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Utilitarianism Is A Repugnant Conclusion

Wednesday, July 12th, 2017

Utilitarianism forms the basis of our current society, which is that we do whatever achieves the greatest happiness for the greatest number as they judge it and report. This runs into collision with an ethical argument first put forth in 1984 by Derek Parfit which became (deservedly) known as the repugnant conclusion.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains the failure of utilitarianism in terms of population:

In Derek Parfit’s original formulation the Repugnant Conclusion is stated as follows: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living” (Parfit 1984). The Repugnant Conclusion highlights a problem in an area of ethics which has become known as population ethics. The last three decades have witnessed an increasing philosophical interest in questions such as “Is it possible to make the world a better place by creating additional happy people?” and “Is there a moral obligation to have children?”

We might view population as the metaphor, and the real question as, “which is better, excellence for a few or mediocrity for many?” In other words, are we aiming for quality or quantity, and if so, are we willing to sacrifice quantity for quality. The idea of utilitarianism is itself entirely quantitative, so we can see where this leads for the utilitarian idea

Parfit’s first and fatal error in attacking this question was to go full-metal Jeremy Bentham. In the proud tradition of scientific socialism, Bentham attempts to put a value metric on happiness. Parfit compounds this wrong further by partaking of the math-nerd version of Spirit Cooking. He uses the Benthamic concept of measuring happiness at the highest population number where H >= 0 for the individual person.

It gets to his choice of ethical systems. Parfit executes a moral decision-making model by using utilitarian ethics: do the greatest good for the greatest number and you will be less wrong. This misses the point entirely. No matter how sophisticated you make it, no matter how many silver-dollar words you describe it with, utilitarian ethics define morality on a basis of what makes the individual person “happy.” Therein lies the rub.

What makes an individual happy depends heavily on what sort individual you’re talking about. In world full of individuals like Trick Daddy, this reduces the epitome of morality to what fills a man’s stomach and stimulates his sex organs.

When I approach this problem, I’m thinking deontologically. As Omar put in on an episode of The Wire, “A man’s gotta have a code.” Rather than cribbing Jeremy Bentham, I would use Isaac Asimov’s methodology instead. Getting the toolbox out and tinkering with Psychohistory from The Foundation series, I came up with a different standard by which we can optimize human population.

Asimov worked as a chemist before his sci-fi blew up and he could earn a living writing articles for Playboy instead. A lynchpin concept in the study of physical chemistry involves a mathematical application of probability theory called statistical mechanics. Statistical mechanics estimates physical (or chemical) behaviors of a substance based upon a distribution of characteristics of individual molecules, atoms or particles contained in the substance. Asimov modified this intellectual framework to plant the theoretical axiom that a historian could start predicting the future history of a civilization based upon characteristics of that entity’s human population.

This leads me not to work towards an optimal population size at all. You don’t reproduce to fill up a cubicle farm. You also don’t cut people off of God’s psychopathic rugby football club just because you run out of jumpers. It’s not the size of the population in question that determines the good. It is the quality. Are these people intelligent? Are they industrious? Do they love their God and love their neighbor? Do they produce or do they mooch? Do they contribute or do they steal? Are they shiny, happy people? Who gives a rat’s rear-end unless they can honestly provide the correct answers to the first five questions?

So how many people do I order the good people to go forth and breed? He doesn’t. The correct question involves how good of a job can you do at g-loading them for war against powers and principalities and then how effectively and diligently are you working at optimizing that potential. Half of being good at mathematics is to know when to stop estimating based on knowledge you cannot yet possess. Sometimes Old-Fashioned Kentucky Windage gets you closer to hitting the target than obsessing over dialing that sight on your weapon with a nail.

So let’s talk reproductive strategy, not numbers. You’ve got two choices: r-strategy or K-strategy. So if you want to flood the zone, and hope that one or two them don’t wind up as casualties, you, like the rabbit or salmonella, choose r-strategy:

Those organisms described as r-strategists typically live in unstable, unpredictable environments. Here the ability to reproduce rapidly (exponentially) is important. Such organisms have high fecundity (glossary) and relatively little investment in any one progeny individual, they are typically weak and subject to predation and the vicissitudes of their environment. The “strategic intent” is to flood the habitat with progeny so that, regardless of predation or mortality, at least some of the progeny will survive to reproduce.

If you want your children to run with the big dogs and not once have to back down from life’s pissed-off grizzly… then breed fewer, breed better, breed K-strategy:

K-strategists, on the other hand occupy more stable environments. They are larger in size and have longer life expectancies. They are stronger or are better protected and generally are more energy efficient. They produce, during their life spans, fewer progeny, but place a greater investment in each. Their reproductive strategy is to grow slowly, live close to the carrying capacity of their habitat and produce a few progeny each with a high probability of survival.

Thus the repugnant conclusion ultimately pollutes the environment rather than solving the problem of how best to populate it. Earth’s K is not purely a function of how many? Ask “How abusive?”, “How needy?”, “How resilient?” and “How anti-fragile?” Essentially, reproduction should be informed more by the Deep Ecology of Arne Naess and not the shallow, mathematically sloppy socialism of Jeremy Bentham. That to me is a conclusion that is far less likely to make the man of intelligence and honor toss his cookies.

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Origins Of Decay

Tuesday, March 14th, 2017

The decay of Western Civilization is all around us. If you have doubts, take your history textbook to a busy public area and focus on observing what you see around you. Other than an increase in technology and wealth, how does this time compare to the past?

Recently someone asked me when the decay started. This proves challenging to answer because most commonly we know decay only through its symptoms, with its causes being invisible and buried under layers of analysis. To simplify the process, it makes sense to look at what public figures have said about decay.

Bill Clinton is known for exporting the concept of climate change to the world. His opinion was that the Earth is in decay and that it is caused by humanity. What he should have said was that climate change is caused by organizations comprised of humans, instead of pointing towards his people as being in decay.

In other words, the organizations are in decay, and this cause results in the symptoms or effects of Earth experiencing decay. We can extend this to any other type of social problem: if dystopia arises around you, stupidity becomes the norm, culture is garbage and your fellow citizens seem more like criminals, this is a result of bad leadership and hierarchy.

