On Identity

Thinking more about the Narrative, that even supposed right-wingers, dissidents and other odd fellows seem to believe in, that white Americans have no historical, racial or cultural identity.  This is false, as I have repeatedly said.  Yankee, for example, was an historical, racial or cultural identity by the 18th century.  As documentary evidence, should you have looked at such, attests.  What then explains this kind of ignorance persisting in our time?

The Narrative has been internalized because of cradle to grave propaganda, even by people who imagine themselves to be enemies of the System.  And that gets you to wondering about identity, what is it, how strong is it, and to what extent is it always a matter of artifice.  In brief, we can see that in our time a Monoculture is imposed, and especially upon those white Americans who used to think of themselves as Yankees.  And this Monoculture has done everything it can to get these people to forget their own history and to believe a fake, self-abnegating Narrative instead.  It has, to date, succeeded in this.

We are supposed to believe from right-wingers that tradition and history is a source of strength and of enduring but we can see in our time that the leftists have none of these things, and see them as heresies to the imperatives of progress.  Which, of course, ceased a long time ago, but leftists remain culturally paramount and the right is unable to mount much more than a token resistance in the cultural sphere, apart from red herrings.  It's fair enough to say that this is because their political elites sell them out, but then one wonders why they have never been replaced with new representatives who more accurately represent their interests (for example, anti-immigration and economic development are their main concerns as of 2024).

Or perhaps they, the political left in the Anglosphere and their toadies abroad, do have those things?  Perhaps there is some truth to the fact that the leftists are descendants, both ideologically and in many cases racially, of the old Yankees who were the "Protestants Abroad" of yesterday.  American Protestants of yesterday felt they had a mission to bring the whole world to civilization.  They were tireless and energetic in pursuing that goal.  And today, we see the leftists behaving in much the same way, albeit maliciously, in tearing down their own country and its history in furtherance of policies guaranteed to end in ruin.  But they do share in common the belief in the absolute truth of their mission and that resistance is to be steamrolled.

They've gotten Americans, even ones who seem to be against them, to believe in and perpetuate their Narrative, and to embrace a false, self-abnegating and detrimental history as their own identity.  They did this through control of media, schools and churches.  But if this process could be done, then it can also be undone.  The wrong and harmful teachings can be replaced with ones that are productive instead.  We've learned from their own methods that identity can be instilled.  But doing so, building something that is more serviceable and more true to our own history, would require an effort that is so far beyond any of our people, who remain mostly passive in the face of certain evil.

We do not need to reinvent the wheel here, as I have said.  If the Israelis could build, for decades, a state in the Middle East based on the most tenuous ties to reality based on an imaginary kingdom in their holy book, then I think whites who are the scions of an America that still existed in living memory can come up with something serviceable.  So what is holding them back?  Well, mainly atomization and lacking the will to do it, it seems to me.  There are still more than enough of them to overcome resistance if that's what it really came to.  But I have noted all my life an unwillingness of white Americans to work in common toward goals and until that changes, I don't think much else will either.

Falsehoods About America

 From a discussion elsewhere:

If you were someone who hung out in the White Nationalist-adjacent parts of the Internet at the right time you noticed a huge influx of people from 2013-2015, or at least this was my firsthand impression. WNism was a very niche thing before this, so that even though I don't think the absolute numbers were particularly impressive compared to what was there before it was quite a lot. A lot of relatively "normal" people, as opposed to the born incorrigibles who are naturally drawn to extreme politics, flooded into the movement. On the one hand, there were quite a few political events that probably precipitated this: the Trayvon Martin shooting, the Ferguson riots, BLM, and the Obama Presidency. But what has been much less discussed is the pop culture atmosphere that I think informed a lot of early 2010s WNism: Skyrim, Vikings, and Game of Thrones. This was the "white ethnostate" that was constructed in the imagination, which is the only place it could be since "white people" is not a real ethnic group with a real history. Even (or perhaps especially) liberals could enjoy this so long as it was confined to the television, and they could dream of a world where feminist slogans they had to profess in public didn't get in the way of rape fantasies.

