Where we are, and where we are going

My conscience after this farcical election remains clear. It was never really an election was it? Can you have an election with a debased populace educated in the enemies accredited centers? Still whatever atrocity, whatever insane, unreasoned, psychotic, degenerate or pathological anti-White measure the DNC enacts from here on forward, can wholly be owned by Liberals, the functionaries of Liberalism, foreign helots, golems and treacherous cowardly “norm defenders” i.e. GOPe vermin.

However the year is now 2020 of our Lord. We may have to come to the realisation that the chapter of European people on this continent has come to a close. Unless Trump, through no knowledge of his own, forgot the memo that history ended, and thrusts European man and woman on the stage of destiny, through a radical act. Does he have the courage to do such a thing? I am uncertain, dark times are ahead, but others far more educated than I say the dark times never ended.

Liberalism has finally won.

I very much agree, I have the same model of history, but in a bit different words, so I will share it because it might resonate with some better.

I’ll start with the observation that Alexander treated his elite men as his friends, while Persian or Egyptian monarchs treated everyone as his slaves and worshippers as living gods. Hence “oriental despotism”. This points to a unique feature of Western civilization, that while the whole society was not egalitarian, there was a certain level of egalitarianism between aristocratic elites, the kings just being first of equals with a bunch aristocrats.

This unique feature of the West made it far easier to do this delegation job for kings, to build a virtuous elite that does the ruling mostly on their own. On the minus side, this also led to ideas like a republic. This is a very Western thing, it would never occur in the Orient. Basically when you take this limited egalitarianism on the top and interpret it as egalitarianism all over society, bad shit gonna happen. If one would conjure the spirit of an oriental despot, he would say “Yeah, that’s why I nipped in the bud”, and I think the West would have to answer that as long as it was limited to the top, and controlled by kings, it led to good things.

From about the 14th century, everybody who mattered had read the Ancient Greek – Roman classics. People were fascinated by that era. And of course noticed all those republics and democracies. And the general consensus was that this only works if the elites are virtuous. More importantly, the term for elites being virtuous was patriotism. (Or later nationalism, I find them mostly interchangeable.) For centuries people have read the Roman stories of self-sacrificing patriotism, considering it the ideal to follow. Dulce et decorum. From this angle, one way to talk about kings building virtuous elites is to say kings build nations and patriotic elites.

So even a liberal like Montesqiueu wrote that if your elites cannot put the good of their country about their own good, you are better off with a monarchy. Because it was just the general consensus. Everybody including the American Founding Fathers understood that the great problem of republics is faction, and thus they require patriotism, they require putting the common good above your own good. This is hard. He wrote monarchy is a whole lot easier, the elites want honors (status), handed out by the king so they server the king and through the king, the country.

Consensus is not a much liked word here, I am using it consciously. There was such a thing as a Western Canon, coming from everybody reading the classics because the Greco-Roman era was a great testing ground for all kinds of political ideas, and coming to this conclusion. Jim is mostly channelling the old and forgotten Western Canon, not inventing something new. Virtue, understood as patriotism or nationalism was widely understood as a precondition of republics.

(Except the unfortunate part where it tended towards the direction of “Don’t worry, guys, we are patriotic and virtuous, we’ll be able to pull this republic thing off.”)

The part where I disagree a bit with the Western Canon is that I think the big problem is not when elites pursue their individual interests. The big problem is when they combine them into a faction. Perhaps due to Enlightenment individualism, it was less noticed. Especially the part that it is easy to form factions, because human nature is tribal. Us vs. them, the way of men is the way of the gang etc. And how easy it is to see your own gang as the true patriots!

Like, in the very first stage of the French revolution all the radicals were from Bretagne. Later the ideology attracted everyone who wanted power, but the first core was this more personal gang, a bunch of bros who knew and trusted each other.

I like to put focus on this, because the patriotic virtues are based on turning our tribal instincts into seeing the whole of the elites or the whole of the country as your one ingroup. When they break down then what usually happens is that there will be lower level groups. Those ones can very easily interpret themselves as something like nations or ethnicities too, think American Civil War, it points to two two groups of elites seeing they are two nations, not one.

The aspect that republics turns into democracies by elites recruiting the plebs to fight for them in their internal struggles is excellent. I would like to word it also a bit differently. Today, the various ideas on the left are obviously incompatible with any sense of patriotism. But back then if you think about socialism especially about its milder, “conservative” forms like that of Disraeli. It was put into a form of a nationalist language: we are all, the whole nation are one ingroup, so why not help each other out, the rich helping the poor? Sounds very patriotic and very virtuous?

The issue with that is of course that it is not how socialism works. It is one group of elites paying off a group of plebs both with their opponents money and if they cannot avoid it then with their own in order to support them against another group of elites. So if elites see the whole nation as one ingroup, there is this failure mode. Meaning elites should only see elites as an ingroup? Would not be a popular idea these days.