Decay can have multiple causes. For example, a population bloom like red tide can eliminate the ecosystem of a lake; introduction of invasive species can destroy indigenous flora and fauna and then, since the invaders are not well-adapted, cause them to die off as well. Invasive species in fact present a powerful metaphor:

All native species — not only those on islands and mountaintops — lack a co-evolutionary history with species from elsewhere. This is why non-native species are far more likely to cause ecological damage than native ones (up to 40 times more likely in comprehensive reviews of data)…

We know that about 80% of all extinctions recorded since 1500 occurred on islands. Two papers recently analyzed extinctions events and concluded that invasive species were cited most frequently as the cause of island species extinctions and invasive species are the most common threat associated with vertebrate extinctions globally.

This provides a vision of decay: the island is still there even though all the animals are dead. Eventually, life will renew itself in different forms. Driftwood will bring animals; birds blown off-course will land there and start colonies. Over time, these will adapt and a new set of distinctive species will arise.

This continuous renewal means that decay is a permanent condition, which means that it varies in degree over time but is never completely absent. All islands, societies and organizations are somewhere on the spectrum of breakdown. Organizations for example are in permanent decay, therefore requiring continuous renewal.

Similarly, human history shows us many instances of humans dying off in large numbers, but somehow renewing themselves and growing to even larger numbers of individuals. How can humanity be in decay when its populations are expanding? How can organizations be in decay when their wealth is increasing?

Comparing to animal populations exploding unabatedly, we see that the differences it that humans have the wherewithal to subconsciously know that an exploding population is a very bad thing. It is inexplicable in the natural order of things. It is out of balance. We know that this means short-term success and long term catastrophic failure.

However, this works against our need for power. Controlling population growth of anything is not a business opportunity. You do not make money from reducing the number of consumers or resources, and so if you succeed in controlling population, the business will fail and the population will fail in consequence.

Humans have always been in decay because they refuse to accept the natural order of things. This means humanity is a mistake; the human species is nature’s mistake. In fact, most planets do not have humans and we commend them on that choice. The reason for refusal to accept the natural order is that humans choose to filter out scary ideas and instead to seize business opportunities.

We peripatetic intelligent Simians have been genetically endowed with the ability to trick ourselves into ignoring bad news. Humans will never tell their children bad things, only the positive, thereby literally selection for the gene that allows for self-deception. Without awareness of the negative, people see only business opportunities, and thus every society grows out of control and suicides.

This makes humans like the animal swarm on the island: a force of its own self-destruction unless restrained by some wiser force. In human history, this force has only come through institutions like the aristocracy which concentrate ability and wisdom and apply it to the rest who will otherwise create a tragedy of the commons and destroy all that is dear to them.

Organizations of this nature need renewal, or constant struggle against the entropy within that occurs through the accumulation of bad genetics, weak people, and corruption in the principles and ways of the institution. The first goal of an institution should be to ensure its own quality, but this is the last thing that most organizations consider, which is why few survive.

Another solution can be found on the individual end. The opposite of renewal in organizations or the individual is the subsidy, because it allows bad traits to persist as well as good ones, and in fact more equally since bad traits are a lower energy investment. We need renewal in human beings as well as in organizations.

This requires humans to better adjust to nature — not being insulated from it with subsidies — in order to limit their decay. That in turn adds value to nature and knowledge of nature instead of self-trickery, and in doing so, forces the human curve upward by demanding adaptation to nature and thus creates a co-evolutionary history for the organization.

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Ecosystems, Societies and Human Conflict

Monday, March 13th, 2017

Biology informs our perspective on a number of our societal problems. One thing that it tells us a lot about is the curse of enforced diversity. We here at Amerika champion the old maxim that diversity does not work. But so far we have cited this as a given, not subjected it to probative analysis. This post seeks to draw upon our background knowledge of Deep Ecology and provide the analytical prop to support the maxim with appropriate rigor.

We know from basic biology that an ecosystem consists of the environment that surrounds a community of species and comprises the region within which these species tend to competitively react. Within said environment each living organism requires four things to do well: food, shelter, water, and space. If there isn’t enough for everybody to get a pony, then one or more of these resources is a limiting factor that is by definition scarce. Once we have scarce resources, competition ensues. Some win, some dirt-nap, some head straight for the exit.

We can then compare our society to said ecosystem by analogy. The different sub-cultures such as religions, races, and social classes are all populations attempting to lay hands on what they need. When times are good and easy, you will get more of them. Absent limiting factors, the different groups will tend to coexist. But when one of the big four requirements runs scarce….Some win, some dirt-nap, some head straight for the exit.

Biologists define diversity as the variety of differing species that exist within the confines of an ecosystem. By analogy, we can describe cultural diversity as the number of different subcultures that compete for resources and status within the society. A biologist will define an ecosystem as robust when it contains significantly large amounts of diversity. A simple extension dictates that a diverse society should also be robust.

However, we now reach a contradiction. Diversity equals conflict, or diversity is our strength. Can it be both, could it be neither or is it forced to be one or the other? This requires an analysis of our appetite for conflict and tendency toward destruction. In competition, some win, some lose and some retreat for the hills. We can referee this competition, or we can let it go full-metal Darwin. We can let iron sharpen iron, or we can make certain competitors pad their blades and use whiffle bats, not war clubs. Finally, and most importantly, we can allow for the graceful exit of those hors de combat or just sadistically kick ’em back into the field of play.

When the competition is refereed, we need to feel confident the referee is just. We have so badly sunk into Post-Modernism and incorrectly applied Nihilism, we can’t even define the term just. Equality of result becomes an ideal held by most who fail to get results any other way. Like the whinging, flop-artist soccer player these people constantly work the ref rather than working on leveling up their game. When this works to the extent that Asian-Americans with an ACT score of X1 have less than half the likelihood of getting into Harvard of a Hispanic-American with a similar score, the impartiality of the referee can only be called into question.

It also calls into question what we define as a strength. Let’s say Harvard University has the best Applied Mathematics Department in America. Let’s also assume it takes a hundred new majors per year. If diversity is truly intended to produce social robustness and iron really sharpens iron, then we ultimately would have to steel ourselves for an outcome where all hundred members of the next Applied Math major cohort at Harvard were all Vietnamese Americans. If that group of individuals happened to be the top hundred, and if diversity is our strength — as opposed to being our slogan — we’ve got to be totally cool with that. Even if we are either Caucasian or African-American. If we really believe Vietnamese lives matter, what else could we conclude? If the referee forces any other outcome, than obviously we have some sort of unjust and implicit hierarchy of which lives really matter more.

