With the recent election, a number of people have discovered that our society is heading in a “bad direction.” Marxism, an ideology that has trashed every place where it has ever been applied, is on the rise. Socially, Americans have little in common with each other. The country is broke and in the hands of bickering maniacs.
To many voices on the right, it seems like this recent outrage exploded out of the wall at the behest of Barack Obama and his minions. He converted our country overnight into this land of descent. In their view, we are all innocents who have been ambushed by this sudden Marxist, multiculturalist, and Statist golem of hatred.
However, this is short-sighted and forgets that for the last century, many people have been resistant to the conditions which made Barack Obama an inevitability. Most of them were not on the right, and almost none of them were coherent, so they amounted to protest and art and nothing more.
Like the parents of a delinquent teen who find themselves, after sixteen years of ignoring some unmet need of their child, facing a police investigation, we are denying the lengthy backstory to our current dilemma. We should have seen this coming, but we denied it because those who spoke of it were generally oppositional to our society.
From 1890 to 1999, most conservatives have fallen into a party line of freedom, liberty and free markets. They advised us even as things were getting bad to put our heads down, work hard on our stuff, and ignore what others were doing.
They forgot one thing, however: civilization inherently distributes impact of its policies to all of its members. If not direct cost, socialized cost. If not that, by foreclosure of future options based on the decisions we have made today. Civilization regulates what options are available to us.
This conservative ideology of rugged individualism carried us through many tough times because it encouraged personal responsibility and, as a result, allowed us to shrug off parasites. It never protected against social decay, however, and that context influences society as a whole, neatly ensnaring the rugged individualists.
Probably the most emblematic symbol of this conflict was the 1950s in America. On the surface, life was perfect: war won, economy booming, kids everywhere, wealth abundant. Under the surface, “problems remain”: ethnic conflict, class resentment, pluralism causing resentment, working women agitating against the family, misery and boredom.
The latter two are the most important. In the great postwar boom, everyone became a slave to the dollar. Mainly because if you didn’t want to slave, there’s another guy right over there who does, and he’ll take your place. You’ll end up selling apples in Central Park, buddy.
The fact is that we’ve made a miserable society. Modern life is ugly, harshly competitive, rewards the wrong people, pollutes everything it touches and is driven by the capricious trends and whims of special interest groups. Most people experience days of grinding boredom in redundant jobs where the bad behavior of others is the norm.
This situation is not new. People have been loathing our society for a century or more and with good cause. With each succeeding generation, the rot has become more complete. It finally found a perfect host in the Baby Boomers who starting in 1968 made it an official state religion and required talking points for the social elite.
All of the gnarly frustrated art which has come out of America and Europe during these years, from Hemingway to Burroughs to Houellebecq, has shown us what we have been fighting hard to remain in denial of: our society is rotting from within through lack of shared values, goals, hopes, dreams and/or quests. We are directionless.
The result is a society where commerce and trends have dominated everything and rendered all of it to the level of obligation. Democracy and freedom (etc) were supposed to help us escape unnecessary obligation. Instead, we’ve created more of it, by giving freedom to everyone so that they can abuse it and also sell themselves at a low price per pound.
Conservatives have failed to succeed in this environment because of our attitude of defending society. It’s popular to say that we shouldn’t pick any one political party, or ethnic viewpoint, but what about society as a whole? We shouldn’t defend it just because it’s what’s left of what we once loved.
Instead, we should recognize that this collapse has been a long time coming. Since 1789, or the Enlightenment, or maybe it’s a trap that has been with humanity since the beginning. It has rotted us away and made life miserable for many generations, and with each one we get more twisted and bitter and pass it on to our kids.
The only way out is to reform society. People should work less, and think more. They should not be forced to burn away their time on redundant or superfluous tasks. The goal should be quality of life, not quantity of people, dollars or warm bodies enthusiastic about some transient idea or another.
If our goal is to conserve, our enemy is society. We must vanquish it so that we can preserve values and common sense. That this involves re-starting civilization is a foregone conclusion. So why are conservatives defending the status quo, and compelling us to more obligation to it?
