nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

I have not written anything since my 18th birthday, so I’ll pick back up there.

I am now, they say, an adult, but the only difference I can see, leaving aside the obsession with political homeopathy peculiar to this nation and its ideological empire, is that I can now legally acquire tobacco. (Not that I had any difficulty with that three years ago.) The span of childhood stretches out endlessly into the horizon, forever expanding its scope as society degenerates. Several generations ago, an ancestor of mine left his country behind when he was younger than I to come to America with nothing but a book of prayers, take a job as a janitor, channel that pay into real estate investment, and die a millionaire. Clearly, such a thing is not even a possibility for this generation. College until 22, graduate school until God knows when, and then a predictable office job until 70 or death—if we’re lucky. The skills, the knowledge, the opportunity have been denied us by a machine intent on creating not factory workers, as is commonly charged, but Cold Warriors, schooled in nothing but the arcane arts of STEM and set eternally upon the single task of stopping the Soviets. But there no longer are any Soviets! Rebels without a cause become bureaucrats without a purpose, marching listlessly about their strange Vogon battleships, getting schwasted on the weekends in a desperate attempt to escape the invisible prison of the postmodern society they inhabit—only inhabit—even if it means waking up in a real one the next morning. Every sensible construct conquered is not destroyed, but merely replaced with an insensible one.

Surely we cannot believe we are free! And yet many of us do. Constantly the battle cry is raised: set us free from this oppressive construct, this totalitarian rubbish of a less enlightened age, that we may reach the only true freedom of the hermit, isolated from all but ourselves! But even the hermit cannot be truly free; can he cast asunder the barbaric chains of his biological needs? No man is free who still must eat. What are we to be liberated from, when liberation is attainable only in death? And, indeed, our contemporary liberation leads us closer to this state; for every bone removed from the skeleton society has built, we further collapse into an orderless mass. In the immortal words of the poet Jeff Moss:

Bones are important,
They do a big job.
Without them, you’d be just
A big squooshy blob.

But for every step we take in that direction, we further sense that something is missing, that something we never knew we had has been stolen from us, and we attempt to build it back, albeit in an unrecognizable form; perverted beyond recognition by that very formlessness, yet in always the same way. The American dream is replaced by the Roman. Rock and roll may be a recent invention, but sex and drugs are eternal.

Mencius Moldbug just posted an article about technology, so I figure I might as well also.

When I started college, it was as a computer science major. I thought I would use college mostly as a convenient way to learn some programming languages and strategies so I could get a degree and a job in the field. But I arrived already burnt out and ended up switching out after a semester, for two very different reasons.

The first is the state of technology today. We don’t deal with the machine; we don’t even deal with abstractions on top of the machine. We deal with layers of abstractions, layers piled so high you can’t even see where they end. Unlike most comp sci majors these days, the first programming language I learned was not Java or Python, but QuickBASIC, which my father taught me when I was around eight years old. (My second was x86 assembly, which I have unfortunately completely forgotten.) For all its inelegance, there is a certain philosophy to programming in that language, a philosophy that is, in fact, partially contained in its particular brand of inelegance: you have abstractions available to you, but you spend most of your time dealing directly with the machine. If you want to write something to the screen, it’s far faster to POKE it to the screen than to go through the built-in routines, and I’m not sure if there even was a way to read things on the screen other than PEEK. I amused myself by writing nine-line programs to print the contents of memory to a text file and seeing what I could learn about the system from reading it. I doubt such things could be so easily done these days.

I’ll admit that that specific philosophy is not exactly conducive to portability, but it should not be hard to imagine an abstraction that can still be dealt with on that level, a virtual machine that actually acts like a machine.

Smartphones (never before have I heard a term so unfitting) did not exist in those days, but it was easy to see the direction in which the field was headed. I had a Mac in those days, and I remember being endlessly annoyed at the absurd degree of isolation from the system that its philosophy mandated (this was before I learned the Unix command line), but it was obvious even on Windows. I ended up learning a painfully limited scripting language concurrently with Java out of frustration that Java wouldn’t let me get at the system.

