I have been staring at a screen for over twenty years now. Only recently have I realized what this is good for. I would like to share my tips with you.
I would like you to do two dangerous things:
First, assume that humanity exhausts the finite resources of oil, gas, radioactive material, etc. without either going extinct — which I find highly unlikely — or figuring out how to indefinitely capture immense amounts of energy from the Sun in a way that could continue to give us all Internet for centuries to come — which, if you investigate this closely, is also really unlikely.
Now, based on this assumption, consider what the world will look like 500 years from now.
I have done these two things and this is my consideration.
- It is the year 2512 and you are loading up your truck with biofuel in Iowa to keep the Internet running in New York. Oops, what’s that noise? Oh no, the peasants are revolting again. They’re unhappy because there are hundreds of millions of them and they are starving to death while you drive their precious corn across the country to fuel some rich tyrant’s desire to watch 500-year-old YouTube videos. Also, they have guns because this is America. Bang, you’re dead.
- Okay, honestly, exactly how long you expect the scenario in (1) to last? 500 years might be a stretch. Even if my scenario is exaggerated, and it’s meant to be, this is the general direction things are going.
- Therefore, something is going to give in the future. I expect this to be something big.
- Human beings who are part of a greater thing than themselves can realize eternal truth that allows them to accept war, disease, family and friends dying, etc. This will be arbitrarily dubbed a “tradition”. Traditions are ubiquitous and unavoidable. (source: all of human history)
- Mass distribution of wealth, caused mostly by the oil bubble, causes those with a deficit of wisdom to think that tradition is an inconvenience and should be erased. (Recently even stupider people have started to believe that the very concept of power can be erased from the world.) What too much wealth actually does is weaken the quality which people assign to their local tradition, and replace it with quantity, the amount of quality-free stuff that people can get their hands on. This describes almost everything in the modern world, from gay marriage to iPhones to the replacement of local fairy tales with a proliferation of internationally marketed picture books. In the West the concept of quantity was weaponized, making it a political necessity to give everyone economic independence, individualism, populism, atheism, and so on. All of this is what I posit is going away in (3).
- Fun challenge: Figure out how to allow tradition to smoothly return in the future.
Consider a perfectly spherical, frictionless human being stuck in an empty teacher’s lounge with nothing but a laptop and an Internet connection, which approximates my situation pretty well right now. Okay, you can use the Internet to buy a birthday present for your mom, search for a less boring job, or figure out where to hang out with friends this weekend. Don’t forget to enjoy the fruits of modernity with everyone else, but when you’re done with that, come back to the “fun challenge” of (6). The Internet has lowered the floodgates of information, even information about traditional truths which have been obstructed by modernist media. The highest value the Internet has for the long-term good of the human race is to enable access to people who are thinking about the long-term future.
This means getting acquainted with writers who can educate you about how tradition works: Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, G.K. Chesterton, Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, René Guénon, etc. Make this into an education that you never received in school. Talk about these writers with like-minded people and grow from other interpretations. Try to adapt their ideas to your personal and local situation.
As time goes by, I assume, you will want to settle into one tradition or another, to improve it and shape it towards the future. You will leave the world where you stared at a screen, and move into politics, finance, farming, religion, bartending, or any number of things more directly relevant to solving the world’s problems. But this is the education you must go through first, so that when you are asked to answer for your judgments, you can be confident in your responses.
The Internet is a product of late oil age society. It will be available for a very short amount of time in human history. Please don’t waste your screen-staring years looking at cat videos.
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Always love your stuff, Avery. Some good advice and good humor on a Sunday morning.
Domo arigato gozaimashita :)
Keeping my fingers crossed for the end of the oil age. It makes me sad to see millions of pointless daily commutes (e.g. “I’m bored, lets go to McDonalds and spend some money because I’m too stupid to realize this is unhealthy and destructive”) that does nothing but result in the pollution and upheaval of our sacred natural resources.
All peasants need to be restricted to local areas of residency to perform menial tasks. They can walk and use bikes. Most of their jobs are stupid/useless anyway. This would also solve the obesity problem and reduce health care costs. Make television illegal (go tend the fucking garden and eat something healthy, dumbass). Plow over suburbs and return them to forests.