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I starting to come around to this way of thinking. From being ‘Pro White’ (in a broad sense) to Pro Ethnic Nationalism to stepping back and wanting to start at the beginning, with all who live in our societies, good and bad, and finding their best place. It is useless to say to most that ‘I am a Nationalist’ or ‘I am a Non Consumerist Deep Ecologist’ because most folk haven’t worked through in their minds what that really means and what you would need to do and forgo to achieve the desired goals that these ways of being can bring.
“We should have seen this coming, but we denied it because those who spoke of it were generally oppositional to our society.”
Oh dear heavens yes, good thing they were all weirdoes. If they had normal hair we’d have to come up with even more ridiculous excuses to avoid the truth that they knew first. Can’t have that right! Aaah, blessed be the cracks for they let in the light.
“People should work less, and think more. They should not be forced to burn away their time on redundant or superfluous tasks.”
Whaaaaat!? “Think” more? Conservatives? Please guy, they think less work and more think is “lazy.” Gotta keep busy at all times!
This sort of response has become the standard response from the herd that feels that every statement about anything should be only what is agreed with by the herd. Dead-end, or what?
And to think, such things actually used to upset me :)
Those days are gone.
It’s the coming thing to actually consider things before sarcasming all over them if they don’t sound familiar.
Background noise is a constant in the modern world.
Ha! I decided to spend $400 for some noise-cancelling headphones, so I would be able to endure occasionally eating out in a restaurant.
That’s modernity for you.
I think I knew we were in trouble here when they started putting TVs in the produce department of the local grocery.
It’s bad enough that the nitwit soulless muzak plays constantly, and of course that people are chattering and running around with noisy carts, but then having the talking heads try to sell you products over the din just makes it worse.
A protest movement should arise based on people wearing noise-canceling headphones everywhere they go. Especially during election season.
Brett Stevens, I am firmly beginning to believe that the entire truth transcends human communication as an exchange of conversational tokens.
I personally believe that you hit the nail firmly on the head with your recent allusions to Mayberry vs. the world of today, which is rapidly becoming a gritty cyberpunk dystopia straight out of the Metal Gear universe. I think that situation – what the world is really like vs. what we all secretly want it to be when we sit in traffic, while we’re showering or while we lie awake at night wondering why everything sucks so much.
In an Anus.com article, somebody said very aptly that many people “have not glimpsed enough of Hell to desire Heaven,” and while I think that was very accurate I think the opposite situation describes modern Westerners: between the broken homes and the pointless striving the native population sure knows no Heaven, and the immigrants obviously don’t or they wouldn’t be here.
I believe people go crazy and shoot up random places boils down to people falling for the apparent reality – that is, the lie – that a Mayberry type place is fundamentally impossible.
I also believe that people in general are skeptical deconstructionists, and even if a Mayberry did exist you could never convince them: you could only SHOW them.
I believe that’s what would have to happen to fix anything. A Mayberry type place would first have to be created (as I believe it has), and then SHOWN to people, so they can learn that it exists and ask themselves deep down whether or not they want to be part of it.
I agree — the great lie is that Eden cannot be rediscovered and re-created.
People want to pity themselves. This lets them off the hook for challenging themselves to achieve something with their lives. They can just blame (whitey|the Jews|capitalism|fate) and keep slacking off, living for little pleasures, etc.
If they put a little more effort into it — and this is mental effort, not back-breaking work necessarily — they could see that we can have Eden if people simply stop avoiding the obvious.
Brett,
If you haven’t read this yet, I would highly recommend it as it discusses most of these questions and issues you bring up. The book is written by a leftist, so it’s a tad biased, but sums up our thought process pretty well:
http://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Mind-Conservatism-Edmund-Burke/dp/0199793743
Quote: “Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is “boring,” said the founding father of the American right. “Devoting your life to it,” as conservatives do, “is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.” With this unlikely conversation began Robin’s decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what’s truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them?”
Meow — interesting. This line in the review caught my eye:
Typical leftist double-speak. What does emancipation mean here? It implies they are oppressed and need liberating. What if the source of their misfortune was their own mental laziness and incoherence?
In that case, “liberating” them would be giving power to a group of people destined to act in reality-denying, thus sociopathic, ways.
