deep ecology

Posts Tagged ‘deep ecology’

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.

Tags:deep ecology, entropy, invasive species, organizations, self-trickery
Posted in Politics | 9 Comments »

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.

Tags:deep ecology, diversity, freedom of association, tragedy of the commons
Posted in Politics | 13 Comments »

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.

Tags:deep ecology, greenland, traditionalism, vikings
Posted in Politics | 6 Comments »

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.

Tags:deep ecology, interview, traditionalism, wrath of gnon
Posted in Politics | 10 Comments »

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.

Tags:alt-right, commodity accumulation, cultural homogenization, deep ecology, economic globalization, environmentalism, human alienation, urbanization
Posted in Politics | 23 Comments »

The era of impossible solutions made possible

Wednesday, March 9th, 2016

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.

Tags:deep ecology, environment, half earth
Posted in Politics | 17 Comments »

The Wump World by Bill Peet

Wednesday, January 21st, 2015

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.

Tags:bill peet, Books, crowdism, decline, deep ecology, environmentalism, existential despair
Posted in Lifestyle | 4 Comments »

Against the Fouad Boutros Highway in Lebanon

Thursday, February 20th, 2014

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:

Cost much less.

Boost tourism in Ashrafieh heritage neighborhoods

Keep traffic and pollution away from Ashrafieh

Increase greenery in the heart of Ashrafieh

Keep small businesses unharmed by the highway

Preserve the last heritage buildings in Ashrafieh

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.

Tags:deep ecology, lebanon, tradition
Posted in Politics | 4 Comments »

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.

Tags:conservatism, deep ecology, realism
Posted in Politics | 25 Comments »

Futurist Traditionalism: Deep Ecology, Traditionalism, Naturalism and Paleoconservatism

Sunday, November 6th, 2011

Our civilization has fallen. It is clear that we must restart, and do so from a point before where our error began. We must find a healthy model for civilization that has existed through the ages and presented the fewest inclinations toward terminal decline. This is not a Utopian view; it does not aim for perfection, and accepts humans as they are, but seeks the best possible option.

Futurist Traditionalism is the philosophy of such a time. It consists of three parts:

An aggregate view of philosophy. As detailed in my book Parallelism, we must view any philosophy through the filter of both time and transmission, which means that every idea erodes until it is the simplest possible expression of itself, even if this does not resemble the original intent. For example, “equality” was intended to mean “equal treatment,” but ultimately comes to mean “equal outcome” because otherwise it appears as if unequal treatment has occurred.
A cyclic view of history. Evolution seems to be linear, starting with unicellular organisms and developing into humans, but this is an artifact of us viewing ourselves as an ultimate state, and not a recurring state or branch of an ongoing tale. In the cyclic view, civilizations move from a position of balance through times of varying degrees of conflict before hitting rock bottom, and either rebirth themselves or die out, and the cycle then happens elsewhere. This means that we do not have “progress” at all; we are either in a state of balance and harmony, or in the process of decaying, but that we can return to that state of balance by adopting its methods, principles and goals.
Recognition of non-inversion. Perhaps the patron saint of conservatism, Plato wrote of the origin of decline as a spiritual shift from thinking toward-goals to thinking from-money:

When discord arose, then the two races were drawn different ways: the iron and brass fell to acquiring money and land and houses and gold and silver; but the gold and silver races, not wanting money but having the true riches in their own nature, inclined towards virtue and the ancient order of things. There was a battle between them, and at last they agreed to distribute their land and houses among individual owners; and they enslaved their friends and maintainers, whom they had formerly protected in the condition of freemen, and made of them subjects and servants; and they themselves were engaged in war and in keeping a watch against them.

In a Golden Age, humans strive to what is right — not through personal morality as in good/evil of the modern time, but in the sense of acting according to balance and harmony so as to maintain a state of those, in a honor/hubris division — but when a society becomes wealthy, it loses its sense of purpose and starts to think backward. Instead of acting toward purpose, it does what is convenient, and rationalizes or justifies this through arguing it as pleasing to individual humans. From this comes individualism, and from that comes collectivism as the individualists use each other to form a mob and suspend accountability, and from that comes egalitarian ideas including Leftism and consumerism.

