academiccompositionab
Empowerment Equalizer
SSaragian
Antony Sammeroff
Ann Sterzinger
Rodney
RJ
busterjames
cainusmaxus
Craig FitzGerald
David Heleniak
Caity & Dan Greene
keirmartland
Keith Preston
Bill the Butcher
ljp711
MRDA
Jack Donovan
Rachel Haywire
comrade hermit
Michael
Vince
Regan
robertstark2014
Noonan
S E Pearson
Rachel Haywire
Nexus X Humectress
The description of this conference asks four questions: Where is victory? Where will the momentum take us? Is there an escape from the Culture War? Is such a conflict winnable? What I will attempt to do in this speech is to discuss each question in detail and then offer an alternative to the culture war model and point to deep underlying realities of struggle that underlie the Culture War. Before we go any further it is necessary to define terms.
The first term we need to define is Culture War. What is it? This particular definitional question is a thorny one. One in which I have struggled for two decades to try to define. If you look at the Culture War on a naive surface reading we can say it is basically team blue vs. team red and they argue over many of the same issues day in and day out gun control, feminism, government regulation of business, foreign wars, government domestic spending and of course some new ideas such as transgenderism and issues with AI. I for many years of my life assumed that things were as they appeared. Yet, something was not right. A pattern, over the years, began to emerge. People would say one thing and then do another. I will provide two clear examples. The first example is the left, if the left means anything in its 200-year existence it means anti-capitalism. What does anti-capitalism mean? It means opposing the extension of the cash nexus and seeking some other form of economic exchange. Georges Sorel, 100 years ago, outlined the socialist strategy. Create a labor market that is closed; seek to achieve full employment; organize labor for mass coordinated strikes; initiate a national strike, whereby the factories are expropriated by the workers. This is a clearly articulated strategy. Any dilution of the labor supply via new workers is to be avoided. Yet much of the left throughout history sought to employ women in the workforce and since 1980 generally supported open borders. It should be clear to all that this will destroy the value of labor and push off the day of the National Strike indefinitely. Are these people stupid? Are they controlled opposition? This quandary captured my attention for many years. On the right, we have the cultural conservatives who always conceded to the left, as Robert Lewis Dabney prophesied they would. How can you seek to fight a culture war with the left and then totally abandon higher education or any education for that matter and the creation of cultural artifacts? Well, you can’t. The left always supports dissident artists who share their values throwing money at them and protecting them from economic forces. Again are social conservatives stupid? Controlled opposition? This split between declared and revealed preferences lead me to consider some rather more radical conclusions. Two concepts from geopolitics will greatly aid in understanding this struggle: frozen conflicts and counter-gangs. A frozen conflict is one in which at least two nations are currently at peace, but have not resolved the issues that once brought about hostilities and might someday in the future do so again: North and South Korea are the flagship examples of this idea. What if the US elites sought to create frozen conflicts in the US in order to prevent various cultural, racial, and class interests from forming and recognizing a shared struggle against the merchants? How would it look any different from what we are seeing today? It wouldn’t! The next concept is counter-gangs. Frank Kitson in the 1950s diffused the Mao-Mao rebellion in Kenya by forming British-controlled “nationalist independence” movements in order to compete with the Mao-Mao for the mantle of leadership. This diffused and dispersed the power of the radical independence movement and allowed for a British victory. If we use these two concepts I propose this definition for the culture war: A series of domestic frozen conflicts which are led by counter-gangs to keep the masses of the American population fighting each other rather than the elite. We saw how in 2011 both the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement were getting dangerously close to the real power centers the banks. This had to be stopped! The synthetic left of wokism was created to dilute the power of the working class struggle and weaponize these elements of society for the military-industrial complex.
Two of the four questions refer to victory in this struggle. If we use my definition, we see that this is an artificially created conflict that does not serve our interests. It explains why leaders of various political groups always stop short of the “killing blow” and seem to strangely waffle on issues once thought written in stone, victory is impossible. The very nature of the conflict is circumscribed by the international lords of finance and they have set up this playground brawl for us to waste our energy on. One should never fight on the enemy’s terms. To fight on his terms is to already lose. A good example of this rule is the American Revolution. The British felt that the colonists would have to fight them as did other European powers, this would have been suicide for the revolutionary cause. Instead, a protracted conflict of militia warfare, army in being, global diplomacy, and bushwacking gradually wore the British down and forced them to surrender. To quote the 1983 movie War Game: “The only winning move is not to play.” Those on the right who have been fighting the culture war have not gotten us any closer to our goals. Is the US more socially conservative? Has the US government been shrunk? Have we driven the left into obscurity and defeat? No to all these questions! The only victories we have gained are substantial fortunes for the well-connected counter-gang leaders and collaborators who work for them. Maybe the goal was always something other than victory?