"In fact, the only reason people like Game of Thrones and other fantasy stories is because they are part of a new shadow genre that I’m going to call ethnocentric fiction. This story constructs itself as an authentic medieval fantasy in order to fill in the backstory of an ethnic identity where history provides none. In much the same way that there was a period during the civil rights era when some black leaders tried to espouse a fiction that the ancestors of the slaves in Africa were all warrior kings and queens because there really isn’t any clear history of the millenia of human civilization in subsaharan Africa prior to slavery, this fantasy fiction is doing the same for northern European whites."

I have seen this same "hot take" from pretentious Eurofags.  America is not a real place, Americans are not a real people, Americans don't really have a history.  Well, to the extent they believe this, the Eurofags are about as illiterate as the Americans they project their illiteracy onto.  We are no fans of the modern state of America, which since a long time I have called Amrika to emphasize its inherently alien character, although others have called it Usonia, or Clown World, or whatever.  But this is an intellectually bankrupt position.

To the extent any of the above is true, it's because the actual history has either been forgotten, or we are pretending that it didn't really exist.  Similar unfortunate things have happened in cultural revolutions in the past, in other lands (China and Russia in the 20th century, or France in the late 18th).  Neoliberalism has most assuredly been complicit in the wiping out of American cultural memory, and the indoctrinating of the populace into the submental viewpoints above that we're not a real people with no real culture or history.  That doesn't mean I have to go along with it.  If there's one thing I'm great at, it's not going along.

I'll give you a hint.  If you look at old histories of the USA, which I must be one of about 10 people in the country to have read anymore, you find even from a very early date that there were four distinct regions each with their own character.  New England/Yankeedom/Puritania, Quakerdom/New Netherlands/the Middle States, the Old South, and Transappalachia.  And since then, others have been added, and they, to an extent, usually were outgrowths from these original seeds.  There also exist in America certain peoples and cultures who were absorbed but not originally part of the Anglo-American sphere at all.  This would include the Northern New Spain area which includes parts of the Southwest starting at Texas.

White Americans don't need a fake ethnic identity, all they need to do is rediscover the one that already exists.  Since the smallest unit of cultural organization is the family, in many cases the customs of these seed cultures never fully died out.  But here is the basic problem.  America became something different in its imperial age, and so many of the inhabitants here are descended from uprooted castaways that they really don't fit in.  They aren't really Americans and they never could become Americans.  American identity is very racialized in a way it is not in Russia or Latin America.  You can't become an Anglo-American, you either are or are not.  So I suppose the fiction of a generic "American" culture had to be invented to integrate a much larger group of people, but it never went swimmingly.

To the extent that this generic culture resembles anything of the old Americas I mentioned above, it is probably closest to Quakerdom/New Netherlands/the Middle States, which was always the most cosmopolitan of the four original hearth cultures.  The big problem that currently exists, as I see, is not whether we have a culture, history or state to call our own, but rather what to do with the large mass of people that aren't really Americans but are here now.  To my mind, there's not much that can be done except to segregate for now, and longer term of course to seal the borders and encourage non-Anglo-Americans to go home, or at least stay on reservations rather than encroaching.  Perhaps some of the white settlers since the 20th century could be integrated into Anglo-America, because through intermarriage, they basically already have been, but the extra-Europeans, I don't see much chance of that and I see no reason to let the current chaos keep on going.

Also, that second quote above came from some Jew, and I frankly find it funny that someone from a race of wandering castaways that never was able to stay in one place for long, owing to their chronic bad behavior, and has a fake history of cobbled together Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Hellenistic mythology, wants to tell the descendants of Anglo-America that we are a bunch of rootless cosmopolitans.  Now that's rich.  And I remind you they are guests here in our country to this day, and that guest status can be revoked at any time.

Occult Training

For those who don't know about occult training, and this includes some of my online friends who have inquired, the simplest advice I can give is to choose a path that works for you and stick with it.  Like any art, the esoteric arts take time to learn.  In fact, they are the supreme arts, so you can expect to spend the rest of your life mastering them.  And the most important part is taking the first step.  But, you might ask, and fairly so, how do I know what path works for me?  You don't, not at first.

What you can do to help with this is to think for a short time before getting started.  Is there any mythic tradition that really calls to you?  If you're a Christian, there are Christian Esoteric societies and paths.  There are also Heathen and Druid paths that are well-developed.  There are traditions of astrological magic from the Renaissance and before.  Some people get into Eastern traditions, and they have the advantage of having living traditions with actual teachers of some accomplishment.  But I have worked predominantly with Western traditions.