Plow over the suburbs, huh. Do you bulldoze the humans, cats & dogs along with all those houses and garages? Everybody going to live encapsulated in 150 sq ft apartments in highrises in the local megalopolis, where they don’t have to commute? Sounds like a touch of cultural marxism.
You sound a lot more Marxist than he does.
He sees how necessary forests are, in relation to ever more witless consumers. He puts trees ahead of society.
Trees produce oxygen, beauty, and natural habitat.
What does society produce, any more? Concrete? Ipods? Toxins?
Anyway, he was being metaphoric, not genocidal.
I could be wrong.
…Trees also participate in metapolitics: they produce worldview. 8))
For a pre-christian, pre-modern man a tree is a ladder to god, to the sky and Sun, an interface to heavens. For my particular tribe, the forest has until recently been a kind of temple where shouting, laughing etc. was forbidden.
Also, when you spend much time in the forest, you get used to not seeing what’s there behind the trees, even if it’s just 200 m away. You cannot just look around to see everything as far as the eye can see, as someone living in the desert can. You have to walk these 200 m, probably squeezing your way through windfall and thicket, and only then you will see what’s there.
The desert soul of GoodKnight cannot bear this. 8)
What a great comment. Full of things you never hear, anywhere.
Trees are exactly that, for me. I’ve always naturally become very quiet among them, as in a great cathedral.
The visual aspect, as you say, is very revealing:
The eyes are engaged with what is close by, and there is no horizon. Things move around. Things live there. There are sounds, unheard anywhere else. And smells. Everything is alive, even the dead things that litter the forest floor.
My wife used to fear forests, but now admits she feels protected by them. She never knew what a real forest was, until she came to live in Canada.
Our house sits in a half-acre clearing in a five acre forest. The trees are between 80 and 175 feet: fir, cedar, balsam, hemlock, alder and maple. Full of deer, raccoons, squirrels and mice. Lots of birds, from hummingbirds and wrens, to vultures and eagles. They are noisy. We are quiet.
And this is how we are able to remain sane.
No, I don’t “sound” more Marxist than curious cat, nor am I marxist at all. I adore forests. I own a farm far from here, which I rent out, but live near a city. Our home is in a wild area with quite a bit of forest and woe to anyone who comes near it with a chainsaw or even an axe to cut down a living tree. We pick only deadwood for burning. We don’t water our grass (not a lawn; too many wild plants & weeds). We grow about 1/3 of all the vegetables we consume and put food by. We keep livestock, raised naturally. We don’t drain the marshy area of our land. We have a dugout for ducks, etc. We don’t live like the good folks who exist in those stupid little apartments in the giant cities, where they are slowly dying because the marxists have encouraged them to live there, be surveilled, then die.
I found CC’s post objectionable because I don’t know for a fact that he was being “metaphoric”. If he was being only metaphoric, then that is good, but if he wasn’t, the devil’s in the details. WHAT do you do with all those people who now live in the suburbs whose treeless condition apparently causes C.C. much heartbreak?
What do you do with those people?
That’s the point I was getting at, because it reveals a peculiar mindset. You do nothing. Nobody does anything for, or to, anyone else. People do things for/to themselves.
Demolish their concrete hovels and they move on and start over, somewhere else, in some other way. I have been doing exactly that my entire life, until rather recently. It’s no great hardship. It’s called ‘life’. It’s exciting, interesting, and grants one character. Something which predictable, insured safety can never do.
Forests are essential. Only fools don’t know that.
Good to hear you live the way you do, except for the residual tendency to ‘care for/about’ everybody else. That is the slippery slope that leads to leftism. You don’t need, ever, to defend people not present, and to whom you have no direct connection.
You’ll likely misread these words as you have misread others, but there’s nothing to be done about that. Look for sense, honesty and vision, rather than what you expect should be written, and you may come closer to understanding the message.
At some point, people whose “concrete hovels” are demolished are going to come after YOU because they’ll find out you approve of it! It IS indeed a “great hardship” to become homeless and have to start over when you have young children, as the dwellers of suburban houses tend to do. They will come to hate you and exact revenge. So, it’s not about neurotic caring for everybody else but about my own long term interest in not having to look over my shoulder for the rest of my days.
Well, yes: fear and insecurity is at the root of all of this.
