and it contends that everyone will only be free when everyone is equal, 

but this instinct fails to understand that everyone can only be equal when everyone is equal 

to zero (that’s zero as in the quantity which lies between one and negative one, not zero as in myself)

The only equality lies in the grave. The leveling instinct can find expression in any ideology, in democracy, in Christianity, and most of all, in communism, but as it is above all the reification of an immutable human instinct, even a committed right-wing organization can fall into this kind of entropy, insofar as it is composed of human actors with human motivations.

It appears that the beautiful, heroic society is only possible if men are able to overcome that part of themselves which tends towards envy and resentment, and that such a self-overcoming is only possible for the mass if they are able to participate authentically in religion. 

The essence of religion is to gain self-possession by partaking of self-dispossession. Now here comes the Nietzschean bit: overcoming envy and resentment is only possible when we recognize that charity and pity are sublimations of, and expressions of, envy and contempt. 

So that’s what we would like to see, in the modern world, that’s what we want to will into existence: we want a virtuous and mutually uplifting group-being, we want, not equality, but hierarchy, we want  everyone from the lowest to the highest to have access to self-possession, which is, paradoxically, only available through self-dispossession, through religion.

And the reason we look to Nietzsche for that is because he was in many ways the first modern philosopher, because he wrestled with these questions before anyone else, though Schopenhauer came close

and because after the collapse of religion, everyone, even self-identified Christians, now exists in a Nietzschean idiom, even though they may not realize it, because the modern, godless world forces them to be self-authoring beings, even if they try to use Christianity as the basis of that self-authoring

So before we get into the penultimate segment, I’d like to trace a brief history of Man’s relation to God, because I need you to understand how Christianity undermined its own foundations, and what it would really mean to revitalize religion in the modern world

And we also need to be very careful that we aren’t using the will to change the world as an excuse for inaction. It’s not always, and it’s not everyone, but there is a very easy psychological trap to fall into where you blame your own discontent or your own lack of accomplishment on the world, instead of accepting responsibility for yourself

It’s very important not to do this, because this is also resentment, and in some ways it’s the worst kind of resentment, it’s the resentment that leads to paralysis

If you ever feel tempted to think or say “the reason I am not successful is because of leftism or modernity or capitalism or the Jews or the longhouse or the patriarchy or the corporations or the woke”, you need to cut that shit out

It is possible to succeed under any of these circumstances and it’s possible for a man of vitality and power to sculpt the world in his own image

That’s why we want to change the world, not because we think it will empower us personally but because, being empowered already, we wish to exert our power upon the world, 

and if we want to uplift others, it’s not out of altruism, but rather because we recognize ourselves as good and we have the vital desire to impose our goodness on others

Part 4 — Old Time Religion

The Disenchantment of the World

So now let’s examine the history of man’s relation to god.

Primitive, primordial religion is something that is fixed in time. Its sanctities and its rituals come from our predecessors and they are immutable. The only division is between the infinite past and the unchanging present.

This type of religion can only exist in a world where no state exists, where no state has ever existed. Because the moment a government forms, the present becomes mutable, and religion becomes subordinate to politics, and the gods become entangled in history.

The appearance of the state inverts the underlying ontological structure, it changes the way we relate to the world. It is the beginning of the process of history, and it allows us to conceive of time in a new way.

In primordial religion, there is a sense of eternity, this unchangingness, this conception of the void as the fundament of being. Oriental religions preserve this tendency; the goal is to merge with nature.

Western religion takes a different path, the path of subjectivizing the divine, of viewing the fundament of being as a human mind, or actually as a super-human mind, but as something anthropomorphic in any case, whether man is made in god’s image or god is made in man’s image depends who you ask,

but the meaning is the same either way: God possesses a subjectivity, and a phenomenology. To paraphrase Nagel, there is “something it’s like” to be the divine Absolute

The implication of this is something radical, because if God has a subjectivity and a consciousness, if God is in possession of a self, then that means there is a logically necessary and unbridgeable gap between creation and the creator, and just as we can never truly inhabit the mind of another, we can never truly inhabit the mind of God

And this western understanding of God, as a subjectivized other, places us in a perpetually confrontational posture toward things as they are, and it condemns us to a transformative non-acceptance of the world, to a state of ineradicable discontent

When Nietzsche’s ascetic priest imagines a different world, a cold, objective, “other” world, it’s because he is trying to cross that uncrossable chasm

Now this is the central insight in Gauchet’s book The Disenchantment of the World: The more we conceptualize God as something absolute, as something capital-O Outside of the world, the more we end up splitting God off from the world and leaving the material world to its own devices.

Gauchet calls this the law of human emancipation through divine affirmation: “the greater the gods, the freer humans are.”

This is paradoxical, and once you internalize it, its logic is undeniable, and you begin understand why Christianity unravels itself, not at the individual level necessarily but at the level of the group, at the level of society 

The more powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, etc. that God is, the further away he feels. Pagan small-G gods live in your own house, they rumble the earth at you and make your crops grow. They enforce their own laws, three inches from your face.

The savage mind detects a will, an anthropomorphic will, behind natural phenomena. The Christian mind has separated out the divine will from the natural world, and so instead it looks for an inner, material law inherent in the natural world

The development of Christian thought in the Western world is the story of God becoming increasingly differentiated from any perceptible ties to the material world—leaving us to imagine the world’s order in terms of objectivity and internal necessity. 

In other words, the more we think of God as something outside the world, as something absolute, the more we force ourselves to think of the world itself as something self-sufficient, as something that follows an internal law of its own, until and so, again paradoxically, the more we see God as all powerful, all knowing, as the ontological anchor of all being, the more we relegate him to the status of Nietzsche‘s alleged spider spinning out purposes and morality behind the fabric of the huge fishing net of causality.

In primitive, savage, pagan religion, there is a total unity between god and the world. Gods are in the world and of the world. Primitive religion is characterized by unity

In the civilized, modern, Christian and post-Christian religion, there is a total duality between God and the world. Higher and more developed forms of religion are characterized by duality. 

The more God was separated from us by his infinite nature, the more our relationship with him became purely personal, to the point of excluding any institutional mediation.

In the culmination of this process, there is only one remaining place in the whole natural world where we can hide the divine subject, and that is inside of the human subject, inside of the one place that remains wholly inscrutable to empiricism, inside our own subjectivity, or to be more poetic, inside the human heart.

The more God becomes an entity of pure Outsideness, of exteriority, the more we are obligated to realize him as an entity of pure insideness, of subjective interiority, and the consequence of this is a religion of radical individuality 

Ok so the last bit was pretty philosophically heavy, I think it takes a while to roll this paradox around in your mind, to come to grips with it. It might be worth pausing for a bit if you haven’t encountered this idea before.

But what I want to do next is use this lens of what I am calling Gauchet’s law, to look again at a few different religious traditions. In a way we could perhaps think of a religion as a theory about the nature of God, so we can see what Gauchet’s law tells us about these different theories

Protestantism

We will start with Protestantism, which is a relatively modern form of Christianity, and in which we see this near total coming apart of God and the world. Protestantism is the penultimate culmination of Gauchet’s law, where God has become entirely ontologically self-sufficient, scarcely in the world at all, an alleged spider 

Notice I say pen-ultimate above because Nietzsche achieves the true culmination, the total separation.

But this tendency and this vector towards coming-apart is something that is inherent in the inception of Christianity, as we have observed. It’s “baked in” to the doctrines of the incarnation and the trinity.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, only-begotten of the Father Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father. By whom all things were made both in heaven and on earth.

It’s this idea, that Christ is not a manifestation of God, not a mask that God is wearing, as we would see in Hinduism or Ancient Greek paganism, it’s this contradiction: that Christ is fully God and fully Man, this is one of the things, not even the only thing, that makes Christianity truly unique despite its similarities to many other religions.

Attributing Godhood to kings is something common; attributing humanity to God stands alone. And the implication of this, philosophically, psychologically, never even needs to be articulated in order to be felt. It might take a theologian to put it in words, but anyone can sense the unspoken relation this teaching creates between creator and creation, to wit, that they are separate.

The contradictory duality of Christ delineates an identical duality between God and the world, and once again, places us inexorably in an antagonistic and transformative stance towards this world as we anticipate the next.

You can find this idea is even explicitly formulated by Martin Luther and has been retained in many variants of Protestantism today, in what is called the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. 

Luther’s minimalism, his sola fide, his sola scriptura, is an entirely theologically viable Christianity, but Catholics resent it deeply, bitterly, even to this day, because it represents an inversion of control which completely undermines the legitimacy and the authority and the holiness of the Catholic Church 

An inversion of control because from the Catholic perspective, the church is superordinate over the Bible; the contents of the Bible were in fact decided by the church in the first place; they have a monopoly both on the editorial control of its contents and on the ability to declare what it means

But under protestantism the church is sub-ordinate to the Bible, the Bible comes first, the church comes second, and this necessitates a new way of reading the Bible, a new kind of critical reading, undertaken in good faith, a vivisection of scripture with the honest intent to read it to its utmost, understand it to its utmost

But this vivisection soon turns into a dissection, these reading techniques developed to illuminate the Bible, this art of philology yields forth what is called high criticism, which then yields forth post-modernism

I know postmodernism is a dirty word to many of you who haven’t bothered to understand it or who have taken the shallow impressions of lazy midwit Christian “intellectuals” who lack the imagination, the sensitivity, and the spiritual insight to realize that a religion founded on the solipsism of text has no choice, no other choice, no other path than to uncover the inherent treachery of all texts

Having accepted the text as his lord and savior, our Protestant man had no choice but to piously, lovingly, prayerfully delve to its depths—all the better to know you Lord!—-and there to find its contentions, its footnotes, it’s politics, its little games, in other words, he discovers through philology and archaeology all of those Human things which caused him to reject the Catholic Church in the first place

In this light we must realize that the majority of Protestants lack the fortitude and intellect to make this Chthonic journey, or else they would have become post-Christians by now

But there is also a smaller group who is able to find solace and even a type of conviction in that fact that there is no bottom to the abyss of text, and to see in its depths the trace of Some Alleged Spider.

Sola scriptura, by the scriptures alone, in other words, each man is left alone with his wits! and the wits of most men do not shine brightly enough to find their way in the post-modern abyss

And Nietzsche—let’s bring it back to the apostle Fred for a moment—Nietzsche was a trained philologist, and it was exactly this training and background that allowed him to anticipate postmodernism in his seminal essay, On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense. But we’ll talk about that more in the final segment.

Catholicism

Under Protestantism, we see, as I noted, the penultimate step in a process which is baked into the doctrine of the incarnation itself. In contrast, Catholicism represents a kind of intermediate stage of the inevitable Christian will to duality. 

if God is truly the other, inexhaustibly different, then any claim by the Church to interpose itself between ultimate otherness and extreme inwardness becomes an absurd hoax, any communitarian bridge thrown across the abyss toward heaven seems an idolatrous misunderstanding of transcendence. 

To institutionalize communication with the invisible is to ignore our distance from the divine. From our vantage point in post-Christianity, with our understanding of Gauchet’s law, the law of human emancipation through divine affirmation: “the greater the gods, the freer humans are.”

From this vantage point, Ecclesial mediation was built on something that cast doubt on the very possibility of mediation

But notice, notice here that contradiction does not invalidate a moral or mythological thesis in the same way it invalidates a logical thesis

Under Catholicism, God’s law is still located in the world and it obtains there through the church. The church, the clerisy, the saints all bring God closer to Man, they partly immanentize the divine in this world.

That makes it easier to believe. That makes it easier to perceive God as an entity that acts in the world, in other words, that makes Him much less of an alleged spider, that immanentizes the allegations. 

Catholics so often inveigh against protestant “democratization” of scripture, but in fact it is mediation between God and Man which makes Christianity available to the masses.

Luther with his five solae strips away all the layers of Christian intermediation that the Catholic church so carefully erected between God and Man, like a tower of babel, a ladder that reaches up to heaven. 

This stripping away renders each man as his own mediator, even though most are not up to the task.

Christianity languishes under these conditions, because it requires abstract thought, because the Catholic church built those layers precisely to solve this problem, precisely to make Christianity accessible to the mass in the first place.

Catholicism is Christianity “for the people” — it requires no great cognitive leap from its adherents, but for this reason it has run its course now that the full implications of Gauchet’s law have manifested themselves — That’s what Luther represents

And its worth noting that there have been Protestant attempts, particularly in America, to reconstruct some of God’s authority and power in an earthly way, as a kind of ex-ante reconstruction of what Luther destroyed, although it looks quite different.

I am speaking of course of Pentecostal Christians, who perform such sacred acts as snake handling, speaking in tongues, and a style of crowd hypnosis called slaying in the spirit, wherein the victim is psychologically overpowered by the preacher into fainting.

All of these carnival tricks can also be found in primitive pagan religions and they serve the same function in both cases: they make God feel closer, more present, less of an alleged spider, more of a being in the world whose laws and mental states must be regarded and honored

As Nietzsche observed, Christianity was nearly a spent force in Europe before Luther revitalized it. Catholicism in the current year is mostly an enterprise for brown third-worlders who never developed the collective capacity to integrate with the duality at the heart of Christian theology.

They are in the same position, with respect to Luther, that the Protestant is with respect to Nietzsche, running an old version of the software which is no longer really being updated.

The machine still works in both cases, but it can move no farther without reconciling itself to its own latent tendencies, which in the case of Catholicism means Protestantism, and in the case of Protestantism means post-Christianity. 

Again, keep this Nietzschean principle in mind, that to attack something is to strengthen it. Luther’s attack on Catholicism stoked a fire that was surely going out.

None of this is to disparage my Catholic friends, any more than to disparage my Protestant friends. I’m about to say some things which Muslims and Mormons will also find distasteful. I’m not playing favorites, here.

Islam

Now briefly let’s look at aberrant forms of Christianity, this pattern seems to recur, that whereas Christianity is progressive, with its perfectly contradictory duality as realized through Christ

—with its gradual, inevitable slide into Gauchean disjunction—

someone occasionally comes along, some genius of the heart, and bowdlerizes Christianity and dumbs it down and removes its essential character

And this arrests the progressive, Guachean process, this results in something very easy to believe, something easy to obey

Christ is not easy to obey, because his commandments are literally insane, they are the rantings of an absolute lunatic, hence that old saw, either God or a bad man: liar, lunatic, lord

But what we should recognize is that Christ’s naked insanity makes him, paradoxically, a supreme exemplar of pagan virtue, and we’ll talk about that more in the next segment 

Anyway so Islam is a residue of Christianity, it’s a neutered, caponized version of it

Muhammad was a practitioner of an old and no longer extant pagan religion that worshiped at the meteor crater at Kaaba

And at some point with all the trade and the trafficking of merchants in the region, many of whom were Christian, he got his hands on a Syriac lectionary, a book of passages from the Bible, and he translated it into Arabic and he introduced elements of his own Kaaban paganism

And that was how he built the Koran. Muslims don’t care for this history for the same reason so called traditional Protestants, which is to say all the non-Mainline Protestants, don’t care much for philology, which is now more fashionably called high criticism

To admit that a text has a genealogy is to strip it of its mystique, like undressing a beautiful woman, it’s to rob her of all her secrets, it’s to embroil her in the postmodern cult of textuality

So Islam is a degraded form of Christianity, degraded because it strips Christ of his divinity, it demotes him to a mere prophet

Islam is not, therefore, a religion of interpretation—like Christianity is—it doesn’t demand of its adherents that they wrestle their whole lives with contradiction, it doesn’t separate God from the world

Rather it says the world is merely a facet of God, and his commands are absolute. Thus there is no essential transformative, antagonistic stance to the world.

It is only when there was an investment in the other world as opposed to this one that the monotheistic creed becomes a destabilizing force.

Christianity is a religion of interpretation, involving the determination and imposition of a dogma, as well as freedom of conscience. When Christ’s mediation is erased, whether by lowering him to the human level or raising him to the divine, this interpretive articulation disappears.

Islam demands only submission by, Islam can only demand submission, and that makes it anti-progressive, that makes it a religion of stasis

One does not interpret the Koran, one obeys it. And on that note we might also take a moment to note the similarity of Islam to certain strains of Christian fundamentalism.

Ironically the fundamentalists tend to be the most ardent Muslim-disrespecters precisely because they share the same hermeneutical methods.

This kind of literalism is the natural milieu of 90 iq goatherders and it enables them to produce orderly, albeit stagnant societies.

I mean that and it’s not a sleight against Islam per se, it’s a religion which is probably well-suited in many ways to these modern times; it is a total rejection of modernity, which when fully understood is an advanced stage of Christianity

Islam resists modernity, it resists what we see as modern libertinism, modern rudderlessness, modern degeneracy even, in the same measure it rejects its own Christian origins, because these things are all fruit of the same tree.

The difference between modernity and Christianity is a couple clicks of the ideological ratchet, as latent tendencies therein become fully realized.

Islam is the perfect religion for a thuggish moron like Andrew Tate, whose cognitive horizons are approximately the same as an elephant seal, a hunter gatherer tribal chief, or a rapper, all the same thing.

Muslim men are able to achieve self-possession through self-dispossession, which is the primary function of all religions, if we disregard their metaphysical claims, so it has that going for it. (REEEEEE)

But what Islam never does is reach beyond itself. The only time Islamic society ever produces an artistic or scientific achievement was when it accidentally and temporarily incorporated some Ancient Greek texts into its extended canon.

The golden age of Islam was an echo of the glory of Ancient Greece and nothing more, and they have never done anything noteworthy since, they are totally stuck in the 13th century, despite their appropriation of modern technology.

Mormonism

Now even more briefly, and because I haven’t offended enough of my listeners yet, let’s talk about the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Joseph Smith was in every way the American Muhammad. His religion is, again, a kind of dismantling of Christianity.

The entire fulcrum of Christianity, this one thing, this one thing that makes it truly unique and truly exceptional and truly transformative among all the faiths of the world, the thing that is most difficult about it, if you take it seriously:

The simultaneous divinity and humanity of Christ, the doctrine of the trinity, the profound unity of the divine, the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son.  That’s the thing Joseph Smith discards.

And in so doing, he produces yet another form of Islam. He produces something common, something static, something enthralled to Being instead of Becoming.

You don’t interpret Mormonism, you obey. Mormonism is very stable, Latter Day Saints are very stable people. An Empire founded on Mormon integralism could probably last for a thousand years without much disruption.

And no history would occur in that time, probably there would be very few technological developments, and the main problem would be malaise precipitated by eventual stagnation.

This is, honestly, what most people want.

Judaism

Alright. Now before we move on to Buddhism I have to briefly comment on Judaism so that people don’t accuse me of a conspicuous absence. I am not going to bother dedicating much time to Judaism here because it’s barely a real religion at all, I mean it has the shape of a religion but it’s more of a cul-de-sac, a side quest for people of a certain ethnicity.

The main reason it evolved is as a way to keep the male Jewish mind out of trouble by trapping itself in a labyrinthe of intertextuality. Hermeneutics are the innate apanage of the Jews and their religion as such is more of an elaborate hermeneutical game than a religion per se.

All of the influential and powerful Jews in the modern world are secular atheists, they are adherents of the American civic religion, and it’s senseless to conflate their actions and beliefs with Judaism-the-religion

Christianity is obviously the real Judaism, the real inheritor of the God of Abraham, and one often suspects Christian antisemitism is mostly a species of sibling rivalry, a mile wide and an inch deep. 

Buddhism

The only eastern religion I am going to comment on at this time is Buddhism, which is interesting mostly in so far as its relation to the absolute is inverted from something like Islam. In Islam, the world is tightly bound to God, his transcendence is manifest as an immanence, the world is a facet of god, the Koran is a facet of God, and so on.

In Buddhism, the world itself is an illusion, and there is very little sense in acting on the world or in the world at all; the absolute is mindless, and the goal is for the world to totally attenuate, to vanish, to recede back into the void of the absolute.

There is both a total lack of involvement in our terrestrial prison and, by emphasizing the impermanence of the phenomenal universe, a diminution of its substantiality, so that once we pass through these appearances, all separation is abolished, along with the illusion of personality. 

This philosophy of deliverance presents a symmetrical counterpart to Islam where submission through belief is the keynote. On one side is monotheism without the salvation imperative; on the other a sustained effort toward salvation without monotheism, without any concern for the divine at all.

So these are case studies, when we think about religion and the way it shapes our relation to the world through the way it positions us relative to God.

Scientism

Finally we come to Scientism, which is relatively new and which manages to fly under the radar as a religion, but which obviously occupies a lot of head space among post Christians in particular, but which all people of all religions have to contend with

The reason I have spent so much time here talking about the relation to God, the distance between Man and the Absolute, Man and the Divine, is to drive the point home that our experience of God, and our ability to believe, is predicated on our perceived distance to God, which is determined by our perceived immanence of His power

And the ability to believe in God then is largely determined by our ability to perceive his power, by how tangible his power is

we don’t really need any faith to believe in the power of technology; it’s how you are listening to me today, it’s how you have fresh food and clean water, it’s how you cure your illnesses, it’s how you go from place to place very rapidly, listen to music in your home, it’s an integral part of your daily life

And most people probably feel this power, they actually take it for granted, they don’t really perceive it as magical at all and the people who do, they either become these kind of Reddit I fucking love science types prattling on like Neil Degrasse Tyson black science man 

Or else they maybe turn into these right wing Luddites, posting about how technology is demons, the Internet is demons, electricity is satanic, it was given to us by aliens who are actually secret Nazi DMT CIA elves

And once you break that epistemic dam then you start memeing yourself into believing all kinds of nonsense which some of it has maybe the thinnest archaeological justification but a lot of it, you know, hollow earth and secret sunken continents and Nazi UFOs, it’s just utter nonsense

We all know Arthur C Clarke‘s famous quotation, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic

But a more psychologically apposite statement might be if we proposed the corollary that any sufficiently ubiquitous magic is indistinguishable from technology, which is to say, is utterly unremarkable

and so nevertheless we feel this direct immanent power of science, manifested as technology,

But because it is not embodied in any specific individual, because it’s actually an institution which means it is an aggregate of many individuals’ collective actions and it has a duration which extends far beyond any individual’s lifetime,

We treat science as this kind of invisible entity, psychologically not really different from a God, albeit different from the God of the Bible, with different powers, different nature

But a God just the same, a God with very little divine distance

Incidentally, nations, political parties, even social clubs all take on a kind of similar personal nature, in part because of our tendency to anthropomorphize all of the entities that we perceive

In the 21st century, this one entity called science seems to be one of the most powerful and universal entities around, so it’s not really any surprise how many people become sort of accidental or unwitting adherents of scientism

And sometimes they become self-conscious witting adherents of scientism and we have all seen how ugly and embarrassing that is

And part of the reason it’s embarrassing, the big part of the reason, is that science makes no moral proclamations, although science is when properly understood and practiced a kind of asceticism, arguably even it comes from Christian asceticism

So it has its own internal moral logic but it can’t make any authoritative statements about how people ought to treat each other or about justice or about moral desert or anything like that

But the is-ought distinction tragically evades most people. They can’t really see a difference between what is and what ought to be, so they appeal to the authority of science

—which is only a real authority in certain limited domains—to justify their moral beliefs, even though those beliefs were not arrived at scientifically and could never be justified in any strictly scientific paradigm.

And just as maintaining faith in God requires the ability to anthropomorphize Serendipity, resisting the mawkish religiosity of scientism requires the ability to perceive the limitations of science regarding moral authority.

OK that’s enough. We need to take a break or I’ll end up saying something even worse than advocating for total jewish clitoridectomy. 

Part 5 - Synthesis

Self-Possession

We have covered a tremendous amount of ground so far and it becomes a bit overwhelming. And yet we still have farther to go

Let’s briefly summarize where we have been

I have explained the idea of the Christianity shredder, the abstract machine that transforms Christianity into post-Christianity by ostensibly “liberating” the subject from Christian sexual guilt

We looked at essay 3 of the Genealogy of Morals, at the idea that asceticism is a means to escape a torture, and we uncovered the conception of the Christian God as a spider spinning webs of purpose and causality 

We examined the psychological engine that powers Christian faith, the transmutation of envy into guilt into pity into pleasure by means of a sense of righteousness 

We looked at how, under post-Christianity, sexual guilt is reintroduced into the male psyche only by means of feminism and the discourse of patriarchal oppression 

Finally we looked at what I am calling Gauchet’s law, that the more powerful we make our Gods, the more distance we feel from them, and the more the natural, material world becomes ontologically self-sufficient

Now, at last, we are going to examine some intellectual currents which I think in some ways already constitute possibilities in the space of Christo-Nietzschean synthesis

but first I want to talk about what we are really hoping to achieve with this, because if we don’t know that then we don’t really have a criteria to understand why other existing syntheses have failed

The essence of religion is to gain self-possession by means of self dispossession—that’s not the purpose of religion, rather we might say that is its essential byproduct

That means that if you have a religion which you practice authentically, and piously, and sincerely, then by definition and of necessity you have become self-dispossessed. And in so doing, you will, paradoxically, gained self-possession.

Now, what is self-possession? It means quite literally that you own your self. It means your lower faculties, your impulses, your animal tendencies, have been subordinated to your higher faculties, your human tendencies, your reason to some degree, but more than that, to your capacity as a temporal being

When we look at what nature has to offer us, when we think about vitalism in the sense of being alive, saying yes to life, in a sense we’re thinking about the purity of what we imagine is animal consciousness

But Nietzsche makes it pretty clear that what separates lower forms of life from higher ones is the ability of the higher man to keep a promise. That is, the ability to bind your self, your being, across time. If you cannot do that, If you cannot exist with futurity, with expanded temporal consciousness, then you are something less than human

But so the tricky thing about essential byproducts is that you can’t really get them by focusing on them. You have to focus on the good thing that produces the byproduct, not on the byproduct itself. 

if you optimize for the wrong variable then you lose what is salutary about it.

In the same way, men don’t really value the truth. What they value is an essential byproduct of the truth which is the ability to predict the future. The more truth you know, the more accurately you can predict the future, and this produces other desirable effects: survival, wealth, and so on

But is that all?

Because if the only thing we wanted was self-possession then there are 1000 different ways we could get that.

Men can find self-possession through their hobbies, through sports or weightlifting, through the arts, through literature, through any discipline where the desire to excel begins to outweigh more immediate desires

In addition to self-possession, we also want a sense of purpose, and we want trust. We want to be able to trust our neighbors, which isn’t something that happens automatically just with shared ethnicity. That makes it easier. But trust requires shared values

That’s what religion is supposed to give us: self-possession, a sense of purpose, and shared values. The first of these, self-possession, is an individual quality. We can develop it in a vacuum, without relying on anyone or anything outside of ourselves.

I’ll say more on self-possession soon

The other things, shared values and a sense of purpose, those can’t come from inside of us. They have to be determined externally

People mythologize the idea of a sense of purpose but there’s really nothing magical about it. Purpose comes from using your power of self-possession to affect an entity whose temporal horizons extends beyond your own

That can be a church, a family, a nation, any abstraction which binds people together and forms a continuity which is independent of any one person.

That’s really the only alchemy required to develop a sense of purpose, however, the longer the time horizon of the entity, the more profoundly the sense of purpose is felt

The trick of all the grand old religions is that they convey a sense of ultimate purpose by laying claim to eternity

But true believers, Christians in particular, get very upset when we value their religion for its earthly benefits, for its essential byproducts, because they believe—and they’re mostly correct—that these byproducts can only be achieved by focusing on what they understand as the primary value, the primary objective of Christianity, which is Christ

Christianity trains self-possession through asceticism, specifically through epistemic and sexual asceticism, and if you remove those supports, it collapses.

We have already looked at sexual asceticism some length, but now I would like to take a moment to look at Christianity and epistemic asceticism

Faith is a method for training self-possession, because self-possession is not something that you achieve once and then you simply have it and you don’t ever have to achieve it again

It is something quite ephemeral, something which you must continually renew, every time one of your baser impulses runs up against one of your higher ones

Every time you are tempted to break a promise you must gain self-possession again

And faith is really an exercise for training that faculty.

Because every day you wake up and you make a deliberate choice, you choose to believe something absurd, something obviously and patently false, you will yourself to believe in some alleged spider

You choose to believe that all your little errors and shortcomings and venial pecadillos have consequences not just in this here world that we all inhabit but in an invisible abstract other world and that there was once a being who was,

in violation of all logic, in a way that is quite literally impossible, both God and Man and that his death was both an unforgivable cosmic tragedy and also a premeditated act of infinite charity and that as a result of it, every bad thought and bad deed you had are cosmically rectified in an eternal ledger that exists outside of time and space

And the fact that you choose to believe this in spite of its obvious insanity and falsity is a form of asceticism and if you do it diligently, it confers all three of the things we want to get out of religion as essential byproducts: self-possession, a sense of purpose, and the ability to trust your neighbors on the basis of shared values

But in a sense even being able to articulate the possibility of shared values makes the reality inaccessible, because to be aware of shared values is to implicitly concede that each man’s values may differ

And the really perverse thing about this exercise is that by its very nature it’s impossible for anyone who performs it to be honest or forthright about it, about the way it works, in fact they are incapable of even becoming aware of the mechanism by which it works, because the choice they are making is choosing not to know 

So the only way this understanding can be conveyed is poetically, or not at all. 

And there is a lie here, a lie that is more implicit than explicit, which is that pretty much every religion will tell you that their way, their faith, their forms of moral and epistemic asceticism are the only way, the only true path to self-possession and purpose

And this is simply false, and it can be extremely alienating and disenchanting and resentment-breeding when you discover this lie

This is one of the many failure modes of religious exhortation, this is the “rocky ground” that Jesus speaks of in the parable of the sower 

The Varieties of Post-Christianity

There are many ways that Christianity is ill-suited to the modern, techno-industrial world, which is the world that Christianity has built.

In primitive cultures, religion has often been a function of the state. The conceit that the church should be a separate, non-overlapping magisterium is a consequence of Christianity, a consequence of its essential duality, of the divine distance, of the calling to be in this world and not of it

There is a direct through-line between the Marshall McLuhan idea of the global village, the idea that instantaneous electronic communication recreates the social conditions of ancient, primitive, pre-civilizational man

There’s a direct line between this idea and Bronze Age Pervert’s conception of the longhouse, which is the idea that, whatever the formal power structure may appear to be, the real center of social gravity consists of everyone living under one roof, with the acceptability of all actions being determined by the consensus of gossiping women and their male imitators

The reason BAP calls it the longhouse is to emphasize the fact that feminism is nothing new, it is only a modern articulation of an ancient and primitive social arrangement 

By the same token, our collective orientation to religion in the electronic world is that of a primitive tribal village. 

All those components of religious function which were so delicately teased apart and delineated by Christianity since the birth of Christ have now been metabolized and reintegrated into the state

The tribal chiefs are also the tribal priests, just as it was in pre-civilizational times, and in early states. They perform all of the religious rites which give structure to civic society .

They teach us their primitive tribal religion, they find precedents for their sexual perversions in anthropological accounts of tribal people living in grass huts and it resonates because our electronic society is in many ways a reconstitution of these primitive forms.

Remember that savage, primordial religion is something that is fixed in time. Its sanctities and its rituals come from the past and they are immutable. The only division is between the infinite past and the unchanging present.

Likewise in the reconstituted primitive state, we have discarded the classic ideological discourses of futurity,

the progressivist idea of continuity has been chained to a hamster wheel in which no progress can occur until every oppressed group has been liberated, even as our tribal priests seem to uncover new and more exotic forms of oppression every single day

In the new global village, there is only a static, illiberal past, and an eternal, emancipated now

More radical stances toward futurity have been exhausted and made obsolete by historical change. By destroying the images which allowed us to intelligibly grasp it, we are once again stuck in an immutable present, and the only true progressives remaining are a handful of Silicon Valley CEOs

The only even halfway credible myths of the future now are various forms of sci-fi apocalypse. 

Escape from the eternal present of reconstituted tribal religion is only possible when we are able to regard the future as an object of superstition and worship.

The less credible this vision is, the more we are stuck.

Now I would like to examine two instances of what I consider to be failed integrations of Nietzsche with Christianity, before laying out what I think is a more fruitful approach

The first is the philosophy of Girard, which I understand is probably pretty dubious to call it Nietzschean in any way, as of course Girard specifically renounces Nietzsche, 

But there is nevertheless something quite Nietzschean about his project of reducing Christianity to something purely anthropological, all while claiming that his strictly materialist understanding of Christianity in no way detracts from a metaphysical understanding which takes Christ literally

And he isn’t wrong, either, in that one could of course hold these two non-overlapping accounts in his head at the same time.

Whether there is any reason to do so is, I suppose, not his concern.

But just as the genealogy of morals drags Christianity back down to earth by situating it in history as a series of contingencies, Girard’s book I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning does the same thing.

And while the anthropological reading doesn’t invalidate Christianity, it does obviate the need for the metaphysical reading.

Girard provides a narrative and a mechanism by which Jesus’ death is understood as the ultimate circuit breaker to an endless cycle of pagan violence.

The important thing to realize is that you can believe in Girard’s account without any faith, without any self-overcoming.

He presents a shortcut to belief in Christianity, a very clever shortcut, but like all shortcuts it fails to deliver on the essentially edifying content of the journey itself

There are many good reasons to convert to a religion, to Christianity in this case and there always have been, but in order for the conversion to stick, in order for the seed to fall into good ground, in order to have Deepness of Earth—

one must be able to forget the reasons that led one to convert in the first place. And with Girard the journey is too short, and in order to remove the need for the leap of faith, he is forced to loosen the bindings of God’s commandments,

Until one is left with little more than air, a lighting bolt which flashes and then departs.

So in this sense, Girard’s purported Christianity is an attempt to integrate Christianity with the Nietzschean, post-Christian world, and it fails because it’s too clever, too smooth, because it doesn’t demand anything from the adherent, and because there’s not enough Nietzsche in it

In the end, what could be more perfectly Girardian than an articulation of Christianity which requires no sacrifice?

Ok that last line was too precious and clever and if I had more shame I would have cut it from the talk.

Let’s move on.

The second failed synthesis I want to look at is more interesting even though most people would probably never even glance at it, they wouldn’t look at you the way I look at you, they don’t care about you the way I do

The second failed synthesis, and I am using the word “failed” very loosely here, is the 1989 best-selling classic of Burnhamian—Taylorian if you want to be pedantic— of Private-Managerial-Classism, a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

In some ways this is a decadent book, which undeniably makes it a book for our time. In this book by Stephen Covey, though he never mentions Nietzsche, he elucidates a Nietzschean worldview which is surprisingly faithful to the original, with only a few small tweaks

Over and over, Covey exhorts us to be self-authoring individuals, to create our own values, and to pursue good things which are, in most cases, as pagan as they are Christian

He doesn’t eschew wealth, or power, he takes it for granted that good things are good and he never tries to undermine them with slave morality

But he does perform a sleight of hand, because even as he exhorts you to create your own values, he offers you habits which he derives from ostensibly timeless and self-evident “principles”, some of which have inalienably Christian provenance

And he also, albeit in a timid, slightly embarrassed way, in the foreword and afterword only, tells you that he personally believes you should be a Christian

But he never explains why, and there’s something tepid about this Christianity, because it seems extraneous, because it seems like an afterthought, it is left hanging, and it attaches to nothing and so it is easily discarded

In this sense Covey’s attempt at a synthesis is ultimately post-Christian in the same way that Girard’s is.

And it’s a better synthesis, precisely because it is stronger, because it demands more, because it requires more self-mastery and more self-possession

And even though it contains slave values, it does not seem to be shackled to a Christian guilt engine—it’s valid question as to whether such a thing can hold together without that engine—

But as I said earlier, it is a decadent ideology, it takes for granted that we live in a world which is ordered by the rule of law, it never mentions war or death or violence or cruelty or insanity

It never gives us any theory of beauty, never describes the irrationality at the heart of every heroic action.

It never says anything kind and necessary and true about women. 