Where I started was with Golden Dawn magic.  Contrary to popular opinion, this is not Satanic at all, and the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were all Christians.  There was a long tradition of Christian Cabalistic magic in the West, and these guys were involved in resurrecting it.  In truth, I didn't go very far on this path, because I didn't need to.  The most important things for me to master were the basics which were the techniques of relaxation, banishing and invocation rituals, discursive meditation, and divination with the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.  After that, I realized a meditative system was of more use to me anyway and I had the basic building blocks of spiritual accomplishment at my fingertips.  I will write more about my ongoing path as it evolves from here.

One thing that many will not like, especially if they come from the heathen end of the right wing, is the explicit Hebrew imagery of the Golden Dawn path.  I personally didn't have a problem with this.  Keep in mind that Biblical Hebrew was used by European Christians as much as by Jews.  Frankly, propaganda aside, I have no reason to believe that the temple religion of the Old Testament has much to do with anything Semitic.  It was clearly a local adaptation of a Hellenistic tradition that existed across the Mediterranean, and the name Yahweh sounds an awful lot like how Jove was pronounced in those days.  You might well be praying to Jupiter Optimus Maximus in an alien language.  Right down to the symbolism it was remarkably like the rest of the temple tradition of Antiquity.

In a sense, it's just an attempt to recreate the sort of atmosphere and sacred practices of old mystery schools that had long since died out.  I tried to focus more on what I was trying to accomplish, and approaching the divine from an attitude of respect, rather than to see the negatives in this path.  The Golden Dawn has a quite developed system, and it works.  But these days, it's not the only path there is by any means.  It's just the one I found that led me into a wider world.  There is no reason that a novice in the occult couldn't pick something else instead.  I repeat once more that the most important part of any spiritual work is to take it seriously and give it the work it is due.  Once you do that, the results will come in time.  And that's another thing, don't expect quick fixes.  Spiritual accomplishment will come at its own pace.

Russia, China and Foreign Corruption

But it appears the Russians and Chinese have learned from watching the demise of the UK and the USA, and that neither of them are eager to assume the crown of foreign corruption that history teaches inevitably comes with empire and ruling over foreign peoples.

 The above is excerpted from a recent post by Mr. Beale.

We can question the extent to which Russia and China haven't done the above.  Russia rules over many foreign peoples, especially in Siberia and even in the core of European Russia, and they ruled even more of them during the USSR and Russian Empire.  The Chinese have over 50 recognized minority groups.  However, the systems there seem to be designed so that the dominant ethnic group doesn't lose hegemony the way that such a thing happened in the Western countries.

But on the other hand, has Russia ever really been ruled by Russians?  It depends how you look at it, but the Rurikids were Finno-Swedish Vikings, the Romanovs began as Russian boyars but were quickly Germanized, and the Bolsheviks were quite the mixed bag (Lenin being of mixed ancestry, Stalin a Georgian/Ossetian, and so on).  Even Vladimir Putin's regime is full of foreigners, including possibly the man himself, since he is rumored to be of Finnish and Jewish ancestry.  Russia's own historical chronicles mention how they first brought in Vikings to run their regime since, although they were a strong and warlike people, the East Slavs could never govern themselves.

The Russian Empire's court culture was European in all but name, being actually German and affecting French high culture (as Germans often did).  One Russian aristocrat in the time of Catherine the Great traveled extensively among the Russian villages and saw the lives of the peasantry and the Cossacks, and what he saw terrified him.  He wrote that the regime would surely one day be destroyed, violently.  It took over 100 years but he was proven right.  That's why I am never quick to dismiss intuitions that certain regimes are headed for the ash heap of history even if they seem to be sound on the surface.  History often moves at a very slow pace.

I don't think Russia is a very healthy country in many ways.  The traditional image it has among right-wingers in the West is a mirage.  Russians are famously libertine about things that would make Americans with a Puritan background blush.  They aren't very religious either, with strict observance of religious practice being a minority concern, much less than in America even.  I would be concerned about them being Asianized as well.  When I visited Siberia, I saw Russians intermarrying with Mongolic types and practicing Buddhism as much as they did Christianity.  There's rampant crime and drug use, and the lifespans of ethnic Russians have been lower than in the West for a long time.