Putting these together, Futurist Traditionalism consists of two concepts mirroring the two parts of conservatism, a radical realism and a qualitative purpose or transcendental outlook, which aim to create the conditions in which a Golden Age can emerge: a restoration of harmony and balance, coupled with a spiritual renovation so that we think in a forward manner again.

A Futurist Traditionalist society would resemble those of the past in social structure and outlook, but would retain modern technology and the impetus to use technology to fulfill the principles and goals of each society. It would be culture-driven and not government-driven, which as a prerequisite demands it be strongly nationalistic or excluding all individuals not from the founding ethnic group, but it would also have an aristocracy, a social caste hierarchy, free markets where applicable, and a union of culture and transcendental outlook to provide a philosophy and metaphysics (or “religion” if you will) that sustains, nurtures and guides that specific population.

Where Futurist Traditionalism differs from most Right-wing philosophies is that it is nihilistic, meaning that it does not recognize universal, absolute or innate truths. In fact, it views all of life as choices that are both up to us and take the measure of us, including the choice to be realistic instead of individualistic, humanistic, solipsistic or otherwise more concerned about human thoughts and feelings than their degree of accuracy in reality.

Nihilism takes the form of a naturalistic, Darwinian and transcendentalist philosophy of extremist realism coupled with a fundamental idealism, or the view that the cosmos operates in thought-like pattern orientation, similar to Platonic forms but in a less literal sense:

Among the possibilities that scare humans the most, the potentiality of no meaning — no inherent values, no innate truths, and no possibility of accurate communication — unnerves us the most. It means that we are truly alone with nothing to rely on but ourselves for understanding this vast world and what we should do in it. This belief is called nihilism.

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence.” – Alan Pratt, “Nihilism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, retrieved from http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/

In the 20th century, nihilism encompassed a variety of philosophical and aesthetic stances that, in one sense or another, denied the existence of genuine moral truths or values, rejected the possibility of knowledge or communication, and asserted the ultimate meaninglessness or purposelessness of life or of the universe.” – “Nihilism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/nihilism

Nihilism rejects the ideas of universalism, rationalism and empiricism which have ruled the West for centuries. These ideas arise from our social impulses, or the desire to include others as a group and motivate them with what is perceived as objective truth.

Universalism holds that all people are essentially the same, and therefore that values are a matter of respecting the choices of each person, truth is what can be verified in a way a group can understand, and communication relies on words which have immutable meaning. Rationalism supposes that the workings our minds can tell us what is true in the world without testing, and implies universalism, or that the workings of our minds are all the same. Empiricism, now linked to its cousin logical positivism, states that truth is only found in observable and testable, replicable observations.

The essence of nihilism can be found in biology. In the tendency of human minds, many identical pieces work together to form agreement, and then act as one. In biology, abundant unequal pieces serve different roles without knowledge of a centralized plan but work together because they are united by very basic principles which cannot be deconstructed further, such as the need to feed, defend oneself, find shelter, and reproduce. Nihilism follows the organic model of different pieces of a larger puzzle working together because they share principles, but not form or the translation of those principles into specific methods. It adds a layer of abstraction to our understanding of how systems — groups of parts producing an output together — function.

This biological framework reveals a “pattern language,” or index of patterns that match functions, to both human thought and human individuals. We are not all alike, nor do we think alike, and many humans have unique roles they can serve where their proficiency makes them ideal candidates. Within the mind, we can identify patterns at a level below language or even consciousness that reveal our thought and how comparable it is to the reality in the external world. This allows us to use self-discipline to become better able to understand reality.

Without universal truth, we bypass the proxy of socially-defined goals and standards, and instead must judge our potential actions by their likely results in reality. This escapes us from the ghetto of human intent, where we judge our actions as if they were communications to others designed to show our value, instead of actions toward a purpose. We lose self-consciousness, which is really an awareness of ourselves as we appear to the social group, and replace it with world-consciousness.

The most difficult part (for modern people) involved with leaving behind universalism is that we now navigate between two poles: first, the wrong idea that there should be one rule and motivation for every person, and second, the wrong idea that avoiding the first pole means that everyone should do whatever they want. Nihilism is the death of “should.” Instead, there is merely “is,” as in each person is what he is and has the wants inherent to being that person. This means that people have different roles, of both vertical (proficiency) and horizontal (specialization) measurements, like animals and plants in an ecosystem. There is no universal role, only a shared mission, and the knowledge of what actions have produced which results in the past, from which we can derive general principles that fit our roles in the civilization ecosystem.