So if the game isn’t fair, should everybody have to play? Now there used to be an implicit right in America known as Freedom of Association that dictated the extent to which you were forced to experience diversity. People could live, work and do business with those they trusted and felt a level of comfort with. Now you will bake their wedding cakes even if you find them utterly detestable and would forego the income that produces with pleasure. You literally can’t escape, and if you compete too hard and too well, the referee will intervene and prevent you from winning to the extent to which you deserve.

Imagine an NBA game where Steph Curry has to crank his threes wearing a pair of five pound ankle weights. Imagine we just tech him up and give the other team free throws if he turns around and gripes. That’s the diversity culture of Modern America. It is not our strength. It is often a laughable rendition of Kurt Vonnegut’s classic Harrison Bergeron. Iron is not sharpening iron. The resources are not accurately valued and a predictable Tragedy of The Commons settles upon us as a pestilence. The different cultures forced into this revolting petri dish of dysfunction hate one another with the blistering fire of a thousand suns.

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Insight Into A Traditionalist Deep Ecology Based Society

Friday, February 24th, 2017

Smithsonian Magazine writes about how one can play the civilization game, do everything mostly right, and still be eliminated by the shifting sands of time:

Yet it appears the Norse were careful: They limited their hunting of the local harbor seal, Phoca vitulina, a species that raises its young on beaches, making it easy prey. (The harbor seal is critically endangered in Greenland today due to overhunting.) “They could have wiped them out, and they didn’t,” Smiarowski says. Instead, they pursued the more abundant—and more difficult to catch—harp seal, Phoca groenlandica, which migrates up the west coast of Greenland every spring on the way from Canada. Those hunts, he says, must have been well-organized communal affairs, with the meat distributed to the entire settlement—seal bones have been found at homestead sites even far inland.

…“People came from different farms; some provided labor, some provided boats,” Smiarowski says, speculating. “Maybe there were several centers organizing things along the coast of the Eastern Settlement. Then the catch was divided among the farms, I would assume according to how much each farm contributed to the hunt.” The annual spring seal hunt might have resembled communal whale hunts practiced to this day by the Faroe Islanders, who are the descendants of Vikings.

The growing season was short, and the land vulnerable to overgrazing. Ian Simpson has spent many seasons in Greenland studying soil layers where the Vikings farmed. The strata, he says, clearly show the impact of their arrival: The earliest layers are thinner, with less organic material, but within a generation or two the layers stabilized and the organic matter built up as the Norse farmwomen manured and improved their fields while the men were out hunting. “You can interpret that as being a sign of adaptation, of them getting used to the landscape and being able to read it a little better,” Simpson says.

This shows a society that lived according to both deep ecology and traditionalist principles. It found balance with nature in its food source, yet also changed the land with the use of manure to fertilize it. It engaged in group activities that distributed rewards according to contribution and not equally. And other evidence mentioned in the article reveals a highly orderly, caste-organized, and religious civilization. These are goals to strive for.

Of course, history brings twists of its own, and one is that settlement on Greenland was doomed because of a volcano eruption and loss of important resources for trading, and so the settlement gradually packed up and moved out, family by family. These periodic historical crises happen, such as the Black Plague in Europe or even the Mongol invasions, and they can destroy civilizations that otherwise did everything right. Nature is random but hopes to, on a statistical level, ensure prevalence of the most well-adapted.

“It’s a very different story from my dissertation,” says McGovern. “It’s scarier. You can do a lot of things right—you can be highly adaptive; you can be very flexible; you can be resilient—and you go extinct anyway.”

Nonetheless, this shows us some basic principles that our future Western Civilization can use: it can exist in balance with nature. It can suppress the weak behavior of humans with strong social order and a devotion to transcendental and qualitative ideas like religion. It can have traditional values without becoming too human to exist in its surroundings. But there are no guarantees and no Utopias; all we can do, by doing the above, is to maximize our chances.

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Interview With Wrath Of Gnon

Thursday, February 23rd, 2017

Many of our readers are familiar with Wrath of Gnon, the cerebral meme-master who pairs classic art with insightful quotations from writers and thinkers. Although he exists only on social media, his elegant images spread across the web and, interestingly for social media, re-appear years later. We were lucky to get some time to chat with the elusive Wrath of Gnon.

When did you first know that you would pursue a different path than that of the majority? Is there any way for someone who aspires to sanity to feel good about this modern world?

I was not exceptional in that I was born reactionary. I believe most people are for the simple reason that all the hollow slogans of the progressives — Equality, Brotherhood, Liberty, etc. — are so obviously untrue to even the most socially isolated child (and I was not in the least isolate, I grew up in a large loving family).

To maintain the progressive mindset it is vital that people remain detached from reality (from their roots, families, friends, communities), and plugged in or attached to the propaganda machine. Take a man away from media for a fortnight and you will see emerge a more sensible, realistic human being. My own reactionary thinking has only strengthened the more I remove myself from modern media and groupthink.

It is not difficult: stop looking at mass media, distance yourself from all writing that “feels” modern; keep going backwards in times until you find what you are comfortable with. There are even some recent writers with an old fashioned mind set, you don’t have to read Chaucer, as certain works of Kerouac will do just as well. Immerse yourself in reality: aspire to experience and perform all the functions of life, as far as it is humanly possibly for you.

This can include growing your own crops to taking your friends for extended hiking trips in the wilderness. There are no excuses and I believe it is possible for everyone to cultivate a timeless mindset. The important thing is to, in some way, manner or form, reach backwards. This is the meaning of the slogan “Revolt Against the Modern World”: to turn your back on modernity.

What, in your view, went wrong with the West, and how do we fix it? How deeply does the rot go?

As for when (even though you did not ask), there is the famous quip — “For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.” (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn) — but the Traditionalist-Catholic wing of reactionary thinkers go further, blaming the reformation. And so on. This is a fun but ultimately pointless game.

Personally I would not even call it a rot, as I subscribe to the Evolian idea that we are already “men standing in the ruins.” Rome has fallen all around us, it is just that we have not noticed yet (or as Adam Smith mirrored it “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”). This question brings to mind the two famous portrayals of two different Roman nobles in the fifth century A.D., one who leaves the Imperial Capital to return to his family lands in Gaul, to “weather out the temporary unrest”, while the other quietly slips away to eventually found his own Holy Order, the Benedictines. The first thinking that order will soon be restored, the other with his mind already set on eternity. Both accounts make for fantastic reading.