China would warrant a post of its own, but I just wanted to mention this in passing because Russia is an important country today, but it's important not to idealize it anymore than we would the Western world.  I have argued that Russia represents the birthing ground of a real high culture that's alive and well (but which will possibly be bigger than just Russian, and possibly more of a pan-Eurasian crossroads culture; not unlike what the Magians were in a previous age, or the peoples of Scythia-Tocharia were in an age before that).  That doesn't mean there won't be fluctuations, as there were in the early history of the Western high culture, as we saw around the so-called Late Middle Ages.  Russia has signs of both life and some serious troubles.

As of now, it doesn't appear they have solved the problem of foreign rule or foreign corruption, since they have a multiethnic oligarchy ruling over them.  And maybe that will not change, because of the way East Slavs approach the world.  But the sorts of dirty tricks that are used to rule the disunited tribes of America don't seem to work as well in the Russian world, either.  Russia might still be in its "crusade" phase against an already existing civilization, and in the short to medium run they might not even win, but they are clearly trying to find their way as a distinctive superorganismic life form in this world, and I doubt that some financial setbacks will derail them overmuch from their destiny.

On Texas

Back in the aphorisms from 2015 on the archive, there's a kind of bitter comment about Texas being an Anglo-Mestizo state with a Yankee millennarian soul.  I'm not sure that's true anymore, having studied more about where America's hearth cultures originated.  Texas is, like many other states, a hybrid.  The Anglo subcultures were the Greater Appalachian and Deep Southern, both with their own rather primitive and looked down upon strains of religiosity (from the perspective of mainline Yankees, but also the wider Western world, being that they're closer in mindset to them).  And on the Hispanic side of things, the Texan type comes from the Northern New Spain type, which was always distinct from the rest of Mexico.  This was a place of desperadoes, revolutionaries, ranchers, religious cranks and con artists.  So Texas comes from a rather odd context on all sides.

The western part of the state is most influenced by New Spain, but of the eastern part, the cities Dallas and Austin would be Greater Appalachian, and Houston and eastward would be Deep Southern.  San Antonio is where some of each of the cultures meet.  There's one thing that seems to unite Texans and that's the love of money and they do graft on a grand scale.  Deep Southern culture originates from Barbadian slave plantations.  They love them some cheap labor and that explains why they eventually welcomed the invasion from Mexico (or, more recently, from all over the world).  The Greater Appalachian type seems to have faded into the background in favor of the Deep South, at least from the Anglo point of view.  Vestiges of the former remain in the countryside, but it turns out the Deep Southern type adapted well to giant metropolises as much, or better, than it did to plantations.  There's probably something to be learned from that.

Graft is the heart and soul of Texas.  You can take a look at the cities there to get a feeling for what motivates them.  Oftentimes, dissidents on the internet talk about "bugmen" as the dominant type of mankind in cities today.  These are generally soul-sucked husks of humans with bizarre or degenerated physiognomy, no internal monologue because they have had their senses (including subtle ones like intuition) dulled from birth, and generally unhinged political and social beliefs which reflect being oversocialized and living in a high anxiety social and economic context.  This most often is used to describe the kind of people you'd find in a city like New York, Boston, San Francisco, or Seattle.  But they exist down south too, in a different form.  And Texas is full of them.  Texas has some of the worst urban development I've ever seen.  Along with California and Florida, it looks like a third worlders' conception of what the first world should be.  Despite Texas having abundant space, houses are crammed together in a claustrophobic way and barely even have any room for a lawn, and this goes on for hundreds of square miles.  I don't know how they can stand to live that way, but stand it they do.  It has profound psychic and physical effects to live that way.  Texans don't strike me as a terribly balanced people; they have the reputation of being loud, fat, rude, arrogant and venal.