That is why people have become what they have become.
Pretty sad, eh? Weak, wishy-washy excuses for humanity.
We try to encourage good stuff, here, in spite of all the hand-wringers that show up and tremble.
Handwringing tremblers? That’s me!
Well I wasn’t specifically referring to you – especially not the human behind the leftward-leaning avatar – but to the manifestations of leftward-leaning thought-patterns.
It’s really very questionable to subconsciously reckon oneself to be so important that everybody, everywhere, needs your help.
It’s a pervasive syndrome.
I’d say that is very much a Christian attitude – that you have to help everyone, everywhere, all the time. But back to those bulldozed houses: People need to live somewhere. I don’t want to see them under a bridge, not with little kids. It’s not that suburbs are bad, it’s that the population is too great. There was a time when we had both Civilization + Forests! Population of Vienna when Mozart lived there and composed his great works: 200,000. Should’ve stopped growing right then & there.
Though many lack the intelligence to see the consequences of their actions, our current way of life will lead nowhere but destruction. It is not feasible, the question is: how much of our natural inheritance will be destroyed before we stop? Everyone loses utterly if we destroy everything in an attempt to postpone the inevitable just a little longer. The longer we wait, the more we suffer.
That wasn’t meant to be a snipe towards you, but addressing that many people will be unhappy with the hard decisions that must be made and may never even realize why they must me made.
Maybe “proles” is more suitable here than “peasants”?
Peasants (= simple rustic people = people working on the land =~ “pagans”) are actually the basis of Indoeuropean tradition. The war between tradition and modernity is, to a large degree, a war between the country and the city. Are there any peasants in the West?..
I’ve never seen any peasants in the west, at least not for many years.
The closest thing to it were potato farm-hands and crab fishermen in Norfolk, UK.
Norfolk was then very rural, and occupied a part of England that nobody ever went to unless on purpose. I really liked it, even though I was an outsider, and thus not welcome there. The locals had a very odd accent like:
“they low-cuws ‘add uh varry add ark-sent, loike…”
Such people hardly exist any more.
WTF you aren’t Brett Sevens!!
Haha :)
Other authors do occasionally put in a special guest appearance.
“4.Human beings who are part of a greater thing than themselves can realize eternal truth that allows them to accept war, disease, family and friends dying, etc. This will be arbitrarily dubbed a “tradition”. Traditions are ubiquitous and unavoidable. (source: all of human history)”
Your inference from, at most, ten thousand years of human history to human nature for all time is unfortunate.
Alos, what are these eternal ‘truth’s that are encompassed by ‘tradition’?
Why is this inference unfortunate?
Is “Alos!” a salutation of some sort?
“Truths” is never possessive, thus the apostrophe is laughable.
Do you really not understand this thing you question, or are you carrying out a veiled attack? If so, why?
I only ask these questions because I tire of such gratuitous attacks on anything written here. Questions that are not questions, at all, but pointless assaults.
Etc.
This is not a pointless assult. It’s a serious question about the sample size that is being used as the basis for the inference ‘traiditions are ubiqutious and unavoidable (source: all of human history)’. Considering that human nature is highly variable depending on environmental conditions, this statement is dubious, in my opinion. We are the same biological organisms as our Pleistocene ancestors, yet we live for 40 years more, send members of our species to the moon, and make death metal music. This variation in human behaviour is not the result of genetic changes but cultural changes. Human beings are not static. So:
1. Just because we have had traditions since the birth of civilisation and the end of nomadic hunter gatherer societies does not mean traditions are ‘unavoidable’.
2. These ‘eternal truths’ that allow people “to accept war, disease, family and friends dying, etc” are not, themselves, truths at all. God, doesn’t exist. Humans create fictions to sustain themselves. They are usefull fictions. I simply don’t accept that to have a conservative veiwpoint on human organisation one has to accept the ontological realities positied by traditions. Maybe the people do, but not the thinkers. It’s offensive to any thinking person who isn’t coming from a Christian or traditional belief system.
‘Alos’ was an unfortunate spelling omission: meant to say ‘also’.
You don’t seem to understand that:
This is Brett’s blog.
He offers a view that is not shared by all.
He offers it to those who share it.
There is nothing to prove.