The good thing is that everything we need to turn things around is already here. All the material, all the plans, all the accumulated wealth and knowledge of millennia of human thought and creativity is scattered all around us. We even have a time table for how to do it (and this was suggested by someone on Twitter three or four years ago), we just start turning the clock back, step by step, reversing history as we go along, keeping only the reality compliant, Gnon friendly parts.

And we might unwittingly have started this already: education, housing, vacation homes, etc., it is all becoming too expensive very fast. We are losing the means of production to more ruthless countries in the Far East, and we are running out of natural resources. Unrest in far away countries have started cramping our wanderlust—quick now, 2017 might be your last chance to see the Louvre, the Pyramids and the beaches of Pattaya! And speaking of Pattaya, sexually transmitted diseases are quickly becoming immune to treatment, thus limiting us even in our choices of partners, and in their numbers, automatically unwinding the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.

Mark Stein said “The future belongs to those who show up,” and as Evola noted, what we have to do now is to hold out, to “ride the tiger,” to “remain standing in the ruins,” to (as Rod Dreher posited) take the Benedict Option and become neo-monastics. And have children, of course. Lots and lots of children.

You publish a series of intellectual memes — striking images overlaid with notable quotations and cutting insights — which reveal much about what is wrong, and where we might go. What appealed to you about this format? How do you choose images and quotations?

I had been skimming the outer fringes of the “reacto-sphere,” but I think I was influenced in taking the step to participate more actively by a few people, and a few memes. The first was an anonymous image showing a leafy green, beautifully airy urban street from the turn of the last century, overlaid with the words: “NEVER AGAIN.” That one hit me like a brick in the forehead.

At the same time, I happened to find @shaunwesleywyrd and E.H. Looney on Twitter. S. Wes shared a photo of an old book by Oswald Mosley he was reading, photographed with whiskey and a pipe, and Looney shared (and I still think this is a most fantastic meme) an image of a young woman in medieval garb with the text: “The First Reich was the Best Reich.”

I saw a way to present (to the general public) very “politically incorrect,” almost caustic ideas, in a fun setting. It took me a few weeks of experimenting to realize that I needed two more vital ingredients: a pinch of gravitas (which I got from relying mostly on very old literature) and beauty. Beauty is the beginning of all things good, and goodness is the beginning of all beautiful things. At the very same time I was reading NRx, I read Bryce, MM, Sailer, Jim, Nick Land etc., and the rest is (well documented) history.

I have a decent image memory, so I remember a lot of images I have seen, and when I find a good quote in my readings (I read a lot, and almost only autobiographies these days) or online or suggested by helpful people on Twitter or Tumblr, that fit an image, I add it. And of course, the other way around. I think my best work is actually when I see an image and the text just comes to me naturally, whether it is my own or a quote from someone else (I do realize that there are almost no original thoughts out there, so as far as possible I try to give credit where credit is due).

Unlike many within modernist movements, including the Alt Right, you are an out-of-the-closet monarchist. What led you to have faith in monarchy? How do we get there from here?

Humankind has at the very least thirty-five centuries of monarchy under its belt by now (at least Europeans, much longer if you include the other great historical cultures), and this has taken us from roving bands of hunters to the outer reaches of the solar system. Furthermore the amount of beauty in the world is diminishing at the same rate that Modernity is growing.

I noticed that globalism is erasing differences both geographically as well as culturally while increasing meaningless ugliness! It is the differences that are important, the distinctions that make everything on this planet so interesting! I even have a love for borders (and walls and fences, demarcations, ditches, hedgerows, etc.): strange and wonderful things happen in borders regions: the starkest contrast, the strangest amalgmations and syntheses, the most interesting crossovers. Borders are great things — we need more of them!

I hate the leveling leviathan of globalization and commercialism. I do not trust systems — is there any system that has not achieved a long history of atrocities by now? All systems are inherently unsustainable, as they are founded in ideas rather than in observable reality, and once the people holding these ideas change, so do the ideas (witness social democrats in Europe or social justice warriors in American campuses).

By contrast, I find Monarchy the most robust, sustainable (and ecological if you will) form of societal organization. It mirrors only those structures that already exist in reality and in nature, it is so simple that even a child can understand it, even participate in it. When ever a group of pre-schoolers gather to play without adult interference, a natural hierarchy will establish itself within seconds. Between the two genders, between the members of the group, between the group (the culture) and reality (nature). The Monarch is to the nation what the Father is to the family.

Humans are the only animals that will actively invent problems in order to provide solutions for them. But monarchy is one of those things that just will not be improved upon, it is one of the eternal truths about mankind and of the reality of things. If mankind ever stops needing a King, well then I posit to say that we have already evolved (or devolved, more likely) into something post-human. But as long as the idea of the King survives, it will live on, ready to spring back into reality.

As Georges Bernanos asked of a four-year-old Lorrainer boy: “What is a king?”, “A king is man on horseback who is not afraid!” As fine a definition as ever I heard, and far more correct than a whole indoctrination camp of university professors.

How have you found ways to adapt to modern life? What is it like, living in a world where basically everyone is not just wrong but insane, and every institution is subtly corrupted?

Humor helps. And the knowledge that all institutions are merely guided by corrupt men and women, and that we are all more or less brainwashed from birth by Modernity. As a culture, we have always had ways to deal with people whose grip on reality is less than robust, only these days they seems to end up Chancellors, Chairmen of the Committee or with Tenure. As we were all once brainwashed, so we can all find our ways out of the modern labyrinth.

Here is where the allegory of the Red Pill comes in handy. I have, by now, a pocket full of them, and the more I give out, the more I seem to carry around. It is a self-feeding fire: every conversion is the seed of a dozen more, and the anecdotes of these “red-pillings” are moralizing tinctures indeed. On a more personal level, I am helped by reading, and finding that I am not alone. Everything I think and feel has been felt or thought before. As Evola put it:

My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.

I have tons of allies. Mind you, most of them (as of now at least) dead, but still. Tons.

If people want to break out of the mental virus of modernity, how should they do so? Is there a universal path, and do all people need to come to in-depth realizations, or can they rely on gut instinct?