Needless to say, the situation now is much worse. The Apple philosophy has spread like wildfire; insulating users as much as possible from the system is the hot new trend to which there is no rebellion. I will admit that it has its merits, especially to infrequent users who only want to carry out the simplest of tasks, but I am not such a user and I would much rather not be treated as one.

The other reason, of course, is that technology education is bullshit. I can pinpoint exactly the moment of my burnout: it was when, as a sophomore in high school, I used the conditional operator in a program for my AP Computer Science class and got marked down because the teacher, an eminently unqualified affirmative action hire sent over from the business department because the Board of Education was too packed with embezzling scum to hire anyone with actual knowledge of the subject, insisted after the fact that everyone use only things that had already been covered in class.

Due to various interruptions from the strange land of real life, mostly midterms and the transformation of my sleep schedule into something not even remotely worthy of the term ‘schedule’, I have not been able to write a full post recently. Instead, take these quotes and connect the dots. There’s not much I could add here anyway; the point should be clear enough.

Fred Reed:

If I were to speechify to a conclave of Tea Partyers, “America is the free-est…the most democratic…the best educated and most dynamic country the world has ever known, an example to all mankind,” the assembled would hoot and hooroar and applaud in dizzy exaltation. Here is the soul of the American approach to existence, bottomless self-admiration devoid of knowledge or curiosity, wrapped like a psychic burrito in the patriotism of overwrought middle-schoolers. And there are many, many of them.

…

Americans believe this stuff. There is probably no one in France, and here I include asylums, drains, and morgues, who could be so narcissistically stupid.

Christopher Lasch: (quoting from the Wikipedia summary because I don’t have my copy of the book at hand)

The book proposes that post-war, late-capitalist America, through the effects of “organized kindness” on the traditional family structure, has produced a personality-type consistent with clinical definitions of “pathological narcissism”. This pathology is not akin to everyday narcissism — a hedonistic egoism — but rather a very weak sense of self requiring constant external validation.

Eric Hoffer:

The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill which can never lead them to fulfillment.

James Madison:

The friend of popular Governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice [faction]. … The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular Governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.

(Note: This is essentially a more accessible tl;dr of my last post.)

The alt-right blogosphere got juggalos wrong. They are not “decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization”; they are just another subculture, a subculture that happens to be far easier to attack than others, for two reasons: natural opposition to outgroups and the demonization of the white lower class (‘rednecks’) that is pervasive in American culture.

Subcultures exist to solve the problem of alienation, a problem created by the lack of social capital in liberal society. They provide a shared identity for those who cannot acquire one from their environment. However, they are not wholly positive; their existence increases cultural diversity, a key cause of alienation.

It is possible to have the negative effects of subculture without the positive effects. This happens when subcultures fail to develop the sense of shared identity and instead remain nothing more than clusters of individual preferences. Upper- and middle-class subcultures are far more likely to do this, possibly due to the closer adherence of those classes to the ruling ideology, part of which is atomistic individualism, and part of which may be due to the tendency toward isolation caused by the neurotically self-critical and anxious tendencies (‘beta’ in PUA theory) common to those classes.

Contrary to what Mangan said, we are not doomed if our future resembles the juggalos; we are doomed if our future resembles the ultra-individualist hipster neurotics of the middle and upper classes. Juggalos have a shared identity, whereas individualist neurotics, by their very nature, do not, and it appears that that sort of alienation can survive indefinitely.

(Update: If you don’t care about Moldbug’s caste system but still want an analysis of juggalos, you’ll probably want to go here.)

I suppose it was inevitable that the alt-right blogosphere would discover juggalos eventually. Unfortunately, they come no closer to a proper analysis than anyone else.