With this, we return to the Traditionalist idea of cause and effect with the cause being informational instead of physical. Pattern and idea dictate outcome more than the particular material elements or particularities of a time period. Consider the knowledge of man trying to start a fire:

Action Result

1. Rub sticks Weak fire, takes a lot of strength.

2. Await lightning Starve (usually).

3. Strike flint Stronger fire, but flying sparks can cause forest fires.

4. Pray to Xu’ul Nothing so far.

5. Bark rope friction Good, but hard to find the right bark.

Society would insert a third column between those for moral judgments, social feelings, personal desires and other chatter from the incessantly rationalizing mind, which seeks to find a justification for its feelings in the world and remove from itself the need to make hard decisions which remind it of existential questions like death, purpose and meaning.

When Bra’agh the caveman thinks about how he should proceed, he inverts the order of the two natural columns. He knows what he wants, or quickly will have to find out, and so he chooses the outcome that will fit his circumstances, and based on that, chooses the method he will use.

If Bra’agh is strong, he may choose to rub sticks. If he has not eaten and is tired, he may take a little more time to look for bark or flint. As a practical person, he may pray to Xu’ul because it makes him feel better, but he will nonetheless seek his own method of making fire (Xu’ul helps those who help themselves). Having bad past experiences getting very hungry waiting for lightning, he will discard that.

When his circumstances change, Bra’agh makes different decisions. If a thunderstorm has just passed over, he might take an hour to wander around looking for burning trees. If he is in a valley where there is abundant flint, he might go right to that method, almost bypassing choice entirely, which can be risky as he will then be oblivious to the downside of possible forest fires. If he is standing next to a tree with the right bark, the decision also seems to complete itself.

All of us have these columns in our mind, and varying degrees of the third column comprised of social and emotional thoughts. The strongest among us can balance the third column so that it fits in with the advantages and disadvantages of methods, like the possibility of forest fires. The weakest among us will think first of the third column, and then use that to choose the method, and will then rationalize from there that their choice is the best, a process called cognitive dissonance.

Nihilism rejects the third column by recognizing the emptiness of shared experience. Some experiences unify us, like love or comradeship in war, but for the most part, we are alone. What we know cannot be communicated unless the other person is willing to analyze it and us enough to know what we are nattering on about. As far as truth, there are accurate perceptions, but these are not shared among people, not in the least because most people do not care about accuracy.

Suppose that Bra’agh becomes a member of a troupe of cavepeople. They wander the fields and forests, foraging for food and hunting what bush meat they can conquer. Then they retreat to their cave where they feel safe. Bra’agh wants to make a fire, but the others either do not or are apathetic. He cannot argue with them, objectively or subjectively, that fire is needed. After all, they have fruits, berries, roots and bush meat which they can dry in the sun and eat, and they will be just fine.

But Bra’agh, he has a dream. In this dream, there are big hunts once a week and then the food is cooked and preserved, so that they will have more free time and do not have to go foraging every day. Perhaps Bra’agh wants to write the great cave novel, or dream of gods in the sky, or otherwise discover the world. For him, time is more important than convenience. This is not so for the others, and nothing he can say will logically compel them to share his vision.

If he demonstrates his idea by slaughtering a caribou, making a fire and roasting the meat and handing it out to others, they may partake. They might not, however, see the utility in this approach, because it is harder and riskier than gathering roots and killing squirrels with rocks. There is no universal standard for all of them.

Suppose that Bra’agh is a burly caveman who instead of arguing for his idea, simply forces others to do it by beating senseless the dissenters. Soon the troupe of cavepeople are hunting and following his path, and he heaves rocks into the skulls of those who thwart the activity. Over time, the survivors are those who share his vision, and the genes for those who are otherwise inclined have passed into history.

In ten thousand years, a civilization may arise in the place where Bra’agh bashed skulls. It will be based on the idea that some risk and effort that achieves a better result (second column) is worth enduring the harder activity (first column). Applying that principle, the cavepeople will start domesticating caribou and planting crops, giving them even more free time. They will invent language, writing and early technology.

After another ten thousand years, the civilization will encounter its first troubles. The people will take for granted that they will always have civilization and stop bashing in the heads of those who cannot direct themselves toward that purpose. Those, who by nature are less focused, will devote their time to the pleasures of the flesh, and become fruitful and multiplicative. Over time, they will outnumber the others.