Most of us are in it too deep. Every time we reach towards the light of the surface, modernism is there again, Chthulu dragging us downstream and into the murky darkness. Sometimes we can be helped by friends, someone reliable to help us climb back up. Find sanity again. Sometimes it happens in flashes of revelations (everyone knows these and Twitter is a great place to share), but like any idea whose time has come, we are slowly building towards a critical mass. Our ideas are sustainable, confirms to reality: when nature, long in tooth and red in claw sneers at us form the dark thicket, we are ready to sneer back, and soon there will be more of us. We will reach, sooner or later, the necessary critical mass.

There are of course savants out there, people who are so remarkably grounded that they are immune to modernity: you probably know many. Your uncle the air force mechanic. That aunt who is a nurse and never opened a book in her life but has started and ended more lives than Sitting Bull. That cousin who can build an engine from spare parts but has never heard of Affirmative Action in his life. Surround yourself with them. Go to them. Bask in their clearheaded glory. And then come back to the fray to pick up a few more lost souls.  As Tolkien stated so well: “It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.”

We hear a lot about environmental problems these days. In your mind, what is the relationship between modernity and ecocide, and is it purely industrial, or related to underlying political or social problems?

The simplest way I can put it, is that the environment has stopped being something wonderful from which to draw resources and strength to start being a problem that we have to “deal with”. Just listen to yourself, the phrase, “environmental problems”! It is amazing when you think about it. How did we get here? It is a combination of many things (let me name a few):

  • Individualism: I have needs, so screw the rest.
  • The Tragedy of the commons: No one owns anything any more. Everything is up for grabs. This ties in to nationalism, which is a natural defense mechanism and reaction to weak states. Environmental concern is the left wing shadow of this reaction.
  • Receding horizons: We are so used to there not being any more fish in the ocean that we forgot what it was like just two generations ago. We are so used to worrying about our kids walking two blocks to school by themselves we think it is normal, even though we ourselves would happily bicycle ten miles or more to go skinny dipping in ponds and lakes when we were twelve.
  • Rootlessness: Why should I bother about this place that I have never seen before and that I will never see again? I have no idea what it was like ten years ago, never mind a generation or more!
  • Unqualified Optimism (in Eternal Progress): Things will only get better. Progress leads to better things and evolution always climbs higher. Well, I have news for you buddy: nature does not care if it produces Beethoven’s Ninth or a superbly infectious tape worm. Whatever remains standing at the end of the day is what will remain. Nature is a blind God and you can never ever outrun or outsmart it. Moloch is not going to protect you either, despite how many babies you roast at its fires.

These all combine to create the situation we have today: Holidays in Cambodia and 120 channels on your TV, meanwhile the Springs keep growing more and more Silent for every year. But it is my firm opinion, that the environment (its uses and abuses, including the whole “environmental problem” subject) is fundamentally and unquestionably a right wing issue.

The left is the side of the favelas and locusts, the factories and the mercury spills, the estrogen in our drinking waters and the loneliness of the last rhino on the savannah. The right is about stewardship, firm action, boundaries, and responsibility. Green is a reactionary color. Just as in this neighborhood we shoot dealers, in this forest we also shoot poachers.

What activities do you find fulfilling outside of politics and philosophy? How do these help you and others live normal lives in the midst of the maelstrom of insanity?

Oh, I hate politics. With a passion. I will only talk politics with actual politicians and even then it is just a ruse to get them so close that I can kick them. Politics divides friends and splits families. Politics starts out with a discussion on the fair way to handle lay offs in industry and ends in one side digging mass graves for the other side. If politics does not get you mad and fuming you are doing it wrong.

I yell at people starting a conversation with the words “So what about that election uh?” Politics is of the enemy. I mine it sometimes, for ammunition, or for making more Red Pills. But that is it. Nothing more. As for philosophy I hardly ever read it. I have always been an “Oh yeah? Show me!” kind of guy. I want to see why monarchy works. I want to taste why democracy doesn’t (Anyone care for Soup? Our chef is legion).

Roger Scruton’s is the only philosophy I ever read, and even then I only read his most down to earth passages and grounded texts. I had enough abstract philosophy at university (and boy was that ever the biggest mistake of my life!), overdosing on Kant and Derrida at twenty.

But as for normal activities, I take an interest in drafting classical architecture, rural crafts, etc. It all helps me refocus, or retune myself to reality.

Right now, what is one thing that a normal person can do to resist modernity and encourage a shift toward a saner, healthier form of civilization?

I touched on this subject in an earlier answer, but if I would have to say one thing, it is to Stop consuming: media, stuff. Once that is done, start by gathering your friends and allies: “Form a Gang.”

I am no fan of rock stars, but they had the right idea when they started defenestrating TV sets. Everyone should try it sometime. The fresh air will do us good! As moms everywhere and in all times have pointed out: “It is a nice day outside, go out and play.”

How can people stay on top of your writings and creations, and what can they do to support your work?

I post most creations on Tumblr, and a lot of my readings and opinions on Twitter. I am not in this for money, I borrow quite freely from the dead and the living, I require no fame. I take up little space and need little nourishment. Kind words help though. If you find the mass of my messages too much, feel free to edit out my name from the images (lots of people do). Use whatever you need.

If you feel like helping, I would love to receive more suggestions from non-English speaking reaction, as long I can double check the sources independently, I am usually happy. If something strikes my fancy I will use it. I sometimes suggest titles that are in need of translating into English. Feel free to get started. Donoso Cortes, Barras, Bernanos, etc. there is so much out there that deserves a bigger audience. Quality is important, but so is quantity. The sheer weight, the volume of thought we can point to—it all adds up.

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Deep Ecology And The Alt Right

Tuesday, February 7th, 2017

It will take centuries for historians to recognize this, as they either sift through thirdworld ruins or chronicle the rise of the greatest power to ever grace the earth, but the Alt Right movement is a philosophical descendant of Deep Ecology.

During the 1960s, more people became aware that human impact on the environment was becoming a very negative thing. This caught the rising population and a cultural shift toward hippie ideals at a crossroad, but that in turn weakened the rising environmental movement. The hippies imported their Marxist-derived goals into those of the environmental movement, effectively weakening it.

This meant that every act to help the environment was also designed to foster “equality,” and since the latter was easier to understand, it became the focus and absorbed everything else into it. This meant that environmentalism could fight for the whales or against drilling in national parks, but not tackle the big issue: we have too many humans to avoid committing ecocide.