Why should this new definition of the culture war be preferred over the team red vs. team blue definition that has been in use for decades? If it really is a war, then we need to apply the terms of war. In war the side that wins is the side that correctly identifies the strategic realities, identifies the source of their opponents power, the source of their own power, preserve their own source of power and finally separate their opponent from his source of power. Throughout the entirety of my life and as far as I can tell the entire the entirety of the culture war team red has never correctly identified the source of the lefts power. This can easily be seen by the long defeat that conservatives have been suffering since 1965. Nobody is fighting this war to win it. Do they even believe in it? Partly this is due to incompetence nobody fighting is able to identify the source of the lefts power. One major source of that power is the university system. Rather than cutting off aid to the system they send their own children to it, in some vain hope that it will give them a successful career, when instead they merely give the left new recruits from their own ranks. In the past the Turks had to tax Christian families for their boys to become Janisssaries, today Christian families gladly give the regime their children to be trained as Janissaries.
Can we escape the Culture War? In two words, chad yes! We in fact must. The first question then to ask is what then is the real struggle? We can broadly think of two one economic and one technical. One reason why the Culture War was fomented was that the working class struggle since 1870 had achieved great gains in the US. Better hours, better working conditions, and better pay for starters. The scope of action for corporations was heavily curtailed by both unions and government regulations. How do you break this up? Divide and conquer; enter the culture war. Before the culture war, there was the class war. From the formation of the first major corporations in the late 1860s down till 1965 the main struggle was the pro-labor/anti-war movement vs the industrial/international/warmachine. The pro-labor/anti-war movement correctly saw that US imperial ambitions were driven by the major corporate dynasties that were gaining control over the US. They sought to organize labor and gain government support to check this power and contain it. This movement was divided over goals ranging from reform (AFL) to revolution (IWW). The war machine, they argued, could not be stopped unless the system of global finance capitalism here in the USA was defeated. This faction along with the Financial Elites knew where real power lay. It lay in productive entities: mines, canals, factories and labor itself on the one hand and infrastructure: railroads; powerlines; and communication channels on the other. They both competed for these valuable resources. The Culture War distracts us away from the strategic struggle for resources to intra-social conflicts reminiscent of high school that only leave everyone exhausted. To the benefits of the lords of finance. Yet this is not the only or most important struggle. The pro-labor/anti-war movement has lost and like the social conservatives is in total route.
The real struggle of our day is mind vs. machine. Carlyle in his Sign of the Times says: “For the same habit regulates not our modes of action alone, but our modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.” Will man have a mechanical or human head and heart? Why do the progressives always seem to win? At least on cultural issues, on economic issues, they have been in a total route since Reagan. The basic issue is this we are all progressives now. What makes a progressive a progressive? A progressive is someone who embraces the machine and envisions new forms of social reality that new iterations of the machine will produce. Technological society is a series of increasingly complex high-energy states, which allow for more extreme social norms. From 1800 until 2020, we have seen ever more rapid changes in our material and by extension social conditions. Our social conditions must alter to fit our material conditions. A society based on social cohesion and trust works in a small village of a few hundred people, but what about a megalopolis where people communicate with digital technology? It becomes a lot harder. Advocating for social ways of life that fail to take these changes into account will in its due course fail. This is not to say that social conservative values are wrong or that the predictions of societal collapse based on community and moral collapse are wrong, just that a naive attempt to plug these values into a modern society as is will not work. There is a whole level of nuance and insight that the mind of exchange fails to quantify. This kind of mechanically minded man is seen in Charles Darwin: “Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. … This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.”
This is the effect Carlyle was afraid of and one that is all too common today. The modern conservative has mistaken the signification of the thing for the thing itself. In Baudrillardian terms, he has mistaken the simulation for the real. A man is not merely an aristocrat if he prances around in finery and has servants do work for him, he must be the best. Ulysses was no less an aristocrat and hero when he was lost and broke at the beginning of the Odyssey than when he was rich and enthroned at Ithaca. The mechanical mind stops up the well of inspiration from the divine and leaves man spiritually impoverished and on the verge of Lovecraftian horrors.
Having stated that this struggle is mind vs. machine, I will define both. Mind or self is that part of a human being that cannot be doubted, as Descartes showed even if I doubt my senses and believe myself to be deceived, I cannot doubt that I am perceiving. This mind is indivisible, immaterial and the source of man’s reasoning powers. The mental is also that part of man which is already in the spiritual realm. The fact that we sense that realm less intuitively than we do the physical will be discussed later, for our present purposes this realization gives us the possibility to spend more of our energy into reaching that realm. This is the realm in which the power to defeat the machine lies. This is also where man’s ability to plan and establish ordering principles is derived. That this power has atrophied is in large part due to the fact that the machine thinks for us.