People generally think of Texas as conservative.  I wonder what that term means anymore.  Big business in Texas is all about the graft.  If they could find a way to make left-wing ideology into graft, they would.  As a matter of fact, they have.  Texan businesses have realized that the government (and so, ultimately, the taxpayers) are the bestower of manna in our time.  And so they have embraced the ways of big government, just as they embraced big everything else.  If you want a recent example of this, look no further than the ERCOT ice storm/renewable energy disaster of 2021.  They got on the "green energy" gravy train and it bit them in the rear, big time.  But that's OK, Texans are used to it.  Their whole economy is built on this sort of thing.  The housing pattern I described above exists because developers realized they could make mega bucks by cramming as many people, citizen or alien, into these cramped 'hoods, and well, people have bought them so it's not as if there isn't demand for this way of life.  Of course, you as an individual pay, and pay plenty, for this kind of thing to go on, should you choose to dwell there.  Texas is known for its exorbitant property assessments and high cost of living generally, and in the urban areas (where most Texans live) in particular.

It's funny to think about California, Texas and Florida and how they represent the Unholy Trinity of American development in the 21st century, each with their own spin on it.  While northern states like Minnesota or Illinois or New York/New Jersey just decline from poor leadership, 2 of these 3 states have found a viral recipe for growth in an age of general decline.  It seems that these 3 former Spanish colonies are the place where the Anglo soul went to die.  Something else quite mutated, but with a sort of memetic vitality emerged in the sunnier climes of the southern part of the 48.  But Texas stands out even from this odd bunch.  It's sui generis.  Truthfully, a lot more could be written about it, and I think it's worth thinking about, because I get the feeling Texas is going to be more, not less, important to American affairs in the coming years as the old states which used to dominate America (e.g. on the coasts or in Yankeedom) continue inexorably on the path of decline.

Reflecting on the blog

Since I had some down time yesterday, I spent some time re-reading the posts on this blog (not all of them though) and commenting on some.  The tone of my writing has certainly changed over time but I wouldn't say I've repudiated old beliefs categorically.  There is a bit more nuance and a change in perspective over time.  Ultimately I've decided to keep the old blog posts up.  The tone is a bit intemperate and some of the sentiments I wouldn't really agree with anymore.  But I wrote those older pieces at a volatile time in history when I was rebelling against my conditioning.  That kind of thing tends to happen at that age, and I've seen the process play out with many younger men as well.  Once the flame tends to burn down a bit, you realize that maybe you went a bit overboard and even feel slightly embarrassed by things you said.  That, however, is just part of personal growth.  It would be intellectually dishonest for me not to keep my old work and pretend this phase didn't happen.

On Declinism v. Acceleration, &c.

Another Xah Lee comment of note:

lol. but the thing with tech is, it's not pausable. If you pause, for ethic or other reasons, others will do it. Then, u will follow or perish. That's what technology is. (AI, robotics, genetics, bio, nano, gigagun, clones, chimera, borg, all's coming.)

In general this is a good point.  Many non-Western countries, for example, were forced to modernize in the 20th century simply because if they did not, they would have been easy prey to the Western powers which were much more advanced.  As, indeed, they mostly had been in the century before.  Pausing a technology in mid-development is not really possible; it behaves a lot more like a force of nature than anyone would like to admit.  There's an impetus of millions of man hours behind it and a lot of cultural power moving it forward.  It's hard to fight that, even if someone wanted to, and the fact is most go along with trends.  So, logically, we probably can't hope for much more than acceleration.

But, and this is important, I do not believe the above technologies will come to pass in our timeline unless something radically different comes along.  It's a simple problem of energy throughput in the end.  The petrochemical and coal industries are going to be in decline by midcentury at the latest, and "green energy" is a fraud/grift that has no potential to maintain civilization at the current level.  Even nuclear has proven to be mostly a nothingburger, and in any case, the development of nuclear energy has fallen way behind.  The biggest innovators today are the Chinese, thanks to treacherous US politicians selling our publicly-funded tech to them for decades.  I have my doubts whether they can scale it up, but certainly no Western countries are going to be doing that kind of thing soon.

The energy scarcity problem has been known by members of the powers that be for a very long time.  But Americans have a very hard time imagining a future that doesn't have infinite progress of technics.  I believe the decline of Spenglerian thought has less to do with his "politically incorrect" stances (since he was a philosemite and hated Hitler, that never made much sense to me) and much more to do with the fact that decline as a theme is incompatible with American optimism or the "cult of progress".  Be that as it may, energy throughput is an absolute requirement for maintaining industrial civilization.  To this date, no good replacement for petrochemicals and coal have been found that would scale.  And contrary to the opinions of some people that these things are "infinite", they are actually tracked pretty carefully by the industries that extract them, and they have a pretty good idea how much is left and where it is.  And the tl;dr is that, apart from Venezuela/Guyana there aren't any supergiant-sized oil fields left that we know of.  America right now is the largest producer of petrochemicals in the world, thanks to the massive investment in unconventional extraction since the late 2000s.  But that isn't going to last.