Not all decay comes from the lower class; some comes from the middle, but due to the nature of the decay they bring about, they are never portrayed as such. It should go without saying that there is no cohesive society in much of America, but a patch to that bug has been found: to fill that alienating void, subcultures (more properly, sub-societies, although that is unfortunately not the established term) have been formed, which offer at least some of the benefits—institutions, shared culture, sense of identity, self-esteem—of a proper society. Mangan comes close to admitting this point:

One of the most repellant aspects of the Juggalos is the way they have themselves convinced that they comprise some sort of brotherhood, that they receive a form of acceptance from each other that “normal” society has somehow denied them

However, this is not a proper solution, for two reasons: that it increases cultural diversity, and that it is not available to everyone. Every ingroup is an outgroup to everyone else, and outgroups are commonly demonized on any available pretense. Subculture membership carries a significant social stigma, which rules it out to all but those who have nothing to lose and those who have no worries about losing anything; for everyone else, joining a subculture would be simply trading one form of alienation for another form whose consequences are, if not worse, at least far more visible. To put this problem in terms of Mencius Moldbug’s caste analysis, subcultures are a viable option to Dalits and some Brahmins, but not to Vaisyas or Optimates. (Helots, of course, have no need for a subculture.)

But, you ask, why “any available pretense”? Surely there must be a clear reason to demonize the juggalos? As Mangan says:

The video on the Juggalos shows us a motley, highly unappealing collection of the most idiotic, most pierced morons that one could imagine. None of them seem to be able to use any other adjective but f**kin’ or m*****f**kin’, nor to say anything that makes much sense. All of them appear to be on massive quantities of drugs and/or alcohol.

I will not dispute those points, but can someone point me to any negative aspect of the juggalo subculture that does not appear to a far greater degree in Brahmin subcultures? (And no, the fact that juggalos are encouraged to be alpha and Brahmins are encouraged to be beta does not count.) Brahmins are notorious for such behavior, and yet they hardly ever draw criticism for it, even in blatantly Vaisya circles. (Also, those traits, in and of themselves, are not negative; it is only when they are taken to extremes that they become negative. But an inability to grasp the concept of moderation is pervasive in America, so that does not complicate the analysis.)

In fact, these traits appear across the caste system, but some groups draw more criticism than others. Examination of those patterns of criticism reveal some interesting patterns: it is well-known that BDH institutions criticize negative traits of OV groups and vice versa, but BDH institutions also frequently criticize some Dalits; specifically, the white ones, commonly known as ‘rednecks’.

Mencius Moldbug’s caste system cannot explain this without an addition: the Antyaja caste, covered by Jim Goad in his Redneck Manifesto. Their exclusion from the original model is understandable, since, whether due to their status as a monkey wrench into prevailing Brahmin theology or out of honest ignorance, Brahmins almost never acknowledge their existence, and commonly confuse them with Vaisyas. (I have experienced this firsthand; my mother is a Brahmin from a vaguely Optimate background, but the rest of my family and many of my friends are Vaisyas, so I was raised somewhat between castes. I made the mistake of believing I was a Brahmin, going to a very strongly Brahmin college, and maintaining some Vaisya ideals, so I was treated as an Antyaja, by which I mean I was accused of being a member of the KKK, told that America and the world would be better off without people like me, and forced out after one semester.)

Another possible reason for their exclusion is that they severely complicate the model. They cannot be said to be allied with either side of the BDH-OV conflict; although they clearly fall on the OV side, OV have about as negative an opinion of them as they do of BDH. In addition, they pattern with BDH on some issues: they tend to be Democrats despite their generally Republican political views, and they, unlike Optimates and Vaisyas, can form subcultures, as exemplified by the thoroughly Antyaja phenomenon of juggalos.

Which brings us back to the original point. Although subculture formation results in higher cultural diversity and therefore higher levels of alienation, lack of effective subculture formation usually means even higher levels of alienation; the underclass (Dalits, Helots, and Antjayas) are better off in this regard than many Brahmins and even Vaisyas, as Van Jones pointed out, although those without a solution to the problem are far harder to criticize, due to their lack of identification with any specific group. But the worst possible scenario, I think, is ineffective subculture formation, which provides none of the benefits of subculture formation but all of the drawbacks. In other words, hipsters.

And as for the charge that Insane Clown Posse “sounds no different than the usual black rap”… well, I’d like to see Soulja Boy do this. Or even this.