Amerika

Much of my time goes to wandering around outside, preferably in the woods, since this environment provides calm with reverent awe and therefore, both excites and stills the brain. This should be the state of life: an animal, moving silently through its environment.

Walking of course gives rise to all sorts of metaphors. Many people tell me about how they want the world of the 1950s-1990s back — basically the period after the Big War but before the accumulated bad decisions unified by its propaganda kicked in — compared to now.

It would be hard to dispute them. Society now is cultureless, paranoid, opportunistic, and filled with insane zombie-robot people wandering around destroying things. Even in regular jobs, most are parasites, especially those who seek power.

We have all seen how the best among us are systematically suppressed by a system from the accumulated envy of others. The average person hates anyone performing above him, and so he will toss that resume, steal that lunch, sabotage that project, or just bully without end.

We also are noticing how nothing really works. Bridges fall down, new houses are built like incompetent peasant shacks, cars and operating systems glitch, and our once-competent institutions seem to do nothing right but still cost much more.

Many are looking back and saying, “I wish I were able to live in the early 1990s.” But knowing what you do now, you would spend all of your time in trepidation and prescient mourning, knowing that the doom of now would follow that time.

Nostalgia will kill you because like other easy answers it leads away from taking necessary actions. Religions offer symbolic purity, ideology offers Utopian crusade-jihads, and material consumption at least sates the mind by stupefying it temporarily.

It might help to view it this way: we are halfway along a path. Behind us is the 1990s, a place that in our recollection (which drops all the bad stuff) is warmer, and objectively, it was a better time and a more functional, hopeful, and beautiful view of humanity.

But we cannot go back. Turning around is not an option, and walking backward would be ridiculous. Instead we must go forward, and we seem to have no power, except perhaps the ability to turn and make choices about where our path goes.

Go into the woods. Get off the path. Take a left, go aways, then take another left. Or maybe two rights, instead. They lead to the same place, which is a direction toward what lay behind the 1990s, namely a functional WASP society based on a transcendent goal.

What is a transcendent goal? It is things of a qualitative nature that you can never fully achieve but can always orient yourself toward, like goodness, beauty, and realistic accuracy. It means seeing life as a whole and acting for that, not yourself or your social group.

Individualists want to create a human-only world ruled by emotion so that they can get what they desire without meriting it. They want to use others as tools to achieve this regime, and they reject nature, the divine, culture, and common sense.

Our society was based on a transcendent goal, commonsense (realistic) principles, and a case-by-case basis for all things. It opposed bureaucracy and centralized management like had crushed Europe as the kings faded. It wanted to aspire toward positive things.

In contrast, our society is based on the Christian principle of forcing the bad to behave as if they were good. It is oriented toward Control — changing minds by prohibiting natural behaviors — and managing constant problems because it does not intend to limit them.

We are living in a chaotic mess and we hate it, but how can we get out? Our fellow citizens are either apathetic or have cast their lot with some Utopian fantasy or another, maybe religion or ideology, maybe just jiu-jitsu or collecting vintage corkscrews.

The answer has always been to gather together those who can think and orient toward an aspirational, positive, constructive, productive, and creative goal. We do not want to go back to the 1990s; we want to make a better version of what people in the 1990s were striving for.

No one wants to end up like the panicked public Right that is obsessed with Christ-like self-sacrifice in the aim of airy ideals that belong to the middle east two thousand years ago, or the paranoiac underground Right which embraces imaginary conspiracies to avoid facing the obvious.

Nor can we let nostalgia paralyze us. Too many people posting weepy stuff on social media exist to simply convince us to give up and become selfish like everyone else, forgetting the transcendent and the beauty that we can have if we simply make the choices that lead to it.

We may be halfway down a path which has gone into the darkest part of the woods, where terrors surround us, but we clearly must get off this path, and our only method is in the choice of where we point our feet. If we point them at the good, we will get there in time.

Tags: nostalgia, the transcendentals, transcendent