Like I said, the author has a leftwing bias, however, the takeaway points of his thesis are these:
1) Despite conservatives’ stated belief in slow gradual change tempered by adherence to time-tested traditions (Oakeshott, Buckley, etc), conservatives have never actually believed in ‘conserving’ anything- they have been the harshest critics of the status quo and believe in a revolutionary overthrow of the current order which has failed to keep liberalism at bay. For instance, Edmund Burke himself said that our greatest institutions have yielded nothing but “dust and smut” and that in every respect “the Jacobins are our superiors”. Maistre and other conservative thinkers have shown similair disdain. In other words, conservatives despise the current ruling powers precisely because they view such powers as weak in the face of crisis.
2) As such, all rightwingers, whether they be conservatives, Randians, libertarians, fascists, etc, are ‘reactionaries’. They react to movements of the left.
3) In reacting to the left, they desire the transformation or overthrow of the current society in order to create new and healthier orders of power and hierarchy.
4) In doing so, they mimic the style and tactics of the left. Thus the neoconservatives copied the Jacobin language of the rights of man, global democracy, etc, fascists created their own version of socialism, slave owners granted slave-owning privileges to lower class whites, Sarah Palin calls herself a feminist, Hayek spoke of freedom from government oppression and freedom of human expression. In other words, the right always re-invents itself by absorbing ideas from the left. The relationship is a symbiotic antagonism.
5) Conservatives despise the left because they would reduce the world to boredom and the mere maintenance of life, biopolitics. Conservatives see life as an existential quest, be it through the epic of war and sublime violence or the risk and adventure of the free-market. The rightwingers are thus not stuffy moralizers and prudes as the left portrays, but incredibly creative and dynamic.
6) Lower class rightwing sympathizers are not duped by ‘false consciousness’. They are granted real power and opportunity when the rightwing gains control and gifts them with their own domains to rule over others. For instance, poors, gays, women, and minorities in conservative parties in the West gain opportunities the left was incapable of giving them in exchange for their submission to the right. Middle managers gain power over employees by submitting to their bosses.
7) Reactionaries secretly hate victory and thrive off of loss. Conservatives were upset with the defeat of communism after the Cold War, because they no longer had a worthy foe. Since 9-11, the rightwing has been animated by their opposition to Islamic jihadists, neo-Marxists and Democrats, this is what makes the rightwing feel alive.
There is a goldmine of ideas here.
“Typical leftist double-speak. What does emancipation mean here? It implies they are oppressed and need liberating. What if the source of their misfortune was their own mental laziness and incoherence?”
Precisely, I said the author was biased. However, the book is not written in a ‘look how bad the rightwing is’-style, rather, Robin goes to considerable lengths to show that the rightwing actually provides coherent rationale as to WHY the lower orders should not be liberated. In other words, he is grudgingly agreeing with the right that we have legitimate concerns, especially given the historical track record of what such emancipated people do when the chains are off…act like idiots and barbarians.
A goldmine of ideas?
What is this human interest in gold?
And in ideas?
What is an idea, anyway? Did anyone ever wonder that?
I have noticed increased function, increased appreciation, and increased immersion, in the absence of ideas.
The idea of an idea, perhaps, is that it occurs when it needs to.
The rest of the time, ideas get in the way of observing, and being part of, reality.
One may well observe me, and observe: “He has no idea”.
Then again, that may be the general idea.
Come on Crow, knock it off. Craaaaaaa! :)
OK. Just being a crow. Aaaarrrk (:>
I like the first point, but think he’s gone off the narrative at that point and is recycling typical liberal insults against conservatives.
Indeed, well put. “our society is rotting from within through lack of shared values, goals, hopes, dreams and/or quests. We are directionless.”
I can see this everywhere. The youth is directionless, there are no shared values anymore, no nothing, nothing to “belong to” or call home.
This modern plague has taken what was once beautiful, (symbols, art, ideas) and have turned them into a meaningless advertisement.
I as an individual don’t know much about politics, so I won’t pretend that I do know, but all I do know is that i’m searching for truth which is buried in a sea of lies. I’m searching meaning in a world devoid of meaning…
People are so afraid of inequality that they destroy all value and beauty. Youth pays the most, as the young people are forced to grow up in servitude to drudgery.