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.

The absurdities of contemporary society outlined in my previous post come from one clear source: the individualist ideography. Human relations are cast as oppressive restraints, and their participants, due to their nature as interchangeable, detached souls existing outside all human constructs, must be liberated from all such oppression, set free to… well, to do what? Individualism is largely silent on that question, but in practice, all it frees most people to do (in the first world, at least; its policies have been far more disastrous in other areas, most notably the former Rhodesia) is march listlessly about in architectural monstrosities of glass and concrete on weekdays and hammer themselves into the ground with cheap beer at night. Meaningless people living meaningless lives, inhabiting places that cannot be homes, occasionally falling into narcissistic restatements, whether New Age or liberal, of the dogma that created their problems in the first place. Or, of course, drug addiction. Anything to escape the hell they have no language to acknowledge.

Without structure, there can be no virtue, only subsistence. Asian parenting tactics are widely opposed, and even in my opinion a bit extreme (mostly because they focus on the wrong things; Asian culture emphasizes skill in repetition over skill in thought, which is useful for getting the best government bureaucrats, but not much else), but when was the last time you saw a white college student with actual competence? As in parenting, so in society: lack of structure breeds failure and apathy.

I saw a high school acquaintance go down that road. He was on the MIT track, but due to circumstances nobody possibly could have foreseen, his train got derailed and he ended up in a party college for rich, nihilistic SWPLs, at which point his parents decided not to give a damn about what he did. He ended up changing his major to philosophy, dropping out, and becoming a drug dealer. Many other people were ruined by that college, that shining exemplar of liberal individualism and hedonism at work; several people I knew there are now reportedly homeless, permafried from acid and riddled with STDs. But our language has no words for such concepts. The absurdity of contemporary society is made apparent by the fact that words such as “wasted”, “trashed”, and “hammered” have taken on positive connotations. Productivity is for squares, bro. Real men fuckin’ party. Drop that Bach shit, let’s crank some Kanye.

Thomas Carlyle, the 19th-century arch-reactionary, saw this all coming:

In the progress of Emancipation, are we to look for a time when all the Horses also are to be emancipated, and brought to the supply-and-demand principle? Horses too have “motives;” are acted on by hunger, fear, hope, love of oats, terror of platted leather; nay they have vanity, ambition, emulation, thankfulness, vindictiveness; some rude outline of all our human spiritualities,—a rude resemblance to us in mind and intelligence, even as they have in bodily frame. The Horse, poor dumb four-footed fellow, he too has his private feelings, his affections, gratitudes; and deserves good usage; no human master, without crime, shall treat him unjustly either, or recklessly lay on the whip where it is not needed:—I am sure if I could make him “happy,” I should be willing to grant a small vote (in addition to the late twenty millions) for that object!

Him too you occasionally tyrannize over; and with bad result to yourselves, among others; using the leather in a tyrannous unnecessary manner; withholding, or scantily furnishing, the oats and ventilated stabling that are due. Rugged horse-subduers, one fears they are a little tyrannous at times. “Am I not a horse, and half-brother?”—To remedy which, so far as remediable, fancy—the horses all “emancipated;” restored to their primeval right of property in the grass of this Globe: turned out to graze in an independent supply-and-demand manner! So long as grass lasts, I dare say they are very happy, or think themselves so. And Farmer Hodge sallying forth, on a dry spring morning, with a sieve of oats in his hand, and agony of eager expectation in his heart, is he happy? Help me to plough this day, Black Dobbin: oats in full measure if thou wilt. “Hlunh, No—thank!” snorts Black Dobbin; he prefers glorious liberty and the grass. Bay Darby, wilt not thou perhaps? “Hlunh!”—Gray Joan, then, my beautiful broad-bottomed mare,—O Heaven, she too answers Hlunh! Not a quadruped of them will plough a stroke for me. Corn-crops are ended in this world!—For the sake, if not of Hodge, then of Hodge’s horses, one prays this benevolent practice might now cease, and a new and better one try to begin. Small kindness to Hodge’s horses to emancipate them! The fate of all emancipated horses is, sooner or later, inevitable. To have in this habitable Earth no grass to eat,—in Black Jamaica gradually none, as in White Connemara already none;—to roam aimless, wasting the seedfields of the world; and be hunted home to Chaos, by the due watch-dogs and due hell-dogs, with such horrors of forsaken wretchedness as were never seen before! These things are not sport; they are terribly true, in this country at this hour.

The main error of liberalism is its denial of human nature. We, the Whig says, are superanimal—fundamentally rational beings, homo economicus, separate from our hardware, and yet with no higher purpose than the base fulfillment of that hardware. (This, of course, is the Bentham/Mill debate, and the world, predictably, has taken Bentham’s side, leading to our current predicament. One cannot justify liberalism through Mill, for reasons explained best, albeit unintentionally, by Jeff Moss: Mill does not like big squooshy blobs.) If you build a contraption to dispense cocaine to a rat whenever it pushes a bar, the rat will waste away at the bar, forgetting even to eat; and in the end, we are but rats. At the very least,  if you firehose dopamine down my mesolimbic pathway, I’ll fry like one.

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.