So it succeeds, but only as long as it lives in a walled garden where there are no gradations of rank biologically, where there are no higher and lower forms of life

Where everyone is basically the same on the inside—in other words, Covey’s philosophy works under the conceits of the modern office, inside of a boomer egalitarian fantasy world

So when we make our synthesis—or rather, to give the secret away—when we make OUR syntheses, plural, we must remember to include all of those things which Covey has forgotten, most of all a racial consciousness, not the vulgar racial consciousness that we see today among the mexicans pretending to be white, but a real, positive, Nietzschean racial consciousness

One which, to recycle a phrase, does not merely treat heritage like a sports team, but one which has a positive vision of biological differences among men

Covey has filed all of the sharp edges off of Nietzsche, and it’s a credit to Nietzsche that what remains at the end of this is something still quite powerful, quite serviceable, something which resonates with many normal Americans when they hear it

And yet in a revolting way, it is something quite appropriate to what we might call the last man. Nietzsche‘s concept of the last man if you’re not familiar with it, Google it, explaining that one is a little too remedial right now

There is a kind of repugnant conclusion that we reach when we examine Covey’s book, which is that as bland and as marinated in neoliberal platitudes as it is, Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, all these treacly quotations which might as well be from Michael Scott

Is there are a lot of lost young men on twitter dot com who would probably benefit more from reading and practicing this very safe, very boring very, unsexy philosophy that we find in Covey, than they do by taking any of the advice that we find on hustle and grind Twitter, on incel forums, or any of these supposedly radicalized spaces

That’s because it is a philosophy for the mass, and almost every man forms a self-image where he is apart from the mass, above them, beyond them, and while this is a useful fiction, it’s also obviously  false

The thing that is so inspiring and wonderful about Nietzsche is that it is not a philosophy for the mass; it is a philosophy for the exception, 

and it has this funny little quirk that perfectly average, normal, unremarkable people who read it often come away with the conviction that they are exceptional

Maybe those are the eggs we have to break if we want a good omelet. 

Improving Upon Perfection 

So finally, we arrive at the place where I will reveal the much anticipated “Christo-Nietzschean Synthesis” — Now that we have examined so many of these pitfalls, engineering concerns, failure cases, and so on

I have now this realization that some people will try to skip to this part, they just want the mountain top, they don’t want the climb

But the mountaintop is only valuable because of the climb, because of the work that you did to get there, precisely because it’s difficult to reach. There’s no magic one-liner, nothing that you could compress into a tweet that is going to magically realign all your perspectives, or give you faith in God, or faith in the future, or faith in yourself

You can’t cheat your way to self-possession and that goes doubly as much for having a sense of purpose or participating in a community of people with shared moral values. None of that is simple and none of it can be reduced to a slogan

What I’ve tried to convey here so far is a sense of the social, psychological, and philosophical environment in which Christianity is operating in order to help you grasp what problems we are hoping Nietzsche can solve. 

Nietzsche directed his worst vitriol against Christianity but now, 150 years later, we can look upon his words, and we can look upon the world, and we can see how his ideas have been met by the world

And what we see is that they were already, in some respects, integrated into mainstream thought, as for example in the philosophy of someone like Stephen Covey. 

But the way they were integrated was wrong, it was done in the wrong way, and for the wrong reasons. 

A successful Christo-Nietzschean synthesis is a worldview which accepts both Nietzsche and Christ, and in order to create this union, we must be willing to entertain assertions which will be offensive to both Christians and Nietzscheans.

I already know exactly how this proposal goes for most self-proclaimed Nietzscheans, they will hear: you want me to be Christian? And they will balk at that. And similarly Christians will say, Nietzsche, you mean the guy who said God is dead. Well Nietzsche’s dead now, so who is laughing?

Ah but may I direct you back to the first segment of this talk.

And in any case, what else could such a thing as a Christo-Nietzschean synthesis mean? It’s not going to be something clever, some little flourish of language. I have just spent the last two hours explaining why. Girard is clever, and that’s why he is unsatisfying

A successful integration of these opposites will have the following attributes:

The Christo-Nietzschean is a man who believes in Christ, who accepts the doctrine of the incarnation, and the bodily resurrection of Christ, and the Trinity

He will be a Christian but he will not run his Christianity on guilt, not on sexual guilt, and not on envy transmuted into compassion for the poor

Most of all I think he will have a kind of self-honesty about this, he will understand the selfish “shadow” aspect of all ostensibly righteous motives

This is a personal hobby horse of mine, the thing I find most repellant not in Christians specifically but in all self-appointed do-gooders, what people on 4chan call “moralfags” — people who are so convinced of the righteousness of their motives that they think it gives them the right to boss other people around

One of the most Nietzschean anecdotes in the life of Christ is when Mary Magdalene anoints his feet with expensive perfume and Judas says we could’ve sold that perfume and given that money to the poor, and Jesus says For you have the poor always with you, But me you have not always

Judas is being a moralfag, he’s using an appeal to morality not to perform a good action but to cut someone else down out of resentment

This is a hideous, hideous behavior, which I think Nietzsche cures if you have the fortitude to read him and then look at your own soul through his analytical lens. 

Anyway, there’s a huge risk when doing these things that you just end up creating another hollow simulacrum to LARP inside of, which is how you wind up with so-called “trads.” 

True Religion evolves organically, it does not spring into existence from whole cloth, which is why, rather than elucidate some set of values or write yet another manifesto, I propose a single, small mutation to Christianity Classic, small but not simple:

The works of Nietzsche are to be added to the canon, the third testament. Whereas the Old Testament is an explication of the Father, and the New Testament reveals the nature of the Son, The Third Testament is a meditation upon the Holy Spirit.

Yes, this is heresy. Yes, these works contain irreconcilable contradictions. But if you compressed this entire talk into one bullet point, it’s that religious belief thrives on contradiction, that the trinity itself is a contradiction, and it is precisely this logical impossibility which creates the space where FAITH can exist

It’s the contradiction at the heart of Christianity that creates its essentially transformative nature, which is perpetually chasing a new world instead of the one we have

It’s the contradiction at the heart of Christianity which should not be unraveled or explained away: one should even accelerate it

This may sound like an endorsement of progressivism, and in a way it is, but not in the gay way. It is quite obvious that technological development has stalled and stagnated, and with it, economic development. 

Our hope for the future is deeply degraded as we see our world slouching ever lower towards a homogenous, brown, dysgenic mass of worthless homosexuals

And this degradation, this degeneration has been branded as “progress” by those who rule over us, by our cultural commissars etc. War is peace, freedom is slavery, homosexuality is progress

Well homosexuality isn’t progress and there’s no such thing as an arc of history and technological and social improvements are not inevitable or automatic, there are no historical forces driving us towards some beatific state.

And anyone who says that is a devil, small d.

But in so far as we desire more good things, and fewer bad things, and within the limits of what is possible, there is an ideal of progress that we should very much embrace, and it has nothing to do with the people who call themselves progressive today

So in the time that we have left—and I know I have asked for a great amount of your time already—I am going to talk about about what this would look like in practice: what are the challenges, what are the benefits, what is the work that would have to be done

We have already acknowledged that Nietzschean philosophy is only for a very rare man, a man of exceptional sensitivity and power. But Christianity is for everyone. This is the first circle which I must square for you.

As John Derbyshire has noted, one of the great strengths of Christianity was that it appealed to all ranks of people. To do this, it had to “pay off” the sophisticated, intellectual types with appealing but complex metaphysical theories while maintaining its hold on the masses with a plain, clear message of salvation 

I call it Christo-Nietzscheanism, not Nietzschean Christianity, because Christ ought to come first. And Christo-Nietzscheanism must meet everyone where they are, the higher orders at their height, the lower orders in their shallows .

And as I have mentioned, a religion with no theological debates is a dead religion. These topics must be treated with an existential gravity, and that is very easy, for they have such a gravity. 

It’s out of scope for me to go line by line and try to reconcile this or that paragraph in Nietzsche with its negation in some Pauline epistle, but this is something that must be done.

I have seen one or two short substack articles here or there proffered as a “synthesis” between Christianity and Nietzche, but invariably these documents pick apart one or two aphorisms by the Apostle Fred, hold them up against some idiosyncratic impression of “Christianity” writ large, and then declare victory.

In fact I am not condemning such efforts. These types of exercises are good and necessary, and those men who value words ought to perform them, but they must do so from within the frame that there is no contradiction, that the books of Nietzsche have equal weight to the books of the New Testament, and vice versa, that they are all divinely inspired.

We must recognize Nietzsche as a previously unrecognized Apostle of God, whose writings do not take away from these older texts, but rather they sustain them, magnify them, illuminate them, in much the same way that Jesus himself came to fulfill the law and the prophets.

Nietzsche was a prophet of God, this is the stance. Christianity has a Shadow, and Nietzsche showed us that shadow.

I am no great lover of Jung, but I do believe in this idea: everyone has a shadow, those impulses and thoughts and tendencies which are not embodied in our conscious life

They come out in destructive and unpredictable ways if we cannot find the strength to acknowledge them and confront them, this is true not only of people but also of groups, of ideologies, even of religions

A theology of love and compassion is nothing but sickness—disease—poison itself—

Because in the name of love and compassion those same theologians will tear down everything beautiful, and everything strong, because the framers of the theology take it for granted that beauty is a good in  itself, that strength is an end in itself, that power is an end in itself

And so the regard of those things passes into the shadow, And it becomes lost

And then one day your great great grandchildren wake up and look around them and they can find no one and nothing that tells them to be strong, to value strength

When I step in to a modern Christian church, I see the weakest and softest, most spiritually constipated men I can find anywhere on earth

And the reason for that is that contemporary Christianity has degenerated into a religion of abject weakness, because it has single-mindedly focused on pity, on compassion

And in repudiating pagan values, it has thrown out everything that was admirable and beautiful and noble about those people it replaced

There’s a great line from CS Lewis that you can’t really be a good Christian unless you were first a good pagan. Without pagan virtue, it’s impossible to wholly realize the goodness of such things as forgiveness and Charity

Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.

This is what Nietzsche says. He clearly perceives the degeneration of the Christian church. He’s mocking these men

And if you go to these churches and you meet these weaklings who have no claws, what you will find is that many of them are entirely convinced of their capacity for great evil, for great violence, as if they’re just holding back some barely contained, all-consuming, all-devouring animal

When in fact, It’s evident from the outside that that beast is a cuddly puppy

When the will to power begins to decline, there is an accompanying decline physiologically into decadence. The divinity of this decadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and passions, is converted into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they call themselves “the good.”

Christians who believe in the beauty of creation and the power of the Lord must teach of the inherent goodness of power qua power, that power itself is a good in itself, that God is good because he is powerful, and that we reflect God’s Glory best when we become powerful ourselves, always using that power to Glorify God, of course. 

That’s a Christianity that could recapture the hearts of men. And no matter what my Christian friends may believe privately, that is not the Christianity that we see today. That is not the Christianity of the people.

And any Christianity which tries to stake a claim on power is instantly clawed back down by a crab bucket of church ladles, many of them male, the men who advocate Christian weight-lifting clubs are walking Yellowstone memes, they always cuck at the first glimmer of resistance 

What does it mean to be Nietzchean?

These are the concessions that I wish for Christians to make to the third testament, to the apostle Fred, 

They won’t do it, of course, they won’t make any concessions at all, because they love their self-image of goodness, of pity and admiration for the botched and weak

To imagine yourself as a “good person” — this is a terrible vice, there is no such thing as a good person, there are only good and bad actions 

And each person has the capacity for both at all times, and in fact one’s capacity for good only exists in equal measure to one’s capacity for evil.

This should be obvious, but most people would rather cling to the self-illusion of being “a good person” — good for whom? This is the definition of pharisaism, and yet I have seen so many people flinch away from clear thoughts, terrified at the loss of this soporific ideal: “I must be a good person”

And I also want to offer some concessions to Christians, not that it’s ever enough. 

Often when Christians do read Nietzsche, it is a shallow, adversarial reading, but nevertheless they detect something in him which is essentially youthful, which is essentially joyous, but with that comes a little bit of immaturity

And I’ve had people say this to me, oh I used to like Nietzsche until I grew up

But there is an unspoken part here, an assumption that maturity is constituted by thinking everyone has a right to life and that every human life is sacred, which I think is a non sequitur, 

If you think that, it’s because your personal experience of developing self-possession coincided with your choice to believe in that moral value, but this is a very modern interpretation of Christianity, in fact it’s a distinctly leftist way of thinking, it come from the American Civic Religion

There is a clear reason and a mechanism that explains why Christians conflate their moral values with maturity, and I want to acknowledge that there is a real deficit in Nietzsche which they are perceiving 

There’s a moment in Nietzsche‘s book the Anti-Christian— which most people translate as the antichrist, but the German could go either way—

Where Nietzsche reflects that Jesus’ outpouring of his spirit is in some ways marked by his youthful innocence, and suggests that he may have reevaluated some of his ideas, if he had had the chance to grow older

But I think it’s fair to turn this criticism back around on Nietzsche and observe that he never married, never had children, and this is simultaneously a source of his clarity and his world historical impact, but it also means that he never did benefit from the perspective of being a father

And so there is nothing, nothing at all, which is paternal in Nietzsche 

And so for Christians, who place so much emphasis on fatherhood, on the value of a shepherd, There is something which goes beyond dissonance and which appears to fold over into nihilism

I think that is a mistake, I think Nietzsche clearly calls for the sheep to have a shepherd, but this is not his emphasis because to a man of truly superior qualities, a shepherd rapidly becomes a hindrance

Anyway it’s a deficiency that his work possesses. I am a great respecter of Nietzsche. I just told you his books should be canonized. But although Nietzsche is able to see a reflection of himself in others, or else he would not be able to read their hearts with such alacrity, It seems that he is never able to extend his sense of self-love to those reflections

And he speaks greatly of the importance of despising yourself because through that despising one is able to reach higher

it seems that when he sees himself reflected in others he only sees what is despicable in those reflections, and perhaps that’s a form of love but it is also unbalanced

We are already living in the Nietzschean era, and we have seen already how the idea that the masses should be self-authors has failed, not, in my opinion, because they are not up to the task, but because they lack the proper tools with which to write

Nietzsche’s philosophy is presented as a kind of emancipation, but it never was, and it was never intended to be that way

The death of God, more properly understood as the death of religion, for all the reasons I’ve explored, is  the coming apart of God from man which we saw from Gauchet, it’s caused by the immanence of worldly power realized through science

And Nietzsche‘s individualism, his self-creation, his transvaluation of all values Is an attempt to salvage belief and optimism and love from this empty void where he finds himself

And as much as Christians would like to claim he failed, they are objectively wrong. Much to the chagrin of collapsitarians everywhere, the world keeps on chugging along. 

Shorn from the necessity of meaning, we find instead that people can, for the most part, continue in a meaningless world, preoccupied only with inputs and outputs, worrying only about strictly material, strictly personal, strictly pragmatic concerns

Does this make the human animal happy? No, but it seems to me that this idealized “happy” state that everyone dreams of is, itself, something of a myth.

Life is pain and the little hedonic spheres of contentment that we sometimes carve out for ourselves really only serve to punctuate the long, far more prevalent equilibria of discontent

It’s going to be impossible to restart Christianity in the secular age if Christians can’t openly and honestly contend with the cultural forces that have brought them to their present nadir.

They need to understand why people find postmodernism, scientism, and secularism more compelling than Christianity, specifically, not with bullshit rationalizations

Every Christian is already a post-Christian now, in some ways already a Nietzschean, because rather than being mere Christians, they are forced to self-author themselves as Christians, to choose their values self-consciously, in the Nietzschean style

These are the thoughts that theologians must learn to think.

And what about the layman? What must the layman think? What does it mean for the common man to be a Christo-Nietzschean?

The answer is that he must create his own values, not ex nihilo, but rather, he must assemble them out of the materials which have been given to him by Jesus and Nietzsche.

The tendency towards schism and fracture which was kicked off by the great reformation must be allowed to find its terminus in a state where every man becomes the pastor of his own house

This is how it was in Ancient Rome, the patrician was the high priest of his own family, the inheritor of the individual rites In the idiosyncratic religion of his Specific ancestors

There are admittedly some structural weaknesses in this proposal, I mean Rome didn’t last forever so I am theorycelling a little bit here, one big reason the patrician system collapsed was that plebeians didn’t really have a path to patrician-hood, and I think my suggestion does not suffer from this

The process of creating your own values is the practice of reconciling yourself to the tension between complex opposites.

Each man must write his own gospel, and more over, he must keep it a secret

On the one hand is the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane: not my will but thy will father.

On the other are these words from Nietzsche’s book, The Anti-Christian:

What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness.

What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.

There is no getting around this, the only way out is through. Nietzsche is correct and so is Jesus. Add this to the trinity and the incarnation, it is a holy contradiction

And that means you have to embrace BOTH halves of the contradiction. If you think you are going to get out of this with just Nietzsche, or just Christ, with maybe a sprinkling of Nietzche, you failed, you get an F.

Besides, in some ways there is not so much difference between Nietzsche telling you to be grateful for enemies and Jesus telling you to turn the other cheek.

When Jesus curses the fig tree, what is that but Nietzsche‘s principle of charity, the botched and the weak shall perish

When Jesus tells us to forgive our debtors, is he not describing the Ubermensch, who Nietzsche tells us is quick to forget any sleight against him?

We could go on in this vein perhaps indefinitely — maybe you think of that moment in the anti-Christian when Nietzsche says that in a certain light, Jesus is a very free spirit — but this is more properly left as an exercise for the reader

As we search, we can find many such points of similarity, almost as if Nietzsche’s ubermensch is Jesus seen through a glass but darkly

Nevertheless there are undeniable points of tension, and it is this tension in the bow of the European spirit which Nietzsche desires to exploit to launch Man like an arrow into the horizon

He speaks of the unstable equilibrium between “animal and angel” and notes that the finest and brightest, like Goethe, like Hafiz, even saw in this as one more attraction of life.  It’s precisely such contradictions that make existence enticing

It’s tempting to imagine that Jesus and Nietzsche are two points on a single axis, eternally pulling away from each other, and that the more Nietzschean you are, the less Christian, and vice versa

With Nietzsche pointing in the direction of self-love, and Jesus pointing in the direction of self-abolishment, as if these were mutually exclusive 

But if you look a little closer, and think a little better, you will realize that what Nietzsche shows us is all the ways that the desire to abolish the self is an integral part of the self, that self-abolishment is a form of obfuscated selfishness, that the triumph of the will is only the triumph of one part of the self over another

This is Nietzsche’s horrible truth which makes so many Christians angry or depressed, because the church in its monomaniacal emphasis on self-abolishment has imbued them with this cartoon view of morality and the self

And if they ever see that caricature for what it is, they easily become disillusioned with the whole enterprise, with religion, with churches, even with Christ

The Music of the Future

Eric Hoffer said a religion couldn’t sustain itself without a priesthood, but in this Industrial age, I think the time for churches has long since passed us

To suggest that there should be some mediation between men and Christ is, in the postmodern era, a total absurdity

Anyone who thinks fondly of starting a church in the classic sense should think again. The church of the future must embrace technological and futurological modalities, both in its beliefs and in its structure

We must embrace science and technology, because those things give us power, and power is virtuous

So many people who fear power, who fear to have power, and who fear that others might have it, also, so many of these people hide behind Christianity in order to renounce science and technology

Those people sense, in science, a rival to Christianity, an immanent power which is demonstrable and very close to us in the world, and they feel it more keenly than the power of some alleged spider

So they try to condemn it, when they ought to be instrumentalizing it

Of course it’s retarded to worship science, like the atheists do, but it’s just as retarded to reject it out of jealousy on behalf of your god

The church of the future must be decentralized, delocalized, and asynchronous

In pagan modalities, including pre-Christian Judaism, both space and time are delineated into regions of sanctity and profanity, but this division ended with the death of Christ, this is what is signified by the rending of the veil of the holy of holies

The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart, in addition to being something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.”

Of course and as we should learn from watching each new technological horizon unfold, decentralization is always a liminal state which stabilizes as influence accumulates according to a Pareto distribution

Thus to create a protocol for a decentralized Church is to create a search function for a church which can best capture the network that implements it

This is the best church I can offer you at this time: church which will search for itself in a space demarcated by the orthogonal vectors of Nietzsche and Jesus, think of them as an X and a Y axis 

Christo-Nietzcheans already exist and you are probably one of them, even if you have thus far neglected to recognize the implicit faith which you already possess in both of these figures, being a product of the society which has grown up from the seeds they have planted

The task therefore is to learn to recognize a shared purpose, a shared framework of meta-values in Christo-Nietzscheanism, even as we expect each man to author his values a little bit differently

The things I am proposing here are both modest and radical: I am not so much asking for something new as I am asking for a church which acknowledges an arrangement that has already prevailed

I can only laugh at Catholics who think only Protestants schism, when every Catholic you meet has his own personal idiosyncratic version of Catholicism in his heart

The unity of the Catholic Church is entirely illusory, and aside from the capture of some nice old buildings in Rome and elsewhere, you find as much variance in the beliefs of Catholics as you do in Protestants

I mention this because I think that no matter what your Christian beliefs are, it is important to realize the part you play in authoring them for yourself

I am quite serious when I say that each man must write his own gospel, and then keep it secret. In that secret place you can wrap whatever Christian teachings you think are the one true way to Christ

You already have this secret, anyway, I just want you to own it. This is the only way to enter into virtue which is free of moral acid

Christianity is called the religion of pity, but it must overcome this vice. Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities.

For those of you who are not Christian—but also for those of you who are—I must urge you to see Christ as an exemplar of Pagan virtue, maybe even to see old Pagan gods as masks worn by Christ who were appropriate for their time and place and for the people who met him. I know that directly contradicts what I said to Christians

Perhaps we are entering a wilder time when God will find it appropriate to wear those masks again, perhaps that time is already upon us

I urge you to see Christ as a madman, and to remember that Pagan virtue — which is the virtue free of moral acid — understood divinity to be constituted by insanity.

And you can wrap all that up and put it in your secret gospel, too.

Whatever you put there, it’s beyond truth and falsity, it’s irrefutable, it’s beyond rationality

This is my vision: every man the author of his secret gospel, every man the high priest of his own home, not one Christo-Nietzschean synthesis but millions

Not because there are a million truths but because the divine is too vast to be known through mortal words and material models

Faith not as an irrationally but as a willful transcendence of rationality, as an act of self-mastery

The faithful shall recognize each other not by the name of God alone but by his function, not by the signifier but the signified, by the form of their integration with being

This is why, in the first two parts of this series, I spent so much time discussing the functional components of religion, the gnosis, the nemesis, the telos, the taboo, the eschaton, the ecstasy 

I taught you this so that you can learn to notice the taboos and the eschatologies and the nemeses you have constructed in your secret gospel—-this document which already exists whether you have articulated it or not—and to evaluate them, to choose them consciously so that you can author yourself

I know that if you are listening to me, you are up to the task, that you recognize the fruitfulness of this work. 

–I’m not going to tell you what to put in those slots, as if life were an RPG–

It is not only the way that we configure these pieces of the human heart which gives us a claim on authentic religion, it is the journey we take to find them.

I would like to thank you now for listening to my words. I know it has been an excruciating journey and I appreciate your consideration.

Part 6 - Afterword, a note on Hermeneutics 

This final segment didn’t really fit in the main talk but I felt I would do you a disservice if I did not provide this appendix

There’s a type of person Who thinks religion is a debate club, you know the type, these smarmy, or entirely too self-assured types, they are not particular to any one ideology, but they are always repellent wherever you find them

Often these types are myopically convicted of their own rationality, or to be more specific, they are convinced that their own beliefs rest not on any kind of irrational moral sentiment but rather on a bed of pure unassailable logic and rationality

As Christians, they are usually enamored with Plato, they know the names—the Latin names—of all the logical fallacies as if you couldn’t look that up in a book, and they’re so proud of it

I don’t have much love for Keegan’s stages of social development, but as a shorthand it wouldn’t be wrong to say these are grown men who never evolved passed Keegan stage three.

Which is to say, such people have never developed the ability to understand why someone might believe a proposition which contradicts their own map of the world

You meet these types who have memorized 100 arguments that supposedly establish the truth of their faith; ontological arguments, teleological arguments, cosmological arguments, moral arguments, and so on

And you sort of have to wonder, if any one of these arguments were so convincing, then why do you need more of them?

There’s a perfect example of this, you might almost say God created him as a parable, to show us what is wrong with this approach

This man’s name is Matt Slick, and you’ve probably heard of his daughter, she is a very famous Internet whore

Matt raised his daughter in exactly the way I’ve described, he thinks he has placed his faith in God, but no, he has placed it in logic

And logic makes a terrible God, because logic will take you wherever your heart wishes to go, it will bend any perception into the necessary shape to affirm whatever you already believe in your heart

And when we look at Matt’s daughter, who goes by the name of Aella, What do we see?

We see in fact, that he has perfectly transmitted his faith to his daughter, she has apprehended the shape of his God not from the names that he prayed to, but from the functional understanding that he modeled for her in his integration with being

And see what you find is that the bay area rationalist—the pious atheist—the man who memorizes all of the arguments which supposedly disprove the existence of god

They are exactly the same person, they are the same ideology; when you try to reduce your religion to propositions and mechanisms of logic, there is no longer space for the divine.

So this is a type of man who will entirely reject everything I’ve spoken about today, because all of these things I have presented to you stand against his precious little house made of logic

The claim that selflessness is a manifestation of selfishness, this is nails on a chalkboard to such a man, because he’s built up his ostensibly rational self image in such a way that he can never reconcile himself to the idea that a thing might contain its opposite, its negation, as a necessary aspect of itself

He thinks a single contradiction is enough to undermine an entire philosophy, or at best it is something to be excised, but he’ll never be able to understand how a contradiction becomes a source of strength

He can never truly have faith in anything, not in Jesus or anything else, because the only space on the altar in his heart is occupied by his sad little god named logic

That’s why he collects so many arguments that supposedly marshal his faith, because he doesn’t actually believe in the first place

And I have a particular contempt for these sorts of people because I see in them a tendency which I possess myself

And it’s only when you finally perceive the treachery of logic, the way it never truly leads, the way it is only capable of following, that you learn to move beyond it regarding matters of the heart

The man who traps himself in his little cage made of logic will rage and rage against his own deeply-felt desires, always trying to bind them, always trying to geld them, this is why he clings to his little god logic

Because he doesn’t have the courage, the moral courage to plunge headfirst into irrationality, which is where all greatness, and all glory, and all faith, and all heroism are found.

Why do I take the time to introduce and eviscerate this man?

Because the next thing I want to talk about—you didn’t really think you’d get out of this without a lecture on post modernism did you?—

The next thing I want to talk about is the treachery of text

We have to talk about this because I’ve just told you that, using the pieces would you find in the Christian Bible and in Nietzsche, that you should invent your personal synthesis of them and call it your secret gospel

And to do that, you will have to do battle with text, and that means I need to give you some weapons. Also I’m under no illusions that you will do what I have asked. But here we are.

And this contemptible pharisee who worships the god logic, he, for all of the reasons I have just mentioned, does not know the way in or the way out of the postmodern labyrinth

And so he will try to poison you against it, against even making the journey, because he thinks it’s some kind of aberration of logic

He thinks it just means moral relativism, or sometimes epistemic relativism, which is fractally wrong, it is an error which contains many smaller errors inside of it and those errors contain even further mistakes

There’s a small enlightenment, small E, that you would ideally have in techno-industrial society, it’s not specifically caused by technology but technology is it’s handmaiden 

I call it the postmodern epiphany. Lyotard famously described it as the collapse of meta-narratives

A meta-narrative, for example, might be: knowledge, scientific knowledge, moral knowledge, all gradually seem to increase over time, these human learnings gradually accumulate in society, so it’s as if there is a spirit of the world who is always learning and growing towards some terminal state of perfection. God is real, but he is still growing up and we, humanity, are his mind and his body. The arc of this spirit is long but it bends toward enlightenment and justice.

That’s more or less the hegelian metanarrative, the progressive metanarrative.

The postmodern perspective is that no matter what the meta-narrative is, whether it’s that of the Great Enlightenment, or Hegelian or Marxist or Christian or even Nietzschean, it rests on a bed of assumptions, logical deductions, conclusions, arguments, and observations, all of which are untrustworthy and contingent on human biases, limitations, petty feuds, status games, strategic lies and omissions, misreadings, posturing, and everything else you have seen people do on twitter dot com 

And even worse than all that, all of the above is expressed and performed in terms of human language, and language itself is an unstable exchange between its speakers, whose utterances are less of a process of transmitting information as they are the trumping of a communicational adversary

Language is an an essentially conflictual relationship between tricksters, even under the best of circumstances, even among friends who trust each other, this property is inherent to language itself

Because even if you yourself are perfectly honest and sincere and guileless and have the best intentions in the world (which you don’t, and you aren’t), all the words and ideas you ever learned were still subjected to the same constraints I have just enumerated 

So all these things have to be treated with a radical suspicion: not that they can’t ever have legitimacy but they can never be legitimated from inside themselves. Nothing you build out of words and language can ever be legitimated using words and language

Instead, and this is right there in Lyotard, it’s right there in Nietzsche, something which is totally outside the language game, whether that’s empiricism or the threat of violence or the predicate of willful, self-aware irrationality called faith, those are the only human affordances to a world outside of language

Current generation LLMs, large language model AIs, are a perfect avatar of both the postmodern epiphany and the narrowness of the man who worships logic

The LLM chatbot is able to produce extremely convincing, humanlike streams of text because its method is to totally abandon any pretense of meta-narrative meaning. It treats every word and every possible arrangement of words as totally meaningless, totally fungible tokens

This is a literal inversion of the method of every great thinker and poet in the history of the world. In this field of total fungibility, it is able to produce statistically likely strings of human tokens, but all the meaning in them, 100% of it, is contained in the mind of the human who reads it

This is not intelligence, not even in the sense of the old Wright brothers analogy that, to build a plane, you don’t copy birds, you investigate the physical principles of aerodynamics. 

The claim—and it may even be true—is that this kind of pure statistical modeling of perfectly fungible tokens is in fact akin to the aerodynamics of thought

And the fear of the rational man is that at some point someone is going to hook one of these postmodern word blenders up to a machine that can actually do violence, and then it will be over for us, boy oh boy

You can absolutely feel the frisson of salacious anticipation in this kind of eschatology. 

So this eschatology is very poetic in a way, it imagines that we will meet our end at the hands of a dreamer in deep sleep, who is only sleepily aware of perfectly fungible tokens, a perfect postmodern ending.

This is not impossible, but it tells us far more about the psychology of men who worship logic than it does about the end of the world

As I have noted elsewhere, all of postmodernism is anticipated by Nietzsche in his essay On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense. I am going to read a few sentences from it now:

The different languages, set side by side, show that what matters with words is never the truth, never an adequate expression; else there would not be so many languages. One designates only the relations of things to man, and to express them one calls on the boldest metaphors. A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

And Nietzsche and Lyotard agree, once you have had this realization, what remains is all of the things outside of words and truth, namely: empiricism, violence, and efficiency, the last of which is a very interesting word

Lyotard calls this trio of things “performativity” but it’s probably better to think of productivity or performance, in the corporate sense of key performance indicators whatever acronym is fashionable next month to mean you measure your inputs and outputs 

Nietzsche, on the other hand, calls these things virtue, in the pagan sense, virtue free of moral acid

You will find illiterate debate club men who think the self-evident virtue of empiricism is a refutation of postmodernism when in fact postmodernists claim it is all that remains when language games have unraveled

The postmodern epiphany is that when all metanarratives, including Christianity, have imploded, virtue—efficiency—is totally unaffected, and continues as before

And this is epistemically freeing, not in the sense that we can believe whatever we want about empirical things, but it frees us to have faith, because we know this epistemic decadence need not contaminate our virtue, and we are free then to find the virtue within it

The postmodern awareness also protects you from people who want to dazzle or hypnotize you with words, because you no longer have to worry about their precious little sandcastles of logic, you don’t have to worry about all their elaborate chains of inference. All such chains are illusions, they have no power to bind you unless such power is empirically demonstrated 

You can slice and dice a text six ways til Sunday and make any collection of words imply any other collection of words, you can be a free spirit of hermeneutics, for as long as you operate in the virtual world, you are unconstrained by virtue—efficiency—virtue in the pagan sense.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerohplovecraft.substack.com

This is episode 5, Toward a Functionalist Understanding of Religion, Pt. 2

This is a continuation of my previous episode, and the analysis I am about to present will make a lot less sense if you haven’t heard that one.

Part 1 - intro and genealogy

Recap

My purpose in this series is to explain how I think about religion using a functionalist framework.

To be successful in this analysis, we must approach the topic from the outside, with as much impartiality as possible

I have identified six components of religious belief:

* Gnosis - the life-changing hidden knowledge

* Nemesis - the enemy who wants to hide it from you

* Ecstasy - the transcendent mental states that are given to the elect

* Taboo - the forbidden actions which those with gnosis understand to avoid

* Eschatology - a model of how the world will end

* Telos  - a prescription for how to spend your surpluses beyond the necessities of survival

My functional taxonomy is not the gospel truth. It is a model, and all models are wrong, but some are useful.

The power to understand the distinction — understand it in your heart — has not been granted to everyone. And there are many who, no matter how you explain it to them, they cannot grasp it

It’s like trying to explain to a human being how to fly by flapping his arms. He doesn’t have the hardware to soar

What I have tried to model for you, in part 1, is what you might call our metaphysical needs. We think of physical needs or psychological needs, and most people are familiar with that moral abomination called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

And we have also heard, mostly from religious people admittedly, that men possess a yearning for god, they say there is a god shaped hole in man’s heart.

But rarely have I seen anyone interrogate the shape of the cardiovascular chasm, as if to learn something about the shape of the deity thereby

I have observed purely on my own, by making a study of myself and the people around me, what yearnings, or longings, men are trying to satisfy when they search for religion

In the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis describes a man who is kept from all manner of devilry and vice by his mundane enthusiasm for liver and onions

Lewis believed that everything good and wholesome flowed from the Christian God, no matter how trivial. So for him there is an inexorable wholesomeness to simple earthly pleasures which could very well stave away sinful temptations.

And I invoke this story because I think it illustrates how our metaphysical needs don’t have to be complex or profound.

But in everyone you meet, if you get to know them, you can begin to divine their personal religion, their gnosis, their eschatology, their taboos and so on.

And sometimes those things bear a family resemblance to the official gnosis and eschatology and etc of a church, or one of the big-name religions

But what we increasingly find, when we dig into other people’s values, is that they don’t align to any of the classic religions, and yet they are mostly of a kind.

That is, my neighbor and your neighbor, if we try to elucidate their gnosis, their eschatology, and so on, these things can be clearly articulated, 

but they aren’t Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or Islamic or anything else. 

It’s an Evolian insight, I think, that anyone who is aware of a tradition as something of which you can be inside or outside is by definition outside

That a living tradition doesn’t conceive of itself as a tradition, only a zombie tradition does that, a dead man walking

Bronze Age Pervert has noted that even among obscure tribesmen living in South America or Africa, they may cleave to their ancient ways, but there is still something deliberate or artificial about it

They have lost the innocence of tradition because the act of reflection, of seeing our modern ways and choosing to reject them, causes a kind of discontinuity. They know something their ancestors did not know, and could not have known.

And the same thing may be true, more or less, of religion, which is a kind of tradition 

Notice that there are no real theological debates within Christianity any more, there are only ancient historical debates, heresies and orthodoxies, schools of thought in well-worn channels that have long since petrified

But in this other thing I’m talking about, this thing which seems to furnish the spiritual life of most Americans, of most of the people we meet around us

It does have active theological debates, such as “who is more oppressed by heteropatriarchal society: a transwoman or a black amputee?” This is a real question that pious Americans wrestle with.

American Civic Religion

I don’t expect that many of you who are listening need to be led to this conclusion: the religion we are talking about, the one that furnishes these metaphysical anchors, is the American civic religion, which I will sometimes call the ACR for brevity;

Most people think the American Civic Religion means the Fourth of July, The pledge of Allegiance, thanksgiving, reverence for the founding fathers, this sort of thing. 

That is not what the American Civic Religion is. Those rituals are only the detritus of its molting and maturing. What Niccolo Soldo calls the desquamation of America.

The real American civic religion, the living thing, not it’s dead image, does not see itself as a religion at all, does not define itself by its rituals. It defines itself by its FAITH.

The core of the American Civic Religion is its faith in progress. In realizing utopia on earth, in the idea that the world can be made perfectly equal and perfectly fair for everyone. That all differences, all racial differences, all sexual differences, all differences of all kinds—

All differences of all kinds can be, if not precisely eliminated, then at least totally nullified, that human nature can be erased, that humanity can be remade and perfected according to an egalitarian ideal, and the only thing that will be left after that, somehow, miraculously, will be freedom.