As a result, the saner thinkers in the environmental movement formed Deep Ecology, which states that in order to avoid ecocide we need a cultural shift that desires a different type of civilization entirely, one where we are not so out of control. Deep Ecology recognizes that the environmental problems we suffer now come from bad leadership in the past, and a society geared toward endless growth and consumption.

Such a society can only exist in the absence of cultural standards, values and purpose. It is in fact an artifact of the democratic era, in which there is no longer a dominant culture, with customs and lifestyle, by which people live that limits the damage they do and the growth of that civilization. Instead, democracy and consumerism have taken over because we have destroyed the ways of life they replace.

This is where the Deep Ecology movement and the Alt Right converge: we know that we need not different policies or laws, but an entirely different structure to civilization itself. The Deep Ecology mission statement shows the need for a redesign of human habitation entirely:

Earth has entered its most precarious phase in history. We speak of threats not only to human life, but to the lives of all species of plants and animals, of the entire ecosphere in all its beauty and complexity including the natural processes that create and shape life’s diversity. It is the grave and growing threats to the health of the ecosphere that motivates our activities.

We believe that current problems are largely rooted in the following circumstances:

  • The loss of traditional knowledge, values, and ethics of behavior that celebrate the intrinsic value and sacredness of the natural world and that give the preservation of Nature prime importance. Correspondingly, the assumption of human superiority to other life forms, as if we were granted royalty status over Nature; the idea that Nature is mainly here to serve human will and purpose.
  • The prevailing economic and development paradigms of the modern world, which place primary importance on the values of the market, not on Nature. The conversion of Nature to commodity form, the emphasis upon economic growth as a panacea, the industrialization of all activity, from forestry to farming to fishing, even to education and culture; the rush to economic globalization, cultural homogenization, commodity accumulation, urbanization, and human alienation. All of these are fundamentally incompatible with ecological sustainability on a finite Earth.
  • Technology worship and an unlimited faith in the virtues of science; the modern paradigm that technological development is inevitable, invariably good, and to be equated with progress and human destiny. From this, we are left dangerously uncritical, blind to profound problems that technology has wrought, and in a state of passivity that confounds democracy.
  • Overpopulation, in both the overdeveloped and the underdeveloped worlds, placing unsustainable burdens upon biodiversity and the human condition.

As our name suggests, we are influenced by the Deep Ecology Platform, which helps guide and inform our work. We believe that values other than market values must be recognized and given importance, and that Nature provides the ultimate measure by which to judge human endeavors.

The portion most relevant to the Alt Right has been marked in bold: “the rush to economic globalization, cultural homogenization, commodity accumulation, urbanization, and human alienation.”

Like Deep Ecology, the Alt Right exists to create cultural change which changes our society to a different type of society. Where the last century favored liberal democracy with consumerism and social benefits, the future favors hierarchy, aristocracy, culture-driven standards and transcendental goals. Civilization itself has evolved.

That change was always the goal of Deep Ecology. From the environmental movement, Deep Ecologists realized that anything less that a re-orientation of society to include inbuilt environmental goals would fail and become another equality movement. They saw that government could not make the changes needed. Only a mass awakening, or at least an awakening among the 5% of people who are natural leaders, could reform the situation.

We stand on the edge of an abyss of ecocide. Overpopulation, pollution, land overuse and other problems are the result of the policies of liberal democracy, which refuses to say NO to any person who wants to buy, sell, consume, breed or otherwise impact the environment. Humanity is like yeast in a bowl of sugar, eating all of the food heedless of the fact that with no resources, it will die out unlamented.

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The era of impossible solutions made possible

Wednesday, March 9th, 2016

endgame_of_liberalism

All of us have grown up in a time dominated by the Leftist ideology and as a result, find it difficult to conceive of the world except on its terms. As part of that, we condition ourselves to believe that the obvious solutions we need are too extreme, and content ourselves with hybrid Leftist “solutions” that defeat our aims.

On a similar level, environmentalists struggle with this issue as well. Since the rise of the Deep Ecology movement, it has been clear that the only possible environmental salvation — from a fate worse than climate change, namely the destruction of our ecosystem and its replacement by a less functional one — is a redesign of society to incorporate living that does not have deleterious effects. Edward O. Wilson tells the plain truth on that one:

The Half-Earth solution does not mean dividing the planet into hemispheric halves or any other large pieces the size of continents or nation-states. Nor does it require changing ownership of any of the pieces, but instead only the stipulation that they be allowed to exist unharmed. It does, on the other hand, mean setting aside the largest reserves possible for nature, hence for the millions of other species still alive.

The key to saving one-half of the planet is the ecological footprint, defined as the amount of space required to meet all of the needs of an average person. It comprises the land used for habitation, fresh water, food production and delivery, personal transportation, communication, governance, other public functions, medical support, burial, and entertainment. In the same way the ecological footprint is scattered in pieces around the world, so are Earth’s surviving wildlands on the land and in the sea. The pieces range in size from the major desert and forest wildernesses to pockets of restored habitats as small as a few hectares.

His approach is similar to that of anyone who has had to balance a budget: if spending is excessive, cut it in half across the board. Instead of trying to target specific human activities, like washing your clothes in a dryer that is not energy saving rated, he suggests we should measure whole impact, and cut that. This in turn implies that humanity needs to have a discussion about its future, its population and the average load that people can exert on the environment. That in turn calls into question the design of our society itself.

Liberal democracy remains highly popular because it is a growth engine. It is essentially anarchy with a pretense of government that keeps business functional, since it requires institutions and courts, and for the early part of its reign liberal democracy seems like a good thing. As time passes, the hidden consequences of anarchy with grocery stores emerges: people, conditioned by the process of democratic thinking, become unrealistic and society goes crazy, then self-destructs.