On Caesars. Long ago, Vico wrote that Caesars happen when elites completely lose the ability to even see something like the public good, to see something like a republic, only their own factional interests. So Caesar comes and says “I am the republic.” Which is the same idea as serving the country through the king. Which is something similar to Napoleon saying “I am the revolution.”

This is a… difficult pill. If you tell me 15 years ago that you can serve your country through serving a king I would have replied that how do you know if the kings private interest is the public interest of the country? If some dude says I am the republic, I would have thought he wants to steal it, impose his private interest on the public good.

It was only Moldbugs secure vs. insecure power and nerdy examples like Fnargl’s Ring that made me understand that the idea is that where is only one truly dominant private interest, it becomes in practice something like the public good or public interest. Because if you own something, and your son(s) will inherit it, you want it to work well.

Well this is not that intuitive. 18th century men thought government has to be limited else it becomes a tyranny. Even Aristotle waay back then saw a difference between a monarchy and a tyranny. This was also a big part of a canon. And a private interest dominating the public can be tyrannical, of course, why could it not be. And all 18th century stuff about limited government. It was an Enlightenment thing. But in 1767 François Quesnay published Le Despotisme de la Chine arguing that this really not Western “oriental despotism” is good when it is sufficiently “enlightened”, relying more on scholars than nobles. So I don’t even know. In this aspect the canon is not very unified, it seems to me. It is unified in claiming republics requiring patriotism but not about this. There have been multiple version of the cycles of various forms of government proposed, not just Plato’s. Perhaps when democracy breaks down you have to have tyranny first, then it mellows out into a proper monarchy.

Thing is, I think like a nerd and I very much agree with Aidan Maclear “The nerd needs his five dollar words as a balm for the fact that he should agree with the jock.” That all this history and philosophy done right just leads to rediscovering much of what jocks knew intuitively anyway. Do they have some kind of an intuitive knowledge why and when does one dominant private interest really becomes equivalent to the public good or public interest and when not?

[black pilling deleted, shill suspected]

How do you all stay so upbeat? I mean, everywhere I look, I see reasons for despair. Outside of this space, pretty much everybody seems to be caving to the inevitability of Biden. The pro-Trump normies I encounter all reject the idea of him crossing the Rubicon, often holding only a leftie in the depths of TDS could write the sort of libelous doom-porn that he would ever do something so transgressive of our Sacred Values as to try to become dictator like the left has long falsely accused him of, or that he might be willing, but if he tried, they and most of the rest of the right would rightly abandon this violation of our Sacred Values, and surely all our military men would obey their Sacred Oath and then remove the Usurper Trump, along with deservedly gunning down any “fascist” who would continue to support him in such an Unconstitutional act. That “even 1% chance of civil war” is too dangerous to contemplate given how much the world depends on Pax Americana.

The further right, less normie sorts are, where possible, applying for passports and preparing international bug-out bags. The religious ones are mostly just seeing to the states of their individual souls, so that being murdered by the left under Biden/Harris just means getting into heaven sooner.

I see no evidence that SCOTUS will hear a vote-theft case before the deadline, and at least some indicators that they *won’t*.

So, again, how do you do it? How do you maintain “patience” and faith when everywhere I look, all I see is that we’re all going to die? Why are none of you concerned that it’s almost guaranteed that every single one of us will be murdered by leftist foot-soldiers (official or unofficial) during the Biden/Harris mass purge of the right? I ask here, because this is the most secular “optimistic right” space; in most any other right-wing space, the reason for optimism is always “God will see us through.” Is it just that all of you have the money and resources to quickly flee to a foreign country before things get too bad? Because, unfortunately, I’m dirt-poor and entirely stuck where I am.

this is a call to arms. That was a moving speech, and I thought he was going to call people up. He cut himself off, but it sounded like he was about to declare war all on his own. Massive, and it sounds like he is going to try to send Trump electors to the Electoral College. Another great sign. A few more rounds like that, and Trump will have all the legitimacy he could ever need.

Almost too on the nose for our purposes to be what it looks, like, but among the “midnight regulations” the “outgoing” Trump administration has recently crammed through:

https://projects.propublica.org/trump-midnight-regulations/

…bringing back the firing squad.

> What Putin is doing, making Russian Orthodoxy the state religion, is working.
Good one. These guys are a joke.
The still-living stereotype is “bless a Mercedes” sort of services. The previous ones were: “converted” ex-political officers — and before that, “livechurchers” doubling as KGB informants.
And back when it was the state religion, the Russian Orthodox Church had rate of substance to appearances was better, but not great. Which was a part of the problem, of course — at least as much as the military chaplains were unable to stop the hostile demagogues. That’s where the nastiest ones (including Tukhachevsky and Dybenko) have started. If so many mutinies wouldn’t happen, perhaps the Civil War couldn’t begin. Not before the new government would fuck up a lot, anyway.

He does, however, seem to have made it at least a state religion placeholder. Something like modern British “monarchs” — it’s not a real thing, but there’s no empty place in which anything more serious could crawl in and make its home.