The civilization will now take a dark turn. It will abandon the original nihilistic principle, which is that some are of the caliber of Bra’agh and must lead by bashing skulls, and instead turn to the principle of universalism. Everyone is welcome and all are celebrated; in fact, they like to say that they are all one. Quantity replaces quality. Realistic vision is lost. The civilization begins to die.

A strange thing will have happened to the people in this civilization. They will live almost exclusively in the third column, thinking about what others think of them, with the world beyond the ego and the human social circle unknown to them. If someone explains nihilism to them, using the language which sprung up as if out of the ground once it was needed, they will retreat in fear, like monkeys flinging faeces at a feared totem. To them, there can only be one rule for everyone — the rule of the third column — or life has become bad and evil.

Nihilism remains controversial for this reason. It connects us to the nothingness in life, and the necessity of sacrifice in order to achieve quality-enhancing results, which naturally brings up the question of mortality that almost all people (except pasty Goths in black) would rather not discuss. People would rather decrease quality and increase quantity, meaning that all actions would be seen as equal, because this is more emotionally convenient for them. Nihilism erases any importance granted to this emotional state.

The modern West finds itself at a crossroads. The path we are on leads to eventual death and a form of entropy that returns us to the state of the cavepeople before Bra’agh and his vision of fire. A new path beckons which will take us higher than the greatness of the past, continuing the idea that seized Bra’agh as he was wandering the veldt. For us to accept the possibility of the new path, we must first strip away the human-only mental prison in which we exist because of social influences and “peer pressure.”

Nihilism leads to idealism for this reason. When we remove the over-dominance of the methods we use to interact with the world, we see the importance of pattern and arranging ourselves and material according to the idea we seek. This connects to a primal idea, which is that existence itself is biological, and that life extends past the physical into the metaphysical. In short, idea is all; material — including the third column — is a false goal that causes us to rationalize and become confused.

In this sense, nihilism shows us the value of transcendental thought. By facing the darkness of life directly and allowing the cold wind of the abyss to lick our faces, nihilism creates acceptance of the world as it is, and then embarks on a search for meaning that is not “social meaning” because it is interpreted according to the individual based on the capacity of that individual. Nihilism is esoteric in that it rejects the idea of a truth that can be communicated to everyone, but by freeing us from the idea that whatever truths we encounter must include everyone, allows for lone explorers to delve deeper and climb higher, if they have the biological requirements for the mental ability involved.

For this reason, nihilism is transformative. We go into it as equal members of the modern zombie automaton cult, convinced that there is objective truth and we have subjective preferences. We come out realizing that our preferences are entirely a function of our abilities and biology, and that “objective” truth is as much an idol as the Golden Calf of Moses’ time: a fiction and consensual reality created to keep a troupe of slightly smarter than average monkeys working together. Nihilism transforms us from human into beast, and from that, to something which can reach for the stars.

***

In Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness and Eternity, your author explores the possibilities of leaving behind the path to death and choosing the new path instead. This cannot be approached directly, because the path is an effect of a cause, which is our willingness to abandon the solipsistic tendencies of our minds and strive for something greater. It appeals to the Bra’aghs of the world, and not those whose skulls were smitten by his rocks.

Through the course of essays composed in the wilderness over the course of two decades, Nihilism unearths the first steps toward the wisdom of the past. It shows a path to clearing the mental confusion of this time from the mind, and seeing the value of nihilism as a gateway to re-understanding the world in a new light. While it is not for all, if humanity has a future, it is through a thought process like the journey on which it takes its readers.

In contrast to accepted doctrine, this book shows that the lack of meaning in modern society came not from the fall of gods and heroes, but from the insatiable human ego and its collectivized counterpart, “peer pressure” or social control. What remains of the old religion is only the idea of universal truth, and that has been reconfigured into an assumption that all that is human is good, and that nature and metaphysics are irrelevant.

Nihilism remains a terrifying topic because it removes the illusions on which our current worldview is based, but that outlook is rapidly failing. In this alternate view, the tripartite illusion — universal truth among humans, equality-based values, and exoteric communication based on universal tokens — has broken and died, and those who wish to rebuild civilization can use nihilism to detach from it and form the groundwork of a new era.