Without energy you don't have any development of technics; as a matter of fact, you will have trouble even keeping the lights on, the water running, the roads maintained, and the population fed.  This may seem far out now, but in about 2-3 decades you will see this start to bite even in first world countries.  That's leaving to one side the other problem, which is that technical innovation has slowed way down in Western countries.  I don't have time to go in depth on this question but some people have done a good job with it, such as Scott Locklin.  We are still very far from something like AGI, say much less things like nanotechnology, clones, cyborgs and so on which are to this day fictitious.  Things like LLMs and image generation have been interesting, but they represent relatively small and trifling concerns, and they will probably be used more for evil than good (deep fakes).  Also, let's be real here, Silicon Valley is not going to be doing any more innovating.  They have been wholly captured by the leftist mental illness and moral panics of the past decade, and in the same period they invented nothing of value.  I will not say there won't be innovations in the future, but they won't come from that place.

We are at a turning point in history, and it's only visionaries who can imagine the future at this point, because the vast majority of humans can't conceive of a world that looks radically different than their past lived experience.  So I am sure almost nobody will agree with me on this, and also that a lot of zombies are going to be wiped out with all the changes that are sure to come, and come suddenly.  The early stages of it already look to be shaping up quite nicely.  I don't imagine there will be human extinction or anything that drastic, but I do think the rest of the century is going to be filled with hardships and that the Western countries may enter what proves to be a terminal phase of decline.

On Piracy, Publishers, Distribution &c.

Legendary coder/troll Xah Lee wrote:

But, writing a good book, thinking and writing a good song, producing a movie, usually costs thousands or millions of dollars. Writer takes years of training, paying for college, etc. Same for software programer and song writers, singers. Money is the primary incentive we produce. If producer can't make any money because whatever he produces can be freely obtained on piratebay, would we still have much good books, songs, or movies?

However, i think much of these file-sharing sites, and to some extend the Free Software and Open Source movements, are scumbags in society who just passed alone and seized a opportunity for their own “right” to get things for free.

I certainly won't say that piracy is ethical.  That would be absurd.  But I think he is missing a key problem here.  Publishing is a business, and in most of the cases today. it is a big business in which the producers of the content, be it books, music or movies, receive little compensation for their work.  The middlemen take the majority of the profits.  Much of pirate ideology is fueled by the fact that the main beneficiaries of the work are not the ones who made it.

Now, there is one thing that nerds get wrong all the time, and this is a point Peter Thiel has made many times.  Distribution is actually a hard skill and it requires hard work.  It doesn't do itself, or we'd have the best products out there rather than the ones that are most popular.  Nerds don't think they should have to be bothered with it and this limits their success.  Whether or not there is even a market for good products rather than ones that will sell is another question and not worth getting into here, for now.

Publishing requires printing/manufacturing physical works, marketing them, bringing the actual products to warehouses and stores, and the like.  This is all real work in the real world.  So we can't fault publishers for taking some money from this, if the creators don't take that responsibility upon themselves.  But can we say it's justified for them to take 80-90% of the profits?  It doesn't matter yes or no, because they have already done it.

That's why I find it hard to get worked up about piracy.  What always happens in American business is that the suits get too greedy and hoover up all the money for themselves, leaving nothing for the people who actually create things.  If they could contain this behavior, there would be fewer people looking for back channels.  But they just can't.

If you are a creator yourself, consider taking more responsibility for the distribution and cutting out the middleman.  Yes, it's more work and harder, but it has been done before, even before the days of the internet, and the internet has made the process much easier.  The aforementioned Mr. Beale has basically done this and been successful at it.  Of course, you can never win in this world — people call him a grifter.  But if the alternative is working a corporate job I can't really blame guys like Beale or Bronze Age Pervert for going the "grifter" route rather than putting up with that garbage.