For this reason, many ideas that were previously considered “too extreme” — like Wilson’s half earth — are now suddenly looking good. People make choices by comparing options, and if the default option is a further slide in Brazil 2.0 where your rape in the favelas will be televised, competing options which seemed too hardcore when we assumed liberal democracy was working now become viable. The same is true of other areas as well:

  • Ethnic nationalism. Diversity makes groups compete and hate each other, and its “success” would be the creation of a new brown race just like the one in most third world nations across the globe. There is no scenario for actual success with diversity. It seems unthinkable that we could deport everyone who lacks an unbroken Western European background, but that is what we must do in Europe and the USA to preserve ourselves.
  • Death of the welfare state. The bennies/freebies culture is very popular but it fails for two reasons. We cannot afford it, and it like democracy conditions our people to think like zombies. We cannot afford to, as happened in the last century, more than double our national budgets to pay for Great Society programs and their descendants; even worse, this massive increase in size of government makes a tyrannical Nanny State. Psychologically, welfare is also devastating. When reward comes before performance, performance becomes optional, and so everything declines in quality just as it did in the Soviet Union. In addition, the maze of rules and extra work required to pay for this makes jobs miserable and people into alienated little monsters.
  • Inequality is good. Inequality is how nature motivates some to rise above the rest, and is also how we grant special roles to certain groups. Women, for example, are happiest when not expected to work and thrust directly into the role of managing a family, in a chaste and traditional environment where marriage is forever and so they are always cared for. Caste systems give each person a job they can do well and a position that, barring absolute ludicrous incompetence, will always be there for them.
  • The death of the death of God. Atheism has failed, and many have noticed how it is a darling of the Left. That alone is reason to oppose it, as is the simple truth that non-Atheists seem happier. But even more, our understanding of the cosmos has changed. Our science has now reached the point where it is again, like the ancients, looking at patterns and information as a underlying structure to all reality, much like Plato did with his forms. Atheism died not of our ignorance, but its ignorance.
  • Existential importance returns. For the past century or more, we have seen ourselves as means to the end of ideology. No more: people are realizing that on both practical and personal levels, this approach is unworkable. People need to enjoy life and relax more, and even get nice and bored so they can figure themselves out in that void, so that they are more functional. But more than that, they need to be able to believe that life itself is pleasurable and good, not a grim task of implementing illogical and unrealistic rules against the resistance of the world. Our people are miserable and make bad decisions as a result, and that must change.

We have lived in despair for too long because of the Leftist indocrination that the family of theories and methods beginning with equality was the only path. Now we see differently, and as if by the turning of the world, new possibilities emerge. We are able to look at recent history as error and recognize what we must do to fix it, even if that denies everything we have known.

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The Wump World by Bill Peet

Wednesday, January 21st, 2015

bill_peet-the_wump_world-medium


The Wump World (1970)
by Bill Peet
Houghton Mifflin, 44 pages. $9

On the surface, this serves as a parable for children about the environmental damage that humans can do. Underneath however as in most of Bill Peet’s work another agenda is at play, which is a confrontation between humanity and the doubt, emptiness and fear that makes the empty pursuit of status and material prestige seem a tempting option.

The Wump World features a planet inhabited by Wumps, who are friendly capybara-like animals who are not particularly exceptional. Like Hobbits, or most people, Wumps specialize in nothing in particular except existence itself. They munch the sweet green grass and frolic in the sun and probably think very little about the big questions of life. Like small children or other innocents, they are still somewhat in love with life itself and concern themselves with nothing greater.

A spaceship lands and discharges a new species, called — in the kind of dead-hand obvious imagery one can use in children’s books — the Pollutians. They have come from a “worn-out world” and are glad to have found a new one for their use. In short order, they tear down the trees and rip up the grass and replace them with concrete, on which they build giant cities complete with “hundred-story skyscrapers.” They are noisy, frenetic, and dump trash in the rivers and fill the skies with smoke.

The Wumps retreat to underground caves where they cower and await deliverance. In the meantime, the cities expand to cover the entire world. The Pollutians work hard at this transformation, but also bicker among themselves and generally seem aimless outside of their hard work in transforming the new world. In the meantime, their own pollution makes the world uninhabitable for them, so they declare it worn-out as well and seek another one. Spaceships explore and find a new place. Then the Pollutians leave.

The story is unexceptional and obvious, even manipulative at its core. To most of us, it seems a preachy parable of environmentalism and nothing more, about what we might expect from the late 1960s and the hippie era. But there is more to this than meets the initial eye. The story of the Pollutians is not so much the external effects of their actions, but the internal hollowness which propels them. These are people without purpose for whom consumption and destruction have become a life quest, even if a suicidal one.

Within the bright colors didacticism of this story lurks the story of emptiness in the soul. The Pollutians have no depth to them and no concern for anything but their own comforts and wealth. This void propels them forward into outer space as it sucks them into inner space, turning them into a type of yeast which consumes all resources and then either moves on or dies. They are their own self-destruction but, unable to suicide, they perpetrate that destruction on others.

For those of us who grew up in Generation X, both stories were familiar. We saw firsthand as our childhood play areas were consumed by an endless procession of condominiums, apartments, factories and skyscrapers. We were told by well-meaning but fatalistic adults that this was simply progress, or humanity advancing, and that all these new people needed places to sleep, work and live. But it also rang hollow, because we saw the haunted looks on the faces of adults going to work and the misery and rage they took out on us after another fun day at the office. Soon it became clear that the plan was no plan except more, more and more of everything to conceal our lack of direction and even more, our absence of a Wump-like innocence and enjoyment of life. It was as if the curse of Eden’s apple finally bit us back.

This book remains vivid in the imaginations of those who read it because it perfectly diagnoses our modern morass, which begins in the soul and not the fingertips. We have no purpose. Lacking any motivation for something larger than ourselves — something for which God is a surrogate, since to know God we must first love the process of life itself or we are simply projecting self-interest into the realm of the spirit — we have fallen into our inner voids and like Stockholm Syndrome victims, have embraced that dark emptiness and now wield it as a sword, consuming all that falls under our control and replacing it with literal garbage as if in the image of our discarded hopes. The innocents, children born into this age, have carried this burden for too long. Either we end it or it ends us, but not first before purging all goodness and innocence wherever we go.

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Against the Fouad Boutros Highway in Lebanon

Thursday, February 20th, 2014

ashrafieh-beirut-lebanon

The Association for the Preservation of Lebanese Heritage opposes the proposed Fouad Boutros Highway that would divide and expose a corner of Lebanon known for its serenity.

Like most things modern, this project seems to exhibit a pathological need to disrupt anything that is not already blighted with the same noise, pollution, crowding and manic disorganization as everything else.

The APLH statement is below:

The proposed Fouad Boutros Highway will not reduce traffic. Instead, it will redirect the traffic from Karantina into the ABC tunnel.

This change will both overburden the ABC tunnel with more traffic than it can handle and choke Ashrafieh with more exhaust and noise pollution.