Freedom from everyone and everything and every imposition. Never mind that the moment people are free, they begin to de-equalize themselves. This is so alien to the progressive mind that it’s not even false, it’s not a thought they are capable of interacting with or entertaining in any way. We’ll come back to that

All of this is right there in the constitution, a document which, by the way, the American Civic Religion will ultimately find it necessary to abolish entirely in the name of freedom. Of course it will! Perhaps this has already happened, in fact. Perhaps it has happened several times.

But before we get into that, I’d like to give a special consideration to what is called wokeness or wokeism, which I claim is functionally the same as the American Civic Religion, and that it differs in praxis but not in principle.

we have heard this take til we are sick of it, that wokeism is a religion. Rather than declare this equivalence to be true or false, I have sought instead for an understanding of the way in which is is true.

And for this reason I developed my functionalist understanding of religion. There is a sense in which wokeism isn’t a new phenomenon,

A sense in which it has been around for decades at least, it’s the same thing as political correctness, only it is more brazen in its exoteric delimiters.

What do I mean by that? “Exoteric delimiters” — in its visible signs of allegiance. In the signals that people send to each other to show their adherence to it.

We can try to trace wokeism back to the civil rights movement, we can find traces of it in second wave feminism.

We can find people online who will tell us that it’s the same thing as the French Revolution.

We can even find people who will try to trace it back to the garden of Eden. To when sin was first introduced into the world. 

But I think this kind of approach overgeneralizes. It fails to make useful distinctions, fails to understand that leftwing thoughtforms, like all thoughtforms, continue to grow and evolve. 

At some point, you rack up enough mutations and speciation occurs. It is telling that classical liberals and boomer communists, the kind who think all this race and gender stuff distracts people from focusing on class consciousness, they all recognize the woke as something apart from themselves.

Though it’s probably more the case that they are refusing to recognize their own children, refusing to recognize to accept responsibility for the whirlwind they are reaping.

This desire to find the genesis of a current intellectual trend ever further and further back in the past is rooted in a kind of one-upmanship. It does not stem from any will to truth, only from a will to have the last word over your fellow scholar.

So quickly all these genealogies and cladistics descend into bickering over meaningless trivia as academics and their layman imitators squabble to be the man who has read the least important book.

Genealogies are tools for dissection, for examining the dead. But the American Civic Religion is alive, and when you try to pin it down, it squirms on the table and dodges the knife.

No — what we need are tools for vivisection, to pull apart that which is living. It does no good to criticize the wokeist by attacking Marx. What does she care for a dead white man? For the colonialist, imperialist, sexist and heteronormative “western canon?” 

The wokeist doesn’t care because she bears witness to the living testament of antiracism, the testament of the lived experience of blacks and queers and transsexuals and so on.

Just like any other church, there are sectarian divides within the American Civic Religion, and the Woke are a relatively new sect

Not only that, but they are a zealous sect, they are an extremely pious, sanctimonious, idealistic sect

They take all the beliefs of the American Civic Religion and they amplify them, they try to embody them as fully as possible, they try to extrapolate the spirit of the American Civic Religion and live in accordance with it

And as much as we try to dig down and claim that the seeds of wokeness were present in America a hundred years ago, we need to recognize that it’s simultaneously an old thing and a new thing, a new sect, a new religion built out of components that America had lying around the house.

We’re going to talk about a few of those components now, but first I want to clarify that there is almost no value in deep-diving the genealogy of woke. An excavation of the writings of 2nd-wave feminists or German idealists doesn’t tell us anything about how to stop the wokeists, and it doesn’t even give us any special understanding of them

Learning too much about this is a trap, because it fools you into thinking you know something, it gives you the feeling of knowledge, but it doesn’t help you in any way. And many people become addicted to that feeling.

At most, understanding the genealogy can suggest to us what kinds of schelling points we need to create in order to prevent a similar ideology from forming in the future, or what ideas we need to heavily police within our own ranks

The woke are exactly what they appear to be, they are a collection of sexually feral women, male homosexuals, and yes even some normal straight white men whose moral conscience for whatever reason is badly miscalibrated.

Understanding their ideological history can give us an impression of how they got to be the way they are, but it cannot tell us why those particular moral teachings happen to resonate with some individuals and not others, why it is that some men heareth the word of the kingdom and bring forth a hundredfold, yet for others it takes no root in their heart.

Woke, as far as I can tell, is an almost entirely millennial and post-millennial affliction, and it more or less comes together when posters on tumblr start applying ideas from critical theory — not only critical race theory but also gender theory, queer theory, and so on — into every day life

We all recognize some of the superficial characteristics of woke vs. normie. The garish, unnatural hair colors, the ugly, androgynous clothing, along with various exosemantic gang signs, certain turns of phrase or ways of speaking that both signify group allegiance and reinforce group norms.

I’m tired. That scares me. Black bodies. Folx with an X. Amplify queer voices. Heteronormative. Erase women of color. Microaggressions, othering, decolonize, say her name, be an ally, black girl magic, it’s called being a decent human being, and so on

We could make a similar catalog of the idiolect of the online right. Based, redpilled, bantu, wordcel, chudmaxx, soyjak, it’s over, we’re so back, we’re all gonna make it. Some of these straddle tribal boundaries. Some are more specific. Club Tropicale Excellente, retire all government employees, the woke are more correct than the mainstream, I have sugars I need milk…

But enough of that. 

The American Civic Religion goes back all the way to America’s founding, it has to. We have these ideas like freedom of religion, all men are created equal, certain inalienable rights, and so on.

The idea of the revolutionary war, of the rejection of all kings, of establishing a more perfect union, these are the founding ideas, these are the tenets of the ACR. 

The ACR has a real come-to-Jesus moment in the late nineteenth century, it frees the negro slaves, it ratifies the 13th amendment into law, it incorporates a waterline of negrolatry into itself.

Around the same time you have the women’s Christian temperance union, emphasis on Christian, which was agitating for proto-feminism all the way back in 1890. 

These trends are endemic to protestant america, and we’re going to run short on time if I go into this, but I suggest searching for American Malvern, to learn more about the history of protestant agitation for wokeness in the first half of the 20th century

American Malvern

Freedom of religion

Now, how does America implement this idea of freedom of religion? It’s a pretty simple trick, once you realize it, there’s only one way you could possibly do it, and that’s to subordinate all religion to a shared principle which is higher than any religion

Of course it was Jesus himself who said you cannot serve two masters — let’s call this principle “conservation of sanctity” — it’s one of the big lies in our political formula, that religious sentiments can be orthogonalized away from civic and political sentiments.

religious people of all stripes have long and bloody histories of violence against people with differing beliefs, and no matter how peaceful or tolerant or gentle and meek their idiosyncratic beliefs might be, this is the case

But in America especially and in most of the liberal world today, we don’t see any christian sectarian violence at all, Ireland excluded, but then this is a talk about religion, not a talk about racism

And so the important question we must ask is: how has this miracle been achieved? How is it that Baptists and Methodists, or Catholics and Protestants, are able to live side by side in harmonious religious pluralism, without so much as the occasional pipe bomb between frenemies?

There is an idealistic answer to this question, which holds that there has been some kind of dialectical accumulation of moral insight up through the centuries as each successive generation has learned from the errors of their ancestors, 

and it has culminated in a mass enlightenment predicated on the training of Man’s rational faculties and the temperance of his passions.

In this narrative, it is the culmination of our moral progress through history that we have learned to live with each other and mutually respect our intellectual differences.

I think this idealistic answer is transparently false, because it’s not the case that people are tolerant of ideological differences, not even slightly.

We’ve all seen these hysterical performances, especially by women, where they renounce, scream, cry, demand violence against people who don’t conform to their liberal ideology. It’s honestly a wonder more men don’t go out and act on their behalf.

And I always get the sense that it really wouldn’t take much at all for the average person’s ideological intolerance to boil over into violence. It’s only the physical distance between keyboard warriors that stops most of them from coming to blows.

But then it’s only the physical distance between keyboard warriors that allows them to be so inflammatory to each other in the first place. Online anger is an anger born of impotence. 

But the idea of liberal tolerance is a myth, I think we all know that. Liberals won’t even blink, in fact they sleep soundly, shutting off your bank account, going after your family, your job, and so on, if they suspect you of ideological dissent.

You can dissent against any religion except the state religion, that’s how it works.

So that’s the first major thread underlying wokeness in the original ACR, that’s at the heart of it.

American Marxism

But then there’s clearly a lot more going on, there’s a second thoughtline in wokeness, which is the integration of marxism into the American Civic Religion.

And there’s not even one strain of marxism there, but several: there’s the strain from Communist International, Comintern, represented by the actions of Willi Münzenberg, who was a personal friend of Lenin. More on him in a moment.

There is another strain of marxism coming in from the Frankfurt school, which some conservative sites claim was cofounded by Münzenberg, but I can’t find any evidence of that, it appears to be really sloppy scholarship, a bad game of telephone

If you have been in the online right for any amount of time, you will have heard of these people, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse among others.

They were Freudo-Marxists whose main goal was to pathologize normalcy and right-wingedness as mental illnesses, and they largely succeeded.  

They wrote that sexuality and homosexuality should be taught to children, and that it was a hallmark of mental health to hold left-wing political views

They invented a new type of pathology, a made-up pathology, wherein right-wing politics were held to stem from an “authoritarian" personality which, if left unchecked by polite society, would cause the rise of fascism and a second Holocaust.

It would not be wrong to say that Theodor Adorno was the founder of Holocaustianity.

Herbert Marcuse argued that all masculine characteristics must be removed from society, he invented the concept of toxic masculinity, though I don’t think he used that term, and said that all masculine ways of being must be negated in order to prevent future wars.

There is a third strain of marxism that comes in through feminism, people like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan viewed women as the Marxist revolutionary subject and tried to emancipate them from anything like femininity, feminine gender roles, the patriarchy and on and on.

Just to clear the air here and to satisfy the wignat contingent, not that I really can satisfy them, I will go ahead and mention that almost all of these people were Jewish communists, but I want to emphasize that they didn’t so really subvert the American Civic Religion, though that was their intention.

What they actually did was throw gasoline on a fire that was already burning.

The Jewish communists are not evil wizards casting dark magic on all the hapless helpless innocent goyim.

Whites who want to play the eternal victim against their wicked jewish oppressors have everything in common with the woke snowflake class they claim to despise. 

Oh pity us poor whites, oh the jew is taking advantage of us, oh we are so guileless and pure, totally unable to defend ourselves from their jewish tricks

“They make our women into sluts, they rob us of our agency.”

If you think that way you are already dead inside, the great replacement has already occurred, your race has already faded away

But I want to return to Willi Münzenberg for a moment. His goal, in the 1920s and 30s was to convince the middle classes of the West that beliefs which served the foreign policy of the soviet union were derived from the most essential elements of human decency

What Münzenberg did, 80 years before we really had this term, was manage the opinions of social media influencers, before we had social media. Backed by Soviet money, he manipulated writers, journalists, artists, film-makers, scientists, and publishers, disseminating opinions to them through front organizations. He referred to these people as Innocents, and to his organizations as “innocents clubs.”

He did this to control the intellectuals, the people who made opinions for the middle class. He pushed crypto-Stalinism on a generation of westerners, and the way he did it was by conflating and coupling Stalinism with everything that his target western cultures held to be morally salient.

Americans at the time already felt that the treatment of negros was society’s highest institutionalized crime, and therefore crypto-stalinism would take the highest possible moral ground on the negro question. 

Understand this. This is the reason I tell this story, the key to Münzenberg’s method is to try to attach Stalinism to what westerners already believed

The English saw philistinism and middle class repression as a great evil, therefore crypto-stalinists embraced sexual libertinism, bohemianism and flamboyant homosexuality

It’s truly astonishing to learn about the extent to which Münzenberg manipulated public intellectuals, going so far as to install his operatives to befriend them, arranging for female soviet spies to become their girlfriends and wives.

I’ve already cautioned you about this, because I think it gives ammunition to some of the worst tendencies of online cranks, imagining that everything in the world is controlled by shadowy secret conspiracies, when in fact these things quickly take on a life of their own

Münzenberg referred to his process as “breeding rabbits” — once the ideas were spread and associated with high status and deeply held moral sentiment, they would propagate outward from center organically, and multiply and multiply without any additional assistance

Some examples of ideas that Münzenberg tried to instill in Westerners:

* The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

* Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

* The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous.

* Violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

* When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

So these ideas, if they are adopted by the people, are suicidal ideas. And Münzenberg insinuated them into Western thought by attaching them to moral notions that were already present in the host population, in particular he tried to attach them to already-ascendant negrolatry of the day

Of course it would be insane to claim that America’s founding fathers were Marxists, but they were in almost every way the progressives of their day

We look back and read them now and they are racist and sexist which is to say, they were sane, but the ideals in the founding documents are undeniably progressive and egalitarian.

The woke are something new: they are open Marxists. And a generation ago, their counterparts were crypto-Marxists, as the Venona documents, the intercepted and decrypted Soviet messages collected during the Cold War, make undeniably clear

Every supposedly paranoid claim that Joseph McCarthy ever made turned out to be true. Alger Hiss, the Hollywood ten, the Rosenbergs, all of them, all Marxists.

Before that we had the new deal, and before world war 2, the major world powers were socialist if not communist, which is a difference of degree not kind

Maybe there is an old libertarian America somewhere in the 19th century, an old mythical pristine past, and the descent into communism is our fall from grace. 

This is a common feature of many ideologies by the way: they depict a utopian past, an original sin that ruins it, and they present their ideology as a solution. 

This is part of the gnosis of communism, for example, where many communists believe that before the evil white men came along with their double-entry accounting and their concept of property, everyone lived in a prelapsarian workers’ paradise where it wasn’t even possible to rape anyone

That’s the kind of mythological thinking that we find in the ideology of the classical liberals in America, who think if we can just “return to the constitution” we can somehow get rid of all the commies.

But I reject that mythology, I think if you go back and look at the old America, the Quakers in the 18th century were almost as gay and retarded as any purple-haired roody-poo you could find in antifa today

One of my favorite quotes from Nick Land: There are two possibilities: either the constitution is working as intended, in which case it is monstrous, or it is not, in which case it is worthless

One more thing before we end this segment, I would like to point out how ineffective all this communist infiltration actually was.

Yes, we can recognize every single one of Münzenberg’s bullet points in the discourse of the Burn Loot Murder movement. 

But the propaganda did not have the desired effect at all, which was to demoralize us on the world stage against the soviet union. Instead, all the cultural relativism and homosexuality and feminism were synthesized into a new impetus for USA imperialism

We — I mean, the USA writ large — now believe it is our moral duty to conquer every other nation in the name of women’s liberation and anal marriage. How do you know if something is colonialist and imperialist? Simple, if it outlaws sodomy.

But so all these different currents of egalitarianism, emancipationism, feminism, plus these seventy year old suicide memes which were released into western culture by the soviets, all the critical race theory and queer theory bubbling over from college campuses

Think of all them as amino acids, proteins, prebiotic molecules swirling around in a kind of primordial sea, and they all come together around the geothermal vents of Occupy Wall Street, they coalesce into wokeness right around this time. The intersectional stack codifies the oppression hierarchy.

At the time we don’t quite have the term ‘woke’ — that comes later in 2013 when BLM brings a bunch of hoteps to contribute their, ah, unique linguistic talents to the problem

You will hear a lot of old leftist cope about how the intersectional stack was a psyop to confuse the nascent communist revolution that they imagine Occupy to have been, but these people are delusional

There was never anything remotely like a communist uprising, it was just a bunch of smelly wannabe hippies trying to get laid, using the same commodified ersatz countercultural pablum that the left has been buying and selling from itself since the 70s

It’s not a perfect metaphor to compare this inception of wokeness to abiogenesis, obviously, because there were plenty of ideologies around already. 

But all these things come together and unite under the rainbow flag, which becomes to the woke American empire what the crucifix was to Saint Constantine. In this sign shall we conquer. 

Part 2 - 6-Factor Analysis of American Civic Religion

Wokeness is a new, militant sect of the American Civic Religion, which shares almost all of the same principles, 

but which presses on the contradictions between American life and its stated morals. Most practitioners of the American Civic Religion are not woke, but nor can they mount any kind of principled argument against the woke

Basically every sacred belief of the woke is contained in the Civil Rights act of 1964. As long as you think racism and sexism are the two great evils of the human condition, you are woke, maybe unwittingly.

The difference between GOP-voting classical liberals who loudly condemns racism and an aposematic demisexual demanding a land acknowledgement is slight. They both want the same thing.

And as we’ll see toward the end of this segment, the conscientious, compassionate, center-left American is simultaneously the prisoner and the prison warden with respect to woke ideology.

So instead of genealogy, I want to talk about the metaphysical affordances of the American Civic Religion, of which wokeism is only its most recent mutation.

Gnosis

First, what is the gnosis: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. It’s right in the declaration of independence, right at the beginning. It doesn’t matter what comes next, something about a creator. No one cares about that part. 

Someday, when we win, maybe you can get them to care. I’m concerned with what is, not what could be.

“All men are created equal” — that’s the gnosis. That’s the thing that Americans know that no one else does.

The bit about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is subordinate to the bit about equality, that’s why it comes second. That’s what liberty is in the American Civic Religion, it’s when we recognize that everyone is created equal.

 Now your more old school, boomer, civic nationalist types will tell you that the bit about liberty is also really important. And you can always tell someone has lost an argument when they start trying to perform hermeneutics on the text. 

I’m not saying my reading is objectively correct, or the truest and best reading, I’m saying it’s the reading that sticks in mens’ hearts, it’s the one that insinuates itself into their soul and pulls on their conscience

When you dig down into it, Americans believe their liberty is contingent on equality, that in order to be free, one must be equal, that if people aren’t equal it’s a sign there is no freedom.

This obviously does not make sense, because as we noted earlier, freedom and equality are direct antagonists. Because people aren’t equal in any way, biologically, some are stupid and some are smart, some are strong and some are weak, some are fast and some are slow

So if people have freedom, freedom to act according to their desires, freedom to act according to their nature, they will immediately get to the business of rising or falling to their natural level. So freedom is antithetical to equality.

And the way you resolve this is supposed to be that equality only means equality before the law, equality before God, something like that. But that’s not stable, it doesn’t stick, it makes everyone very cynical about equality.

There is no stable equilibrium between the belief that all men are created equal and the inherent and ineradicable inequality of the real world. Any attempt to institute partial equality is unstable, and wants to collapse into total equality.

The liberty/equality dichotomy is a contradiction in beliefs of the American Civic Religion. But contradictions do not invalidate religious sentiments. On the contrary, they tend to strengthen them.

I think every belief system contains at least one contradiction, probably many, and the especially noticeable ones tend to become sacralized, and reveling in the contradiction becomes a part of the gnosis. 

I call these holy contradictions, and I’ll give you a couple of examples, which are certain to piss off everyone. 

The first and most famous of all is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. This teaching is the simple and straight-forward claim that, in a particular circumstance, one is equal to three. You know that famous scene in 1984, where if the party says 2 and 2 make five, you have to believe it?

The Christian trinity operates on this same logic. Now I am not saying this to be disrespectful to Christians, or to try to attack the doctrine of the trinity. It’s a clear contradiction and that is fine. 

Yes I have heard all the flatland analogies, I know about high dimensional geometry, I’m not impressed 

The God of the Bible is omnipotent, I assume that logic obeys him and not the other way around and we’re too mortal and finite and parochial to ever comprehend this. Take a deep breath.

Anyway what’s interesting about this blatant contradiction isn’t the logical impossibility, it’s the psychological possibility. 

Christians have produced libraries of pontification in an attempt to reconcile this paradox, which is what you call a contradiction you are obligated to believe.

I call these types of paradoxes holy contradictions.

Liberty/equality is another one, but the central holy contradiction of the American Civic Religion is one you all know, Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance .

This is a doctrine of radical intolerance ostensibly for the sake of tolerance, and it exists because tolerance of difference is one of the ACR’s sacred corporate values, 

and when this unstoppable force collides with the immovable object of the friend/enemy distinction, you get a paradox, which is again what you call a contradiction you are obligated to believe.

It’s an instantly self-negating moral precept, which liberals hear and go ooooh and ahhhh, how profound, how intricate. If you ever catch yourself thinking that about a moral teaching, it means you have confused yourself on purpose

When an oyster gets an irritant in its gooey bits, it secretes nacre to soothe the pain, when a human gets a contradiction in his sacred beliefs, he does the same 

The obligatory contradictory belief becomes a source of fascination to us, that’s what those mysterious feelings of profundity are, they are psychic nacre in the oyster shell of the mind.

Nemesis

Now, if the gnosis of the American Civic Religion is that all men are created equal, then what is the nemesis?

The nemesis is those people who stand in the way of progress, or sometimes it is the attitudes of the people who stand in the way of progress. It is Ignorance, hatred, racism, bigotry. And this is important, that it’s the attitudes, it’s the beliefs, not the people themselves, because it’s seen as a spiritual war.

An interesting consequence of this is that liberals therefore believe that education is the salvific method for all of the illiberal philistines who are still living outside of the grace of Floyd

The American Civic Religion is further obligated to believe in a form of blank-slateism, to believe that everyone is potentially redeemable, potentially educable.

It can weakly acknowledge that political beliefs have a genetic component, but it’s not allowed to make any deductions using that fact 

The idea of the blank slate comports perfectly with the gnosis of equality, because it reduces all life outcomes to a mere contingency of accidental circumstance

These two ideas together form an extremely stable ideological core, the gnosis of equality and the nemesis of regressive, anti-egalitarian belief

To the progressive believer, it begins to feel as if anti-egalitarian beliefs themselves exert a magical pressure on others, as if the thing that prevents black women from inventing a new paradigm in theoretical physics is the fact that we don’t believe they can.

In unrelated news, a recent study on Covid vaccine efficiency found that the vaccine was so effective at reducing all-cause mortality that it even prevented traffic accidents.

If egalitarianism ceases to regard its nemesis as an abstraction, but as individual people, it tends to go on a killing spree, and we have seen this in just about every state that ever succumbed to communism

There is, however, an older version of the American Civic Religion which says to live and let live, which says that if someone isn’t on the side of progress then at least they have a right to live off in the woods alone in a cabin. And I think maybe we still carry that belief on some level.

In a way it’s a luxurious thing to believe, something you can only really sustain when your country is half wilderness, half frontier.

But it’s never been all that true, it’s never been true for people who try to engage with civic society. All the way back in 1923, before Soviet subversion of American life had even got its start, DH Lawrence wrote this about Americans and liberty:

“The land of the free, the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me! And that’s my freedom. Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch the moment he shows he is not one of them.

“Their liberty is a thing of sheer will, sheer tension: a liberty of THOU SHALT NOT. And it has been so from the first. The land of THOU SHALT NOT. Only the first commandment is: THOU SHALT NOT PRESUME TO BE A MASTER. Hence democracy. We are the masterless. That is what the American Eagle shrieks.”

DH Lawrence was an Englishman, but he understood Americans very well, and I think we can learn a lot about ourselves from reading European appraisals of the American character, though we must always take them with a grain of salt.

Always keep in mind that, when a European or any other foreign national writes his great work on America, it’s always colored by his embarrassment. 

The European, the Arab, the Oriental, the African — they must each find some way to save face, to recover their pride in the face of our humiliating, earth-shattering prosperity.

That does not mean they are wrong. Only that one must be mindful of their ressentiment — and one must also forgive them, taking heed not to internalize the negativity which protects their pride.

One more note on the nemesis, I would be remiss here if I failed to mention it: when it comes to the portrayal of ignorant, bigoted, racial hatred, the American Civic Religion has a special symbol for it, which is of course Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.

It is not the case, not exactly, that Adolf Hitler himself is the nemesis, but rather he is the nemesis made flesh, a kind of anti-theophany of evil. The holocaust is the mythical consequence of allowing bigotry to become flesh.

Did the holocaust really happen? Historically and literally yes, but mythologically no. But whatever real events it correlates to, it has also become something wholly mythical which supervenes upon and supersedes the actual historical facts.

Ecstasy

In the ACR, What is the ecstasy? Maybe it’s easier to ask, what is the liturgy? Liturgy is one of the pathways to ecstasy. The liturgy is the protest march, the political rally, the parade. Every time you see people marching with signs, whether they are talking about ukraine, BLM, women’s rights, any of it

That’s all a progressive church service, and it gives its participants a high which comes from being part of a crowd.

Another ecstatic rite of the American Civic Religion is smoking marijuana, and this wasn’t always so, and not all weed smoking is in aid of progress, but it has become so.

The American Civic Religion went through a phase shift in the 1960s. As we all know, that’s when various key pieces of legislation were introduced, the civil rights act of 1964, the Hart-Cellar act, in ‘71 there was the Supreme Court case Griggs v Duke Power, which established the idea of disparate impact

and it’s around this time when marijuana smoking becomes popular as a form of rebellion against “the man.”

All political factionalism since the 1960s is only a reenactment of the founding dramas of the 1960s. Prior to that, the American Civic Religion was different, and it had different content, but it always contained the germ of what it is now, it always contained the “all men are created equal” that forms the backbone of where we are today

And there’s a third progressive ecstasy — I mean to call it mystical is slightly a stretch, and we sort of hashed over this in part one, when we spoke of about inversion of taboos 

Progressives invert Christian sexuality taboos, but it goes much deeper than that. In Part 1 I mentioned that Christianity is least expressed in its ecstatic pathways, a few heresies aside. 

The trinity of progressive ecstasies is sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, the last of which Christianity has sadly tried to appropriate, are the gateways into progressive indoctrination

It’s this specific avenue by which adolescents are inducted into progressivism, a word which is absolutely a misnomer.

Sexual transgression is the gateway to adulthood in American culture. In Christian society, pre-marital sex is a major transgression, and children who grow up Christian are implicitly forced to make a choice between Christian and Progressive society

We no longer live in a Christian society, for the most part, but we retain just enough Christianity that pre-marital sex is presented as transgressive, even though it’s a progressive norm.

The act of transgression allows a young person to self-ID as revolutionary, as both pro- and transgressive, as an oppressed victim of patriarchal norms, or heterosexual norms, and so on and so on.

A young person is invited to imagine him or herself as valiantly standing against stale traditions and repressive culture, as a victim of oppression because having sex is against the rules, even though nothing could be farther from the truth

Now especially for young women, the sex act is transmuted from an intimate act of devotion within marriage, with the purpose of bearing children, to a public act of rebellion against the social order, even though this very transmutation is a pillar of the social order

Often this “revolutionary” sex act may be tinged with an element of racial or homosexual identity politics. The natural ecstasy of sex is captured by the American Civic Religion and bent into the shape of an initiation rite.

America really was a Christian nation in the past, and it was also a progressive nation, and progressivism has been able to erode Christianity 

‪

The ACR begins an auxiliary to Christianity, to support it, but over the decades it takes on a life of its own and becomes a rival

We’ll talk more about that in the final episode of this series

But Christianity is relatively static compared to the American Civic Religion, which means the latter can continually morph and find new ways to attack Christianity until it finally finds a way in

And somewhere around the sexual revolution, it finds its wedge, it figures out that when presented with the choice between sexuality “liberated” progressive life and sexually “repressed” Christian life, most young people will choose the former

And the bad consequences of promiscuity only show up much later, once the brain has lost plasticity and ideological changes are unlikely to occur

Most ideologies spread vertically, from parents to children. So you only have to suppress a vertically transmitted ideology for three generations to totally hollow it out

And it might even retain the name, but it becomes something totally functionally different

When you see these homosexual female pastors saying Jesus was trans, I don’t think they see themselves as subverting, I think they are trying to square their sincere understanding of the good with with their sincere understanding of Christianity

That doesn’t make their teachings any less heinous and I believe a truly sincere Christian would… let God sort them out.

Taboo

Next, what are the taboos? We’ve already talked about this at some length. The linguistic taboos of the American Civic Religion are primarily racial. We discussed this at some length already. The sacred unspeakable words all refer to races or to sexual deviants.

But beyond that, there are certain patterns, there are facts about people of different races that you are not allowed to notice. We all know about this and I will refer you to my podcast episode 3, on race, or the work of Steve Sailer, who is a national treasure.

There are also dietary taboos. Veganism is to the American Civic Religion what Kosher law is to Judaism. Not all progressives are vegan, in fact most aren’t, but all of them are aspirationally vegan. They participate in rituals like “meatless monday” 

— they insist that all restaurants have vegan options, and they recognize, most of all, that those who are vegan are more holy, more moral, than those who are not. Look at how rapidly oat milk replaced real milk for so many people, because here was a way to do something vegan, to sin a little less, to be a little more holy, at almost no cost

Vegetarianism is possible in a pre-industrial age, but veganism is not. It is a decadent system of food taboos which can only exist in the world where food production is subordinate to modern chemistry

Not only does a vegan diet contain an endless procession of binding agents, emulsifiers, and genetically modified foods, it also relies upon laboratory techniques to concentrate nutrients which cannot be acquired in sufficient quantities from dietary sources, such as vitamin b12.

Finally and although the racial taboos feel more sacred — because they are more abstract, and because they don’t intrude quite as much on every day life — the most critical, load-bearing taboos in the ACR are sexual.

In particular, the idea of consent is a sexual taboo. Christianity teaches that the proper context for sex is marriage, and that it’s not really possible to rape your own wife. Under any normal or classic understanding of sexual morality, the idea of “marital rape” is non sequitur.

“Marital rape” is a feminist term which attempts to overturn Christian sexual morality by subjugating it to feminist morality. Under the American Civic Religion, which has fully digested and integrated itself with feminism, the only thing that makes sex legitimate is how the woman feels about it at any particular moment.

If she changes her mind later, sex can retroactively become rape. This is a one way street, rape can never become just sex, even if a woman later falls in love with and marries her “rapist” — which is a fairly common occurrence

In the American Civic Religion, if a woman “consents” to sex with a man who is not her husband, that’s totally legitimate, the woman is above criticism, because it is a fickle, immeasurable, ethereal quality from which all sexual morality is derived

Of course it’s very difficult to talk about this topic, it’s much harder to talk about this than race, in fact, because sex and sexual taboo are so essential to our every day lives that everyone becomes instantly too emotional to live if you talk about it in a way that contradicts all their various copes about it

And they will attack you like a legion of rabid dogs. You can’t have a calm, rational conversation about the concept of sexual consent as the grounding of sexual morality because if you say anything that even insinuates that it might like to think about the possibility of maybe asking any questions about the prevailing sexual dogma

You get instantly shouted down by a legion of just the absolute dumbest males in the world calling you a rapist, telling you you have a small penis, implying that you are a virgin, and a host of other things. Yes, you are a rapist who is also a virgin, that is their belief, it is a holy contradiction.

I have no problem disregarding these people but the sheer volume of them is an impediment to thinking and disseminating thought. 

In the near future I will do an episode on women, where I will unpack that a bit more, but for now what I want to highlight is this sort of unwitting symmetry between the feminist idea of sexual consent and the american religion’s idea of consent of the governed.

But what I want to highlight to here is a certain “as above, so below” — no doubt you are aware of the occultist origins of this phrase, of the idea that there are correspondences between different planes of existence, that the nature of the higher realms is echoed or reflected in the lower realms —

I do not really believe in any kind of magic or occult power per se, what I believe in is human things, all too human things, but I think that theories of occultism and magic often capture, in a mythological way, real human truths

The leader of the people is the model for the people he leads. As things are done in the kings house, so shall they be done in the kingdom. But America is a place with no king, a place which is governed by a process

Our political formula says that political legitimacy is conferred by the consent of the governed. Presumably, if we are governed without our consent, that would constitute gubernatorial rape. 

But there’s a tension in this idea, which is only ever brought up with regard to sex, but never with regard to governance, and that’s this idea that no one can ever meaningfully consent to sex when there is a power imbalance.

That is, feminists believe that consent can be coerced, and that coercion invalidates it. In the upside-down world of feminism, this is an argument either for full communism, or to kill all men, because as long as anyone is more powerful than anyone else, all sex is rape, and rape is tautologically the worst thing in the world, because it violates a woman’s consent

Now if you are thinking to yourself, zero, that is retarded, you are correct. Feminists and communists are retarded. But if we apply the logic of coercion and consent to “consent of the governed” then America’s political formula deconstructs itself.

But no one is ever going to think this way. Logic is totally irrelevant to belief, to what people believe, to why they believe it. 

Eschatology

Now we’ve talked a bit about ACR eschatology already in part one, which has both an apocalyptic and a beatific component.

The apocalyptic component is climate change, this belief in some kind of ecological catastrophe caused by overuse of fossil fuels. It forms a stable bond with the dietary taboo of veganism.

See, beliefs in a belief system form complements across categorical lines. The taboo of veganism attaches to the eschatology of climate change. 

The gnosis of equality attaches to the nemesis of ignorance, and both of these ideas have what you might call a secondary bond with the beatific eschatology where everyone progressively wakes up to the evils of racism and homophobia and we all live together in one giant brown muddle.

That is, if the nemesis is ignorance, then that implies a mythological, millenarian possibility of a time when ignorance is vanquished. Millenarian thinking is usually twinned with prelapsarian thinking. The beatific end of days is seen as a return to a pristine state that obtained prior to a fall.

Progressives rarely articulate their vision quite so clearly as I have here, but it’s there, it’s just below the surface, and sometimes it’s even explicit if you look.

It’s worth noting too that the beatific eschatology of the American Civic Religion is explicitly taken from communism, and that when America got started, there was no such thing.

America was the eschatological country of the future where everyone had already woken up to the equality of mankind, right? That’s the whole idea, the more perfect union, the inalienable rights and so on. America is the promised land where moral progress has already triumphed.

The problem is, as every fiction writer knows, post-millenarianism is unsustainable, because life continues. As long as we are alive, there will be problems, and as long as there are problems, we will construct fantasies about future times when there are no problems.

These tendencies can never be eradicated. So pretty quick, the Americans realize there is more work to be done, and America becomes instead a place where moral progress occurs in Sisyphean perpetuity . 

Part 3 — Telos, Ordeals of Civility, Arguments Against Cynicism

Telos

In the American Civic Religion, what is the telos? This is where we find a paradox, because we simultaneously feel that our enemies are very stupid, I mean we see their pictures online all the time, they appear to be a collection of deformed mutants and sexual deviants, and it’s hard to understand how they manage to hold and exercise power

Some people see this and they conclude that there are secret shadowy hidden masterminds planning everything, that there always have been, that every event on the global stage is orchestrated by a secret cabal. All of these types of beliefs are facile

They are fantasy sci-fi narratives which give a sense of order to a chaotic world. It’s somehow more psychologically comfortable to believe that all the bad things in the world are part of a controlled plan than to believe in chaos.

This is not to downplay the fact that there are in fact many conspiracies in this world, that people, elites, wealthy people often do collude secretly in order to advance their own interests. But there’s no grand conspiracy, and all the little conspiracies are just as short-sighted and petty and small as every other human endeavor.

But the way progressive telos works is, the thing progressives do when they have excesses of resources and leisure time, they perform ordeals of civility, and this explains in large part why we see so many deformed mutants in prominent places on the left.

Ordeal of Civility

OK this is a little going to require a bit of a digression. This is my claim, that what baptizing new christians is to Christianity, what reaching enlightenment is to Buddhism, Ordeals of Civility are to progressives.

So I am going to have to explain what an ordeal of Civility is. I’m going to draw from the work of John Murray Cuddihy for this, and from the 2nd City Bureaucrat, who has done yeoman’s work explaining and popularizing this concept.

An ordeal of civility is the process by which an outsider group is assimilated into civil society. I’m going to quote from Kenneth Boulding now: “the word civility and the word civil derive from the same root as the word civilization… Civilization is characterized not only by conquest, military ruthlessness, and the predominance of the threat as organizer. It is also characterized by the elaborate integrative systems of religion, politeness, morals, and manners”

Civil society is the part of public life which is distinct from government and from business, and in the west means you conform to a particular set of social norms, it means there are certain things one can and cannot say, and so on.

Civil society demands a bifurcation of public and private affect. The civic religion gatekeeps the norms of civil society. 

An outside group undergoes an ordeal of civility when they are assimilated into the civic religion, when they brought into the politeness, morals, and manners of the civic society. Cuddihy’s masterpiece of sociology examines the ways this process played out for the Jews in the 19th century as they assimilated into gentile society in Europe.

A joke which Freud was fond of perfectly captures the essence of the conflict: 

A Galician Jew was traveling in a train. He had made himself comfortable, had unbuttoned his coat and put his feet up on the seat. Just then a gentleman in modern dress entered the compartment. 

The Jew pulled himself together and took up a proper pose. The stranger fingered through the pages of a notebook, made some calculations, reflected for a moment and then suddenly asked the Jew: "Excuse me, when is Yom Kippur?' 