Nobody to persuade or convince.
Those who share his views are heartened that they are not alone.
Those who don’t, need not bother themselves with it.
They certainly have no reason to be offended at anything.
Unless, of course, they are dimwit leftists.
Which, not surprisingly, is the whole point of the blog.
Get it?
Brett didn’t write this post. It is substandard. Spelling and expression is even awkward. It reads like a some paranoid, apocalyptic-obsessed autistic traditionalist wrote it. I’m sorry for the crudeness of this description but it’s true. People read this shit, and they may as well flip to alternativeright.com in this case.
“It’s offensive to any thinking person ”
Maybe if by “thinking” you are referring to the modern notion of “free thinking”- which is a mere mental masturbation, devoid of any principle, orientation or purpose.
Otherwise, there are just a few things more offensive to true intelligence than atheism and “materialism”. It is hard to imagine a more limited intellectual horizon than this.
What on earth? So according to you, intelligence is no longer a disposition to identify correspondence between a proposition and reality. It is a reflection of maintaining an orientation with concepts that belong to a closed community, some ‘tradition’?
By ‘thinking person who isn’t coming from a Christian or traditional belief system’ I meant someone who recongises that the ‘truths’ of tradition are not in themselves ontological realities but merely concepts that lead to pragmatic results. There are plenty of conservatives in this camp. Read some Nietzsche, listen to some jonathan bowden.
I cannot believe anyone with an IQ higher than 100, or someone really young, would believe that intelligence = sticking to traditional club speak rather than investigating the nature of reality.
What traditional ‘truths’ can be revealed by honest, rational empirical enquiry beyond pragmatic truths? None. By pragmatic truths I mean sociological truths such as: (a) Society is less materialistic when a common culture is pervasive (b) Society is less materialistic when they have ontological belief in something beyond the individual.
The author of this articvle wrote “4. Human beings who are part of a greater thing than themselves can realize eternal truth that allows them to accept war, disease, family and friends dying, etc.” However, the people aren’t realising any truths at all. They are entertaining concepts (like ‘God’ or something) which when held collectively, *it is true*, lead to a less indivdualistic, materialistic, managerial society.
This all might sound like semantic masterubation to you but it’s not. It’s highlighting a much needed space for non-traditionalist conservatives. I.e. conservatives who do not simply ignore the realities of modernism (one of these being evidence and science). There is a difference between a Nietzschean conservative and a taditionalist one, for example.
Importantly, I’m not bagging people who *do* hold traditional beliefs in metaphysical realities. Just don’t expect all conservatives who are sympathetic to the sociological upshots of traditionalism to hold the metaphysical beliefs.
“What traditional ‘truths’ can be revealed by honest, rational empirical enquiry beyond pragmatic truths?”
This sentence clearly shows that you have no idea of what traditional wisdom and knowledge actually means. Of course, this is what scientism has been promoting for the past 3-4 centuries- what surpasses its field of competence and methods of inquiry simply does not exist- case closed, without right to appeal.
Conservatives who oppose the modern world but hold an atheistic world-view do not understand that it was precisely such a world-view that brought about the modern world in the first place.
Nietzsche clearly has some very interesting orientations and promotes some elements worthy of a healthy and superior way of life, however, in order for these to be effective they do have to be directed towards a transcendental direction, otherwise they just fall flat like any other philosophical system created by mere individuals.
Nietzsche’s ideal of the “superman” is nothing but a phantasm and suffers from the same ill as Marx’s “end of history”- it is just a baseless utopia, no doubt harvested by modern evolutionist fantasies.
Whoa! Well put, Mihai-san :)
“This sentence clearly shows that you have no idea of what traditional wisdom and knowledge actually means.”
I’ve read evola, some guenon. That, initself doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but my point will be that I don’t think it is possible to clearly, and transparently say what it means, at all. In other words I don’t think you have a concrete idea what it actually means, if so, please tell me what ‘truths’ traditionalism gives us, in themselves, like I first asked at the outset of this conversation, that aren’t pragmatic, or psychological truths about human organisms.
“Conservatives who oppose the modern world but hold an atheistic world-view do not understand that it was precisely such a world-view that brought about the modern world in the first place.”