Touching on ideas from both the occult and mainstream religion as well as philosophies ranging from Germanic idealism to perennialism, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness and Eternity explores nihilism as a fully-developed philosophy instead of the melange of anarchy and self-centeredness by which it is portrayed in most literature. In doing so, it discovers a way out of our landlocked modern thought, uniting both wisdom of the past and possibilities for the future into a single vision.

Futurist Traditionalism takes its influences from several existing genres of thought and philosophies:

Traditionalism

At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.

First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness–the world of things and animals and men and even gods–is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

Aldous Huxley, “The Perennial Philosophy”
Naturalism

What constitutes knowledge: Naturalism as a worldview is based on the premise that knowledge about what exists and about how things work is best achieved through the sciences, not personal revelation or religious tradition. The knowledge we have of ourselves and our place in nature is the achievement of a collective effort to construct a consistent view of the world that permits prediction and control. This effort proceeds by experiment and rational inquiry, and the knowledge gained is always subject to further testing as understanding matures. Wanting something to be true, or having the intense personal conviction that something is true, are never grounds for supposing that it is true. Scientific empiricism has the necessary consequence of unifying our knowledge of the world, of placing all objects of understanding within an overarching causal context. Under naturalism, there is a single, natural world in which phenomena arise.

The causal view: From a naturalistic perspective, there are no causally privileged agents, nothing that causes without being caused in turn. Human beings act the way they do because of the various influences that shape them, whether these be biological or social, genetic or environmental. We do not have the capacity to act outside the causal connections that link us in every respect to the rest of the world. This means we do not have what many people think of as free will, being able to cause our behavior without our being fully caused in turn.

The self: As strictly physical beings, we don’t exist as immaterial selves, either mental or spiritual, that control behavior. Thought, desires, intentions, feelings, and actions all arise on their own without the benefit of a supervisory self, and they are all the products of a physical system, the brain and the body. The self is constituted by more or less consistent sets of personal characteristics, beliefs, and actions; it doesn’t exist apart from those complex physical processes that make up the individual. It may strongly seem as if there is a self sitting behind experience, witnessing it, and behind behavior, controlling it, but this impression is strongly disconfirmed by a scientific understanding of human behavior.

Responsibility and morality: From a naturalistic perspective, behavior arises out of the interaction between individuals and their environment, not from a freely willing self that produces behavior independently of causal connections (see above). Therefore individuals don’t bear ultimate originative responsibility for their actions, in the sense of being their first cause. Given the circumstances both inside and outside the body, they couldn’t have done other than what they did. Nevertheless, we must still hold individuals responsible, in the sense of applying rewards and sanctions, so that their behavior stays more or less within the range of what we deem acceptable. This is, partially, how people learn to act ethically. Naturalism doesn’t undermine the need or possibility of responsibility and morality, but it places them within the world as understood by science. However, naturalism does call into question the basis for retributive attitudes, namely the idea that individuals could have done otherwise in the situation in which their behavior arose and so deeply deserve punishment.

The source of value: Because naturalism doubts the existence of ultimate purposes either inherent in nature or imposed by a creator, values derive from human needs and desires, not supernatural absolutes. Basic human values are widely shared by virtue of being rooted in our common evolved nature. We need not appeal to a supernatural standard of ethical conduct to know that in general it’s wrong to lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, torture, or otherwise treat people in ways we’d rather not be treated. Our naturally endowed empathetic concern for others and our hard-wired penchant for cooperation and reciprocity get us what we most want as social creatures: to flourish as individuals within a community. Naturalism may show the ultimate contingency of some values, in that human nature might have evolved differently and human societies and political arrangements might have turned out otherwise. But, given who and what we are as natural creatures, we necessarily find ourselves with shared basic values which serve as the criteria for assessing moral dilemmas, even if these assessments are sometimes fiercely contested and in some cases never quite resolved.

Naturalism.org
Deep Ecology
We believe that true ecological sustainability may require a rethinking of our values as a society. Present assumptions about economics, development, and the place of human beings in the natural order must be reevaluated. If we are to achieve ecological sustainability, Nature can no longer be viewed only as a commodity; it must be seen as a partner and model in all human enterprise.

We begin with the premise that life on 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, as well as the health and continued viability of the biosphere. It is the awareness of the present condition that primarily 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 drive to economic globalization, cultural homogenization, commodity accumulation, urbanization, and human alienation. All of these are fundamentally incompatible with ecological or biological 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 and science have 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.
Foundation for Deep Ecology
Hierarchicalism

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” This utility has one negative and one positive component.