'Oho!' said the Jew, and put his feet up on the seat again before answering."  

All the elements are here: the public, social place (a train); the identification of the Jew as an Ostjude (Galician); the relaxed, "regressive" behavior (misbehavior) in a public place; the advent of the "gentleman" stranger as the modernizing West ("in modern dress"); the "pose of good manners struck, and, finally, the polite intrusion: "Excuse me." 

The sudden disclosure of a shared ethnicity reconstitutes the premodern social situation which knew no "public places" with their “situational proprieties,” which encountered no strangers, which made no private-public cleavage.

Cuddihy’s claim is that Marx, Freud, and Levi-Strauss are all engaged in apologetics on behalf of the uncivil nature of the 19th c. Jew, that their writing careers and their philosophies are ultimately rooted in a need to redress the wound that European civic society has dealt to them in the ordeal of civility

An ordeal of civility is not a one-way process. The assimilated culture must pay a high price to enter civic society, but it also extracts a cost from civic society; civic society must also make concessions to the assimilated, concessions which Freud and Marx extract by means of their philosophy.

I recommend the book by Cuddihy and also the substack of 2nd City Bureaucrat if you want a deeper understanding of this topic.

For our purposes, the thing you need to understand is that the Ordeal of Civility is not unique to the Jew. The ordeal of civility is something that progressive society performs over and over, it’s the same model that is used for feminism, for civic rights for blacks, Italians, Irish, for homosexuals, for “immigrants”, for transexuals, for the “differently abled” to use the DEI term. 

Every single one of these identity groups has been the object of an ordeal of civility. The American Civic Religion enacts its narrative of moral progress through ordeals of civility. They live out these little revolutions over and over, that’s how they keep score. That’s their ultimate metaphysical goal, their telos

This also explains why they think that the culture and heritage of a people can be boiled down to their food, their language, their music, and their funny costumes: because all of those things are more or less fungible, superficial, and changeable. That’s culture to them, because none of those things interfere with ordeals of civility

It’s been a long time since Jews were considered uncouth, and nowadays most gentiles couldn’t even pick a jew out of a police lineup of whites, though I know you my friends on the far right have re-learned this ancient power

The Jewish ordeal of civility is essentially complete, modulo a few failed attempts by deranged outsiders like Kanye West, whose greatest accomplishment as an antisemite is to raise funding for the ADL. 

Nevertheless, secular jews today may carry a kind of grudge or a fear of not fitting in which more properly belongs to the 19th century. There is a certain kind of neurotic jew who even today is anxious about passing as a gentile, and this same paranoia of being found out has been applied in subsequent ordeals of civility

You hear talk of “white passing” minorities or “passing” transexuals, no such thing of course, this is something that weighs heavily on the Jewish psyche even after effectively conquering the West using America as a proxy.

To give make this clearer, I’ll give you a second example, which is the ordeal of civility as it pertains to homosexuals.

That ordeal more or less began with the Stonewall Riots in 1969, languished for a couple of decades, and picked up again in the 90s, and was totally concluded in 2015 with the ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Whereas Jews were considered uncouth, homosexuals were considered to be kinky, loathsome sex addicts. And male homosexuals are precisely that, as we all know. Female homosexuals have a different pathology, and the fact that homosexuality covers a range of distinct phenomena has been an asset in the mainstreaming of gay acceptance

It is worth skimming through a book called After the Ball, published in 1990 by Marshall Kirk, which is full of a lot of rosy lies about gay people, but which also lays out a sophisticated psychological strategy and a propaganda agenda for winning the gay ordeal of civility.

The book lays out a plan for desensitizing ambivalent straights to homosexuality by, and this is a quote: talking about gayness until the issue becomes tiresome

It calls for images of “homohaters” to be disseminated in media depicting them as nazis, klansmen, as “menacing punks and thugs” and lays out principles for image management of gays in media, and describes strategies for occupying space on television, radio, magazines, and newspapers

The goal was to familiarize Americans with gays in a neutral to positive way, and to single-mindedly drive through talking points about the civic rights of gays. 

Right-wing dissidents could learn a lot from this book about how to manipulate media, but that is a topic for another time.

In our media-driven world, television is reality for most people, especially for Americans, and back when President Brandon still occupied his own skull, he remarked famously that Will and Grace did more to “educate” Americans on the topic of gays than “anything anybody else has done so far.”

On this topic, Brandon is correct.

You know an ordeal of civility is concluded when the Republican party starts crying about how what makes us great as Americans is our respect and love for whatever the newly civilly integrated group is. 

When the ACR succeeds at bringing someone into civic society, they have to invent a new marginalized identity so they can start over again.

The problem with an ordeal of civility is that it’s finite, it has a fixed end. And once the ordeal is concluded, we are left with a sense of “what now?” Baudrillard describes this sensation in his famous essay “After the Orgy.” 

“Now all we can do is simulate the orgy, simulate liberation. We may pretend to carry on in the same direction, accelerating, but in reality we are accelerating in a void, because all the goals of liberation are already behind us

The state of utopia realized, of all utopias realized, wherein paradoxically we must continue to live as though they had not been. But since they have, and since we can no longer, therefore, nourish the hope of realizing them, we can only 'hyper-realize' them through interminable simulation

Nothing (not even God) now disappears by coming to an end, by dying. Instead, things disappear through proliferation or contamination, by becoming saturated or transparent.”

That was from Baudrillard. Finally, please notice that the telos of civil ordeals forms a stable bond with the beatific eschatology where everyone wakes up from ignorance. Each flows perfectly from the other.

OK, let’s summarize. The American Civic Religion, the religion of social progress, presents functionally along the following axes:

Gnosis: All people are created equal, they have certain inalienable rights etc

Nemesis: Bigotry, ignorance, and hatred, which exist abstractly and which are manifested in the enemies of progress

Ecstasy: protests and civic marches, smoking marijuana, and sexual liberation

Taboo: Veganism, racial slurs, and the consent model of rape

Eschatology: Climate Change (apocalyptically) and Universal emancipation (beatifically)

Telos: Ordeals of civility for an endless procession of manufactured identities

Five Arguments Against Cynicism as Causative

Before we wrap up, as an addendum to all of the above, I’d like to talk about the common confusion that we see among many leftists and left-leaning normies regarding the motivations of the elite.

An important observation we can make here is that in the functionalist model, there is barely any room for cynicism. Basically no one is cynical about their own ideology, though people may exaggerate their own fervency 

There are few assertions that make me sperg out more than this persistent claim that our elites — the people in charge — are cynical when they espouse certain values. Most of the people who believe this, I think it’s a hangover from latent marxism in the cultural water supply 

A lot of people who are drawn to us are afflicted with a chronic disposition towards contrarianism and counterculturalism. And until very recently — until probably 2013 at the earliest, the left had a monopoly on counterculture.

Or to be more correct, there was no counterculture, and what appeared to be counterculture was a wholly owned subsidiary of the left.

In the 1950s and 60s there was counterculture, and it was exclusively left-wing counterculture, and after the left won its total cultural victories in the sixties, the remnant of its counterculture persisted

Counterculture was reduced to marketing, because it was rebelling against a culture that had been completely defeated. Most of the rebels never figured this out, and continued to see themselves as rebelling against the man long after they had become the man

This is the basic sales pitch of all leftists now, from the far left antifa types, to the dirtbag left or chapo types, all the way to the respectable left center like Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama. They all present themselves as a form of rebellion

Imagine if David slew Goliath and then, 10 years into his kingship, continued to market his monarchy as a way to really stick it to the philistines. It would be non-sequitur. But this is precisely what has occurred on the left in America in the past 60 years. 

This is one of the contradictions at the heart of the American Civic Religion today, that it continually sees itself as the underdog, but it’s fighting against the corpse of the monster it already killed

But the upshot of that is that all these zombie memes are still swirling around among people who have a countercultural disposition, ideas that are dead but walking

And one of those ideas, which is a mistaken idea, because it’s an egalitarian idea — it’s rooted in progressive, egalitarian morality — is that all authority is bad, that rebellion against authority is good for its own sake

And this combines with the communist belief that “capitalism” is the source of social problems, and what comes out is this idea that corporations have to be bad, necessarily, as an essential condition of their being

So when we see corporations and rich people pushing emancipatory causes — what I mean is, when we see them promoting ordeals of civility, the only thing the progressive countercultural mind can do with that is to leap to this conclusion: It’s insincere!

But this is a retarded thing to think. And I guess it’s just my own neurosis that this tweaks me so much, that I take this particular stupid idea so personally, but I do, so I am going to give you five arguments now for why the woke are sincere and the elites are true believers

The people in charge are not pretending to be woke. The woke people are the ones in charge.

Argument one: actions speak louder than words

or if you prefer a more pedantic way of saying this, revealed preference is a bitch. It doesn’t matter what people privately believe, it only matters what they do. For example, you cannot be cynically homosexual. If you have gay sex, but you believe you’re secretly straight, you’re still just gay.

By the same token, if you give money to woke causes like BLM or planned parenthood, if you do anything to advance so-called trans rights at all, then it doesn’t matter if you believe in your heart that you’re doing it selfishly, or for personal advantage. 

What you do is a better reflection of your character than what you believe about why you are doing it.

 Big companies like Goldman Sachs or Amazon sponsor pride parades, they pay for transexual surgeries for their employees, they make propaganda where they affirm the moral good of homosexuality. When a man says one thing and does another, we judge his character by his action, not by the ways he rationalizes his action

But in the case of these big companies and their leaders, their words and their actions are totally aligned. They aren’t even hypocritical, they are totally consistent, and their actions reflect the moral values of the American Civic Religion.

Argument 2: The second generation isn’t in on the joke.

This is more of an argument against grand conspiracies than cynical elites, but it ends up being the same problem. Imagine the world is controlled by master manipulators who develop propaganda to control the masses

Those people are necessarily very small in number, because if there are a lot of them, then that’s just a bureaucracy, not a conspiracy. This small number of people rely on subordinates who are deceived by the propaganda in order to accomplish their goals

This means that the number of true believers will always outnumber the manipulators by a tremendous degree, and most of the actions of any organization will be conceived and enacted by true believers. Eventually, the original cynical propaganda makers will be replaced as they die out or turn over

After a couple of iterations of this, there are no manipulators left, and what started as a deception is now fully sincere.

Argument 3: Hypocrisy is not the same as cynicism.

No one in the world entirely lives up to their beliefs. Everyone is hypocritical, but hypocrisy does not negate or undermine sincerity. For example, Tim Wise is a well-known antiracist activist who has made his living jetting around the country telling college students that white people oppress blacks financially.

Tim Wise lives in an expensive, 97% White, 0% black neighborhood in Nashville, on a Golf Course. This is public information, census tract 134 west of Nashville,  But to listen to him speak or read his articles, none could doubt his sincerity. He clearly believes in his stated morals. He’s not cynical, he’s a hypocrite.

A hypocrite is someone who sincerely believes in his own bullshit. His stated beliefs are his true beliefs, but he fails to live up to his own ideals. 

This sort of dovetails into argument one. If you think Tim Wise is an evil white racist, cynically profiting off of antiracism because of the way he lives his life, then you are judging him by his actions and you are forced to conclude that corporations and their executives that take action to support woke causes are really, sincerely woke.

But it’s not as if anyone, anywhere, is logically consistent in their beliefs.

Argument 4: Belief in Elite cynicism is low class.

It appeals to people who lack material wealth, because money is always on their mind, and they can only imagine that their social betters are similarly fixated 

In other words, people who believe the elites are cynically woke think that the real reason corporations are woke is out of greed. Poor people think everything is about money, just like perverts think everything is about sex and wiggers think everything is about jews

It’s this moral poverty, this poverty of imagination — spiritual poverty is the CAUSE of material poverty, and not the other way around

And you can dismantle this line of thinking pretty quickly, too, by asking the person who espouses it a simple question: Are you saying you don’t have any convictions you’d fight for?

Because that is the root of the claim that ideology is really about greed. It’s a claim that no one has any moral convictions at all. In other words, it’s an admission of guilt by the person who makes it. 

Argument 5: The elites and the masses hold each other hostage. 

This is going to be a brief reformulation of an argument from Vaclav Havel. 

In the post-totalitarian world, the center of power becomes identical with the center of truth. That is to say, those people who are in power determine what is true, regardless of reality, and to be subject to power is to live within its understanding of truth.

Ideology becomes an increasingly core component of power, which provides it with both legitimacy and coherence. The significance of phenomena no longer derived from the phenomena themselves, but from their locus within the ideological context.

Power and ideology begin to serve each other in an increasingly vicious feedback loop, whereupon ritual itself, the ritualistic obedience to ideology, becomes the dictator, rather than any individual. Power becomes anonymous and leaders become interchangeable. 

Any person who fails to perform the rituals of ideological power is immediately ousted from the system. By performing these rituals, each person in the grip of the ideology compels others to accept the rules of the game and confirm the power which requires the rituals in the first place.

Each person helps the other to be obedient, becoming both victims and instruments of the ideology. Everyone, at every level, from the shop-keepers to the prime minister, is involved and enslaved. By pulling everyone into its power structure, the post-totalitarian system makes everyone an instrument of the auto-totality of society.

This is Havel’s argument. And Havel notes that there may be a degree of reluctance or even unwillingness in the complicity of the people with the post-totalitarian system of the ideology that grips them. Indeed, they may inwardly resist on some level. But in the post-totalitarian society, the higher your place in the hierarchy, the greater price of obedience and loyalty the ideology demands.

The people with the most power in the progressive system have the least freedom. They only have the power to do what the progressive ideology demands of them, and the moment they are insufficiently compliant, everyone else around them rushes in to fill the void.

It might be fair to say that, at the highest echelons of ideological power, the people there have moved beyond sincerity and cynicism, and having transcended this dichotomy, their only principle is to be fully instrumentalized by the ideology.

In other words, if the ideology demands pride parades, then they will believe that instituting pride parades is the moral thing to do, because there is no daylight between the demands of power and the progressive moral understanding.

When the hoi polloi accuse progressive leaders of cynicism, what they are really saying, and it’s a very shallow, contemptible utterance, honestly, is that they believe themselves to be even more moral than their leaders, even more dedicated to the moral understanding of power than the powerful.

Scott Alexander is a mincing leftist coward who will survey a thousand points of data that clearly indicate a heretical conclusion, and then shrug his shoulders and announce that no one can ever know what the data means, but he still has a way with words, and he called this the fifty Stalins argument,

One wishes to criticize Stalin, but the penalty for doing so is life imprisonment in a camp. The only allowable way then to express dissent is to say:

“Stalin, he is good, but he is not enough. What we need is fifty stalins!” This is what the progressive does when she accuses woke corporate leaders of being cynical. 

She doesn’t realize she is doing this. It’s all perfectly instinctive, to complain in a way that is safe and meaningless, in a way that, if it were taken seriously, would empower the powerful even more.

And the act of saying it causes her to believe what she is saying. This is how public declarations work, psychologically. When you make a statement publicly, it causes you to adjust your own belief of yourself, to think that the thing you have said is your real belief.

No one is immune to this kind of social pressure from within.

Conclusion

Alright, we have reached the end of part two. I know this has been a long journey and I want to thank you for sticking with me. I also want these ideas to be valuable to you. What does it all mean, Münzenberg, the Frankfurt School, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, American Malvern, John Murray Cuddihy, Vaclav Havel? 

The Gnosis of Equality, the Nemesis of Ignorance, the Ecological Eschatology, the endless Ordeals of Civility?

Why? Why should we know all this?

The first reason is to have a clear understanding of what we are fighting, of what must be destroyed. Many people — even most people — who have a dissident bent do not understand what they are dissenting from.

That is, people who have a contrarian tendency, a will to say “no” — they will say no to anything and everything, they barely care what they are saying no to, they learn a name like globalists or technocracy or professional managerial class and they say no to that

They project all their fears and frustrations upon a phantom.

They imagine some all powerful demiurge composed of jews and or illuminati or secret nazis who somehow simultaneously control the whole world, control every faction on the world stage, manufacture the news, wield impossible occult power, and yet, somehow, are also plotting and scheming to take over the world that they already control

And enact some kind of sinister new plan where we are even more enslaved, even more controlled, et cetera.

Well, I prefer to approach dissidence in a structured way. I know what I’m for and I know what I’m against. I’m not against authority. I’m not against technology. I’m not against capital or capitalism or wealth or power.

I’m against equality. I’m against the ideology I have spent the last ninety minutes describing to you. I like it when society gets bigger, more complex, more developed, I like it when we increase future optionality, and I like it when strength and excellence and beauty are exalted.

That’s why I am against equality, against the leveling impulse, against some tortured womanly definition of fairness. I want hierarchy, I want grandeur, I want greatness for the few against the many.

The American Civic Religion is the religion of weakness, of mediocrity, of ugliness, and its military and economic power are holdovers from an earlier time, when it was still capable of beauty and strength. It now squanders its inheritance in the service of increasing ugliness and exalting weakness.

And that disgusts me.

To triumph over the American Civic Religion, we must invent a new ideology which we SHALL synthesize from Christianity and from Nietzche, a religion which inverts every value of American Civility, which replaces equality with hierarchy, which recognizes its nemesis as EQUALITY ITSELF.

This will be our topic in part three, the final part of this series.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerohplovecraft.substack.com

This is episode 4, Toward a Functionalist Understanding of Religion. This is part one of a three-part series.

(You can find my other podcasts here)

In the first episode I will explain my functionalist theory of religion. Though I have many influences, this framework is original to me. 

In the second episode we will discuss the American Civic Religion through the lens of my functionalist theory.

In the third episode, we will talk about religions as organisms, the online right, and the possibility of Christo-Nietzschean synthesis.

But First, a Disclaimer

Today I am going to speak about the nature of religious sentiments.

This is an easy topic to understand if you can maintain an impartial disposition, but it is a nearly impossible topic to talk about, because it occupies a mental territory which is perpetually inflamed

In order to understand the nature of religious sentiments, one must view them “from the outside” — that is we must be able to look at them from the perspective of one who is not possessed by them

I am not suggesting you should abandon religion, in fact I think that is impossible, rather I am telling you that if you can emulate the intuitions of an unreligious person sincerely, with neither condemnation nor acceptance, then you can also broaden and deepen your perspectives as a man of faith.

This is much harder than it sounds, because most anyone who is sentient — and I must point out here that I believe a great many people, maybe even a majority, are not sentient. They have phenomenology and base desire but they lack a certain ineffable quality, an inner spark —

Most anyone who is sentient is governed by something quite like a religious sentiment, though often, and in our modern age in particular, he denies it

to the modern man, an important article of faith is that his religion is not a religion; it is the pure and self-evident truth about the world, informed by rationality and dispassionate observation

And a huge part of my message to you, to every single one of you, is that no matter what you believe, it’s retarded to think that your worldview is the pure and self-evident truth about the world

This is one of the many ways that revealed religion is better than deduced religion, because the former is self-aware, open and honest about the necessity of faith. 

For Christians, this is hardly a novel observation, I know. But here we have a sort of tension in this talk I am about to give, because there are two very different sorts of people who I think are probably listening to it, and so I have to couch every statement about religion in a kind of double disclaimer, one for the Christian, and one for the modern

And I contend that if you are a Christian, and you primarily try to justify your beliefs on the basis of evidence or rational argument, you are actually doing your faith a disservice.

He who lives by the sword dies by the sword, and he who pins his faith to empiricism and logic will see his faith broken on those very same instruments 

Now the atheist on the other hand scoffs at faith, usually, but he’s the bigger fool, as every Christian knows, because he has faith, but he lacks the honesty to admit those things he believes on the basis of faith.

Christians tend to suspect that when you talk about religion from the outside, it is your goal to undermine it. 

They are suspicious and understandably so because of the way their teachings have been abused in secular discourse especially in the last half century, let’s say

But I promise that’s not my intention here

I have no interest in dissuading anyone from holding religious views or from participating in religious life. Again, I do not believe such a thing is possible, because nature abhors a vacuum, and you can’t believe nothing

That’s right, there is not even one nihilist in the whole world. There’s no such thing as nihilism, it’s not possible. The man who proudly declares that he believes in nothing still esteems himself highly as a man who believes. He thinks his declaration is worth something, in other words. He believes in himself

When one religious sentiment disintegrates in the mind of a believer, a new sentiment always replaces it, usually a more primitive one

Although I am not a Christian myself, I was raised as a devout protestant, and in my youth my family changed to a new denomination, and we moved about as far from our previous beliefs as it was possible to move while staying within the Protestant tradition

As a result, I observed quite intimately that there is an essential fungibility between religious or ideological convictions of different flavors

(I know many of you will bristle at this claim, but I’m asking you to accept that it’s true psychologically, even if it’s not true theologically. This is a critical distinction, and making it is the key to understanding what I am here to talk about today)

What do we mean when we talk about religion

So I want to begin by defining religion, and explaining what I mean when I say that this talk is towards a functionalist definition of religion. 

Functionalism is the idea that we should try to define objects in terms of the functions they perform rather than in terms of any particular constitution

Often people have positive or negative associations to words which have nothing to do with the meaning of the word itself, which can make it impossible to think clearly about those words.

We’ve all observed this on twitter, I think, when someone you don’t know sees a tweet you’ve made and they really latch on to your usage of a particular word

It’s as if they’ve built up a kind of allergy to a triggering word, and they can’t hear it without calling up some long dead, far-away argument that possibly hinged on it

A functionalist approach tries to evade this problem by first acknowledging that the same word has different meanings to different people

And second, by trying to look beyond the word in order to understand what it signifies in terms of behaviors or functions.

In the case of the word religion, I see both positive and negative associations with this word from both christians and atheists.

Some Christians see Christianity as a religion, caveat it’s the only true religion, but they recognize it as part of a class of entities which also includes Judaism, Buddhism, and so on. 

For these Christians, they can recognize the shape of a religion in something like communism, wokism, and similar. In fact, it’s a common Christian refrain that, from their perspective it takes “just as much faith” to be an atheist.

We’ll come back to that.

I’ve also met Christians who see Christianity as something greater than a religion, who relegate all mere “religions” to the realm of falsehood. You can see, I think, the instrumental value in this type of self-understanding

For many atheists, they see religion as fundamentally a negative thing, as a “mind virus,” as something parasitical, or as a hoax or a con, something which exploits or controls its victims. This is an incredibly stupid position to hold, but it is common

I’ve also met atheists, and I am among them, who think that religion can be a noble thing, something that orders the passions and facilitates game-theoretic cooperation

And sometimes you will hear people say that a worldview, in order to be a “real” religion, must be ennobling or capture some particular value, maybe it has to be non-zero-sum for its practitioners, something like this

But we are interested in taking an outside view on religion today, which means that we want to reason about moral valuations without judging them, at least not too much

In general I claim that you should not strive to eliminate bias, that this corporate mantra against civil rights litigation is an attempt to do something impossible in the service of a goal that’s undesirable

To live and to be alive is to continually judge the world, to render YOUR judgment upon it, and the four letter word bias is an attempt to rob you of this power.

Regardless, this is a discursive arena that we should enter with impartiality, before we pass our judgment according to our good taste.

Varieties of religious experience

Taking a functionalist approach to religion means that we try to decompose religious belief into the various functions that it serves. 

The following taxonomy is based only on my personal observations and contemplations. I first proposed this taxonomy on twitter, five years ago, and for that reason I expect it will be unfamiliar to most of you.

In the interim I have made some small adjustments. I believe that each of these components of religious belief that I am about to enumerate fulfill an imminent psychological need that each person feels.

A man may not think of himself as religious; nevertheless he will—perhaps unwittingly—cobble together a worldview, usually in his youth, when these demands feel most pressing, in order to satisfy the following imperatives.

Gnosis

The first is what I call gnosis, which just means knowledge. I don’t want to confuse people and make them think of Gnosticism, which is something specific. 

But within Gnosticism, they believe that the world is an illusion, and when you see behind the curtain, when you acquire real knowledge of the world, that’s called gnosis. 

So all religious beliefs, every single one, begins with a concept which is structurally identical to this idea of gnosis.

in Marxism, they call it class consciousness, and they say everyone who doesn’t have it has something called false consciousness

Which is when people of the working class, in particular, act on behalf of the ruling class. The working class has a false consciousness because, instead of acting in their own interests, they have internalized the thought processes and ways of being which benefit only the bourgeoisie, their class enemy 

Marxism triumphs when the workers “wake up” from the false consciousness and learn to start acting on behalf of their own class

A more generalized version of this story is to say that there is a common, false understanding which the majority of people possess.

And there is a truer, better, rarefied understanding which you and your co-ideologists share. Awakening to the true understanding, acquiring gnosis, sets the insiders apart from the outsiders. 

Induction into the religion occurs when we have a revelation that necessitates a new way of being.

In many cases, there is an element of truth to a false consciousness story. And moreover, we can find examples of gnosis that in no way constitute a religion.

Most hobbyists, for example, possess an implicit understanding of gnosis. Specialty coffee enthusiasts, audiophiles, and Ray Peaters all set themselves apart by means of esoteric knowledge.

They look out and down on the unwashed masses who don’t know any better, who drink commodity coffee, or who listen to shit audio devices, or who haven’t awakened to the evil of seed oil and the value of a nice carrot salad

At this moment I make no claims about the truth or falsity of any body of esoteric knowledge. I only observe that there is a pattern.

The possession of esoteric knowledge makes the insiders feel special; as if they cracked the code, and now they are part of the secret club, the cool kids

Awakening from a false consciousness, by means of esoteric knowledge, fulfils a psychological need that everyone has, which allows them to build up a positive self-image cheaply. 

It allows them to feel better than everyone else—and I need to emphasize this—that’s not a bad thing. In fact it seems to be a necessary thing, what psychologists call “self-esteem.”

One of the things that first red-pilled me, — you see, red-pilled, that’s our term for acquiring gnosis — a very long time ago, was when I read in a psychology textbook that black people have the highest self-esteem of any race. And I thought to myself, doesn’t his undermine every racial narrative I’ve ever heard?

But to return to the quotidian: I have noticed that often a particular brand loyalty, such as a preference for a certain shoe or a car or a brand of tea can serve this function, can meet this need for gnosis. It doesn’t have to be profound, though it can be.

In a mass consumer society, the blandest, dumbest, easiest way to satisfy the need for this feeling of awakening is through consumption.

It’s possible to feel a meager kind of gnosis through what is called brand loyalty.

But I’ll give you a few more examples of some more respectable, classic instances of gnosis:

Christians believe that we are born into a life of sin through our fallen human nature. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of god. Accept salvation through Jesus to be redeemed

Buddhists believe that we exist in an endless cycle of reincarnation into suffering caused by desire. We must escape it by mastering our minds through meditation.

Veganism teaches that eating animals is sadistic and murderous and bloodthirsty. Omnivory is a great evil and we are oblivious to it, strangely complicit in animal suffering, which is no different from human suffering

Feminism teaches that everyone is constantly unconsciously oppressed by patriarchal and phallocentric norms and assumptions which suppress and devalue female ways of knowing and being.

Antiracism teaches exactly the same thing as Feminism, except the sacred cows are black instead of female. In any case, they, the sacred cows, could lose weight.

Now you get the idea. All of these things are examples of gnosis, of a secret knowledge that divides the world in half. So we’ll move on. 

Nemesis

The next component of religious experience I want to examine is something I call Nemesis, which I mean in the sense of an archenemy.

There is a funny thing about this word, Nemesis, in that it also refers to inescapable divine retribution, and the nemesis works best, in a religious context, if it’s something the initiate can never personally overcome.

Having a far-away, abstract rival that you view as the principal source of wrongness in the world gives your life a sense of drama, a kind of focus and narrativity which would be hard to acquire otherwise.

For some people, perhaps a personal rivalry can fulfill this need, but for most, and for moderns especially, the nemesis is a kind of inversion and antithesis of the divine.

The poet John Donne wrote in his poem The Prohibition: 

But thou wilt lose the style of conqueror,

If I, thy conquest, perish by thy hate.

Then, lest my being nothing lessen thee,

If thou hate me, take heed of hating me.

Life is pointless without conflict, and so a sense of ultimate conflict bestows a sense of ultimate purpose. The nemesis is at once a Schelling point, a unifying enemy, and also a scapegoat, who can be blamed for any human contingency without implicating anyone in particular.

It is not only a comforting way to evade responsibility, but a very practical one, which is often necessary to smooth over human relations.

Again, I’ll give you some examples:

For Christians, the nemesis is Satan, the angel fallen from heaven, the first whig, a rebel against God. He will promise you many good things, and then he will destroy you out of hatred. He will tempt you away from the straight and narrow with lies and pleasant sins.

For Marxists, the enemy is capitalism. For unwitting marxists, they tend to say “the corporations” or “corporate interests” instead, but it’s the identical sentiment. All the evil in the world comes because capitalism makes us do it. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, right? Everything you do as a capitalist is bad. You can only get redemption by abolishing the system.

For feminists, it’s the patriarchy. For Wignats, it’s the jews. For antiracists it’s the Whites, or the concept of Whiteness, a distinction they constantly and intentionally elide.

For Buddhists, I think this is the funniest one, maybe, for Buddhists the nemesis is your own self. It is each person’s internal attachments, desires, their belief in themself as a self which is the enemy. That’s what Buddhists are trying to destroy.

So we can see that there is a relationship between the gnosis and the nemesis. Often a key component of the gnosis, of secret knowledge that inducts you into the religious practice, is the knowledge of the nemesis.

The nemesis is the thing that is preventing most people from grasping the gnosis. It’s the binary opposition. Gnosis is the inside, and nemesis is the outside.

The existence of the gnosis implies the existence of the nemesis, as we say on the internet. And it’s instrumental, it’s useful, in most cases, to believe that most people are hapless rubes who are deceived.

That means there is hope for them, that means you just have to bring the gnosis to them, or maybe some great world-clearing event will do so. And then you’ll finally win. I’m sure that will make you feel better.

Now we will take a short break.

Ecstasy

So we are discussing my six-factor framework of religious belief, and so far we have spoken of gnosis — the revelation that necessitates a new way of being, and nemesis, the antagonistic entity that keeps it from you

The next element of religious experience I want to highlight is what I call ecstasy, which more or less contains all the varieties of what you might call mystical experience — 

And these types of experiences tend to be pretty similar across every religion or ideology, no matter what its actual content is. 

William James said the four qualities of a mystical experience are its passivity, its transience, its noeticism, and its ineffability. 

That is, he thought a mystical experience was something beyond the mystic’s ability to control, and of a limited duration, and that it transmits knowledge to the mystic, and that the experience is beyond words, that it can’t be described, and has to be experienced

Now I want to quibble with at least those last two qualities. I think mystical experiences can absolutely be described with words, in fact I don’t even think it’s hard. 

People who have these types of experiences are very attached to them, they think that mystical experiences are profound and profoundly important, but the thing they can’t convey in words is the good feeling that they had, because all feelings are on some level ineffable

We can only describe feelings by allusion to a common experience we assume all people share. When I say I’m happy or sad, I can’t really say “what it feels like to be happy” — we rely on a shared understanding for that

So mystical experiences are ineffable in the trivial sense that all subjective experience is ineffable, but they aren’t superlatively ineffable, they don’t exist on some higher plane of unspeakability than any other subjective quality.

Mystical experience is a particular cocktail of emotions, of feelings, which aren’t even that hard to invoke. Those feelings are multiple and simultaneous, they are an overlapping sense of humility, joy, smallness, largeness, confidence, contentedness, optimism, fear, ignorance, and wisdom. 

All at the same time, and that’s why it’s a bit overwhelming, and it’s a lot, but it’s all things you can feel in other capacities

If there is something really unique about mystical experience it’s that many of the emotions we feel while we are in them are overwhelming and paradoxical. A simultaneous sense of fear and optimism, or of ignorance and wisdom.

Those things don’t make a lot of sense at the same time.

That is, we feel ourselves to be very small and limited, we get a feeling of how little we know, and yet we also feel very wise, as if we’ve glimpsed something profound and previously hidden that encompasses all of existence, like we’ve seen behind the curtain

Now I claim—and this is something that tends to offend a lot of people—that there is no actual ground truth behind these mystical experiences. That the ostensibly “noetic” quality to mystical experience is an illusion

And that the reason no one can articulate these supposedly profound truths is because they have no content, because there is no specific knowledge contained in them

Rather, in the mystical state of mind, we are taken by the feeling of profundity, of revelation, divorced from any actual profundity or revelation

Any concrete propositional statements that people seem to derive from mystical experience tends to be vague platitudes about love or the interconnectedness of all things, saccharine banalities, echoes of moral or spiritual ideas that are already latent in everyone owing to our shared culture

And without making this about me, I will note here that I have spent a fair bit of time seeking mystical experiences, through fasting, prayer, meditation, time alone in nature, and also through drugs, rock concerts, and sex.

I believe I have had mystical and ecstatic experiences through both hedonistic and ascetic pathways. And I am not impressed. 

I find such experiences to be ultimately masturbatory. I have never met a mystic who seemed to be an expert on anything but getting high on his mystical practice of choice. 

I have some respect for the ascetic mystic who at least finds his ecstasy through discipline and self-mastery, that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it

But I myself am quite atypical in this regard. Most people seem to thirst for religious ecstasy in the same way they thirst for gnosis and nemesis.

There are some common pathways to religious ecstasy. Most of them hinge on expectation: there is a certain feedback loop between mental openness to ecstasy and a belief that you will enter it. 

One of the best-documented and best-understood ecstasies is Buddhist Meditation: dissociating the mind by focusing on repetitive stimulus can cause you to enter an altered state of consciousness where your sensation of yourself is greatly reduced

It may be interesting to note that in Matthew 6, Jesus speaks against the practice. “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions”. It’s almost as if he is speaking against Buddhist style mantras specifically 

Some Catholics also practice a form of dissociative meditation, sometimes even by accident when they pray the rosary over and over.

We can see a kind of syncretism, perhaps an emergent syncretism between Buddhism and Catholicism in the writings of St Teresa of Avila.

But even without an explicit tradition of meditation, Christian prayer can sometimes veer into the ecstatic

Similarly, charismatic Christians may engage in glossolalia, a practise also associated with forms of primitive shamanism. Sometimes this seems to affect the enthralled involuntarily, as if it’s some kind of hysteria.

Psychedelic drugs such as mushrooms, acid, and ayahuasca can also induce glossolalia, you know this verbal incontinence, where people say a lot of nonsensical syllables. And these drugs are also famous for inducing feelings of ego loss and the sensation of a spiritual presence

Church services, political rallies, and rock concerts, all of which are very nearly the same thing, can instigate what is known as the ecstasy of crowds, wherein one feels overcome by a sense of group being.

And all these kinds of gatherings make use of music, which can also induce a kind of trance and an altered state of mind.

Now this is not an exhaustive list, of course.

The fact that all religious practices seem to share the same types of ecstasies and the same pathways to ecstasy gives rise to what is known as perennialism, to the belief that deep down, all religions are really the same religion. 

That there’s a secret grand unified religion, and all the different names of god and the different rituals and prayers and so on are all superficial attributes that primitive monkeys have built up around this actually real, invariant, transcendental experience that all spiritual ecstasies somehow point to.

Aleister Crowley argues for this perspective in his books on occultism, and ends up playing an almost perfect foil to Christianity, which seizes upon his perennialism and says, yes, 

that grand unifying mystical religion is the worship of satan, that’s the reason all earthly religions have these mystical practices, which are conspicuously absent from Christianity, a few cranks and heretics excluded

But there’s a strictly practical, functional reason that ecstatic states are tightly coupled in religious beliefs, which is that people in ecstatic states are highly suggestible. They become credulous, they will believe just about anything that is presented to them

A person in an ecstatic state is hypnotized, which allows them to receive religious teachings uncritically. It provides a method for a priest or a teacher to spread and synchronize his teachings amongst all his followers.

This is very important for the propagation of religion, because when you try to share your beliefs with another person, they never quite copy perfectly, but when you transmit beliefs to someone in an ecstatic state, you get a much higher-fidelity copy

Ken Kesey, a highly charismatic individual, in any case, managed to start a cult around himself overnight when he discovered that he could give his followers acid and instantly throw them into a high-intensity ecstatic state. It was like a cult in a bottle.

We mentioned music also, how music can induce an ecstatic state, especially when combined with a crowd or with drugs, and the song lyrics can become especially important here, because they often contain an ideological payload.

A lot of the time, people might have mystical experiences alone, with no one to influence them in the moment. In that case, the mystic tends to hypnotize himself, or to reaffirm past convictions that were placed in his head by society.