The machine is a catch all term I use to describe a combination of factors that are overlapping and reinforcing three thinkers inform me here: Ellul, Illich, and Veblen. Ellul argues that technique is the relentless drive to ever increasing levels of efficiency, with each independent technical system seeking to merge into one global system. Illich argues that we are living in the third age of tools, systems. Man is one sub-component of a larger system. The system no longer serves him, he serves the system. Veblen argues that the machine process is a necessary corollary of industrial production. Unlike the rhythms and flows of nature as seen in the four seasons or the tides of the ocean, the machine process is an orderly, controlled and uniform system that does not allow for change or variance, unless some specialized expert makes a change at some one part. This rigidity is unnatural to human and organic life. All of these concepts technique, systems and the machine process all come together, in my mind, and are expressed with the catch all phrase ‘the machine,’ or ‘machine.’
The machine is a moral hazard. With all of the medical and technical developments, many socially expensive and self-destruct behaviors are now tolerated. Sexual immorality which would in days past have a very high chance of killing you through a slow painful death by STDs can be indulged in with impunity and indefinitely as long as “medicine” keeps flowing. This will lead to progressives of all stripes seeing socially conservative norms as outmoded and mean. The progressive will say: “What stake do you have in what two consenting adults do together in their bedroom! Nobody is hurt!” Of course, the full cost of these actions will only be felt later due to the moral hazard of technology. This ratchet effect is a losing proposition for traditionalists. This war seems unwinnable and indeed would be if we continue to live in this digital Babylon. Yet there is hope.
Looking at these three struggles: Culture War; Class War; and Spiritual War the last one is where the future lies. I have spoken about this before at length and will therefore only discuss this in brief; we need communities that are sealed off from technology. Imagine a city with walls. The walls keep out invaders and at the strategic point of the gate allow on occasion outsiders to come in for legitimate business. The people inside are protected from rapine, plunder, harassment, and invasion. We do not primarily struggle against these older human threats, but a more insidious and imperceptible threat of technological subversion whereby the incremental creep of ever more synthetic material living conditions with their concomitant social conditions forces us into the shadow of progressivism as RL Dabney warned of. We need a place where the end of history stops and we can live as real people, as our ancestors used to live. We need a firewall that keeps out unnecessary technology. How much should be kept out will be debated for years and different communities will find different answers. What all of these communities will agree on is that any uncritical and naive incorporation of technology carte blanch is to be rejected. We will need trained professionals who can man the walls of these cities and be able to mediate between those inside and those without. They will have to be able to represent the values of this society to the rest of society and yet have the strength of will to reject the seduction of the machine as well.
One might object and say that this society is vulnerable and weak. It will be stamped out, it will fail to compete with the rest of techno-capital. I argue this is not so. I will quote Carlyle again: “We figure Society as a “Machine,” and that mind is opposed to mind, as body is to body; whereby two, or at most ten, little minds must be stronger than one great mind. Notable absurdity! For the plain truth, very plain, we think is, that minds are opposed to minds in quite a different way; and one man that has a higher Wisdom, a hitherto unknown spiritual Truth in him, is stronger, not than ten men that have it not, or than ten thousand, but than all men that have it not; and stands among them with a quite ethereal, angelic power, as with a sword out of Heaven’s own armory, sky-tempered, which no buckler, and no tower of brass, will finally withstand.”
A spiritually enlightened mind is greater than all other non-enlightened minds! This truth, a truth we should all implicitly accept is the truth of our age. None of the legions of soy-fungus men and attack helicopters can overcome this reality. They are foredoomed to fail. The problem is that we do not live in communities that can produce such men. The mechanization of the mind takes place at an early age. We need a, dare I say it, safe space for children to develop a spiritual mind and when we are able to unleash these Carlylian heroes the power inherent therein will be obvious to all. The spiritual in that it is higher and before the material is of course more powerful. The problem is that man is an amphibian and lives in both worlds with a preference for the material. His appetites and desires often lead him to, as the Apostle Paul says, see through a glass darkly. We need to practice the virtues and spiritual discipline to see through the glass clearly. Only then can we see the material struggles around us for what they are and carefully pick and choose those fights we actually have a stake in and ignore those that are distractions or bait.
It is no fault of man that his body entails he must eat, sleep, drink and if the race of man is to continue procreate, that is what is demanded by his physical body. Yet man often expends exorbitant amounts of energy on satisfying these needs beyond what is necessary. Often leading to addiction and dependence. What needs to be done is to declare and delineate what are the true physical needs of man and set up an economic and social system to provide the satisfaction of these needs so he can be free to develop the inner self. By this process of spiritual growth one can become the enlightened man Carlyle speaks of. Yet this is the end result of a carefully planned life and culture.