The civil coalition of which APLH is part promposes the Fouad Boutros Park as an alternative. This plan will avoid vandalizing Ashrafieh with noise and pollution, and instead will:

  1. Cost much less.
  2. Boost tourism in Ashrafieh heritage neighborhoods
  3. Keep traffic and pollution away from Ashrafieh
  4. Increase greenery in the heart of Ashrafieh
  5. Keep small businesses unharmed by the highway
  6. Preserve the last heritage buildings in Ashrafieh
  7. and allow their restoration with the budget surplus

If we keep fighting traffic with more highways, all of Lebanon will suffocate under asphalt. Already we see the consquences of too much asphalt: winter has not showed up for the first time in decades, perhaps centuries; there is not enough natural growth to provoke water evaporation, condensation and precipitation (rain).

The DESERT is only a few paces away, and the more asphalt we create, the faster we DESERTIFY Lebanon. Act now. Yes to nature and heritage, NO to useless highways which will pollute Lebanese neighborhoods.

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Conservative realism

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

Who is this guy?
It doesn’t matter who he is.
It’s what he’s doing that matters.
He is observing.
Observing what?
Reality!

He lives by observing what is there, and interacting with it. Smart guy! He gets my admiration, although what he is doing is – in itself – no big deal. Or rather, was no big deal, until quite recently.
These days, reality lies buried behind feelings, interpretations, judgments and politics.
What is there, really doesn’t matter any more. What matters is how you feel about it, and what it means to you. And how you can best use it to beat others about the head with.

Look again at the picture. What do you see?
I see an Indian. He is sitting on a rock. He carries weapons. He is alert.
But there are many, who would see all, or some, of this, take into account the text I have written, and come up with something like:
“I see a savage. This is a stereotype! This is something that offends Native Americans!”
Or:
“I see a Native American, but the writer refers to him as an Indian, therefore he must be racist, because he is using an outdated term which demeans Native Americans.”
Or:
“I see an armed menace. This association of Native Americans with violence is an offensive stereotype, and must be confronted.”
Or:
“I see a First Nations guy, (being Canadian) being misrepresented in some way that I am unable, as yet, to identify, but I will work on it until I can…”

So what is all this about? Where am I going with this? Good question: give me a moment to decide…

Reality. I have been pondering this concept for a while, now, and have observed several interesting phenomena connected with it.
Nobody sees it in quite the same way. Hence the current idea that reality is purely subjective, and so I have no need to accept yours. Along with the added extra, so characteristic of the left: that mine, however, is authentic, and so you are required to accept it as such.

Until recently, reality was a uniform thing subscribed to by almost all people, within a society. Everybody agreed upon many basic things, and so knew what was what, and where they stood.
The ones who didn’t, were looked upon as mad, and as long as you were not one of them, your life remained viable.
Now, however, nobody agrees upon much of anything, and while rightists generally shrug and accept that this is so, leftists generally throw a fit and demand that their own, special reality, is the only real one. And this is why rightists generally view leftists as mad. Because they do this absurd thing, and demand that everyone else does it too.
And this demanded acceptance of mass insanity, and the re-branding of it as ‘normal’, results, as you have noticed, in what we currently refer to as a socialist society.

Well there’s something wrong with that.
Centuries of subscribing to one, uniform reality, suddenly brushed aside and replaced with something that clearly can only end in disaster.
Yeah: that’s real smart.

Degradation of reality. Devaluation of reality. Denial of reality. The three ‘D’s.

Degradation: the removal of all live content from life, and somehow expecting nobody to notice its lifelessness.
Devaluation: Socialism devalues everything it comes into contact with. God. Religion. Marriage. Heterosexuality. Reason. Money. Real Estate. Everything!
Denial: in spite of the fact, now indisputable, that everything we have all depended upon for our lives and our futures, is now crumbling down around us, still we change everything around, every few days, and proclaim that anything other than socialism is evil.

Well there’s something wrong with that, too.
We had all better start understanding something about the left: everything they come into contact with, turns to dust.
Don’t take my word for it. Think about it. Research it. Test it and see.
Remembering that you, too, risk being turned into dust, merely by contact with this socially-transmitted disease.
So what to do?

Figure it out for yourself, if you’re able. That would be the best thing. Or consider these points:
If you’re reading this at all, you’re conservative already, or else a spoiler from the swamp.
If you plan on remaining what you are, then start defining Reality. For yourself. No hopes, no desires, no interpretations, no emotions. What do you see? What you see, without modifications, is Reality! Accept no substitutes!

You will discover, that the disease has made subtle changes to your perceptions of what reality is. Pressure from everywhere has done this. Conditioning. Dogma. Out and out brainwashing. You don’t notice the small things for a long time, but finally, they all add up to a big thing, and you’re on your way to becoming as lost as the rest.

I recently had a revelation, in the form of a flash of the totally obvious:
My whole existence revolves around spirituality. It’s the way I live. Nothing at all to do with the New-Age crap that the left took up and devalued merely by coming into contact with it.
No. I do nothing for show. And nothing that has no obvious purpose, or result. I balance.
And writing for this site, I sometimes get attacked, by a few warped types, intent only upon destruction. I make an especially juicy target, because ‘I try to appear to be spiritual…’
Note the ‘try to appear’ bit. Because a leftist’s whole reality is based upon appearances, with a dose of equality added, for show. Thus whatever I am, and whatever I do, it must be fake. Because if it were them, or anyone like them, being it, or doing it, then of course, it would be.
Still with me?
The punchline is this:

Spiritual people dress up in white bed-sheets, smile vacuously all the time, do nothing but act nice, and be totally harmless!
And it suddenly occurred to me, that even I was thinking and behaving along these lines, albeit without the bed-sheets, the vacuous smile, and the acting nice.
No.
Harmless I am not. Never have been. Never will be. A man should, under no circumstances, ever be harmless!
Some readers expect me to behave like a Hollywood Christian, because I speak of things spiritual. To them, I say:
Prepare to be disappointed. And surprised. I can be exceedingly not-nice, when I so choose, in ways most have never even imagined.

And this fits well with conservatism: a state of mind where reality is Reality, not subject to individual whim. Not subject to being re-defined with each new leader, idol, whim, or movement.
It is what it is. Life. Reality:
A dangerous place in which a man must sometimes be dangerous.
Armed with an unflinching gaze, and the courage to back it up.
Niceness doesn’t even enter into it.
Hard-ass first, and all things later.

Conservative Realism. For Conservative Realists. The Real Right!
No others need apply.

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