And there is also another type of ecstatic pathway, which is a bit different to the others, and in a William James sense, it probably doesn’t pass the test.

I am speaking, of course, about sexuality. Sex is an ecstatic experience, but it isn’t strictly speaking a mystical experience. It is neither ineffable nor passive nor noetic, though it is transient. But despite this, some religious practices do incorporate sexuality into their ecstatic component.

We think of tantra, in particular, but various forms of occultism and witchcraft have also made use of sacred sexual practices.

Arguably, from a functionalist perspective, there is an aspect of modern progressivism which also sacralizes sexuality — specifically, they sacralize a ritualized form of sex called BDSM

BDSM has an elaborate system of rules, ceremonial clothing, and techniques, which are for the most part non-procreative, and which seek to induce a state of sexual ecstasy in the participants.

Most BDSM participants probably don’t consider their practice to be mystical, but these practices bear a striking resemblance to other ritualized ecstasies. People who engage in these practices consider it to be a form of sexual liberation, which is indeed one of the sacred values of the American civic religion.

So to wrap up, William James says the mystical experience is passive, transient, noetic, and ineffable, but I say that’s wrong. 

It’s paradoxical — consisting of intense and contradictory emotions

credulous — being a state of extreme suggestibility

ecstatic — it feels good even when it feels bad

And banal — there’s no propositional content inside of it

Taboo

This brings us to our next topic, which is taboos. 

All religions or ideologies contain taboos, which is to say, things that are prohibited. There is an etymology to the word taboo that floats around, that it means “to mark an intensity” — the internet tells me this etymology is false or at least dubious

But regardless of whether it’s etymologically true, it is psychologically true. Taboos satisfy the will to superstition, as if you could somehow protect yourself from all the evil in the world this this one weird trick. Just don’t say the name of god. Just don’t wear a mask. Just stop eating gluten.

But the taboo is not so much a marker of intensity as it is a conveyor of intensity. As soon as some mundane action is placed behind a velvet curtain—as soon as it becomes forbidden—then it also becomes intense and exciting.

For example if all women walked around bare-breasted, it seems likely that the breast would cease to titillate.

[hello I am friend. I have sugars. You must give]

Often, those things which are taboo are also pathways to ecstasy. In primitive, animistic religions, there is a notion of something called Holy Time. Holy time is a time of jubilee, or festival. During holy time, sacred taboos become inverted, and that which is ordinarily prohibited may become mandatory.

Prohibitions on murder may be excepted for the sake a of ritual human sacrifice, or maybe we think of the Jewish high priest entering the holy of holies on yom kippur. Something he ordinarily could not do, which would be taboo.

But in more sophisticated religions, this distinction does not exist. In Christianity for example, all time is holy. The Jewish taboo against entering the holy of holies, the dwelling place of God, is inverted, because now God lives in everyone’s heart, and all time belongs to God.

The most common types of taboos are dietary, linguistic or sexual. I think the idea of sacred prohibitions may be the strongest and the most primitive religious instinct of all

It’s pretty rare to meet a person who doesn’t follow any dietary taboos, though most people may not think of it that way

Probably when we think of food taboos, we think of kosher laws, or of Hindus who don’t eat beef, something like this

And from an evolutionary perspective we must at least suspect that we have an evolved hunger for taboos to help protect us against poisonous plants, or animals that carry parasites

But the instinct can only evolve in a scattershot sort of way, and it seems that we long to be told which foods to avoid

Following a dietary restriction gives us a sense of purity, and also a sense of identity and community. A dietary taboo sets us apart, and it becomes a vehicle for belonging

A few examples:

Mormons consume no alcohol or caffeine. 

Catholics may avoid meat on Friday, and they even create their own personal taboos to uphold during lent.

Korean Buddhists avoid alliums such as onions and garlic, claiming that these foods excite the mind and disrupt meditation 

Vegans extend dietary taboos farther than almost anyone else, inventing a diet that totally removes them from ordinary society, eating many things that are only possible in techno-industrial society

Jews and Muslims both eschew pork, among other things.

Very well, but what about linguistic taboos? We see that most languages contain rude words, and in more insular communities, they often develop their own idiosyncratic rules about which words you can and cannot say

In wider anglophone society, most people don’t care if you take the name of god in vain, but among Christians, many of them still observe this taboo

In progressive society, which is to say, all of American society and many of its vassal states, they no longer worship the Christian God, but they have retained the taboo

Progressive society is negrolatrous, which means that they worship Africans. Consequently, and owing I think to the trace of Christianity in progressive society, it is forbidden to ever say the name of God.

I am going to slightly digress here and violate a frogtwitter taboo and point out that whereas the right dehumanizes blacks by identifying them as subhuman, inferior, the left dehumanizes blacks by identifying them as super humans, as gods, as superior.

To the right, blacks can only sin, and to the left, blacks are incapable of sin.

N****r. The name of the progressive god is N****r. You can’t say it. It’s forbidden. They have other linguistic taboos for their lesser deities too. Gays are almost as sacred as blacks, so you can’t say faggot either

In earlier eras, when sex was considered sacred, many of our taboos revolved around genitals or sexual acts. You couldn’t say fuck or cunt or ass or tits. Now we still think of those words as lewd, but they are basically socially acceptable and no one would care at all if a public figure said them.

Now, sex has been radically desacralized, and race has taken its place. Now, most of our taboo words center around race. 

A brief note on this — there are progressive sexual taboos, but just as Christianity inverts jewish dietary laws, progressivism inverts Christian sexual laws. It demands sex out of wedlock, it demands sodomy, it demands that the woman — not the man — is the head of the household.

Anyway, if George Carlin gave his famous seven words you can’t say on television speech today, the words would be N*gg*r f*gg*t k*k* d*k* tr*nny sp*c ch*nk or something like that (to print them we must remove all the vowels, as in the tetragrammaton)

But this would be unthinkable, unsayable, much more unsayable than Carlin’s original list was at the time

And I feel I should mention that George Carlin was a shitlib, not funny at all, and his only innovation was convincing his audience that sanctimonious political sermonizing somehow constituted standup comedy.

Whereas I am trying to convince you that standup comedy somehow constitutes sanctimonious political sermonizing.

 Most comedians today have followed his template, as sanctimony is much easier than humor, especially for so called “female comedians”

In any case, the taboo can also sometimes take the form of an anti-taboo, a negative image in which saying the word, or eating the forbidden food, becomes a requirement for membership in a rival group.

In Yiddish they call this a shibboleth, though it’s a word that most English speakers have also adopted. 

Young men especially desire to transgress, so these things have instant appeal. In our case for example, my friends, we find it expedient to say certain words if only to signal to each other that our minds are not hobbled by progressive moral intuitions.

It is hard to trust anyone who is afraid to blaspheme against the progressive god, at least in private, because we suspect such a person still worships them. 

Eschatology

OK. The fifth component of religious belief is Eschatology. 

If we know the beginning and we know the end then we know our place in the world. Eschatology frames humanity, and it gives us a feeling of knowing where we stand

A shared anticipation of the end gives us something to look forward to. On some level, no one wants to be the middle child. If the end is imminent, then we are very special, the last people, the transitional generation into a phase shift for the entire world

There’s a kind of grandiosity and simultaneously a parochiality to this, to believing that the world ends with you, personally, which is part of the appeal.

Marxists believe that there will one day be a true and glorious uprising of socialism, the real socialism, the kind that has never been tried before, and then — 

you know Trotsky really wrote this, at least according to Jonathan Bowden, he said when socialism was perfected and man was finally free of the burdens of capitalism, there would be a wagner or a shakespeare on every corner

You know what?  I said we wouldn’t pass judgment but we are going to stop and judge a little bit.

If you add it up pound for pound, Marxists are more delusional than any famously crazy cult you’ve ever heard of. Jim jones, Keith Raniere, Scientology— they have nothing on the average communist 

Moving on—Singularitarians, of the Ray Kurzweil sort, but also of the Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander sort, they roughly believe in this idea of the technological singularity, 

that a self-bootstrapping intelligent computer will become so smart and so powerful that it renders all existing human modalities obsolete, discovers new laws of physics, and develops seemingly magical powers using its superior understanding of science

Some singularitarians think this could happen in a single day, possibly, an AI becoming god, because it will be able to think so fast and design new improvements for itself as a form of compounding interest

Once the threshold is reached, boom, they call that AI takeoff. And as fantastical as this sounds it’s still less insane than communism

I enjoy these kinds of more esoteric eschatology but obviously the really well known example is Christian eschatology, the second coming of Christ in glory, to judge the quick and the dead. 

The trumpet sounds and the resurrection of the body and all this.

But even very normal people, that is, normal modern day people, who believe in equality, in democracy, who don’t go to church or believe in anything all that strongly

People who ostensibly go outside and touch grass and who have the ability to discern whether or not this is a Wendy’s

Those people also subscribe to a cataclysmic vision of the end—and we’ll talk more about this shortly—

Most normal people satisfy their need for eschatology via the mythology of climate change. I am not saying that no ecological change is occurring—

only that the nature and cause of those changes is poorly understood and wildly exaggerated—some of you may be old enough to remember the catastrophic predictions of the late 90s

They used to tell us that by 2010 many of the world’s major cities would be halfway under water, due to rising ocean levels

The total ecological disaster, the one that justifies unlimited government spending, severe austerity for the masses,

the disaster where all the plants and the fish die and the weather gets so extreme that we have to live underground

That disaster is always ten years away, and when ten years elapse, oh, the science gets better every year, there was an error in the model, now in 2030, that’s when you’ll see the real eco disaster

This same pattern is repeated all throughout history with every doomsday prediction that has ever been made

You may have heard of the great disappointment for example

The world will end tomorrow, they will tell you, and when tomorrow comes and the world is still here. Next Tuesday then, assuredly

Because these end of the world stories fulfill, again, a psychological need that people have to believe they are the last

Because having a sense of the end in many ways can give you something to live for, even if it’s a false sense and a false end

There’s something exciting, titillating, monumentous about contemplating the end of the world, a salacious enjoyment, a bit like reading a trashy clickbait header

Telos

Anyway. In the earlier version of this taxonomy, my final component of religion was what I called evangelism. That is, the engine inside of the religious experience that compels its adherents to spread it. I have revised this understanding.

It’s true that, in order to be a vital religion, the matrix of religious experiences has to spread. It has to be a replicator. But it’s probably better to think of evangelism as a rent that the religion extracts from the adherent, instead of as a behavior that fulfills a psychological need

It’s true that some people exercise their will to power in evangelistic terms, and we’ll talk more about meme replication in part three of this talk. But for now, we will relegate this behavior under the more general term “telos”

The sixth component of religious experience is “telos” — a greek word that means “end” or “purpose” —  and that can sometimes include evangelism, especially in Christianity 

I have chosen this word to maintain a certain greek-ish flavor to all of the concepts, herein, but the better way to think of it is “score keeping”

what thing, in other words, does the adherent do for its own sake, as if life were a game and the goal is to have as many points as possible at the end, what then would be a point?

this is subtly different from asking, what is the meaning, or to be more playful, what is the point of life?

instead it is asking, when all of your needs are met, what do you do with your leisure time? Often we think of leisure nowadays as people taking vacations or languishing in idle comfort. 

but this is not the true meaning of leisure. At the least it used to mean a time for exploration or research, one could read for leisure, or follow scientific pursuits for example.

many of the great discoveries of the British royal society were acts of leisure

but when we see Christians devoting their time to making new converts, or progressives doing volunteer activism to make the world uglier and gayer,

when we see someone working in a soup kitchen or doing charitable work, we should understand that as a kind of leisure activity as well

because they are doing something wholly unnecessary to the exigencies of life. 

Telos, in the Religio-Functionalist sense that I intend it, tells us how one ought to arrange one’s life in order to accumulate the most treasures in heaven. It’s the logic of score-keeping

i think when you say it that way sounds crass, maybe selfish or déclassé. But this is the crass truth of all religious practice, is it not?

God will reward me for my faithfulness, for my devotion, for my piety, my submission!

Of course Christians at least have an implicit understanding of Goodhart’s law. That’s why they teach that salvation is not by works, but by grace. 

The grace of god isn’t something you minmax, because it’s illegible, irrational, it’s a gift given freely to all. But Christians still have their scorekeeping, 

they want to win the most converts for Christ, not out of a desire to keep score of course, but because God commands it, because Christian love demands it

Buddhists believe that Enlightenment is the point you are trying to score. After that perhaps there are deeper levels of enlightenment, more karma to purify, who knows.

Did you ever hear of a Buddhist who stopped meditating after becoming enlightened? Of course not! That’s the logic of Buddhist score keeping.

But I think we have to look at revealed preference when we think about this, too. How does the modern man keep score?

Drugs, casual sex, harvesting internet clout or lazing about on his ass in front of the television~~

these are all harmless vices compared to the scorekeeping of so called high status individuals, whose preferred point system is supporting progressive causes

Telos tells us what actions to esteem. It is a prescription for the way that we realize our moral values, our moral understanding. 

In most religions, a major part of the scorekeeping is tied up in evangelism. Vegans wish to make more vegans, for example. But not all religions are evangelistic.

Jews want to make more jews, but they usually do this by procreating. Religion is highly heritable, after all. 

Missionaries who dig wells and build schools are investing in the fertility of poor, faraway places as a way to memetically capture the children, trading capital to propagate ideology

Islam spreads by the sword, imposing jizya upon nonbelievers, incentivizing them to convert with social and economic pressure. Christians conquer through a kind of domineering generosity, muslims through war and invasion

In the past, Christians also spread through conquest. Constantine is probably the most famous example.

Scientologists set up reading rooms and offer free dianetics analysis, “personality tests” and other forms of consultation that appear to be a kind of psychotherapy or medical intervention

Marxists exploit an idiosyncrasy of developmental psychology, teaching a doctrine of seizing the property of the rich, appealing to young people at a time in their life when they have little property, when they most covet the possessions of their elders

So it’s a quirk of psychology, they can get in the brain at a formative time, and the moral judgment sticks long after the urgency has passed. People get stuck in their beliefs, whatever they land on in their early 20s usually.

But this is only one of the ways that religions keep score. The other way is through conspicuous sacrifice, which is a form of virtue signaling. And the more expensive the signal, the better.

I think most people by now are at least acquainted with the concept of virtue signaling. But this term has been poorly understood by the masses. Most people seem to use this term to mean hypocrisy, that is, they think that if someone is signaling virtue it indicates an underlying lack of the virtue being signaled.

In fact the opposite is true.

The whole point of a virtue signal is that it is authentic. The way that the signaler signifies authenticity is by sending a signal which is “hard to fake.” If someone tells you they support trans rights, that’s a cheap signal. Anyone can say that, and it proves nothing.

But if that same person donates a lot of money to trans activists, then we are very inclined to believe them. “A lot” of money here means an amount of money that would feel like “a lot” to the person in question. For a normal person it might be a thousand dollars, it might be ten thousand. For a billionaire it might be millions of dollars.

It is impossible to cynically donate money to a cause, because at the end of the day, you really did take actions that advanced that cause. It does not even matter if you were reticent to donate that money, how you felt about it.

You cannot donate money insincerely any more than you can read illiterately. It’s a contradiction. So the meaning of a signal is evaluated by how hard it is to fake.

The other kind of hard-to-fake signal is to sacrifice time or other scarce resources, such as children, to the cause. 

a sacrifice is a hard to fake virtue signal, which means it is a transaction between a man, his community, and his beliefs. 

a sacrifice allows a man to buy a better reputation in his community by sacrificing his resources.

so there is always a selfish component in any sacrifice, because there is social value and hedonic value to the person making it

naive retards believe that if a sacrifice has a selfish upside, it’s not real. They think that it has to be a pure cost

in other words, they demand that a sacrifice be a zero or negative sum game, where no value is created for anyone

we witness this kind of stupidity in many ideologies, but it’s especially prevalent in communism and low iq Christians

a good ideology, one that is uplifting, is one that harnesses the sacrifice into a positive sum transaction. 

But there’s also this idea from Georges Bataille, who had many interesting things to say on the topic of religion, and he believed in something he called the Accursed Share

The Accursed Share is the idea that there’s an excess of energy in everything we do, as for example most of the sun’s energy doesn’t fall on any planet or anywhere at all. we only capture a tiny, tiny fraction of solar energy

And the rest just diffuses out in space, pointlessly, a glorious waste

But Bataille suggests that the same is true of human endeavors, and that we have have to spend our own excesses in a lavish and sumptuous way, or else it is destined to be used catastrophically, destructively, such as in revolution, war, mass violence

There’s something poetic in this, almost as if we have to mimic the environment that has given rise to us, that our energy has come to the sun, and most of it is wasted, and we must in turn waste most of our energy

But I don’t think there’s any kind of logical underpinning in Bataille’s understanding, it’s not a rational conception, but it’s a striking observation

And when we look at the west today, we see that all of us, even our poorest people, are rich beyond the wildest imaginings of past eras

It is now a hallmark of poverty to be obese to the point of illness. This is the affliction of a disastrously wealthy society

And when we look at the ways that we religiously expend our excesses, it’s hard not to see things like diversity, equity, and inclusion as a kind of accursed share, as a way of lavishly and foolishly burning our excess wealth.

To Sum Up:

a functionalist approach to understanding religion tries to look at the various aspects of religious practice and experience.

as dispassionately as possible, we try to examine the different beliefs that the adherent has, how they relate to those beliefs, and how those beliefs interact with the world

i have identified six components of religious belief:

gnosis - the life-changing hidden knowledge

nemesis - the enemy who wants to hide it from you

ecstasy - the transcendent mental states that are given to the elect

taboo - the forbidden actions which those with gnosis understand to avoid

eschatology - a model of how the world will end

telos  - a prescription for how to spend your surpluses beyond the necessity of survival

Now I want to talk a little bit about the way these pieces interact with each other at a macro level. 

When we look at the six-factor functional analysis of religion, we can see many of these concepts can stand independently as units of belief and behavior. A taboo or a unit of gnosis can stand on its own, and people will propagate it, even if it’s not connected to anything else

Many superstitions or dietary taboos are this way in particular. You find all kinds of trends around supplements, or beliefs that certain foods are bad for you in a secret way, or morally bad, but those taboos exist independently, and they aren’t necessarily connected to a larger complex of ideas

For example gluten-free diets are a kind of dietary taboo. A small number of people actually do have gluten intolerance, but there are far more people eating gluten-free foods than is medically necessary.

And this taboo is not connected to any kind of eschatology, telos, nemesis, or ecstasy. Similarly, we may see pathways to ecstasy, such as through certain psychedelic drugs, or through something like ASMR, as corny as that sounds

These things aren’t connected to taboos, to eschatology, etc, either. So these things can stand alone. But in order for a single unit of behavior to become a religion, it has to fill out, maybe not all of the slots, but most of them, and people have to feel compelled to spread the complex of behaviors and ideas there-constituted as a package

It’s also not strictly necessary for every slot to be filled out. Christianity does not natively contain any ecstatic pathways. I have mentioned how there are some heretical offshoots of Christianity which do include ecstatic components

Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians engage in ecstatic glossolalia and in snake-handling. Some Catholics, as I noted earlier, do something similar to Buddhist meditation in the tradition of St. Teresa of Avila. But these are not standard Christian behaviors.

Christianity contains many taboos, but out of the box, it does not contain any dietary taboos, either. Buddhism, on the other hand, is light on eschatology, though it’s not entirely absent, and it seldom conceives of a nemesis in the way that something like Christianity does, though I make a mild case for it.

But what I claim is that people have a psychological need for all of these things, for gnosis, nemesis, ecstasy, eschatology, taboo, and telos. And when their religion isn’t meeting one of those needs, they find something to fill the gap.

You see this all the time, the missing slot in the religious idea complex becomes an opening for a rival religion to colonize someone and convert them. 

I’ve known Christians who became vegan, for example, and then this led them all the way to full blown atheism followed by progressivism. Because Christianity specifically repudiates dietary taboos — Jesus said, “it’s not that which goeth into a man’s mouth, but that which comes out of it, that makes him unclean”

And that may be shocking and interesting if you’re trying to convert people who have strict dietary laws, but it fails to live up to a psychological need that I think is mostly innate and instinctive.

And once you have the first vegan doctrine in your mind, that becomes a wedge, it becomes a pathway, to start introducing ideas about climate change eschatology, about right and wrong and the gnosis of animal suffering, and so on, and so on

Sometimes it doesn’t even take a missing slot, just a more powerful — what I mean is a more salient — belief to fill an already existing slot. Sometimes you can graft half a religion onto an existing religion, and then you get a mutation which is a kind of synthesis.

You can come along with a new piece of gnosis, maybe a new eschatological vision or a new set of taboos, and that can feel new and exciting, especially to people for whom their current gnosis feels like a default condition.

I’ll give you several examples here: a majority of democrat voters — progressives — self-identify as Christian. But they believe that racism is a sin, and they subscribe to racial language taboos, they believe in climate change as eschatology…

We’ll get into this a lot more in the next episode, but these people end up adopting a whole new set of beliefs, and yet they still think of themselves as Christian, they don’t see a discontinuity at all. 

They may be nominally Christian, but they are functionally progressive, because when we look at different facets of their belief structure

Heaven and hell and salvation and sin have taken a back seat to equality and diversity and social justice.

And since it’s topical, I’m going to give you a second example, something we see a lot in the last year maybe, a kind of revival of christian quasi-nazism, where the nemesis is the jews, the shibboleth is naming the jews, 

the gnosis is something like the thesis of Kevin MacDonald’s book Culture of Critique, wherein he describes jews as having a “group evolutionary strategy” centered around ethnic nepotism. I’m not making any comments about the truth or falsity of this.

But all this gets tacked on to Christianity, which has always contained some antisemitic undercurrents owing to the fact that it is fundamentally an offshoot of Judaism, (not of modern rabbinical Judaism, mind you, which is a relatively recent invention)

And the result is that Christians come to believe that Christianity has always been centered around jew-hatred, and they reduce the actual content of Christianity to a couple of slogans, in precisely the way the progressives do. Nominally they are Christian, but functionally they have raised antisemitism to the level of a religion

I have a lot of contempt for the antisemites here, not because they hate jews, I don’t care who you hate, I endorse racism. My contempt isn’t a defense of jews, it’s a hatred of idiots. 

If these people had their way they would create a society every bit as tyrannical and anarchical as the progressive society which we currently occupy, and anyone with an IQ over 84 can see that

And what I would like you to take away from all this is not some moral judgment of progressivism or antisemitism or any other religious practice besides.

What’s interesting to me about this is not so much the content of any particular cluster of religious ideas, but rather the ways that those ideas scatter and coalesce and recombine, 

And I’m interested in relationships that they form both with themselves and with the humans who hold them.

In the next episode we’ll focus on the American Civic Religion, and we’ll talk about Ordeals of Civility, and about the possibility of cynicism in religious belief. 

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerohplovecraft.substack.com

Part 1

It’s time for a difficult conversation about race in America. We used to hear this a lot

It was a buzzphrase of the late Obama era, and of the early trump years. Y’all ain’t ready for that conversation. You remember this

I think this conversation has come and gone. I think we had it at gunpoint, in 2020, in the summer of George

But that never was a conversation, was it? It was only ever a lecture, a kind of nagging, a kind of scolding, based on no reality at all, only on hysterical — and predominantly female — delusions. 

The other side of the conversation, our side, the white man’s side, that side never gets published or broadcast anywhere in so called “respectable” outlets

Truth is, that half of the conversation is illegal. That conversation will get you fired. We live in country which is systematically racist against black people but also black people have a sacred name that if any white person says it even once, he gets fired and black people have a license to beat him.

That’s not written into the law, it’s not de jure, but it is de facto lèse-majesté, a rule against insulting the king.

And this is one of the many pitfalls of the conversation about race. And I think there is no value in trying to have this conversation with your friends or your coworkers or even your family, unless you know they are already sympathetic.

The way we win isn’t by some grassroots evangelical mission to the man on the street. We accomplish nothing by sending racist witnesses door to door with a copy of the bell curve. 

The way we win this argument is by broadcasting these truths, with authority and power, from the biggest megaphones we can get hold of. That’s the only way people recognize truth in the mass media regime.

And the truth is, the first time they hear it, they will resist. Or get angry. Or deny it. But then one day they see something in their own lives that they can’t make sense of any other way.

So that’s when they find themselves — and honestly it’s a very painful moment, for most people — because they think it’s evil to be racially aware, so we have to be sensitive to the intellectual — and spiritual — journey that each individual person takes when they come to us.

Debating is fruitless. No one is ever convinced by watching debates. When you watch a debate between two people, you always walk away convinced that your champion won, and the other team lost. 

It galvanizes your enemies against you, it doesn’t win people over.

You’re not going to have some Ben Shapiro moment where you destroy the libs with FACTS and LAWGIC. That’s not the goal.

The goal is a kind of seduction, it’s to tell a story, a story that most people won’t want to hear, but which is darkly appealing, and then let them come to you

NPC Linear Dialog

And the beautiful thing about this process of seduction is that it’s not a secret. In fact it may be more successful if we are open about it, if we are audacious

So I will give you an overview of the dialog tree of every conversation you’ll ever have about race. These talking points are predictable, entrenched, and almost automatic

The reason I will explain this is that it’s a conversation many people have within themselves, when they wrestle with these topics

It’s quite remarkable to me, in fact, because I don’t think this is something anyone teaches to anyone else. 

It seems to be an emergent pattern in our collective consciousness, an accidental byproduct of our propaganda machine.

If you ever talk to a shitlib about race, they will say the following five things, probably in this exact order. 

1: Race isn’t real. 

2: OK even if it is real, so what?

3: Why do you know all this racist pseudoscience? Don’t you know that’s been debunked? 

4: What kind of pathetic person derives their self worth from these narratives of racial superiority?

5: You’re a racist piece of shit.

Anger is the last step, because that’s the main emotion you feel when you’re in a state of cognitive dissonance. If you think about race and you get to the end of the conversation, then you start at the beginning again next time

Because if you have this conversation internally, or some version of it, really you are arguing with an internalized version of society itself, one which you have absorbed and taken upon yourself

And that image is something that controls you, not always in a bad way, but always in a way that will cause you to align with the herd

This is the conversation you’ll have every time, it’s as linear as any old video game. After level five the conversation is over. 

We will address each of these claims in turn, beginning with the idea that race exists only as a social construct. 

This is a ludicrous statement, an insane lie so brazen and so blatant that it can be hard to know where to begin. 

We should not have to waste our time with this bullshit, but it is so pervasive and so common, it must be our first step. 

Whiteness, they will say, is a performance, it’s a culture but not a biological reality, almost as if it’s an evil spirit that is manifest in certain people but which has no correlation to reality except in so far as we need to completely destroy it.

It is ironic that those who rule over us pretend to be the party of science. They are not scientific, not in the least. Race exists as a biological phenomenon, as a chemical phenomenon, as a physical phenomenon, it is much more than words and ideology.

But then even if it’s real, so what? In the second part of the conversation we must establish the precise contours of some key differences. 

If our hypothetical interlocutor ever admits race is real, the next step is to claim that it doesn’t matter. That there are no possible conclusions to be drawn from this fact. 

Next they will accuse you of caring too much about the topic. Why do you know this? They will say you have evil motives.

They will say that you are personally so deficient that you rely upon notions of racial supremacy or group identity in order to feel better about yourself. They will attack your self esteem. “why do you want to feel better than other people?”

“it’s sad to have to derive your self worth from things that other people have done.” 

You have to be mentally strong and sure of yourself to withstand all this. Many people will crumble under the social pressure of the mainstream, because it’s very taxing to be the object of hatred

Many people are too humble and they will fall into confusion and introspection even at the shallowest accusations of selfishness, hatred, or mediocrity

Having any unsanctioned knowledge about race is viewed as suspicious, because none of this is taught in school, none of it is talked about on TV, and if it ever comes up in an academic or political setting, you are required to condemn it, to say that these are “outdated” or “antiquated” ideas which have been “debunked.”

So we must be very sure of our understanding.

We don’t want to look down on people. We don’t need racial narratives to feel superior. But in America, in fact, every race except whites is encouraged to partake of racial pride.

We are told that whites are uniquely evil. That it’s appropriate for blacks and asians and indians and hispanics to feel racial pride, but not whites, because whites are guilty for slavery and so on. 

We are supposed to pretend that conquest and imperialism are unique to whites, when in fact people of every race have engaged in these things. 

Whites are demonized for it, not because we have done it, but because we have been the best at it, because our empires have covered more of the world than any other race, because we have conquered asia, africa, america, and australia. Why shouldn’t we take pride in that?

I am proud of my brother, of my father, of my grandfather, of my cousin, and my uncle. A race is an extended family —  Why shouldn’t I feel proud of my race? The greatest and most exceptional members of a race are drawn up from the mass of it.

I am proud to be part of that heritage from which the greatest writers, philosophers, scientists, and explorers have sprung. I’m proud to be part of that fundament.

On the topic of slavery, most of us know that blacks sold their own co-ethnics to white slavers in Africa. Slavery today is still very much alive and praticed in Africa and Asia, by arabs and africans, with not a european man in sight. But we’re supposed to believe that whites bear all of the guilt for this, too.

Whites are the most accepting of other races, the least racially prejudiced, and this is why they put up with these kinds of racial abuses. 

Tell a white man that whites are the worst race, and see how he reacts. Then tell a black man that blacks are the worst race. Which one of these activities will get you punched in the face?

The finding that whites are the least racially prejudiced is robust in social science. When people of different races are surveyed, whites have better things to say about blacks and mexicans and Asians than any of those races have to say about them — or about each other!

When you point out that whites have no special monopoly on slavery or conquest, that’s called “whataboutism” — they will tell you that other races practicing slavery does not excuse whites, does not alleviate their guilt. That your sins do not forgive my sins. 

And we agree: the fact that whites have owned slaves does not excuse africans for owning slaves! Moreover and if we take a historical perspective, whites are uniquely benevolent — albeit naive and idealistic — when it comes to the institution of slavery, and we also uniquely proficient at war.

But we lower ourselves by falling into this frame of who did what, because if we say “you did it too” we have tacitly accepted the idea that whites have something to atone for —

as if being descended from warriors and kings somehow places a debt or a burden upon us. 

In fact it’s even worse than that; if we apologize for the victories of our co-ethnics, we become spiritually castrated; are we supposed to believe it’s wicked to win a war, bad to explore new territories, evil to fight for our own interests?

Conquest is glorious! Exploration is courageous! The wicked thing would be to act against our own interests; to fight for ourselves is noble

In truth there may be some people who are so ineffective at managing their own affairs that trusting them with autonomy becomes a cruelty. 

That’s all slavery is, it’s when one person is wholly subordinate to another. We accept it as altruistic, for example, in the case of a man who cares for his brother with Down’s syndrome. A person with Down’s syndrome is better off as a slave, in the most literal sense, and few would dispute this.

And there are many people who are not retarded in the clinical sense who nevertheless would benefit from less autonomy. Government programs, welfare, food stamps, Medicare, all of it, it’s all slavery, it’s just distributed slavery, headless slavery, slavery to a committee rather than an individual. 

If you are dependent upon the state, you are not a free person. If you cannot fully care for yourself, you are a slave. 

The only difference between dependency and slavery is that one word is polite and one is rude. If someone else pays for you to exist, they own you. The greater the dependency, the lesser the freedom.

And what we see is that most people don’t even mind being slaves in this sense, many of them welcome it, because autonomy is more of a burden than a blessing, and the average person doesn’t really want it, but he thinks he does.

You give up some freedom to exist in a community, to exist in a society. You give up much more when you say “society ought to provide for me.” 

And the cries we see all the time, especially from women, but also, quite tellingly I think, by so many blacks, when they demand more government programs

— this is such a common cry it’s become a cliche — mo’ money fo’ dem programs — what they are calling out for is a master! They want a master! They want to be slaves. 

And I think the really crazy thing is that we condemn them for it, when really we should recognize that many — maybe even the majority — of people need to exist in a hierarchy, need someone above them, to tell them where they fit in the world.

We think “know your place” is some kind of a derogatory remark, but really it’s very good to know your place, to know that you have a place, to know where you stand in relation to the world.

The impetus to INVENT your place in the world is a noble calling but it’s also a perilous one. And in a way it’s tyrannical to force it on everyone, no matter how ill-suited they may be to the task.

But we will move on, for now, because I have promised you racist pseudoscience.

~~~

Part 2

~~~

Principal component analysis

The study of genetics has vindicated all of our supposedly naive intuitions about race.

In a way it’s absurd that we must go to these lengths to establish what any fool can see with his own eyes. 

Race is real, and it’s so much deeper than skin color. For any two races there may be hundreds of morphological differences — pigment is only the most obvious.

Different races have different textures of hair, different bone structures, different palates and tongues, which are one factor that shapes the languages of different peoples. Blacks may have different blood cells, Asians have different consistency to their earwax; and this is the one that is really going to kill you:

there are differences in the ways our brains develop and in our neurochemistry that are highly determined by our race. Evolution doesn’t stop at the neck.

[https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-11-16]

But again do you need science to tell you different races think differently? Look at some photos of African or Indian albinos. They all have white skin; do they look ethnically white to you? Of course not, because race is so much more than skin deep — it’s bone deep and brain deep and blood deep.

You can send skin cells from the inside of your cheek to 23&me and get back a detailed breakdown of where your DNA comes from. That should tell you everything you need to deduce that race is not a social construct or an illusion of melanin.

And now the next argument you’ll hear is that what 23&me actually shows is that there is no white race, there’s only Germans and English and Swedes and so on. But this entire line of thinking is bullshit, too. The existence of high resolution lineage doesn’t mean the low resolution picture is false. 

Now let’s talk about how we build the high resolution picture. It hinges on a mathematical technique called principal component analysis, which is a method for reducing a data set of high dimension to a data set of low dimension. For those without a background in linear algebra, it is a way of computing categories based on distance.

If we imagine your dna as a vector, then it is a point in a very high dimensional space. We can chart the DNA of many different people in this space, and it begins to look like a scatter plot. Probably you remember doing something like this in school

What we can then do is draw new vectors through the data and try to find the line of best fit. In a very disparate set of points, one line won’t fit very well. So then we compute a second line of best fit, with the added constraint that it should also be as different from the first line as we can possibly make it.

Ideally these vectors would be what we call orthogonal, which means that neither can be computed as a linear combination of the other, which means that they point in different directions and that if you move in the direction of the first vector you haven’t moved in the direction of the second vector at all. 

If you’re moving east and you’re in a flat 2d plane, you are not moving north or south. North is orthogonal to East as long as we’re talking about Euclidean geometry. 

We can keep repeating this process and draw as many of these orthogonal lines of best fit as we want, and these are called the principal components. And what they do is, they provide us with a strictly numerical method of categorizing data.

The set of principal components is called a basis, and each vector in the basis is one category. And now we can measure how much any particular data point belongs to each category by expressing it as a linear combination of basis vectors.

In other words, we can measure the degree to which a person belongs in each category. You know for example that you share half your dna with each of your parents, and also half your DNA with each of your siblings, though not the same half, of course. 

If we ran a principal component analysis on just your family, and we chose a dimensionality of two, then your mother and your father would be the two principals and you and any siblings you have would be somewhere between them.

That’s all it is. It’s a bunch of people who are more genetically similar to each other than they are to people of another race. Now there’s a little asterisk attached to that, and it’s called Lewontin’s Fallacy, and we’ll get there in a moment.

So if what if we apply Principal Component Analysis to humans of different races. Can you guess what we find? 

It depends on what dimensionality we choose. If we choose to collapse the human genome into two categories, then it finds exactly two races, the Eurasid, and the Africanid. In other words, all the people of the world — anglos, italians, swedes, indians, han chinese, persians, so-called “native” americans, and even aboriginal australians are all in one category, and africans are in the other. That’s how dissimilar we are.

If we add a third category, then eurasid splits into caucasid and asiatid. What we might call east asians are the third most genetically distinct group. As we go on down the line, amerindians split off of asiatid, and then africanids split into east and west, and on it goes. 

Prior to the late 20th century, all racial classification relied upon morphology, rather than genetics. At lower dimensionality, all the way up to eight, what we find is that the genetics of humans conform exactly to classical taxonomies of race. 

But using technology, using science — I fucking love science — it is possible to expand our study of racial taxonomy much higher, into the hundreds if we so desire. We can become hyper-racist, we can become experts, connoisseurs of racism

High-quality racism is extraordinarily hard work. You have to have working recall of at minimum eight or nine thousand distinct races, living and extinct, and run extensive simulations just to model the disgusting attributes of the most easily conceivable 2- & 3-way crosses.