I mean no direct offense to you personally but this sounds like 100 per cent, card carrying, traditionalist club speak with no thought given to it. I’ve read it before and, again, I find it meaningless. It’s ad hoc. I could just as easily argue that it was bloody Christianity (at the very least its Protestant variety) that brought on the modern world, with it’s individualism, humanism etc! That’s what makes it ad hoc.
“in order for these to be effective they do have to be directed towards a transcendental direction, otherwise they just fall flat like any other philosophical system created by mere individuals.”
This is sounding worse. What systems aren’t created by ‘mere individuals’?! And do you have anything to back up such a wonderfully traditionalist assertion as this, i.e., that conservatives who aren’t metaphysicians ‘fail’. Nietzsche went insane, but it was because of a physical mallady. So as well as Nietzsche I can think of Bill Hopkins (i.e. myself), Jonathan Bowden, and Wyndham Lewis who were all powerful conservatives. And, low and behold, they all existed in modernity.
I think your conditions for ‘true’ conservativism (i.e. traditionalism) are ad hoc and you entertain theories which limit ‘true’ conservativism to people of religious beliefs like yourself.
You’re too clever to know anything.
If you did know anything worth knowing, you wouldn’t be carrying on the way you do.
Atheists are like self-mutilators, who claim being mutilated is where it’s at. Others of like mind buy it, but nobody else does.
You haven’t responded to anything i’ve written in the last 3 posts, Crow. I would rather Mihai responds to me.
I’ll see what I can do so that the internet is set up just the way you like it.
“In other words I don’t think you have a concrete idea what it actually means [...]”
Tradition is not compatible with systematic labelling, nor with academical definitions. It never needed anything in its defence, any explanations concerning it until the advent of the modern world, which is singular, in all of our recorded history, in its lack of any tradition or at least a conception of any order of reality that is more profound than the most gross.
What I mean to say is that if you cannot or will not personally undertake the task of understanding what is implied by metaphysical knowledge, than no one can do it in your place. The metaphysical truths are either understood and lived (at least in to a minor degree) or they are not understood at all, in which case no “debates”, verbosity, reading or whatever can make up for it. It may sound to you like a dodging of the question but I assure it is not. In the very least I can do is point up to you one of the few positive, compensating aspects of modernity- the access to the sacred texts of the majority of traditions of the world.
“I mean no direct offense to you personally but this sounds like 100 per cent, card carrying, traditionalist club speak with no thought given to it. I’ve read it before and, again, I find it meaningless. ”
Then please observe the fact that the modern world, with all its rationalism and scientism, has been unable to formulate any reference point, any life purpose that isn’t in the category of the most utilitarian and gross. Later, it has simply ignored or outright denied the importance of such questions. After all, if we are just a cosmic accident and there is no purpose to our existence, why bother at all ? The “absolute relativism” of our age is the logical consequence of the absence of a stable reference point which transcends the all too human domain.
Modern philosophy, with its lack of principles, has never been able to offer anything. Every single individual can participate (to different degrees) to a traditional doctrine (because such a doctrine transcends the limits of individualism), but philosophical systems can only appeal to those who have the same mental constitution and predisposition as the individual philosophers who create these systems.
By the way, since we are at this point, I must say that I really appreciate Nietzsche as rich mind and powerful thinker, and quite a breath of fresh air when looking in the context of his period. But I must observe that, in his philosophy, there are certainly two points towards which he strived. To leave the “all too human” roots and to avoid being a child of his time- in his words, this should be the highest goal of every philosopher. Unfortunetly, he failed miserably at both points.
Also, please understand that I am not setting “conditions”, I am not giving direction, I am just making observations at the contradictions and inaccuracies of contemporary conservatives. Myself, I am no conservative- because there is really nothing left today which is worth conserving in the first place- and I do not wish to limit myself to right vs left dichotomies.
Sadly, I see no hope in the “new right” any more than in other contemporary movements.
I think I’ve written enough and there’s nothing more I’d like to add.
You’re right: You’ve written enough, and well. Said it beautifully. The obvious, made poetic.
A very, very clear declaration of reality.
The only point I would contest would be that there is nothing left worth conserving today:
While that is undeniably the case, in human terms, for as long as a single tree remains, then there is still something worth conserving.