1) The positive component is a function of the increment of one animal. Since the herdsman receives all the proceeds from the sale of the additional animal, the positive utility is nearly +1.

2) The negative component is a function of the additional overgrazing created by one more animal. Since, however, the effects of overgrazing are shared by all the herdsmen, the negative utility for any particular decision-making herdsman is only a fraction of -1.

Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited

Garrett Hardin
Independence from Groupthink

In order to make ourselves more powerful, we act so we appear altruistic, but we also act to appear independent and unique so we attract others to our personalities. This causes us to act entirely through social thinking.

Through this method, individualism creates a “social reality” or a conspiracy between people to manage reality with social factors. Since we need others, thanks to specialization of labor, we use this more than reality itself.

This has two effects: first, we become neurotic because we see reality in the details but are encouraged to ignore it; second, since social reality ignores secondary effects, disorder spreads and the cost is passed on to us.

This in turn encourages us to try to break away from social obligation, since we feel it is parasitic to us, and so we break away using more individualism. This does not work, so we turn to our leaders and ask for more control.

Control is the external imposition of what some people agree is true. Unlike an organic order, or one arriving from agreement and cooperation among people, it requires force and small rewards to function.

In this way, we can see how individualism leads to disorder which requires more control, in a process and cycle that gains intensity over time, causing civilization to collapse.

Vijay Prozak, Parallelism
Nonduality

Imagine human beings living in an underground den which is open towards the light; they have been there from childhood, having their necks and legs chained, and can only see into the den. At a distance there is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built along the way, like the screen over which marionette players show their puppets. Behind the wall appear moving figures, who hold in their hands various works of art, and among them images of men and animals, wood and stone, and some of the passers-by are talking and others silent. ‘A strange parable,’ he said, ‘and strange captives.’ They are ourselves, I replied; and they see only the shadows of the images which the fire throws on the wall of the den; to these they give names, and if we add an echo which returns from the wall, the voices of the passengers will seem to proceed from the shadows. Suppose now that you suddenly turn them round and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at the real images; will they believe them to be real? Will not their eyes be dazzled, and will they not try to get away from the light to something which they are able to behold without blinking? And suppose further, that they are dragged up a steep and rugged ascent into the presence of the sun himself, will not their sight be darkened with the excess of light? Some time will pass before they get the habit of perceiving at all; and at first they will be able to perceive only shadows and reflections in the water; then they will recognize the moon and the stars, and will at length behold the sun in his own proper place as he is. Last of all they will conclude:— This is he who gives us the year and the seasons, and is the author of all that we see. How will they rejoice in passing from darkness to light! How worthless to them will seem the honours and glories of the den! But now imagine further, that they descend into their old habitations;— in that underground dwelling they will not see as well as their fellows, and will not be able to compete with them in the measurement of the shadows on the wall; there will be many jokes about the man who went on a visit to the sun and lost his eyes, and if they find anybody trying to set free and enlighten one of their number, they will put him to death, if they can catch him. Now the cave or den is the world of sight, the fire is the sun, the way upwards is the way to knowledge, and in the world of knowledge the idea of good is last seen and with difficulty, but when seen is inferred to be the author of good and right — parent of the lord of light in this world, and of truth and understanding in the other. He who attains to the beatific vision is always going upwards; he is unwilling to descend into political assemblies and courts of law; for his eyes are apt to blink at the images or shadows of images which they behold in them — he cannot enter into the ideas of those who have never in their lives understood the relation of the shadow to the substance.

Plato, The Republic, Book VII

To most people, the word “traditionalism” conjures up ideas of reverting society to a previous time; in the cyclic view of history, it is in fact acting out the society of a future time, which is why it pairs well with futurism. This invokes other philosophical doctrines as expressed above.

Tags:aduality, conservatism, deep ecology, futurism, futurist traditionalism, naturalism, nihilism, perennialism, rightism, traditionalism
Posted in Politics | Comments Closed

Action	Result
1. Rub sticks	Weak fire, takes a lot of strength.
2. Await lightning	Starve (usually).
3. Strike flint	Stronger fire, but flying sparks can cause forest fires.
4. Pray to Xu’ul	Nothing so far.
5. Bark rope friction	Good, but hard to find the right bark.