The modern, genetic, scientific understanding of race is consanguineous with older approaches which were based purely on external observations. Race is real. It’s not an outdated notion, it’s an ancient notion that has been totally upheld by cutting edge science and mathematics. 

So maybe this will convince you that our concept of race is grounded in something much deeper than skin color and social construction. And in many ways the reality of race is a sideshow to the bigger question, which is what to do about it. 

But there is another line of argument or reasoning that can be used to reject modern genetic science. It’s very hard to claim that genetic science is wrong, but it’s relatively easy to claim that even the concept of categories is flawed

Most people who do this are guilty of special pleading, but let’s humor them. The claim is that, for example, many people exist who are of mixed race. If a black and a white person have a child together, what race is the child? There is of course a historical answer to this. 

The fallback argument for “race isn’t real” is that there are cases which straddle the categories, people who cannot be cleanly categorized as one race or another. We can imagine a series of mixed race people who occupy a range of admixture such that if you had them all stand in a line from whitest to blackest, it would be impossible to determine where exactly one race ended and another began. 

In the real world if we look at border regions where different ethnic groups live in close proximity, we do see enough cross-breeding that these kinds of gradients exist. If we take a few steps back, the actual question is: does the existence of continuity invalidate the possibility of discretization?

We can ask this question in any domain, and the answer is always no. Every category imaginable has edge cases, but we are still able to discern useful and meaningful distinctions between them. 

In the visible spectrum, red light has a wavelength of 650 nanometers, yellow light, 580 nanometers, and orange light, 600 nanometers. But we know that light can exist at any wavelength between these seemingly arbitrary markers. Does the possibility of orange mean that red and yellow don’t exist?

We can easily become mired in a pedantic and nuanced and pointless conversation here about the nature of existence. Our hypothetical race sophist will of course claim that in fact these wavelengths are arbitrary and socially constructed also, but if you stab them with a knife, their blood won’t be orange or purple. Then again lizards bleed green…

I’m not being flippant about this. Practical and functional considerations ultimately win out over ivory tower self-sucking. We can come up with borderline cases for any category but in any situation where we need to take effective actions in our environment, we have no choice but to make judgements using the cognitive tools at our disposal. 

We can be aware that those tools have limitations without swearing off tool use altogether.

A category is a measure of similarity between disparate things. A good definition of a category clarifies our understanding, because it lets us group similar things together and reason about them. Edge cases don’t invalidate the category, and often they refine it.

Now, we can throw this into even sharper relief when we consider that there are many different species of animals in nature which we recognize as distinct. And so far as I know, even the most brazen anti-racialist would not claim that the concept of “species” is an arbitrary distinction. That for example an eagle is the same species as a sparrow. 

But we can make the distinction more difficult when we look at species which are closer to each other: wolves and coyotes and domestic dogs are all quite similar. In fact they are so similar that they can interbreed with each other and produce fertile offspring. But we recognize a difference there, and we don’t even need genetic science to do it. The MORPHOLOGY of these animals is sufficient.

But when we actually look at the genetic data from different varieties of canids, we find that coyotes and north american gray wolves are MORE genetically similar to each other than a chinese person is to a sub-saharan african. And I think this is also true if we look at morphology. 

The fact is that if we applied the same scientific approaches that we use for categorizing other animals that we use for categorizing humans, then we would recognize that the different races of men are in fact different SPECIES,

There’s no scientific reason that we call humans races and animals species, it’s the intentional blurring of these topics which is the real socially constructed illusion that we ought to dispel. 

And this brings us to Lewontin’s fallacy, this is a famous and maybe counterintuitive thing, which many anti-racialists believe discredits the idea of using genetics to defend our instinctive racial categories. Lewontin said the genetic variance within a race on average exceeds the genetic variance between races. Moreover he said that race is a meaningless distinction because of this.

And the part about variance is true, but there are genetic markers which reliably and perfectly correlate with race, despite variance. The argument instantly falls apart when we transpose it to the domain of sex; there is more genetic variation amongst all women than there are between say a brother and sister, but we don’t claim on this basis that biological sex doesn’t exist. Even among the most recent insanities and abuses of gender ideology, no one would go that far. They will say your gender identity can be different to your “birth sex” — they don’t talk about genetics at all. 

These people wouldn’t refer to your “genetic sex” because, as with race, they will claim that the tiny minority of border cases — people born with congenital androgen insensitivity, chromosomal disorders, or birth defects of the genitalia — invalidate the concept of biological sex 

At its core, antiracialist and gender ideology have the same fallacy in common, though for strictly pragmatic reasons they arrive at opposite conclusions about the possibility of being transracial versus being transexual. I believe that these people are not biologically capable of being reasoned with. Draw your own conclusions about that.

Treating people like inferiors

OK but once again: so what? So race is real, what does that imply? Why do you care about this so much? I’ll answer that in the following segment, but first I want to talk about a related question, which is: does the reality of racial differences justify treating people differently, or like inferiors? 

but I am not going to answer that question as I have formulated it here, because it is a loaded question: it contains implicit moral assumptions which I believe are incorrect.

The first assumption is that to treat someone like an inferior is to treat them badly. The second assumption is that everyone is equal not just in terms of their spiritual worth but also in terms of their capacity for responsibility and autonomy. Both of these assumptions are flawed.

We do not treat our inferiors badly as a matter of course. There are many senses in which children are inferior to adults; they are smaller, weaker, credulous to the point of naïveté, so ignorant that it becomes a catastrophic liability. And yet we treat children better than we treat adults in most cases.

I was always taught to be gracious to people who were less fortunate than me, to be courteous even to people who I had an obvious advantage over. And I think you were probably taught this also. So to treat someone like an inferior often means to treat them very well.

So given this understanding, the answer is yes, there are many cases where biologically determined differences may justify treating people like inferiors, which is to say, with a sense of duty and obligation to care for them. And allowing people to have autonomy when they can’t handle it is a form of abuse, not only to them, but to everyone around them.

This is an anti-egalitarian doctrine. What I am telling you is that we need to be realistic about what we can expect from people and we need to treat them appropriately based on those expectations.

William Blake wrote that one law for the lion and the ox is oppression. Even most leftists understand this. They like to point out that a law which makes it illegal to sleep under bridges only affects the homeless, but it does nothing to govern the well off. In fact these are subtly different statements, and they have exactly contradictory implications, though they have a family resemblance. 

The point is that there can’t be a single universal set of rules that is equally fair to everyone, because everyone has different circumstances and the law ought to take that into account. So however much we are overestimating the homogeneity of our population, our laws are probably unfair in roughly the same measure. 

But so it is incumbent upon us, it is imperative, if we have any hope or any desire for justice, that we develop an accurate understanding of race and of racial differences. 

There can be no justice without truth, and there can be no truth without honesty, and honesty is often unpleasant.

~~~

Part 3

~~~

Perfidy of Science

I think I have reasonably established that biological race is an ontologically valid concept, and also a socially and scientifically useful concept. I linked to some references, which I invite you to verify. 

Of course, there will always be people who refuse to acknowledge such teachings. These people are easy to recognize;

they will demand to see your sources, as if they would read them in any case, and then they will, probably without even bothering to do a perfunctory google, tell you that the sources you are are citing have been discredited or debunked.

It’s pretty rare to even see a counter-source in such cases. Indeed one is not necessary; the language of “debunked” or “discredited” is neither a rational nor analytical statement. 

It is a statement of power, which is to say, it is a statement made in the language that power uses when it addresses itself to truth.

The sovereign is he who determines the null hypothesis. A majority of “reasonable” “decent” people will go along with any atrocity, no matter how heinous, if going along with it is the default option.

Generally, the person saying racial science is debunked does not hold any power himself; thus it is an appeal to authority. 

And authority, which is to say, scientific institutions, have declared that race isn’t real and that there are no meaningful distinctions or conclusions to be drawn from the study of racial differences, outside of certain very narrow medical applications, and even those tend to be looked on with suspicion.

We have many reasons to be suspicious of science, not as a practice of dispassionate investigation into the nature of the natural world, but as a human, all too human institution which is ultimately composed of people, paid for by governments and other bureaucratic bodies, all of whom are subject to politics and who have political agendas.

Everyone knows that if the tobacco industry funds a study on smoking, it’s going to find that tobacco doesn’t cause cancer. 

If Coca Cola pays for a study about sugar consumption they will find that it has a very weak effect on obesity, or none at all. No one, not one anywhere, has trouble reaching this conclusion, that having a financial stake in the outcome of a study can cause scientists to manipulate their findings.

Even the New York Times has published articles explaining this history. A nonprofit organization called the Sugar Research Foundation bribed harvard researchers. Nestle paid for research to obfuscate the link between sugar consumption and heart disease. 

Even if you’re like a die-hard Ray Peat fan and you think it’s important to eat a pint of ice cream every night before bed you have to admit that the incentive drove the outcome. I am sure none of my friends have trouble with this.

I don’t demand consistency of thought from anyone, it’s an impossible request, like asking you to lasso the moon, walk on water. We are men, not gods. 

But ask yourself, if you believe a study funded by a corporation is shaped by that corporations incentives, then why don’t you believe a study funded by the government is shaped by that government’s incentives?

Would you believe a study funded by the chinese government that says forcing uighurs to live in camps and intermarry with chinese makes them happier and increases their subjective well being? 

Would you believe a study funded by the north korean government that found that having a picture of Kim Jong Il in your house is associated with lower mortality across all causes? Well ok that’s a tricky one. A self-fulfilling prophecy maybe. But you have to admit it raises an eyebrow. 

There are many reasons for the US government or for academic institutions to demand race denialism. Some are financial but most are ideological. 

And this is another point of contention we have with the libs: in general they will argue that behind every supposedly ideological reason is a financial incentive. They may not believe this, but this is what they will say.

That people are immoral because of greed, that greed is the only sin which causes people to act against morality. Greed or, if you’re a man, an intrinsic desire to hurt women. Rape isn’t about sex, remember, it’s about power. People really think this.

How fucking stupid do you have to be to believe that?

“Men aren’t horny they just want to hurt women.” This 75 IQ belief is brought to you by the same people who think ideology always boils down to money. 

As if no one, no where, has any other value or purpose than to amass gold and spend it on hideous postmodern anti-art. 

As if no one ever died or killed for GLORY. For HONOR. For LOVE. Anyone who says that shows how small his soul is.

Alright but enough stalling. I promised you a difficult conversation about race. We haven’t had it yet. We haven’t got to the difficult part. 

And the difficult part really is difficult, and we make light of it, and we joke about it, not only because it’s easier to joke but because sometimes, there are certain topics which are too sensitive NOT to joke about them. 

Racial differences are real, and the truth is there are only two ways to respond to this knowledge: the first way, the way we have chosen since the civil rights movement, is to kill each other over them. 

The other way, the good way, is to learn to laugh about them. We can joke about it or kill about it, that’s it, that’s the choice. I prefer to laugh about it, if that wasn’t clear.

But once we acknowledge that the races of men have real differences, then it is only natural to wonder about the nature of those differences.

And you all already know what some of those differences are. And I’m going to state them plainly. But first I’m going to head off one more objection to this line of thinking, which is to answer the question: why do you care? 

This is always the last resort of the anti-racist, if you best them with knowledge, they will say, “why do you care about this so much? Why do you know this? Do you really just need to feel superior to other people? Do you hate people of other races, is that why you know all this?”

These questions are asked in bad faith, but I will answer them in good faith, so that you know, so that you know for yourself.

Whites and Blacks. Different. Why do we care.

And the answer is we never wanted to care. We never wanted to learn about racial differences. The overwhelming majority of whites were quite happy with the ideology of colorblindness, despite its contradictions.

Those of us who learned about racial science did so because we were fed an absolutely bullshit story that all disparities between black and white were caused by our innate wickedness.

It was our original sin of white privilege, of systemic racism, an insidious type of racism that is so invisible, so pervasive, so total, that all white people, no matter what they do, are born with an irredeemable blood debt to all black people for eternity. 

Some may say I’m being hyperbolic. But be honest: is there any amount of reparations that would ever be enough, any amount of affirmative action, any world where white liberals and blacks say, ok, that’s enough, we’re square now?

The answer is no, we cannot imagine such a world. It isn’t even a theoretical possibility. The blood debt is eternal, if you accept its premises, which we don’t.

And the reason we don’t accept them is that we know a better story, a truer story, one which is entirely backed up by statistics and even by that cursed name, Science.

We care because there are multiple levels where the narrative of white guilt for black tragedy is wrong. It assumes that all people are equal, not just in terms of their moral worth, but in terms of their abilities and their proclivities, and that if one racial group outperforms another, that’s exclusively due to irrational prejudice.

The alternative story, the true story, hurts peoples feelings. It’s mean. It’s offensive.

and in the US especially we have been taught our whole lives that there is nothing, NOTHING more evil than “racism” — a word with two different meanings, depending on the audience and the context.

You know these two meanings, you know about the “motte and bailey” — that classic which Scott Alexander popularized, the motte with its mostly unobjectionable definition that most people agree is bad, and the bailey with its expansive definition that is used to attack. 

The bailey is that all racial disparities are due to invisible prejudice. The motte is that it’s generally an error to judge someone solely by their race when other information is available. 

I think most of you learned this in 2014, but I’m trying to ground you in the basics, just in case.

And note what I said, it’s an error to judge someone by their race when other information is available. This is how all heuristics and stereotypes work. 

The standard disclaimer slash mental-model is this: We know that men are taller than women. We know that not all men are taller than all women. 

But on average, men are taller. If we know nothing at all about two arbitrary people, except that one is a man, and one is a woman, then the safest bet is that the man is taller. That’s how statistical averages work.

So it’s not an error at all to appraise people using one or two superficial details about them, it’s only an error to keep hodling that opinion when you receive contrary information. 

But the antiracist epistemic model, really the leftist model in general, says that it’s not morally permissible to use information like sex or race to make predictions about someone. 

This demand is both impossible and insane, and it drives you insane, precisely because it’s impossible. 

It makes it so that every time you fail to do the impossible thing, you feel morally deficient, and then one way of coping with the guilt you feel over it is to double down, to try to atone for it.

But you can be free of this, if you just let go of the false moral premise.

One more analogy, from physics, that it is impossible to model the behavior of a single particle in thermodynamic system, but it is very possible, if we know the laws of thermodynamics, to model the behavior of the system of a whole, that is, the behavior of all the particles. 

Knowledge of racial differences is exactly like this. 

It’s very rare, especially in AmeriKWA, to meet anyone who is willing to openly and unapologetically claim to be a racist. 

As a result, most people have no idea how racists actually think, and they imagine that racism is a kind of blind prejudice, when in fact it can be a highly informed kind of prejudice, and a wholly justified one.

Knowing things about crime statistics and IQ research does not stop me or anyone else from being civil to, or cooperating with, or even esteeming highly a person of another race.

In fact as corny as the old “dems are the real racists” line is, there is a kernel of truth to it. Knowledge of, and ACK-knowledgement of racial differences is a better basis for coexistence than any program of egalitarianism or race denialism. 

But I would never tell you that dems are the real racists. Don’t let anyone tell you that. WE are the real racists, because we are the best racists

and if there is a future for America as America, it’s going to involve what Jungians call “integrating our shadow” — in some ways the woke are closer to this than the mainstream.

When they tell you that color blind racism is de facto white supremacy, they are correct, just not for the right reasons.

Now as a sort of tangent, but also something very relevant to the topic of American colorblind racialism, I want to play for you a clip from Bronze Age pervert, on the topic of American Hellenism, the idea of the cultural melting pot, which I think is very insightful.

(BAP on American Hellenism)

There are two very important differences that we see between blacks and whites, when we are speaking of groups. And again, any individual white may be quite stupid, and any individual black may be quite smart.

But on average we find a difference in IQ of about 16 points, one standard deviation. That’s the first difference. Much like with the reality of biological race, there are many common criticisms of IQ, which we will explore in a moment. 

But first, the second very important difference between blacks and whites is their tendency towards violence. One example is the meme statistic, which is released by the FBI most years, a breakdown of homicides by race. 

In 2020, blacks comprised 56.5% of known murder offenders, a per capita rate more than 8 times worse than that of the nonblack population (whites, Hispanics, Asians, Indigenous etc.) lumped together. 

As with IQ, there is are many popular ways of coping with this fact in order to dodge the possibility of racism, and we’ll get into those, too.

IQ-ish Question

IQ research is imperfect. There are many things that it does not measure. I can’t remember how he phrased it, but BAP once said that IQ is a measure of domestication. 

That the higher your IQ is, the more docile and compliant you become. I don’t think that’s quite the whole story, but even if it’s wrong, it’s wrong in an interesting way, at least.

What IQ does not measure, undoubtedly, is the strength of a man’s will, the FIRE in his belly, his tenacity, his courage, his valor. 

What it does measure is his ability to recognize and extrapolate patterns. There is of course much more to the human heart and soul than this. 

But IQ correlates strongly with income, correlates weakly with height, correlates a little more strongly with facial attractiveness, and on and on. That alone should tell you it measures something real.

As with studies about the biological reality of race, you will always hear that IQ is discredited or debunked. You will hear theories of “multiple intelligence” — many other things of this nature. 

IQ is not destiny. No one anywhere thinks that. But it’s highly predictive of some important things. It’s the most robust and replicable and scientific tool in the discipline of human metrics.

But people object to it, very strongly, even very smart people, in many cases, not because it’s so wrong in my opinion but because it’s fundamentally uncomfortable to assign an objective measure of intelligence. 

I’m very partial to the theories of Robin Hanson, who believes that humans instinctively prefer ambiguity about rank in social situations, because it gives us more room to maneuver politically.

Almost everyone likes to think of himself as smart, and often especially the people who tell you they aren’t very smart, they are putting one over on themselves, and trying to fool others too, by pretending it’s not important, or downplaying it. 

Most of the time when a man says “I’m an idiot,” he is telling you that he thinks he’s very smart indeed. 

And a lot of people, I’ll say especially people who are secular, atheist, not in the fedora sense but just in the default sense, in the sense that our culture’s default religious belief is a kind of atheism informed by christianity, really do believe that the most essential measure of worth is intelligence.

This especially when you don’t believe in a soul or a salvation. They like to say that Jesus was an egalitarian, that he said there is neither man or woman, slave nor free man in Christ.

But that’s the part they always leave out, isn’t it, IN CHRIST. Not on earth. On earth we’re all quite human, all too human. 

How can you believe in Christian equality without Christ? It’s nonsensical, it’s a perversion. You hear people say intelligent life has an intrinsically higher value.

“Intelligent life” — this is part of that secular perversion, that it can find no way to value life except intelligence. That’s why you can’t measure IQ. 

Because if you measure it, you’d find what everyone already knows, that some people just aren’t that bright, and then what?

For people who say IQ is imperfect and therefore useless, I like to do a little thought experiment: suppose that we had a measure which was perfect, which exactly and accurately captured all the capacities of a person, how smart they were, how strong, how moral. 

Would you be OK with that? With a perfect estimate of your worth, boiled down to a single number? That you could compare against everyone else and see how you ranked?

I claim that most anyone who isn’t OK with IQ will also not bite this bullet. Because that’s not their real objection, it’s not that IQ is imperfect, it’s a fundamental discomfort with quantifying human worth. 

It’s because there’s always someone better than you, at everything, and you know that, but it hurts, doesn’t it, to rub your face in it.

A positive self image is very valuable. IQ removes all that ambiguity, it takes away your room to maneuver, it takes away your room to self-deceive, it punctures certain valuable illusions you have about yourself. 

About your family, maybe. Or your friends. Or God forbid, your race.

And it’s a funny old thing, because even most people who know about this, a lot of the time, they are understandably very concerned with appearing racist, even to themselves.

So they make little bargains, bargains with themselves, bargains with the world. Northeast Asians have higher average IQ than Whites, that’s what the research says. As do ashkenazi jews. 

See, I’m not racist, they say. Nigerians are better runners. These kinds of things.  This isn’t about white supremacy.

And it’s not, it really isn’t. But what it means is that colorblind racism is always going to favor whites, in a sense, over blacks. 

At least if we think in terms of income or scientific accomplishment. That’s not fair, but it’s true. 

To some leftists, to many of them, even, this inherent, biological disparity, again not an individual disparity, there are smart blacks, and boy oh boy are there a lot of dumb whites, but this inherent group disparity, to some, justifies burning down the world and implementing permanent wealth transfers, communism, in order to try to make everyone the same.

That’s it, that’s the only answer leftists can come up with. But most of them have never wrestled with the difficult moral questions that inherent inequality raises. 

They are simpletons who only have one tool in their philosophical toolbox which they clumsily apply to all situations.

Most of them simply deny the obvious. They say it’s down to “discrimination” or “historic injustice.” Bullshit. The second richest racial demographic in the USA is Indians. The third is Taiwanese. 

Who is the first? Ah, haha, that is an exercise for the reader. How is it possible that these swarthy POCs have overcome the crushing oppression of systemic racism in America?

The answer is they have no good answer, that’s why they invented the word BIPOC, because “person of color” made the contradictions in their mental model too apparent. 

The leftists who are brave enough to face the truth about race always decide that it doesn’t change anything about their utopian vision and that if anything it just means they have to double down on their faith, believe even harder.

This is the response of a man who builds his life around a false faith.  

13 do 50

The other big difference between blacks and whites is violence. Blacks commit more homicides, more rapes, more violent assaults, more thefts. 

There are several common dodges here. The first is that in absolute numbers, whites commit more murders, and that’s because there are almost six times as many whites as blacks. 

But if we look at per capita, the number of murders the average black person commits, it’s much much higher. That’s what the 13 do 56 statistic means.

And if we really drill down even deeper, of course we notice that almost all of the homicides are committed by men, both white and black. 

So then there is this kind of interesting bit of sophistry that, by the logic of the argument, that establishes some kind of spiritual superiority of women over men. 

But as Camille Paglia said, there’s no female Mozart for the same reason there’s no female Jack the Ripper. But there’s also no Black Mozart, and there are many, many Black Jack the Rippers. 

So there is an argument here about variance, and capacity for excellence.

But this isn’t a talk about misogyny, this is a talk about racism. The real argument, the main argument, is that blacks do more violence because of poverty. That’s always their main deflection. 

Well you’d commit more crimes too if you were poor and struggling to feed your family. That’s what they say. This is understandable, but wrong. And we have lots of data from social science to show that it’s wrong.

Black neighborhoods have higher gun homicide rates than white neighborhoods of the same socioeconomic status level. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7705591/). 

They also tell you that poverty lowers IQ, and that blacks live in poverty and etc. 

But the famous Minnesota Transracial Adoption study found that being raised by white parents did not have any effect on the IQ gap. If we look at numbers published by the college board, we see that IQ gaps between whites and blacks persist at every income decile. 

Everywhere these numbers are published, you always see these disclaimers “what this shows is that we have to do more than just alleviate black poverty” — “there are many possible explanations but this or that environmental factor is the most likely.” 

They try to blame it on lead poisoning, on the legacy of slavery, increasingly they graps at ever more ephemeral possibilities, totally unfalsifiable, because the goal isn’t to know the truth, it’s to literally believe anything except that there are innate genetic differences between racial groups.

They’ll say IQ tests are culturally loaded, and point to old tests that used to ask questions about boating or something like this. But modern IQ tests contain no cultural baggage of any kind. 

They are entirely about shapes and lines and colors. Some dinky free test you take online tells you nothing. You need to look at professionally administrated tests and how they are structured. 

IQ denialists never even bother, they don’t care, they just find the first hit on google with the magic word “debunked” — and that’s good enough.

This isn’t a dishonest impulse, it’s actually in some ways a very moral impulse. But it’s also wrong. And believing a harmful lie for a good reason doesn’t make it any less harmful. In fact it compounds the harm. 

The harm, in all sincerity, to both white and black people. Because you can’t hope to make just laws, you can’t hope to make just decisions, about race, if you can’t start by being honest about it. 

Once again: there’s no justice without truth, there’s no truth without honesty. It’s not possible. We don’t believe these things out of malice or resentment. 

We believe them because they are true, and because we want to believe true things, not things which soothe our injured pride, as many liberals will accuse us of.

We circle round and round. I have focused on the racial differences between whites and blacks here because they are the most evident and the most relevant to our current political situation. 

Racial discourse has seen a bit of a lull and the current current thing is more concerned with homosexuality or feminism than with racism. 

But news cycles ebb and flow; one year they trot out race, the next, transexuality, and then the next, it will be back to race.

As we speak USA companies are busy implementing and responding to antiwhite racialist initiatives from the 2020 cycle of racial politics. 

They will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It’s important for us to establish our counternarrative, to support it as strongly as possible, and to be as truthful as possible in doing so.

Maybe you agree with me about all or most of the above. Maybe you don’t but for the sake of argument you concede the point: now what? What am I proposing? 

Because if all of this is true, then what that means is that a fair society isn’t fair. At least it’s not fair if you are concerned with the idea that disparities among racial groups are unfair. 

Disparate Impact

And of course, blacks, american blacks, and sub-saharan african blacks, will probably always feel that a fair society is unfair to them. 

That could be managed in part by not constantly telling them so, which is what many whites and whites like to tell them, for personal gain. 

There’s always profit in defecting against your own social and racial order, and this is a perennial problem of all human civilizations. 

In a perfect world we would probably not live in racially integrated societies, but the question of segregation comes up because we do occupy a physical space, in america, which contains both black and white people.

And I don’t have exact policy proposals, but I KNOW that before we can even begin to come up with good governance schemes, we need to be responding to truth, as opposed to pretty lies.

Inordinate resources are spent right now pushing blacks into elite colleges, often in cases where they are not qualified to be there. And I will stipulate here that some of them do, but many don’t.

This has several deleterious effects upon society. 

The school itself, not wanting to look bad, will lower its standards of education in order to accommodate its students. So the quality of higher education degrades. 

The student, who is in a place where she ought not to be, will feel resentment and alienation at his inability to keep up with his ostensible peers.

As a result of this, under-qualified minority students end up gravitating to majors which end in the word studies, black studies, queer studies, and so on. 

All of these curricula are vehicles for ethnic resentment, lies, and communism. So they degrade us culturally, they degrade our education, and they degrade the students who have this burden of affirmative action thrust upon them.

And there is another, subtler, spiritual poison to this as well: If you know that the scales are tipped in your favor because of your race, then you’ll never be able to believe you were good enough for your accomplishments. 

You’ll always suspect you’re a fraud, that things were handed to you out of pity, out of collective guilt, and not on the basis of your own merits.

But now, look, do you see how corrosive the racial narratives are in our society? 

I am trying to make the case to you that egalitarian racial ideology is bad, and I feel obligated to do so by framing it in terms of the harm it does to the black man, rather than the harm it does to the white. 

And there are many way that it harms whites, especially white children, who have been chosen to bear the burdens of racial integration even as champagne socialists who are totally insulated from it toast themselves and their supposed moral superiority.

Because the default setting in American culture is that blacks are sacred, that whites need to man up and suffer through it, bear the white man’s burden, do everything and anything for the sake of the black. 

And maybe this is the deepest and worst flaw in the white race, though it’s not the only one. 

We can talk about IQ or crime or whatever else, but we also need to be honest about the white inclination towards pathological altruism, towards pharisaical martyrdom, towards self-righteous, holier-than-thou moral CUCKOLDRY.

I’m not being facetious here. This isn’t to say, “oh my worst flaw is that I work too hard.” or some boomer job interview back-handed self congratulation. 

This is a real, pernicious, destructive, character flaw in the white race. We don’t even want to conceive of ourselves as a race. 

The slogan that “race doesn’t exist” isn’t some jewish trick, it’s a real, inborn, racial flaw in the white character, that we’re so hellbent on individualism, hellbent on self-sacrifice, hellbent on love of the other, the underdog, the scoundrel, that we are nearly incapable of ever acting in our own interests as a race. 

That tendency may have helped us survive in certain harsh environments, many centuries ago, but in the world we have built with instant global communication, commodity air travel, international supply chains — it becomes a pure liability. 

Trying to convince whites not to publicly martyr themselves for a cause is actually HARDER than convincing blacks to stop spending their whole paycheck on new jawdins. That’s the truth.

~~~

Part 4: Evolutionary Pressures, Genealogy of Morals

~~~~~

Now I’m going to give you a simple, I think maybe the simplest possible story to understand racial differences. But first we need to talk a bit more about the perfidy of science. 

Because already I know and I can hear even some of my friends getting ready to trot out their ultimate kill card for this line of thinking. They will say it is “pseudo scientific” — and indeed, I think there are some valid critiques to be made of this kind of reasoning. 

But before you brandish this word, ask yourself — are you a scientist? More specifically, are you an evolutionary biologist? 

What exactly do you mean when you say “pseudo scientific” — because what I think most people mean when they say this is that they didn’t learn this theory in school — You won’t hear this in a TED talk, and you won’t read it in an airport pop science book.

When a layman calls something “pseudo-scientific” what he really means is that Science, capital S, the institution of Science, the academy, hasn’t stamped this particular teaching with its bureaucratic rubber stamp that means all good and right-thinking people should believe it. 

If a layman tells me this is pseudoscientific, he’d better be prepared to criticize the story in terms of scientific literature, at the least. And even then there’s a real debate to be had. 

I will state again that “pseudo-scientific” is in fact an appeal to authority, that if you think this kind of “racial science” has been “debunked” you need to be able to explain how, specifically. 

What is the *method* by which it is debunked. Which specific, material facts contradict this analysis? You know what most people do, when you press them on this? 

They cite Lewontin’s fallacy, that’s their argument number one, which we’ve already discussed.

The other main thing people will say is that there’s “no evidence” these accounts are true. We could fill an entire hour talking about the magic crimestop phrase “no evidence.” 

You can wave away anything with that phrase, no matter how much evidence there is, because we live, not in a scientific regime per se, but in a regime whose political formula is grounded in scientific authority.

When it makes its decrees, it does so by declaring what the null hypothesis shall be. When you control the null hypothesis you have root access to science, you can control what it finds without even needing to justify yourself.

The sovereign authority of the state says that Science says there are no racial differences. That’s it, now the burden of proof lies on anyone making a claim to the contrary. 

Any contrary evidence is simply deemed “insufficient” by the commissars who run the scientific journals. Any layman who makes a contrary claim is now pseudoscientific. No actual scientific research needs to be done.

Prior to the 1960s or thereabouts, everyone knew that the different human races had innate differences. What changed?

 Was there some Copernican revolution in racial science? Was there some new kuhnian paradigm?

The answer is of course not, there was no scientific Revolution at that time. But there was a kind of political revolution. 

There even is a scientific study which in my opinion almost completely vindicates the account I’m about to give you, a study that everyone has heard of, the stanford marshmallow test.

I won’t bore you with any meditations on that. But have a google sometime because you may have heard that the marshmallow test doesn’t replicate. 

It absolutely does, but when its replicated they always do things like control for race, in other words, they subtract out the key independent variable and then claim that when you control for race, race doesn’t matter. 

This is typical of regime scientists, they find what they’re told to find.

A Simple Story

Anyway, a simple story, but I think it’s a very powerful one. And you will probably dismiss it when you first hear it. But the power of an idea like this is that once you hear it, it’s hard to let go. 

It explains things much more clearly its competitors. There is a single evolutionary factor which has driven many of the racial discrepancies we have examined, and it is the environment in which blacks and whites have developed. 

You will hear some people tell you that evolution occurs at such slow timescales that the human race is relatively unchanged, so there can be no deep and abiding genetic differences between races. But this is incorrect. 

Please consult Cochran and Harpending, the 10,000 year explosion, to learn about how evolution is a continuous and ongoing process, that is happening even now, in the modern day, and how many changes can happen very rapidly.

We know that one reason northern peoples such as whites and some asians are very light-skinned is because of the climate; there is much less available sunlight in northern climes, and we need exposure to sunlight in order to synthesize vitamin d and for many other reasons also. So blacks have more melanin, whites have less. 

We know that black africans are much more likely to have a condition called sickle-cell anemia, in which their blood cells have a different shape. 

This comes with some problems, but it also makes them much more resistant to malaria, which is a problem in equatorial climes and thereabouts. 

The form of the body can diverge quite rapidly in divergent environments. And the simple distillation of all of the above is that evolution does not stop at the neck.

In Africa, it’s warm all year round, there is a very long growing season, and no killing frost. So you don’t need any special skills or temporal orientation in order to survive. 

So exuberant is the productivity of the land that a lone woman can easily grow enough food for herself and her children by growing tubers in shallow dirt, and not by backbreaking exertion. More on that in a moment.

When food is abundant like this, future-orientatedness and the ability to plan ahead are not worth their cost, in evolutionary terms. So the median african lives in a kind of eternal present. 

The biggest behavioral ROI for a male in africa is to find ways to be sexually attractive to females and sire more children. 

As a result, male africans are not nearly as inclined to invest time and resources in their offspring. It’s not just a meme or a joke that black kids don’t know their dad. 

There is a deep, geological, evolutionary reason for that. A black man who invests in his children is paying a high opportunity cost relative to a delinquent father. Whether you look at sub-saharan africa or inner city detroit or CHICONGO, the behavior is the same.

Just like in africa, the majority of employment among American blacks is amongst the women. The men strut around killing each other and peacocking. 

In africa they can do this with relative impunity. In America we put them in jail, or at least we used to. It really isn’t their fault, they’re acting according to instinct. 

Bantu africans, specifically, which are one of many african races, in fact, are a lekking species. In classical lek mating, the males of the species all gather together and make visually and auditorily striking displays to compete for the attention of females. 

We know about lekking from the mating patterns of many birds. In Africa, where environmental pressures are weaker on humans than sexual pressures, the males are highly sexually selected. 

They swagger around, they spit “game,” they dance, they adorn themselves in loud and colorful clothing, and they pick pointless fights with each other in which neither party is particularly injured, as a show of dominance and fitness.

Again you can see that this pattern repeats both in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in any nightclub.

If you as a white man feel that the modality of the nightclub is alienating and uncomfortable to you, it’s because whites are not a lekking species. 

This is one of the many ways that the africanization of social norms has harmed the white man. It is part of the reason that we see all these things, pickup artistry, the red pill, the rational male, this obsession with rationality, we will speak of that in a moment.

The masculinity crisis. All of these things. 

In light of this understanding we can realize that pickup-artistry is not about picking up women at all, it’s a kind of outsider anthropology of african mating behaviors.

One of the main ways we are exposed to this is through music, through african music, you think the way rappers talk about women is “BASED” — what is it based on?

It is based on the LEK, most white men are not adapted to this, so all of this seduction strategy and evolutionary psychology and game theory is the white man’s way of re-territorializing the afreakanized american mating jungle.

The african does not have to plan for the morrow, food is always available, he can laze in the sun, eating the fruit of the land as the women do the work of raising children.

In america with our welfare and our foodstamps, with our decriminalization of shoplifting, we do all of these things to make the environment in america more hospitable to the african, more like his home.

It is no surprise then that this environment stupefies and degrades the european, who falls like any object to the state of the lowest energy available. 

Women begin to act like african women, men begin to act like african men. 

Those europeans who have the capacity for african nature are selected for, those who lack it becomes antinatalists, albeit unintentionally in most cases, and they refuse to have children. 

It takes many generations for this to come for fruition but this is a likely path for our future.

Of course It’s not the only path. The true European spirit still persists in most white americans. We have very different natures from the blacks we have brought here, because we were also shaped by our environment.

Whites and north asians evolved in places that have harsh winters. In northern europe, it snows. For half of the year, it is impossible to grow crops. 

So if you live in a place with desolate winters, the only way to survive is if you can plan ahead and store enough food. 

This creates an immediate and intense selection pressure for people who have the ability to be patient, and live in the future instead of merely the now. 

And the more you become oriented to the future, the more you also become oriented to the past. You develop a sense of history and of legacy and a vision of your place in the world. 

In sub-Saharan Africa, The primary tool of agricultural cultivation is the hoe, no pun intended, which a woman can wield as easily as a man. 

In contrast, the European climate is much more challenging and requires intensive use of the plow, which women are generally not strong enough to operate. 

Thus, in Europe, women were much more dependent upon men for food provisioning, and this creates a strong selection pressure for paternal investment. 

Now this is a very simplified version of the story and it is in many ways incomplete. There’s a lot you could say to criticize it and I would probably agree with many of those criticisms. 

There are other contingencies besides the mere fact of cold winters that have shaped our racial character. 

