nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

So, here we are. Christmas Eve. I’m sitting in the corner of a McDonald’s, chugging down my third gallon of sweet tea, mulling over the real possibility of ending up homeless for a few days, thanks to the latest in a long series of family issues bordering on—no, firmly planted in, irretrievably sunk WIPP-style in—the absurd. I didn’t sleep at all last night, and, although some of the singers of the Spanish-language Christmas carols (why would they translate something as terrible as Jingle Bell Rock?!) do have ridiculous American accents, I haven’t heard a word of English since I ordered. What fun.

Such things make it far easier to understand the liberal absurdity of “emancipation”, described most accurately by Carlyle:

Certainly the notion everywhere prevails among us too, and preaches itself abroad in every dialect, uncontradicted anywhere so far as I can hear, that the grand panacea for social woes is what we call “enfranchisement,” “emancipation;” or, translated into practical language, the cutting asunder of human relations, wherever they are found grievous, as is like to be pretty universally the case at the rate we have been going for some generations past. Let us all be “free” of one another; we shall then be happy.

Our institutions are flawed, and rather severely so; not only that, but the flaws—more accurately, the heresies, for heresy is, as Belloc said, nothing more than “the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein”*—are aspects of an ideology, Moldbug’s “Universalism”, which has been on the rise for anywhere between two and twenty centuries, and now clearly holds the scepter of prestige in the entire Western world. (Of course, one who follows Alain de Benoist’s origin story of Universalism would not see it as a heresy at all, but my sense of decency prevents me from criticizing Christianity one day from the center of its calendar—a center for which we may very well have capitalism to thank, since I, at least, would expect the center to be the far more theologically significant and far less easily commercializable Easter. But on the other hand, as early as 1833, it “all other doth efface”.) Given all this, is it any surprise that those institutions are commonly seen as irreparable?

Anyway, it is Christmas Eve, so I suppose I should post something in the spirit of the season. Here’s the least intolerable version of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen that I could find, besides the instrumental Mannheim Steamroller versions:

And a relevant bit of context from Frost:

Whether you believe in the particulars or not, I think the ideas of God and The Devil as metaphors for the just authority and the temptations of evil are useful. If you believe in Good and Justice, why not call this natural order ‘God’? If you believe in Evil, why not call its personification ‘The Devil’? I make this mental substitution all the time when reading dusty old books, and it works just fine for me.

Leaving aside the problematic notion (it is a rare man who can withstand violations of subsidiarity with his morals intact!) of one “Savior … to save us all from Satan’s power”—a notion that Alain de Benoist would surely call Christian to the core—the message is strikingly relevant. Nobody at this point can deny that we have strayed far into the clutches of Satan, although if you ask ten people, you’ll get eleven Satans; we clearly now stand at the beginning of a paradigm shift, but there is agreement on neither the paradigm nor the shift. (My own prediction is that, just as the last century belonged to the left, this one will belong to the right. After all, the first Whig was the Devil. But I am most likely either too optimistic or too pessimistic here; it’s anyone’s guess as to which.)

* As for Belloc, I doubt the practical existence of such a scheme as he posits; there are many complete, self-supporting schemes out there, but none that can withstand the human factor. One that could, of course, would be utopian. This probably relates to dialectics somehow, but I’ll leave that up to someone more well-versed in that system than I.

In closing:

Now to the Lord sing praises,
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All other doth deface:
O tidings of comfort and joy,
comfort and joy,
O tidings of comfort and joy.

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.

(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.