Such a society will be able to produce many sorts of goods that a technological society cannot. Examples include children, men of a certain physical and mental quality, community and others that those inside the machine will find useful to keep around. So there are reasons for the machine to look the other way, or at least agents of the machine. This will be the key advantage of such communities and they must lean into it. Do what the machine cannot and compete with it on that level. This is a classic axiom of war: play to your strengths and exploit your enemies weakness.
The question of “seeing things as they really are” is a multilayered problem that will carefully have to be looked at from all possible angles. There are two basic factors here: distorted perception and reliance on the machine. A man’s perception of a thing may be distorted for several reasons: ignorance; passion; deception and image generation. A man might mistake a thing for what it is or isn’t by being ignorant. He does not know enough about the thing under discussion to correctly judge the matter. A man might be blinded by his desires an obvious falsehood is defended as truth because it is in his economic self-interest to say it is true. For example saying a man can be a woman, in order not to lose his position at work. An enemy might try to actively deceive you and lead you astray. Lastly, the problem we are most suffering under is the replication of the image. As we move up the ladder of Baudrillardian simulation we inhabit a world where the sign and the thing signified no longer correspond. This discrepancy can occur without any malice of forethought; much as a man who wanders off the trail in the wrong direction gets progressively more lost. The kind of spiritual man that I am speaking of can see all of this for things for what they are. This entails that he must have self-control, which is necessary to avoid passion; education to avoid being ignorant and deceived and discernment to avoid walking off the trail in the great hall of images.
Tolkien makes a distinction between Elf and Mordor magic. The former seeks to develop inner capacities to strengthen other wills where as the other seeks means to dominate and bulldoze other wills. The machine can give you god-like powers for a brief span of life and then when it withdrawals them and gives them to another the user feels empty and hollow; unable to come to terms with his new reduced state. Given that the machine is what we struggle against and by this term, I mean both the mechanical infrastructure that holds us in a mechanical womb and the forms of mental distortion it demands of us to participate with it. One must not let the siren call of god-like power seduce you toward the machine. You cannot use mechanical means for traditional ends. Since the very means of using it destroy the very preconditions for traditional thinking and spiritual growth. Of course, one cannot avoid its use entirely and so a mental state of mind must be cultivated to use it without being pulled off track. The machine drains your will into itself, this is the wraithing process. It also seeks to generate an image of reality in which it is the only reality, thereby cutting you off from true reality and any ability to navigate the collapse. If a system is collapsing the only way to survive is to step out of that system onto another or more fundamental system. This can be either another constructed system in full vigor of force or something more fundamental such as the earth itself.
We must start from the axiom that the spiritual or immaterial realm is higher and more potent than the material realm. Most reasoning for action takes place with a tacit assumption that the immaterial or spiritual is irrelevant; even if the person you are talking to does believe in that dimension of existence. The reality is, modernity is leaving its taint on the thinker. The reason why we so seldom see the power of the spiritual is that, man is an amphibian living in both the spiritual and material worlds. He is more immersed in this world of sense and matter, in part because growth in the spiritual realm is predicated on rising above physical impulses. This is hard because man does need to satisfy physical needs or he will die, but he also needs to avoid overindulgence in order to live fully. The machine holds us in this realm by the sensory stimulation overload of constant dopamine hits from its tendrils. Few men can resist the call of constant over-stimulation; in fact, they often don’t even choose. The world we live in is permeated by all sorts of waves: radio waves, TV signals, etc., bathing us in a sea of stimulation and sensory disruption. The goal here is to find a way to both develop a frame of mind and a living space free from these distractions so that man can redirect his energies toward mental and spiritual growth.
To sum all of this up the Cultural War is a frozen conflict led by the counter gangs working for the global financial elites. This war is unwinnable as we are fighting in a simulation of their design. The culture war was invented to disrupt and counter the class war that had existed from 1870-1965 and has been a total success. The real war is between mind and machine. The machine turns us into little machines and we move further away from the spiritual. One enlightened mind is stronger than all other non-enlightened minds. We need to form a protective barrier for people to live within that gives them a reprieve from the machine whereby others man the walls and hold back the night. We need men able to see things as they are, by calling them by their right names. We need to cultivate elf-magic by developing inner capacities and not mistake the god-like power of the machine for our own. I want to leave us all with hope. Though the future is dark, the tools to navigate it are already in our hands, we need to refamiliarize ourselves with them and use them to build a new future.