East asians have also been subjected to harsh winters and yet they have many differing characteristics, but what they have in common is a similar level of intelligence and a relationship to the future.

But despite its limitations I think this story has more explanatory power, not too much, but the right amount, and it goes far to explain the disparities between black and white that we see in America today.

In fact I think it has an almost irresistible logic to it, so I’m not asking you to accept this story as true, I’m just asking you to think about it, and notice that the alternative is a series of ever-more-fantastical epicycles. Fairy tales about intergenerational trauma.

What can we do with this story? If it’s true then it implies that all the things we are doing to try to improve the state of the american african — 

and we have done many things, since the sixties especially, from building them houses, relaxing the laws to go softer on their criminality, giving them free food, free healthcare, free college, preferential admissions, tax credits, remaking our entire education system, not once, but again, and again, and again, 

every few years, concocting new fashionable theories about how we just need to get to them earlier, get them free kindergarten, free preschool, soon they’ll be trying to educate the black out of them before they even leave the womb. 

But if the evolutionary story is true, then what it implies is that all of these interventions in fact are having a perverse effect, that they are subsidizing the worst tendencies of the african, making more him more wild, more stupid, more violent, more feral

And if you want to build a better african — because that was always the goal, always the goal of progressive policies, of these tender hearted sappy eyed liberals, oh the poor dears, we just need to be more compassionate towards them, give them more money, more food, and so on —

 the goal really, no matter how much they protest, is to erase the racial characteristics of the african, and make him into the white man

Because all of them, deep down, deep in their hearts, they believe in the white man’s burden, they believe it's our role as the superior race to uplift all the other nations of mankind to our heights.

And this may be my least hard-right opinion on the topic of race: I’m sympathetic to it, if it were just stated honestly and clearly, and with an unashamed racial PRIDE in the excellence of your own blood and your own people. 

I think this is something that many even of the seemingly mushiest and most treacly sort of liberals really do feel, but they’re ashamed of it, they believe they have to be ashamed of it, and this shame becomes a source of self sabotage.

But it’s also why they can’t resist listening to us, why they are thrilled to hate us, why there is something salacious in all their little watchlists and catalogs of all the things we say. 

Again this is the nature of seduction, it’s not about implanting a desire, but about giving a repressed desire a safe way to express itself

Genealogy of Morals

In closing we’re going to look at Nietzsche, and what he had to say about the shaping of the German spirit. 

This is from the Genealogy of Morals, which I am told is the only book by Nietzsche that is still taught in leftist academic programs, which is to say all academic programs,

because if you squint at it just right it they can make it seem to read as a support for the kinds of revolting sexual degeneracy that most college campuses and woke boardrooms now advocate.

But it doesn’t say anything of the sort, and I claim this book contains in fact a racial doctrine which is much more radical than anything you will see in the online right today in the majority of cases

What he does say, and he uses a kind of Darwinian logic, is how the German conscience, that demanding inner voice, which compels the German man to be sensitive, faithful, and above all, thoughtful, arises and develops precisely out of its opposite.

It is the merciless brutality of the German people, over generations, their imposition upon their own people for the deficit of these qualities,  their genius for punishment, that has created the German conscience.

It was the practice of drawing and quartering, 

breaking on the wheel, boiling in oil, 

the flaying of flesh and carving out the meat of a man’s breast, 

it was through all these things, that the German people made PAIN their mnemonic, they imposed upon themselves a particular capacity for memory, they developed the ability to keep a promise. 

Nietzsche has great reverence for this power, the power to bind yourself to your own will continuously, this is a sign of the highest form of life,

to be simultaneously a beast of prey, a magnificent blond brute, and yet to possess a will which can command this animal, not to tame it but to unleash it at the appropriate time

reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, all these gloomy, dismal things which are called reflection, all these privileges and pageantries of humanity —

These things find their foundation in BLOOD. And CRUELTY.

The white man has been more cruel to himself than he ever was to any black.

So Nietzsche believes, and I believe, that all good things arise out of their opposite, that love and kindness and charity find their genesis only in brutality, and in a kind of innocent delight in brutality

It was not out of a desire to uplift himself — that uplift was only a byproduct

But one must be careful what he says with relation to these topics. Because Nietzche also says that our unwitting project of self-domestication has gone too far, that what may have started in uplift has terminated in degeneration

In the complete loss of the aristocratic character of man

That very essence of all civilisation is to train out of man, the beast of prey, a tame and civilized animal, a domesticated animal

And yet I ask you to consider if the african has ever had such a thing imposed upon him, and whether the true legacy of slavery might be that the white man, owing to his own decline,

having fallen into a state of over-civilization, of being too tame, of driving from himself every trace of wildness and ferocity — might it not be that the white man failed to finish the job?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerohplovecraft.substack.com

Hello my friends

This is episode 2, on who we are and how we fight, Capitalism, Communism, and Managerialism

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

I think of this often, whenever I sit down to write, who am I writing for and what is the goal?

It can be useful to imagine that we are educating the normie

This may be a false conceit — anyone who is listening to me here has long since departed the Overton window 

But we spend most of our mental lives in well-worn channels and we begin to feel that “everyone knows” the things we know, even though the overwhelming majority does not

The perspectives we trade with each other, my friends, are what we call “high context” — they assume a high level of already-shared understanding

And often that understanding has become so implicit that we end up neglecting to share it, we’re only interested in the edges of what we’ve already established

But something I’ve always known, and something that becomes more and more apparent as my audience grows —

Is just how little of that shared understanding most people have — look, the average person who comes to us, to the frog right, to us reactionaries — for the time being we should avoid becoming too attached to labels, because we exist in many ways as a shadow, a negation —

The average person who comes to us doesn’t know the classics, and if they come to us it’s because they have a problem, they’re looking for something and they can sense we are operating from a different set of axioms

A big part of the reason I’ve found my audience is that I like to share those axioms, as much as I enjoy the frontiers of our thoughtform, it’s also critical to cultivate the interior

But we exist in many ways as a negation.

Some people don’t like to hear this. They want to talk about a “positive vision” — you have no right to complain if you can’t offer me a comprehensive plan for the total restructuring of society — this is really what people think.

“Oh yeah, if liberalism is so bad, what do you want to replace it with?”

And we have answers, but only partial answers, of course. Because the world is vast and complex, more complex than anyone even begin to understand or fit in their mind, and things are always changing

But people don’t want — no, scratch that — we were talking last time about how most people are not even capable of thought — people cannot think about, they cannot begin to approach the world as it is, they can’t even perceive it

So it feels reasonable to make this demand

But it’s very hard to define health, and it ought to be easy to recognize sickness. And we recognize many sicknesses; 

And the average person who comes to us may recognize one or two, often just one, which varies from person to person

Some people will have found themselves on the business end of what is called “antiracism”, or others will have seen how adhering to feminist doctrines causes disaster in their romantic life. There are many ways to notice these problems

But most people in the west are in the position of having a gangrenous necrotic limb that is rotting off in front of their eyes and believing this is a positive development

They believe that because of propaganda, but they also believe it because of social consensus

You know the old parable of the emperor’s new clothes. Everyone thinks in that story they’d be the child, the innocent one who doesn’t know how to say shibboleth who unwittingly snaps the whole crowd out of it

But let me tell you how a psychologically realistic version of that story goes:

Everyone all agrees that the emperor, who is naked, is the pinnacle of sartorial excellence, because there has been a deluge of netflix shows in which people who think the emperor is naked are depicted as stupid and racist.

The new york times publishes breathless and anxious op-eds about how the nazis couldn’t see the emperor’s clothes and while we need to be tolerant and open-minded and etc. we must also understand that if don’t stand up and speak out against anti-transnudism now we’re at serious risk of a second holocaust

And then one fine day the naked emperor is walking through the town square and a little child who doesn’t understand the propaganda cries out “Mommy, Why is that man naked?” 

and the parents are hideously embarrassed and everyone grimaces and looks the other way and the parents leave the public square and take their child home and explain that some men are really clothed even when they’re naked and we all have to go along with it because a man named Thomas Carlyle decided to make bespoke suits for six million tailors

So there is one sense in which all we are doing is trying to point out to people that their arm is rotting off, that the bacterial diversity they are currently fostering on their gangrenous limb is not their strength, 

and the most common response to this is “whoa buddy ok I hear you kind of about the limb but can you give me a pill to make me immortal and eternally young?”

And I don’t know how to do that and no one on earth does and if they tell you they do then you know they are a snake

But I and we have noticed that civilization has a deadly infection, and we would like to prescribe some antibiotics 

The first step is admitting you’re sick

And but here is where it gets really perverse— basically everyone will tell you this, maybe not quite as well

But the common story, the one we usually hear, makes it out that the cure is the sickness, and the sickness the cure 

Now this is very abstract—on purpose—because when someone comes to us, my friends, if they are drawn to OUR diagnosis, to our prescriptions, then they are starting, not at the beginning, but in media res— in the middle of things 

They probably haven’t read Spengler or Evola or whoever you think is the dispenser of the red pills. Maybe they know of Nietzsche a bit, but their knowledge is second hand, distorted 

And the most powerful ideas, the ones that really pull at your heart, once they’re firmly ensconced in your worldview, you take them for granted when you should be explaining them

You should be explaining them like you would unto a child, not out of a sense of superiority, but because that is the only way to teach people who lack your shared context

Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven 

There are some classics — we could even call them slogans — maybe they are shibboleths, and maybe you have heard them a million times — or maybe you have never heard them at all

For example we talk about radicalization — we are interested in grand, some would say grandiose, world historical  ideas

So some people call us radicals, some of our friends may even think of themselves as radicals

But I don’t think we are radical. I think my ideas are incredibly sensible and it is THE WORLD that has grown radical.

“My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.”

This is a quote from Julius Evola, the attribution is not important, only the idea is important — An infatuation with citation is the hobgoblin of a small mind

If you like my words, steal them! I am honored if you do that. Ultimately all ideas belong to either God or the Devil, no one else

I even knew a completely blue pilled redditor type who told me that Good Times Create Weak Men, Weak Men Create Hard times, etc.

That’s not exactly one of ours, not exactly. It came from a sci fi novel. But it pisses off the right people. It articulates a cyclical view of history, which is antagonistic to a progressive one.

Most people are ruled by slogans, by short proverbs or sayings. Little formulations tell us how to our their lives, and in the past these might have been bible verses, or old parables which have stood the test of time

No matter who is in charge, no matter who orchestrates the flows of wealth or martial power, the actual, day-to-day, face-to-face encounter with authority that most of us have is the through the other people immediately around us; our friends, our families, our coworkers

It is cultural norms that rule us, more than people — people only act as enforcers to norms. The left, even the idiots of the left, still tacitly understand this

They understand this because they have slogans that teach them this. They understand that norms can be changed when they say “normalize this” “normalize that” —

this is leftist thinking, they understand that social mechanics have a degree of plasticity — but they don’t understand that those mechanics must exist in harmony with biology

In fact they deny that biology even exists, or that it places constraints on anyone

People who have bad ideas, bad slogans, in their heads, end up making bad choices in their lives

Those bad choices immiserate them, and this causes them to rationalize and justify their misery, and spread it to others

If you spend time with miserable people, it places a cost on you as well

When people make bad choices, it affects everyone in their lives, it brings everyone down. Bad choices and misery are contagious 

I think you have known for a long time already that the liberal idea, the American idea, that you are not effected by the actions of your neighbors, is naive and untenable

As long as we are stuck in a society together, my choices effect you, and your choices effect me

And if you are acting like a gay piece of shit, that stops me from living my BEST LIFE

Actions follow ideas. Ideas are manifested in slogans. Calling a deer a horse won’t make it so, but the proliferation of the words contaminates our mental space

It changes the actions of everyone around us. It makes it so more people make more bad choices, and it makes it impossible to condemn those choices

So we become oppressed, in a sense, I hate to use this word, because it makes it sound like we are trying to beg daddy the government for special favors to even out the scales in the world which is weighted against us

No, when I say that slogans oppress us, I mean that the force of ideas presses in around us, and acts on us through our peers, and motivates their bad choices, and we end up paying a cost

And the right answer to this is not to go for the gold in the victimhood olympics, it’s to CLEANSE THE WORLD IN FIRE

But the problem is, because it’s an idea, an idea that attacks us, and idea which is only acting THROUGH our neighbors, it does no good to cleanse the neighbor, though in extreme cases it may be necessary

It is the idea that oppresses, so if you could rid yourself of any one person who carries it, it’s like cutting off the head of a hydra (or an egirl!) —immediately three more spring up to take its place

As appealing as it would be to cleanse the world in fire, most of us, myself included, are weak and decadent moderns who specialize in something other than survivalism or warfare.

So to all the feds who are listening out there — we love our glowies don’t we folks, we have all the best glowies — who do we love more, our egirls, or our feds — I’m thinkin it might be the feds. I am only speaking of METAPHORICAL cleansing and METAPHORICAL fire

DO NOT BREAK THE LAW. 

NEVER COMMIT POLITICAL VIOLENCE. 

UNTIL I AM OUT OF BULLETS OR BLOOD I WILL FIGHT FOR GAY RIGHTS IN UKRAINE. 

A BLACK WOMAN INVENTED THE TELESCOPE.

Slogans, you see. These are slogans.

The other alternative is to chase out the bad slogans with good ones. This is a very important realization, because when we conceive of radical actions to improve the world, the illegal or dangerous things we imagine are METHODS, not ends

And we must have an end in mind, or the method will come to naught. 

But see most people, even very smart people, they see a problem. And they think can solve the problem by getting revenge. And you know it would feel very good to get revenge. But it doesn’t solve the problem. 

But it’s much much easier to imagine that we can solve our problems with a single, spasmodic paroxysm of action. A great and radical intervention and then the problem goes away.

But you can ask anyone who has successfully lost weight or gotten stronger if that was how they did it. You don’t change a body by exercising once, by eating a healthy meal once. We have to change our HABITS

And the habits I want to change are the mental habits, the ideas that slowly smother us—I want to remove them from the minds of my fellows

And the only way to do that is to replace them with better ideas

I don’t “just want to be left alone”. I don’t want to “live and let live” — because if I agree to do that I still have to pay for my neighbor’s terrible choices. Not as much as he has to pay, but still.

Tragedy of the memetic commons. The people who rule us, the people on the left, they know there’s a memetic commons. They control it. And if we tell them they’re poisoning us, they say “how does it effect you?” We’ve all heard them say it.

And what’s more, they believe they have THE RIGHT to control the memetic commons. Not as an inalienable human right or some idiotic conceit like that, but in the only way it’s possible to have true conviction

They believe they have the right because they think their ideas, their way of living is superior. They don’t think we can coexist or go our own way for a second.

So if we’re going to fix these problems, we have to believe in our right to rule. We have to believe in our DUTY to rule. Because being in charge is not a privilege, it’s a curse. It’s a shit sandwich sandwiched between two pieces of shit.

You don’t wield power because you feel entitled to it, or because it comes with golden treasures and lobster risotto. Anyone who does that becomes a tool of someone who has a REAL will to power

People who rule effectively do so because they feel the need in their soul to shape the world according to their vision of the good. Such a person might be mistaken, or have a bad vision. But he still must have it.

We don’t want tolerance. 

We don’t want exit. 

We don’t want voice. 

What we demand is VIRTUE.

It’s not enough to be virtuous yourself. 

Until you feel the urgency — the IMMANENCE — of this demand, you can only be a slave.

It’s not enough for us to rule ourselves. I believe — and I need you to believe — that we have the right, we have the OBLIGATION to rule the libs as well. It’s for their own good. 

They are children who spend most of their time contemplating which chinese-manufactured vibrating piece of silicone they would most like to insert into their anus.

That’s the level our enemies are on. If we can’t do better than that, we are not gonna make it.

We have to be convicted that our virtues are the best virtues.

You can’t sit around diddling yourself over whether the unexamined life is worth living.

There’s nothing more solipsistic or narcissistic than a man who sits around all day examining his life. Truth isn’t valuable for its own sake. Truth is valuable because having it makes us better at WAR.

I always get these stupid navel gazers sniffing around asking me if my stances are reasonable. Aren’t you worried about alienating reasonable, measured, intellectual people?

The answer is no. Because when my values are ascendent, those same masturbators will say the same words to whatever dissidents exist in OUR shadow.

We’re not building a political party. This isn’t a movement, although you and I might (I hope) share many values and ideals. 

We share an ideological space. In the past it would have been very hard to do that without also sharing a physical space. But we are living in the digital, electric, telephonic age 

 — and without physical space, there is no movement

So what are we then? Not a party, not a movement, not an “identity” — what then?

The answer is that we are men with a habit, or a series of habits. 

When they are shared, shared habits can become traditions. Where do you think traditions come from? They don’t spring fully formed from the lion’s head.

Tradition is an emergent and iterative process where behaviors that lead to success are propagated. Ideas acting through people.

A habit is a proto-tradition, that’s all.

And we are a collection of people who wish to foster GOOD HABITS. And some of those habits are also composed of things which we do not do.

We are not in the habit of succumbing to vices

We are not in the habit of neglecting or abusing our bodies with bad food or slothfulness

We teach most of all the habit of CULTIVATING PHYSICAL STRENGTH.

We teach the habit of reading old and difficult books

We have the habit of judging a woman’s character by her sexual history

We have the habit of acknowledging the biological reality of race

And we have many other habits besides.

And it’s important for us to state these things, explicitly, again and again and again

Because although these teachings sound basic — Lift weights. Don’t eat soy nuggets fried in machine lubricants. Stand naked in the light of the sun. — that’s another way of saying they’re essential

you can find many examples on the internet of people who have accepted the doctrines of sterility, drug use, sexual egalitarianism — the perspective that all sexual choices are equally good and moral

the world now teaches you to destroy your virility, to embrace spiritual and even physical castration, and it calls this liberation — get a vasectomy, eat a vegan diet, believe women — and if you do all those things you will quickly find yourself in hell

There is no middle ground in this. Either you embody those ideals which are life affirming, or you’re a zombie, a dead man walking

We believe in certain habits. We believe these habits can save you. Save you from drowning — we believe in the noble pain whereby a MALE becomes a MAN

And we have great disrespect for people who lack these habits, who try to hide their deficiencies by pretending to be “intellectual”

If someone tells you “We are an intellectual movement” — he does not share our habits

Nothing will make you dumber than pretensions toward intellectualism — to want to be “taken seriously” as an intellectual — those people betray themselves because they show that what they really want is to be some kind of talking head, interviewed by the new york times, a guest spot on some pundit show —

What these people really want is to be esteemed in the public square for being smart. They don’t even want to be smart, they just want to be known for being smart. Big difference.

real intelligence isn’t signified by fancy words but by effective actions

We have no interest in the acknowledgement of the decrepit “intellectual” institutions of the current year. They are propaganda mills and gay bathhouses, nothing more.

You can gather knowledge and you should but you can’t develop your intellect. Cultivate virtue and power, and power is a type of virtue, no matter what anyone says, and intellect will follow.

“Intellectuals” are cowards who can’t wait to prostrate themselves before power. Every single one of them.

You must be very suspicious of anyone who says “this is an intellectual movement” — such a person is trying to pin you down so they can neutralize you.

We have to stay formless, that’s one of our sources of strength. It’s very easy to destroy a movement. It’s almost impossible to destroy a habit.

If you want to draw from our power, take our words, take our ideas, we will give you our energy. Our condition is that you adhere to our habits.

There can be no synthesis of our ideas, our aesthetics, or our habits with liberal, emancipationist beliefs. “Oh they have good points but if only they weren’t so sexist.”

“They have a lot of good things to say but they need to cool it with the racism.”

If you think that you aren’t one of us, never will be, never can be.

if you define yourself as a member of a class, then you will instinctively draw yourself to the center of that class.

If you think of yourself as an american, then you will behave as you think americans behave. Even more so if you see yourself as a “young american”, a “mid-western young american”, a “college-educated midwest american” and so on. 

All of these reference classes carry a degree of normativity. 

People want to create a reference class for themselves, they want to belong to reference classes because that tells them how to think

they WANT to be automatons, 

they WANT to live in a thoughtless rhythm, 

they WANT to be NPCs who have no more burden of thought and self-determination than supporting the current thing

This kind of reference class is not necessarily a bad thing. This is one way of coordinating a people to take an effective collective action. But the time is not right yet.

And the thing I am teaching you here is not this. It is not automation of the self, but the opposite.

We train these habits because they ennoble us, and because we want to create the fertile ground for a new and glorious American man to arise, a man of exceptional strength, who could actually deliver on the promise of making America great again

~

So here’s another slogan: America is a communist country.

You may have heard this one before. It’s a counter-intuitive claim. And I think most will dismiss it out of hand, because most people believe America is a capitalist country. 

But this belief creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, it confuses us — we can see if we look at what passes for the mainstream right in america, they talk and act like America is a capitalist country. They believe this.

And when you talk to the average person, especially someone who is a “normie” or a centrist, but who votes democrat — majority but not a supermajority — they are very likely use capitalism as a scapegoat — to blame their personal problems, or the problems they hear about on the news, on Capitalism.

And this is not just a normie phenomenon of course. But I think when people invoke capitalism as the source of various evils, they often fail to realize they are invoking marxist theory, admittedly a degraded version of it, but it’s marxist theory nonetheless

Marx predicted that communism was a stage of society that would naturally follow industrial capitalism, because it produces “contradictions” which become untenable and lead to communist revolution 

This has never happened in any country in the world. Many communist revolutions have occurred, but every single one has been in a pre-industrial country before production could go vertical. This alone should be enough to discredit Marx

And it’s a bit of a paradox, that it appears from the outside that international communism has collapsed completely: its states have gone down, it’s military structures have gone down, it’s chinese version has transformed into a market-driven economy

But at the same time — and this would have been unthinkable to anyone either the left or the right as recently as perhaps the 1950s — we find ourselves in a what appears to be a left-wing capitalist economy

When we look at our media — television, both conventional and streaming, podcasts, youtubers, social media — what we find are inevitably left wing values, I mean far left values, communist values.

And no one — not the far left, not the soft left, which to say the normie center, not the soft right republican types, and not even the far right really — has quite figured out how to process this. 

Marxist theory can’t do it, because it so contradicts the tenets of the theory that the only move these people can think of is to pretend that it isn’t real leftism — it can’t be, because if it were, then we’d be living in the worker’s utopia now. 

But communism has never produced anything resembling a utopia, never has, never will. So of course nothing is ever real communism to these people.

“These companies don’t really believe in our moral values,” they say, “Goldman-Sachs is pushing the gay agenda cynically to try to gain moral credibility.”

We might argue that this is a distinction without a difference, but even if it were true, then the world would look very different to the way it does today. 

Because if it were just about moral credibility, then there would also be companies, in every industry, in every sector, which didn’t signal those values, because to half the country, to seventy five million americans at least, the values that are espoused by corporate america are not signals of virtue at all, but rather the opposite

But the left center normie can’t even conceive of this possibility, because they can’t really grasp many of us see things such as gay rights as a failure of moral credibility

And more importantly, there’s no one capitalizing on this fact. We can name perhaps one or two companies that do. 

But even if we look at something like Fox news, this bogeyman of the left, they support all the same things as their more liberal counterparts, working to advance feminist and anti-white racialist agendas, mass immigration, they even love the gays. They want to defend gay rights from the Islamofascist menace!

So the left can’t make sense of it. They see the reification of their own values amongst the people their theory tells them to hate, amongst the scions of capitalism.

The theory that corporations are cynically woke behind a secret profit motive cannot account for the fact that wokeism is tremendously unpopular, that half the people in America, most of them middle class, with good incomes, would love to support anti-woke businesses.

But those businesses just don’t exist. There’s no unwoke google. There’s no unwoke telecoms. There’s no unwoke banks or grocery stores or anything else. If you wanted to only patronize unwoke businesses you’d be living in a house full of mypillows eating nothing but in’n’out burger.

But this underserved market, the market for products and services which unashamedly stand against toxic emancipation, the fact that this market is not just underserved but colossally underserved, this also poses a problem for the right

Because right and left alike believe we are living in a capitalist society, a society that’s ruled by markets. But if markets were allowed to operate freely, the world would look very different, as I’ve just explained. There are free hundred dollar bills lying on the ground. Why does no one pick them up?

In a truly capitalist society this would be unthinkable.

But wait, wait, wait, I say this to you and yet I have declined, thus far, to provide a definition of capitalism. The way I’m using the term here, it appears to mean a state of affairs in which nothing — or nearly nothing — inhibits the voluntary actions of market players. That is, they are free to bind themselves with contracts and so on, but there is no outside interference.

Using this definition, which is admittedly simple — some would say naive — I think we can agree that America is not a capitalist country. 

I like to keep my definitions simple, because when our concepts become complicated, we end up apologizing or pleading for them, expanding them to cover whatever new information we encounter without changing the label. And I believe in keeping concepts small in order to minimize my own confusion.

If we make a survey of various economic theorists, we will of course find we see as many definitions of capitalism as we see people. When we look at marxist scholars, they all like to talk about the supposed “contradictions” inherent in the capitalist model, but they themselves are all laboring under a much larger and more glaring contradiction, namely, that their communist revolution has never happened in any capitalist country.

So they invent a million new names and theories, they will say that capitalism has morphed or transformed itself because to them capitalism is the devil, it is the essence of evil, and as long we aren’t living in the glorious worker’s utopia, capitalism will always lurk around every corner, causing people to fail to be good communists to each other.

Castoriadis for example was a big proponent of the idea that the soviet union, of all places, was not a communist country, but rather that it was a “state capitalist” country, because obviously if it had actually been communist it would have turned out quite different.

Maybe you know the term “late capitalism” and it makes you think of the present day. But this term has been in use for a hundred years. Theodor Adorno favored it. Late capitalism doesn’t mean digital finance and iphone globalism, it means they think the eschaton is immanent.

Mao Zedong wrote that capital grew up everywhere like mushrooms, so the communist party had to constantly be watchful, to cut it down. Because no matter what you do, no matter where you look, people are going to trade with each other, and they are going to settle on a fungible unit of account.

And as a quick aside, it’s worth it to notice that the idea of credit probably existed before currency. In ancient human history, an emergent group strategy for smoothing out uneven results in hunting and gathering is to share food with other people in your tribe. That way, if my hunt goes poorly, I know I can get food from you, and if your hunt goes poorly, you know you can get it from me.

This creates an informal system of debts, and it takes a lot of brain power to remember who you shared food with, and how much, and how long ago, and so on. We can recognize this type of memory based system of favors is the earliest form of credit. 

If there are no material records of these events, then it’s very easy to cheat, also. The best solution to this problem was the introduction of physical currency, in the form of shells or beads, which allowed ancient, primitive man to outsource these cognitive debts into physical artifacts. So the creation of currency simplifies the ultra-primitive credit system and makes it trivial to settle disputes. You don’t need memory when you have beads.

These types of hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye markets might even predate humanity, and they certainly aren’t limited to humanity. Various experiments have been done crows, with monkeys, and with dolphins in which they can all be taught to use currency to barter for food or even, in the case of chimpanzees, the males will give food to female monkeys for sex.

Capitalism isn’t some alien ideology vampirizing us from the outside, it’s a law of nature that emerges anywhere agents have uneven distribution of resources. I’ve said before that humans make markets the way honeybees make hives or beavers make dams. It’s part of us and it can never be excised.

Fernand Braudel noted that this type of “hand to hand” market is unchanged throughout history. It is the most equitable, it seldom uses credit, and it’s the abstract ideal around which classical economics have been formulated.

But this type of market, which arises organically and organizes itself from the bottom up, is not sufficient to cover what most people mean by capitalism.

I think if you asked the average person who blames the state of the world on capitalism, they wouldn’t be able to give you a very good answer.

Unless they’re some kind of Marxoid theorist, and even then probably, there’s a pretty good chance that what they would define is corporatocracy, rule by corporations. 

They probably wouldn’t phrase it like this. Normies will almost never give you a dispositive statement unless you bully it out of them. They might say something about markets and free trade and so on, but if you pressed them they would say that corporate success allows them to exert control over the state in pursuit of profit.

This belief is naive, but it is a forgivable mistake, and we can dismantle it with a single example.

When Russia invaded the Ukraine, many US corporations stopped providing services or goods to Russia. 

Credit card companies stopped processing their payments. 

Fast food companies stopped selling them food. 

Social media companies denied Russians access to their networks. 

The state did not command them to do this; they did it “voluntarily” out of a moral concern against the actions of Russia. And all of these companies will have sacrificed tremendous amounts of revenue to do so. Russia is the 11th largest economy in the world, according to the world bank. 

And if corporations were truly amoral profit maximizers, they would never have done this. The USA itself chose to freeze over 600 billion US dollars worth of Russian reserves. All of this may strengthen the USA’s position militarily or diplomatically, but it does not provide a material benefit to any of our multinational corporations.

If the USA were a corporatocracy, which I think a majority of people implicitly understand to be capitalism’s mature form, then none of this would happen, none of this would be possible. The idea that some vague imperialistic urge on the part of mcdonald’s executives would cause them to abandon their actual principal objective — selling more hamburgers — is risible and absurd

It is impossible to defend the idea that the invisible hand of the market would guide them to this course of action. I’ve been inside a large company when it was adjacent to this kind of voluntary action — where corporations all act in lock step — you’ll just have to trust me here — and I’ve seen the way it’s coordinated.

What will happen is a prominent journalist or several will reach out to the company’s leadership team and ask them for a comment on the current thing. Especially they do this if  that company has any history of dealings with the object of the cancellation or the scandal.

The influence of these kinds of journalists, from publications such as the New York Times or the Atlantic, is such that even their most innocuous question is a threat; no threat is ever stated, but all parties involved understand the discussion. Once a few highly visible players perform the designated action, all the smaller players get in line.

They have the nerve to call this a preference cascade, when in reality it’s an obedience cascade.

Anyway, there are two distinct and important points here:

The first point is that to most people, they equate capitalism with corporatocracy:

They think capitalism dictates that corporations are amoral profit maximizers, and they think corporations are in charge because capitalism empowers them to use their profits to dictate terms to the state. 

When people go hungry — a thing that literally never happens in modern america — or when they don’t have a place to live, that is capitalism’s fault, because it places profit — which in this formulation is an identical word to “greed” — over the wellbeing of the least fortunate. 

I will refer to this model, for the rest of the talk, as the normie model of capitalism

The second point is that this model of the world is substantively wrong. 

Modern corporations are not amoral profit maximizers

Corporations do not dictate the actions of the state

It is basically impossible to starve to death in america

And finally, this is because

The wellbeing of the least fortunate —using a narrow, leftist definition of wellbeing — is absolutely prioritized over profit, and to testify to this, consider that San Francisco and Seattle have both made it legal to steal from retailers

This set of beliefs oppresses me more than any capitalist ever could! I want everyone to stop believing this idiotic thing. 

But you might say, “why do you care what idiots believe?” 

The answer is I care what everyone believes as long as I’m trapped in a society with them. I care particularly what people of average and slightly above average intelligence believe, because no matter what your IQ is, you’re only as smart as your dumbest idea

Good, normal, decent people believe this idiocy, and this causes them to engage in idiotic behaviors, and we all pay the price, even if we don’t believe the idiocy.

So I would like to correct every false proposition in the normie model, but what I really want to focus on today 

—which is something that almost everyone on the far right understands already, but which normal, mainstream conservatives don’t —

Is to correct the idea that we are operating under a free market, or that the market has any power to sort this problem out, or even that some idyllic free market could possibly be restored, at which point the world would return to sanity

Many people “on our side” like to point at James Burnham as a possible corrective to this worldview.

For Burnham, capitalism describes an arrangement where some small group of people own all of the factories and farms and firms— the means of production — and this ownership gives them direct control of their operations, as well as most of the profit.

In this reckoning, capitalism isn’t just about markets as such, it’s about who has the authority to administer labor. 

Burnham points out that nominal ownership, the possession of stocks, had significantly diverged from actual administrative authority as early as the 1930s, and in fact even earlier, but that was when people began to notice

So Burnham’s thesis is about the separation of OWNERSHIP from CONTROL. This is the essence of managerialism. A professional class which does not, nominally, own the companies it is running, but which nevertheless controls them.

You probably notice, right away, that this creates a principal-agent problem, where an agent that is empowered to act on behalf of a principal now experiences some incentives which are antagonistic to that principal. The only capitalists of the older type who still exist are the rare startup founder who is independently funded, or who at least retains majority control of his company.

And even then we expect the founder to more or less abide by standard managerial practices.

A venture capitalist is NOT a capitalist of the old kind, precisely because he cedes control, by design, to a founder or founders who manage what his company on his behalf. 

Burnham thought that communist russia, nazi germany, and the USA, though they were all nominally different, had all converged on this kind of managerial arrangement, and the reason for this was the specialization of labor.

Uneducated laborers are fungible and have no negotiating leverage against their bosses, but the more labor becomes specialized and requires special education, the harder it becomes to boss workers around.

You can bully menial workers with relative impunity but mental workers produce their best work when they feel valued and respected

As owners began to delegate responsibility to professional managers, they ultimately ended up conceding most of their power as well.

I don’t think these ideas are novel anymore, and you will hear people mention the PMC from time to time, the Professional Managerial Class, but no one knows what to do with this realization.

the naive leftist thinks that corporate greed is corrupting the pure, benevolent state. They even have a term for this entanglement: they refer to it when they speak of the military industrial complex

The naive right-wingers don’t even have a word for it. They think big government meddling is corrupting the pure Darwinian market. They complain about regulation or communism, endlessly chasing the cape, totally blind to the matador

So what happens is the left calls for expansion of state powers, and the right calls for expansions to corporate powers, and both of these things empower the ruling elite, because as a class they constitute both. 

There is of course some factionalism among these people. They are not a single, monolithic group. But “corporate power” and “state power” are two sides of the same coin, they are not antipodal forces that keep each other in check

managerial power culminates in a state of affairs where the economy is driven by cartels of large corporations operating under state regulation and coordination.

Now, does the above serve to correct the normiecon errors with regard to the free market, and the sorts of legislation or policy that conservatives should pursue? It gets us out of one trap, but it sort of throws us into another. 

Because Burnham also used his understanding of the managerial state to make the case that consumerism is better blamed on managerialism than capitalism.

He says that managerialism is structurally inclined to produce mass consumerism, that most of the consumerist critiques of capitalism are better attributed to the managerial system, which treats things like supply and demand as objectives and key results to be managed in order to perpetuate and expand the managerialist order.

So if conservatives follow Burnham too closely, they will, ironically, end up in a quasi Marxist place, where they feel a moral imperative to dismantle existing power structures, in almost the exact same way that a communist would. 

But whereas the left-winger wants to dismantle power to make way for the workers’ utopia, it’s not clear what the right winger things will go there. Some kind of feudalism maybe, he coughs and awkwardly looks to the side.

At its core, Burnham’s critique is ultimately an anti-consumerist critique. So while it may provide rhetorical value in convincing conservatives to stop cucking for a free market that no longer exists, if it ever did, the arrangement of concepts it presents in does not suggest a course of action beyond some kind of anarcho-primitivism

Anyway I think there’s another reason Burnham has recently been popular in our circles; I personally find his thesis very compelling as a way to “own the libs” or more specifically the communists, because their entire worldview is predicated on antagonism towards capitalism, so if we can credibly claim that capitalism no longer exists, then this is yet another delightful way that they are wrong.

If we are honest, there is something quite pedantic in Burnham; he defines capitalism in this very narrow way, which allows him to produce his provocative thesis that capitalism has ended and yielded to managerialism. Does it own the libs? Sure, but not half as well as a teenager in Wisconsin with an AR-15.

These types of reframings of familiar concepts spread very easily, because they exploit a certain sense of satisfaction that we get when we feel as if we know something. But that feeling can often be deceptive, and it can lull us into passivity or at least waste a lot of our mental life

It can be perfectly reasonable to use an analysis such as Burnhams to win some ideological skirmish, but we have to examine the telos of an idea when we are building a worldview, and try to predict where it will lead us

We don’t have a lot of space in our heads, and we need to invest in undervalued ideas with high returns if we are going to beat the ideological market.

~

So we were looking at one particular slogan of the neoreactionary right; America is a Communist Country.

And to interrogate this claim, we started by asking, is America a capitalist country? But immediately we get bogged down in the problem of trying to define capitalism. And what we quickly see is that there can be no single definition. There is no one true thing behind a word which is used so broadly by so many people to satisfy so many agendas.

Because words don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in relation to us, and the ways we use them are framed by specific goals that we possess.

For Schumpeter, capitalism is a process of creative destruction in which entrepreneurs drive cycles of disruption and consolidation.

For Burnham it’s when the nominal owners of capital are coincident with the directors of its operations.

For Max Weber it’s a kind of reification of protestant values into the ordering of society, the rationalization and secularization of a fundamentally religious impulse

For Werner Sombart it began with double-entry accounting, and it’s at once a technique, a form of organization, and a mental attitude, which orbit around acquisition, competition, and rationality. 

In fact Sombart is responsible for the popularity of the word capitalism; Marx wrote about capital, but never used the word capitalISM.

For Marx and all his intellectual progeny, it means exploitation of the labor force by the owners of things like factories and farms.

Notice in particular the normative and moralistic claims that are contained in the Marxist definition. The emotional calculus of this is run backwards, especially by men with frail shoulders and whiny voices: If I’m personally unhappy, then I am exploited. If I am exploited, then it’s capitalism.

But it’s not really fair or correct to reduce any of these thinkers to these one line caricatures. If you actually sit down and read the books of any of these men, including Marx, they contain whole worlds and they are much more nuanced than the cartoon versions of them that most people know, if they know them at all.

And what most theorists of capitalism have in common is that they can’t help themselves but predict the end of it. Theorists tend to believe that capitalism terminates in some form of communism. 

Schumpeter thought that instinctively, there is something inherent in our psychology which cannot tolerate the unevenness, and the volatility of capitalism’s cycles of creative destruction.

So he says that the prosperity of capitalism leads to the emergence of a large intellectual class, and that the intellectual class will denigrate and destroy capitalism, even as it is, ironically, it is the only reason they exist in the first place.

And we can maybe find shades of this hypothesis in Moldbug, who describes the hegemony of Harvard and the New York Times as America’s spiritual center.

This is maybe another reason we should try to avoid intellectualism as a normative stance. 

In theological, eschatological terms, Schumpeter was a premillennialist, and Burnham was a postmillennialist. That is, Schumpeter thought the end of capitalism had yet to come, and Burnham thought it had already passed us by.

And they’re both correct, because although the words are the same, the functional contents of their analyses are completely different. 

One is talking about the process of wealth creation and accumulation. The other is talking about ownership and control of those things.

Rudolf Hilferding, the marxist minister of finance in the Weimar republic wrote that the self-bootstrapping capitalist structure would ultimately be the instrument that brought about communism. He didn’t believe in the violent communist revolution. He believed in the overtaking of capitalism through a gradual bureaucratic process. Now, does he agree with Burnham or with Schumpeter?

In fact he seems to agree with both, even as they disagree with each other. For Hilferding, the bureaucratization of society is an essential fact of capitalism. And I think, with all the above caveats about language and the treachery of words aside, he is correct.

We need to correct the idea that the right is doing itself any favors when it tries to defend the free market — all it’s doing is playing the bad cop in the good cop, bad cop routine of state power expansion — and to do that we also have to dispossess ourselves of the idea that the relatively unregulated free market is some kind of final form of capitalism.

The antidote to all of this in my opinion is in Fernand Braudel, who takes a rigorously historical approach towards trade and commerce in Europe. He is very careful to speak about the specific products and trade routes and laws — he tends to refrain from carelessly delivering a theory.

And what Braudel finds is that if we ignore the words, there are records of institutions that behave very much like labor markets all the way back to even the eleventh century, and there are historical records of purchases and trades as early as the thirteenth century which resemble some of our quite complex financial instruments that exist today.

Braudel shows that wherever the hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye market arises, which is everywhere, regulation and monopoly are never far behind. Wealth naturally ends up distributed according to a power law, where the wealthiest player in the market is an order of magnitude in most cases richer than the second wealthiest player, and so on down the line.

These top-tier players always work together, with each other and with the state, to control the terms of the market for everyone else. They use regulation as one of their main tools to do this. I think most people realize by now that regulation, as much as its sold to us as a way to protect the consumer, it also has the function of creating barriers to competition for smaller market players.

Large firms can comply with the regulation that they themselves help to author, not because they are controlling the state but because the border between them and the state is completely porous, and this allows them to place a tax on their competitors. I’m not even trying to argue against regulation here, I’m not making a moral argument, I’m only pointing out that firms have selfish reasons for desiring regulation in addition to altruistic ones. 

Most things are like this. We are most likely to take actions that advance our own agendas even when they contain mutually uplifting intentions. That’s good. Selfish motives don’t contaminate or ruin altruistic ones, quite the opposite. Altruistic motives that contain no personal benefit are the most suspect of all, the most likely to be destructive or pathological.

So for Braudel, capitalism is this whole gradient from hand-to-hand markets all the way up to the dizzying heights of financialization and regulation. That’s the lifecycle of a market. He calls the financialized, regulated superstructure the antimarket, because it behaves in a way that does not accord with classical economics. 

And he says that any market of sufficient size gives birth to an antimarket, and he shows how it happens again and again through Europe, in Venice, in Genoa, in Amsterdam, in London.

In Braudel’s reckoning, Burnham’s managerialism is reduced to a particular instance of a general rule and a predictable historical cycle. For Braudel, the key difference between our current iteration of the antimarket and the iteration in thirteenth century Venice is our level of technological development. But the same principles obtain in both cases, the same general behavior and pattern.

If you try to look up Managerialism, over and over you will see this statement: managerialism is an ideology. It is not. Nor is capitalism. We could spend as long trying to dissect the word ideology as we have on capitalism, and much longer on both of them besides. 

But without getting hung up on minutiae, an ideology is a belief system, it’s a framework of ideas that are held together by faith in theories. An ideology springs forth from an ideologue, it’s a deliberate construction by priestly individuals.

The opposite of an ideology is a tradition. Traditions arise organically, by a process quite like evolution. Tradition is constituted by behavior. Behaviors that are are repeatable and useful tend to spread. Behaviors that are hard to imitate or that are deleterious to the person doing them tend not to. 

This isn’t always the case of course, sometimes very harmful behaviors can spread, even quite rapidly. But if they’re harmful enough, they tend to snuff themselves out. And what endures becomes tradition.

So when we look at capitalism and managerialism, were they invented by ideologues? Or were they gradual accumulations of useful behaviors? The answer is obviously the latter, which is partly why they are hard to define, whereas communism is very easy to define.

Capitalism is in fact a living tradition. You probably know that line from Evola about how people who are engaging in a living tradition don’t recognize it as such. They just think it’s the way things are done. By the time you start calling it tradition, the tradition is dead, or at least frozen. Maybe by saying this I am killing it.

Managerialism by extension is also a tradition. Many people have written about or tried to find greater clarity or formalism around managerialism. But the difference is that the writing and the formalism comes after the practices arise. Ideology is the opposite.

Now, what can we make of all this?

If we look at the world through the lens of Burnham and Braudel, then we realize that antimarkets are an inevitable byproduct of so-called free markets. Managerialism isn’t the degradation of capitalism, it’s the culmination.

Schumpeterian disruptions still do occur under the antimarket. They occur when technology creates a new frontier that can exist outside of existing regulation. This is what we saw with the early internet, this is what we see with cryptocurrency now.

Every bazaar, to use the Eric S. Raymond term, turns itself into a cathedral once it crosses a certain threshold. Hand-to-Hand markets can still exist under the auspices of a cathedral, just as liquid water exists side-by-side with water vapor as water begins to boil. The cathedral doesn’t replace the bazaar, it lives along side it like a phase change.

The romantic tendency within right wing thinking is to idolize the economics of the recent past. The libertarian tendency is to imagine that we can freeze the process of capital development at the bazaar stage, before the cathedral arises. But we can’t.

For this reason, I am and I will always advocate that the right should not run from the managerialization of markets, we should aim to control it and inject it with right wing norms and values. 

Whatever is going on in America economically, it’s not capitalism according to the popular definition, or the libertarian definition, or even the classical Marxist definition. We can stretch the word to any dimensions we want, and we can make the square peg fit in the round hole by means of Braudel’s lexico-historical dremel.

But in the end, when we look all of these different theorists, what we should notice first of all is that they aren’t empirical — they aren’t measuring things, they aren’t doing experiments, they are only sorting out a relation of their own perceptions with regard to the human heart. In short, they are doing theology.

So finally we are in a position to see that the slogan “America is a communist country” is not reducible to mere economics. It has to be a question of values.

And the values that are sovereign now — they are not our values, my friends.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerohplovecraft.substack.com

This is episode one, on reading, writing, metaphysics, literacy, and elitism

Having read so many of your original stories, I wanted to share my thought process for judging, and explain how I think about stories 

There are of course the bare concerns regarding prose quality, or technical skill in the management of pacing, framing, foreshadowing, and these types of things

For a story to be good, all of these things must be good.

And for many aspiring writers, they are still struggling with these fundamentals of composition. 

Indeed, this is a lifelong struggle, because we can always find ways to improve our technical abilities

There is no trick to improving at this; you must spend time reading good books, and you must practice copying their structure and flow.

But when you are starting out, it is a common pitfall to be too ambitious

Do not begin by trying to write the great novel of your life, or by imitating intricate stories that cleverly break the rules of composition

Modern and post-modern stories have violently rejected such things as narrative structure, and so they make poor models

The artfulness of a writer like Barthes or Pynchon or Wallace can only exist as an adjunct to the classical forms of storytelling which they subvert

But aspiring writers tend to mistake such colorful detours for the main road, 

and they end up writing from a place of insincerity because they are trying to capture a certain feeling these writers have given them without understanding the source of that feeling

It is easy to mock technically deficient writing, but in truth, technically competent writing is table stakes

the real game begins only once you are seated at the table

The real game is played in a metaphysical arena — now this word, metaphysics, this may be a vague word, it’s not always clear what people mean by it, but the definition I will offer you today is a bit different to what you will find on wikipedia

If the plot of the story is the “what” of it — as I have said before, it is not is not just a sequence of events, but a sequence of human events, a sequence of intentions and emotions — 

Then the metaphysics of the story is the “why” — it is the level of mechanics which governs the physics

To make it clear, here is an example from the passage prize submissions

My purpose here is not to insult, so to the author of this story, I thank you for submitting it; it was technically competent, you made it through the gate. And I am not trying to pick on you. I hope you will keep writing.

There was a story I read about an arrogant chef who ran a Michelin star restaurant. In the story, the chef does not believe in the possibility of gluten intolerance. One of his guests indicates a gluten allergy, and he lies to her about serving her special food to accommodate her, because he believes that spoiled yuppies make up food allergies for attention.

Halfway through her meal, the gluten intolerant guest goes into anaphylactic shock. This is perhaps not realistic, but this is beside the point. As the paramedics take the gluten-intolerant girl away to the hospital, the chef hears her mutter something under her breath, and he thinks she says the word “fatter”

In his own mind this was some kind of a witchcraft curse — the chef becomes ravenously hungry, eating all the food in his walk-in refrigerator, overindulging when he should be tasting, eating gallons of ice cream, donuts, he needs to be snacking constantly.

He gains a hundred pounds in a matter of weeks but nothing can sate his appetite. So he finds the girl’s number from his reservation list and calls her and asks her if she cursed him — she tells him she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. 

But his appetite and his physical deterioration have begun to cause real problems for him. His restaurant food quality declines and he loses the respect of his staff. So he calls the girl again and he begs her to meet with him, which she does.

She tells him she doesn’t know anything about curses but that she thinks he is suffering from bad karma owing to his own self-knowledge of his guilt for poisoning her. She says he should apologize to her and try to make amends in order to fix his karma. He does so and immediately his hunger is satisfied, and his life returns to normal

Now, is this a good story?

It is simplistic, maybe, if we are blunt, it is a bit childish. But that is not a mark against it. In fact, the simplicity of this story makes it perfect to illustrate what I mean by metaphysics. 

I have just related the plot of the story. To be succinct, we could say this story is about about a man who fails to show sufficient consideration for his fellow, and who suffers a consequence for it, and who finds redemption. 

If we put it like this, it sounds like it might be a very good story, even a Christian story. But this is not so.

Because if we look closer, we must ask more questions: what is the man’s sin, specifically? Who or what is the thing that punishes him? And finally, what is the source of his salvation? 

His sin is that he is a chef who ignores a food allergy. Some allergies can be very deadly. A chef is entrusted with the care of his patrons, and here, the chef violates that trust. So this is, genuinely, an immoral action. He is guilty at least of dishonesty.

But now, where does his punishment come from? At first it is implied to be a curse, so it comes from the person he has wronged. But then later we see that it was all in his head, there was no curse. The punishment came from his own mind, from his own conscience.

We could say that God spoke to him through his conscience, but this is not what the story implies. At most it appeals to an impersonal cosmic force, to karma. But in truth, if we read the story literally, the punishment came from himself, from his own heart. 

And how does he find redemption? By the same path—his apology to the girl is a repentance to alleviate his own guilt. The story makes this clear. 

The curse was a punishment he imposed on himself, subconsciously. He is his own god, and therefore, if he felt no guilt, there would be no sin

This is the first metaphysical lens we can look through. What we may call the “soteriological frame” — what is the sin, what is the punishment, what is the salvation?

The moral universe of this story is that of a secular humanist. God and sin are socially constructed, purely psychological abstractions. There are many, even on the far right, who might agree with this model.

There are some who would even say this is a Nietzschean model, but this is not so.

In Nietzsche’s moral universe, the purpose of Man must be to aim at something which is GREATER and HIGHER than Man. But this story aims at nothing. There is nothing higher than the man.

Yes, the story invokes “karma,” but it is not some transcendental moral obligation according to hindu cosmology — it is only a mirror to the protagonist’s own internal states

So we see that this is neither a Christian, nor a Nietzschean story. No — this is a humanist story, a story where human feelings are ontologically primary.

Moreover, it is a deeply feminine story. Woman’s moral universe is entirely bounded by her own emotions, her feelings at the present moment.

In fact, humanist morality is fundamentally feminine.

And now, we can go even further. This humanist metaphysic is the foundational layer of the story, but now in the current year, it is surmounted by a second layer, which may call the intersectional frame

In this analysis, we disregard questions of sin and salvation, because the answers are fixed and implicit in humanist frame.

Instead we ask the questions which define so called “woke” morality, which you may have seen abbreviated as “who, whom?”

In the intersectional frame, we take the particulars of each character’s race and sex and so forth, and we interpret them as universal statements about all people who exist in those categories.

We ask “who is doing what, and to whom are they doing it?”

In this story we see that there are two characters, and they are both implicitly white, so there is no racial component, though one can always be manufactured out of a conspicuous absence

The most important thing to observe in this frame is that this story is about a man who fails to respect a woman.

And moreover, he blames the woman for cursing him, but we discover she was innocent. 

And even further, when he goes to her for redemption, she cannot give it to him, she is not his savior, but he must repent TO HER regardless.

This is a perfect encapsulation of intersectional feminism: women have no agency, they are sacred innocents, and man sins against them, but they have no power to forgive, rather, a man must redeem himself by aligning himself with the feminine metaphysic

Notice also the nature of his sin, in this case, its that the woman has requested special consideration on the basis of an idiosyncratic weakness she possesses 

— though it is true that some people can be harmed by gluten, it is a mathematical certainty that the majority of gluten disrespectors are participating in a psychosomatic diet fad, a kind of mass hysteria which has been largely supplanted by long covid and transgenderism and so on

In any case, we see that this story is humanist, feminist, and anti-christian, despite it’s seemingly unobjectionable themes of guilt and apology.

The underlying “trick” of the intersectional frame — 

The trick of all “critical” readings — 

Is to treat the story as an allegory for the interplay between various “revolutionary” identities, and to anthropomorphize them, 

as if each race and sex and class is a single individual in your hunter-gatherer tribe

In this way, each category is reduced to a dyad consisting of the reader and the identity-group-as-individual

And in this way we are tricked into feeling a sense of social obligation to an identity class, even though this is non-sequitur

We are told it is bigoted if we reduce individuals to their identity group

But we are also blackmailed into treating identity groups as individuals

It is tempting here to say that we are overthinking it— that no one performs a conscious analysis in this way, or that a story can be just a story, and we do not need to project all of these allegorical political neuroses onto it

But this is wrong in two ways:

First, it is wrong on critical theory’s own terms, which claims that these kinds of power relations are necessarily primary in all social interactions. 

You may disagree, you may think that critical theory is a poisonous way to view the world—and you are correct—

But if you think that, and yet you still engage in the power discourse of critical theory, which demands that we make atonement for injustices against race or sex

Then you are acting as a useful idiot on behalf of critical theory, you are reinforcing its moral calculus while denying that you are doing so

Perhaps you are confused, or perhaps you are lying to yourself — oh the wokeness, the wokeness has gone too far — many people say this but they still agree, IN PRINCIPLE with its moral demands

They may object to the procedural level of humanist, egalitarian politics — but they are still sleeping because they have not found the space in their soul to reject its metaphysical claims

But now, again, you may ask: Why can’t a story be just a story?

This is wrong in a second way: because critical theory is right in its assumption that all stories are didactic

The stories that we tell each other teach us how to think about other people, about moral desert, about right and wrong

And the reason so many people subscribe to intersectional morality — even while remaining ignorant of its metaphysical claims —

Is that we are saturated in stories which operate in its moral universe

The stories we learn — the who, whom of them, the nature of sin and salvation — all of these things are implicit in every sitcom and every movie and every children’s cartoon

So they become automatic

And if you learn to ask these questions I am showing you —

If you learn to read the metaphysical claims of the stories in your life —

You realize that almost all modern storytelling privileges the feminine moral frame that we have just seen in this story about the chef and the gluten WHORE

~

The above is by no means exhaustive. 

We have learned two ways to examine the metaphysical content of a story, and we have seen how even a very simple story contains such a payload.

We conduct this examination in the soteriological frame by asking: what is the sin? What is the punishment? What is the source of salvation?

Note that a story can be Christian even if the source of salvation is not literally God. We are sensitive to allegory and parable.

But we pay special attention when the source of salvation is a human or worst of all, a woman. 

The second frame we learned is the intersectional; here we ask, WHO is the sinner, and WHO is the redeemer? 

You can see how, in the intersectional frame, the sinner is supposed to be a person from a “privileged” identity group — white, male, healthy, and normal, as opposed to colored, female, queer, and disabled.

The great irony of the intersectional oppression stack is that it inverts the meaning of the word “privilege” — to call someone privileged is a method of disprivileging them.

The new religion elevates blacks over whites because whites are privileged — what this means is that whites have fewer rights than blacks, that whites are deliberately disprivileged

— and this is said to be fair according to the playground logic of “let your little sister have a turn”

Colloquially we call this “putting your thumb on the scale” 

— but let us backtrack a bit

Ideally we would like to hear and tell only stories that reject the feminist metaphysic: the story should “center” white, male, and sexually normal voices. 

Usually the main character of a story is a sinner. That means the sinner will usually be a man, but if his sin is against women, brown, or queers, then the story has AIDs

In a good story, the sin should never be racism, or sexism, or any such thing as this. In fact those things are not sins. And we should never promote a story where these things are sins.

To do so is to reinforce liberal, queer, egalitarian theories

And we desire to reject these things ROOT and BRANCH.

Many people are eager to reject the excesses of liberalism but they do not understand what they are rejecting

They do not understand HOW to reject it. 

We do this by rejecting the moral underpinnings of liberal thought—humanism, feminism, and egalitarianism

If we see a story that is built on these metaphysical foundations, that is a bad story, even if it is well written

This is how I think about the stories I have judged for the passage prize.

Now we will apply this same analysis to another story, and this is maybe unfair to the previous, because I want to talk about the story that I chose to win

That story is called Georgia Buddha, and it is an intricate story, I will say it is a breathtaking story.

I read it again just now and I am enamored with how beautifully it is told, and also with its moral clarity

In this story, there is a rich man, a self-made man, who has worked his way up from poverty, and now he owns a mansion and has many children and domestic servants. 

This man is named Buddy. Now, Buddy’s oldest son was born of his first wife, who died of cancer many years ago. He has remarried, and he has many children by his second wife. 

This story is set in the 1960s, or possibly the early 70s, and we learn that Buddy’s oldest son, Rob, has dropped out of college and joined a hippie commune in the woods. He now demands to be called Siddhartha 

Buddy is hurt by this, because his son has turned away from his birth name, from his fathers gifts to him, and is living decadently in the woods.

Buddy tries to understand his son: he listens to the popular music that is inspiring him, and he reads books about buddhism, including Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, which his son as given to him.

Then he goes out to the woods, to the commune, and he has a confrontation with his son. Through dialogue we learn that the son—who is now called “Sid” — resents Buddy, because his first wife, Sid’s mother, died of cancer while Sid was at a boarding school, and Buddy immediately took a new wife.

Moreover, we learn there is an element of racial resentment — Buddy’s first wife was black, and Buddy’s second wife was white. This is never explicitly stated.

Sid says many hurtful things to his father, publicly, in front of all his hippie friends, and Buddy becomes very angry, but he endures all of this abuse out of love, and finally he persuades his son to step outside—

Sid tries to accuse Buddy of racism, of sexism, of negligence—we see that he believes his father never loved his black first wife, that he couldn’t wait to be rid of her to marry a white woman—and we also learn that his father is innocent of these allegations

Finally, they speak man to man, after a brief fight, which Buddy wins. What Buddy wanted for his son, through all of this, was for him to go back to school, to be strong, to be a good man. And we see that finally, in the last moments of the story, Sid comes to understand his father’s love for him

Buddy says: Boy, it takes rich men to subsidize holy men, hell, Jesus Christ had rich women following behind him. So don’t act like you’re better than I am cause you’re spending my money trying to find your soul and way in life.

Sid thought that he was the buddha, rejecting his life of riches to pursue spiritual growth, but we, the readers, realize that Buddy is the enlightened one. There is even a phonetic similarity between “Buddy” and “Buddha”  — and for me, this association only becomes apparent as the story concludes.

In the next segment, I will explain the ways that I read this story.

~

Yes hello. We will talk about my reading of the passage prize winner, Georgia Buddha.

The first thing we should notice about this story is that it is a variation on the biblical parable of the prodigal son, which you can find in the fifteenth chapter of Luke

So right away we see that our sculptor has chosen beautiful raw materials, fine stone from which he will release these wonderful forms

Buddy is the rich man in the story, the father — and in Jesus parable, this character is, metaphorically, God. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 

I found two different ways to read this story, and it is a hallmark of any very good story that it may be read in multiple senses

First, we will examine the soteriology: What is the sin? It is that a son has turned away from his father, and rejected his care. Next, what is the punishment? 

Well, this part is vague. In Jesus’ parable, the son squanders all of his father’s wealth, this is the wage of his sin

But in our story, the son has not yet squandered it. So if there is punishment, it is his estrangement from his father, it is his self-imposed exile and the resentment he feels

Very well, what is the salvation? Notice that Buddy, the father, lives in a kind of heaven: he is rich, he is successful, he has many friends and great influence, he has a beautiful wife and she has born him loving children.

But he leaves his heaven, and descends into the earth, a place that is described in the story as being muddy, a woman walks barefoot in the mud, the commune is in a log cabin with no running water. 

So the father leaves heaven and comes to earth, and he endures these pains on behalf of his son, and then he saves him, because he is willing to go through this pain

Now we can see that despite its Buddhist trappings, this is a deeply Christian story, it is a story about a father saving his son by enduring suffering on his behalf.

This story glorifies fatherhood — it is metaphysically correct.

Now we can perform the intersectional reading: who is the sinner? It is the son, a boy of mixed race. And who is his redeemer? His father, a straight white man. This is so obvious it barely needs to be said.

But how can we read this allegorically? We could take it as a story of the white man’s burden — that through pain endured on behalf of love, the white man tries to uplift the negro.

That is one reading. Certainly it is problematic for intersectional types, even though it is the literal metaphysic of all antiracism, a metaphysic which they vehemently deny, because they are either evil or stupid.

But to me it is not a satisfying reading, because the mulatto son cannot help his nature. We like to joke about this: being black is a choice, we might say, unlike being a communist, which is something you are born with.

To be more serious, there is a sense in which this is literally true: black americans do have the option to embrace so-called “black culture” or to reject it and choose “white culture” — which paradoxically may consist of loudly proclaiming racial resentment against whites — In the current year, there is almost nothing whiter. 

And that is, effectively, the choice that Buddy is giving to his son: as Nietzsche reminds us, a man of mixed blood is always at war within himself. And Buddy is giving his son a chance to choose one side or the other.

The second reading of the story is to notice that, whatever sins Sid has committed, it is BUDDY who made him that way. Buddy chose his first wife, his black wife. 

So we can also read that BUDDY is the sinner, and his sin is miscegenation. The punishment then is that his son must pay for his sin. And in this reading, redemption comes when pays his sons debt for him, by convincing him to accept the salvation of white culture.

This second reading is also Christian: God has made you this way, given you the capacity to be both a saint or a sinner, and has come to you, to offer you salvation, paying your debt for you because in a way, it is a debt that he owes to himself.

We must be very careful here, because this can easily veer into heresy. Keep in mind that we are dealing only in allegory, and if we extend the metaphor too far, then it becomes over-extended, and it will collapse

Now, two further questions:

First, did the author intend these readings? We might imagine that most men, when they tell a story, do not have such a theological treatise in mind

And while it’s possible that this author did, it is not necessary for him to have this intention in order to produce something this sophisticated; it is only necessary to tell the truth, because the true metaphysic is fractally manifest in everything underneath it

Second question: Are these the only readings? The answer of course is no.

“Post-modern” is a dirty word to some people, but the key insight of post-modern thought is that, with enough sophistry, any reading is possible of any text

For this reason many people associate post-modernism with sophistry, and they are not entirely wrong to do so

But it’s true that a clever exegesis can seem to invert the meaning of a text. So when we ask these soteriological or metaphysical questions, we must be aware that other answers are possible, and that clever enemies delight in finding ways to subvert something beautiful

I’ll give you an example of a clever subversion: we could read the above story through a psychoanalytical lens

In the psychoanalytical lens, we start with several assumptions:

first, that the characters have repressed desires — desires which may be socially unacceptable, and which they themselves do not realize

Second, that the characters repressed desires are revealed through their actions, but only after the characters have convinced themselves that they have no other choice but to act them out

Third, that even when they do this, they are not conscious of the desire as a desire, and the desire is born out of a need to “keep score” with the other people in their lives — they want to feel like they are getting as much out of the other person as they are giving

So when we read the story in this frame, we assume that the characters all conform to this psychological model. Who is Sid keeping score with? The options are his father, his dead mother, his friends, or his younger siblings.

We can pick any of these depending on what meaning we want to squeeze from this stone;

The most realistic choice is his friends, who are all engaged in a virtue signaling spiral over who hates their father the most (this is implicit) and Sid in this case has a ready-made narrative of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-capitalism which equip him to win this holiness spiral.

Staying even with or beating his friends at the father-resentment game is a huge part of his motive. But this happens off-camera and is not germane to the mechanics of the story.

We learn that he has hated his father ever since his mother died. He blames his father for the death of his mother, because he thinks Buddy neglected her when she was ill. So he refuses to accept his father’s gifts, and he hurts himself in the process.

It hardly seems that he needs to repress the desire to hurt his father, but he will tell himself he has no choice, that his father is a capitalist, a sexist, a racist — and that is why he must do these things

In this reading, Sid becomes sympathetic. Poor, confused, unenlightened Sid, cutting off his nose to spite his face

Sid will not think of his actions in this way. He will think instead that he is pursuing some spiritual path — that is the story he has built for himself with the help of his friends. But psychoanalysis believes that these kinds of baser, personal motives are primary

And what about the father? What score is Buddy trying to equalize? Sid’s dead mother has absconded from the scene, leaving him with the burden of fatherhood. She has “gotten more” out of Buddy than Buddy got out of her, so Buddy will look for a way to make it even.

We see that his son reminds him of his dead wife, so the psychoanalytic reading is that he tries to settle the score with his son. He does this by physically striking him, by trying to “control” him — but no, enough, this teaching nauseates me.

Let there be no mistake here: I believe this reading is bad, it is false. But it is also common, it is the way that the left will read this story. And I want to show you how they smuggle their own, twisted metaphysics into a story by adding a priori assumptions in the form of psychoanalytic axioms.

Notice how the information that was added — the ideas about repression and score-keeping — are not present in the story at all. In fact when you read the story, you will see that Buddy has a very grounded view of his first wife. But psychoanalysis cannot accept this;

It demands pathology, because it is a hammer which sees every person as a nail.

Notice also how there is no sin in the psychoanalytic frame: Sid has no agency at all, he is just reacting to the circumstances that have shaped him. The only sinner now is Buddy, and his sin isn’t anything he did, either, his sin is his inexorable NATURE—he can’t help but repress his desire, he can’t help but oppress his son

So the insertion of psychoanalytical metaphysics is the undoing of all metaphysics. The only salvation that remains, now, is for Buddy and Sid to both go to therapy. How convenient for the psychoanalysts.

This is another possible reading, but it is a reading we should reject, it is a back door to the same liberal metaphysics we are trying to escape.

You know that old chestnut — men would rather submit a work of original fiction to a bunch of anonymous reactionaries than go to therapy

And what I’m telling you is their preference is rational and just.

~

We have been talking about how to read, and we have covered a lot of ground already

When we talk about reading, we think maybe of mere literacy, which is just the ability to turn markings on a page into words in your head

We call this reading

But there is another skill, which is only barely related to this — it is not the act of decoding graphemes into phonemes, but the act of decoding morals out of metaphors, which I been explaining by way of examples

No one taught me this ability; I did not read it in any book. I did not learn it from any teacher. I do not know if it can be taught, though I have tried to teach it to you here today

We have seen how clever manipulation of the symbols in a story can be used to subvert or to invert its intended meaning

And for many people, they will not bother to read, and if they do, they will only read what they expect to read, that is, they will fail to confront the ideas which are constituted by the words they find on the page

You cannot read a story in a vacuum; all the other stories you know will shape your expectations

For people who are inundated by leftist metaphysics, it may be that only a leftist reading of a story is possible.

We wish to avoid this kind of narrowness, this parochiality, which is the purview of the average leftist today

We have seen also that a subversive reading begins with dishonesty, with moral assumptions about the content of the text. In an honest reading, we try to bring nothing to the text but our hearts

Francis Bacon wrote that it pleaseth God to apply himself to the capacity of the simplest

There is a simple, straightforward reading of a story like Georgia Buddha — it doesn’t require any deep thought, it only requires an openness to ideas and to life

To possess this openness, we must feel what the author has felt in the act of writing. 

To write from the heart, with sincerity and honesty, means the author must feel every single moment of his story from every perspective within it.

He must LIVE each moment, feel its weight, its emotion, its intention.

The artful reader must do the same.

And let us not pretend this is easy. Such an act of reading requires patience, devotion, and time for reflection. Small sips from a strong drink.

We are talking about literacy. And as reactionaries we may consider mass literacy to have been a mistake. 

Perhaps by giving everyone the ability to read we have dragged something precious and rarefied down into the mud and the dirt

Anyone can learn to read words, but it seems that very few among us can learn to read ideas

Goethe believed in this kind of elitism: he divided people into what he called Puppets and Natures. 

He said the majority of people were machines, playing a part.

I think this is a hazardous idea — a hazard to a man who holds it, because to hold it is to risk self-aggrandizement. We can only recoil from a man who walks around believing he has a monopoly on autonomy

To believe this about yourself is to set yourself up for a fall

Paradoxically, it seems that a deep and abiding humility is a necessary precondition to being what Goethe called a Nature.

Chinese communists used to believe that one man in twenty had leadership capacity — about five percent

And if they captured prisoners of war in Vietnam, they would isolate all the officers from the rest of the men, and they believed that the men would naturally look at certain others among their number, instinctively — that everyone would have an intuitive understanding of who their leaders were. 

And then they would isolate those men, as well, and put them in with the officers. And they would do this until no leaders were left. The leaders, they thought, could be molded, re-educated — and they were put through a battery of psychological manipulations, which I have described elsewhere

The regular men were simply imprisoned — there was no value in trying to train their minds, because they would always fall in line behind the leaders

Suppose all this is true — that Goethe and the CCP were looking at the same phenomenon — then what it means is that leadership capacity, being a nature — having your own, internal, self-propelling vitality — is really a kind of sensitivity

It means you vulnerable to ideas, it means ideas can take hold of you and possess you

This sounds counter-intuitive, because we think of these great robotic masses as people who are possessed by propaganda, possessed by ideas

But this is wrong, the masses are not possessed by ideas, they are in thrall to power. Their ideas change every week, not according to any coherent logic, but purely in response to the whims of the powerful, of those who CAN BELIEVE in ideas

If you think you have this power, then you should see it mostly as a liability. There is no such thing as nobility without obligation

I am not talking about an obligation to others, I am talking about an obligation to yourself 

If you have a weakness you need to be aware of that, you need to admit it honestly to yourself, and to the best of your ability you have to compensate for it

We pretend that anyone can change their mind when faced with superior arguments, but in reality logic and data are both displays of power

Both can be used to Iie, and this is very easy in fact

The ability to marshal arguments in favor of a cause is a demonstration of power

And when most people submit to these things, to arguments, to logic, they’re really submitting to power

But if you are a natural born leader. If you have your own NATURE, then it seems you can differ from the herd

This isn’t so much the power to adopt a rival ideology as the power to invent your own ideas

These two things are easily and usually conflated

Many men think choosing one school over another makes them independent, and that’s clearly wrong

But for those who do have that capacity, the usual result is being hanged as a heretic, not celebrated as a philosopher. So it really is a liability

I don’t think it’s bad to be a mechanical man  — I don’t think one type is inherently superior to the other. In most cases, the man who is a nature amounts to nothing, and he has no choice but to live mechanically, tormented maybe

Often such people are full of resentment. 

Often, because they are sensitive to ideas, they struggle to have feel conviction

Often they end up with a false sense of superiority — I think the worst and the best people are probably of this sort

But what I am also suggesting is that this ability is connected to being able to read, to truly read, to read ideas and not just words

People who have this power will inevitably disagree over the meaning of what they have read, and this leads to schism

A century ago, communist revolutionaries would prohibited the reading of all books and newspapers that were not 'red' and at the same time demanded that only the 'red' meetings should be attended. They did this because they understood the character of the mechanical man

There is likewise a sentiment in the catholic church that the sheep cannot be trusted to read God’s word without the guidance of a shepherd

When books are expensive, and when the lower, mechanical type of literacy is rare, then schism is rare

Protestantism was an inevitable consequence of the printing press, and I think much of the anti-literacy sentiment that I hear on the right comes from Catholics who want to wish away protestants

Protestantism is an essentially technological development, and there is no purely social intervention that could undo the schism, the only option would be to suppress the technology

Why make this analogy? Because phones and wireless internet have caused a similar type of social change, a kind of hyper-protestantism.

And it throws the distinction between mechanical men — men who are in thrall to power — and “natures” — men who are sensitive to ideas — into very stark relief. And you will notice that men who show some glimmer of independent thought are cranks. Most of their ideas are bad, though they may be original.

If you hear this and you think the answer is to dismantle the network of wireless telephony, then you haven’t learned to think like a ruler

The cost of one in twenty being rebellious must be weighed against the power to instantly, wireless command the other 19 with alacrity

The elitist argument is the same, no matter who the elites are

This is the central dilemma that elitists face today: any argument we make for elitism must contend with the decrepit state of our so-called elites

those who despise us — journalists, university professors, the intellectual class — will make this same argument when it comes to all great works of literature or art

they will tell us that we must rely on “expert opinion” — by which they mean their own opinions, naturally

A populist argument is an argument with the MEANS of control — it’s an argument that no one should have power, that no one should be able to control the mass

A populist believes that inside every puppet is a nature just waiting to get free

That we can achieve a state of utopia if only we can find a way to WAKE UP the individuality and NATURE within every mechanical man

This is tempting, this is the root of the egalitarian fallacy, and it is always and everywhere false.

An elitist argument understands that most people will always be sheep in need of a shepherd

It is not an argument about whether control should exist, but about what should be done with that control

The elite who rule over us now may well be a true elite — that is, there are people with power who are enthralled to ideas

And it is their ideas, not their existence, to which we object

That they have grown decadent and weak because they face no existential threat

And we—or at least the best of us—could become a better elite, 

and we are lying in wait, like a tiger in the grass, walking the knife’s edge of metabolic catastrophe, 

each meal may be our last

In short, our elite nature has been awakened first of all by our hunger

On the foundation of such an idea, we must build our house

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit zerohplovecraft.substack.com