Dearest friends,
There comes a time in every man’s life where he must become pastry.
Nah, I’m Just Fucking Kidding.
And I’m kidding about that too! No conspiracy theories, please.
Nobody really believed the Wall could fall until it did. Except for those crazy people who did, but let’s ignore them. Mass psychology is a funny thing. But people, far better people than I, have already written about the psychology of the masses. Unfortunately for me, they did so in books, long books, long books with big words and no pictures, thus placing these insights far outside my reach. However, I have no doubt you, dear reader, could be an equal to these challenges.
Instead, I’m going to talk about an easy subject: Brahmin. Brahmin are easy to discuss because you can watch them and write down their silly behaviors. And they are fruitful to discuss because, generally speaking, few people write about Brahmin. The masses can’t write about Brahmin because they don’t see Brahmin, and the Brahmin don’t write about Brahmin because all of the interesting insights they take as natural. Fish are tragically unable to know water.
A Brahmin is a priestly creature. He loves books and Calvinism and books and smug pontifications about the Galapagos and books and dolphin-safe donuts. Being a creature of religion, heretic though he may be (do you see Brahmin living among their beloved ghettowalkers or getting divorced?), he has a big ego goal – to preach his religion.
But, you may say, Brahmins hate Christers! Or maybe not. Presumably you’ve already read some neoreaction. Regardless of their professed religion beliefs, Brahmin do, more or less, believe in a set of doctrines and moral behaviors that, if followed, will lead to paradise, and which constitute the grounds for moral judgement and sin. The real religion of the Brahmin is, of course, the Cathedral. Universal, omnipresent progressivism. The goal of the priest is to become pure and attain paradise, but what of the Cathedral’s priest? Given that his paradise is earthly, he has no choice but to attempt to immatenize the eschaton. He will bring paradise to the present, material world.
Now, every so often, a Brahmin goes off the reservation and renounces the Cathedral faith. What then? Well, dear reader, you might say they finally let truth into their darkened eyes and embrace neoreaction. Of course, once we formally recognize power, restore the sovereign, banish egalitarianism, and end voting, we will attain the Superparisian Vienna on a hill. Paradise, good wine, and good times will be had by all.
Dawkins may have been pwned, but so was Moldbug. It’s not just that the Cathedral is a religion. All political ideologies are religions – they promise to fix the problems of society with a few prescriptions and thus deliver humanity into the age of good government. The issue is that while they fix a few problems, usually the problems they purport to, they create others. Why? They ignore the fundamental problem of power.
Which is really a fundamental problem of humanity.
The problem is that gains are not made without tradeoffs because this is not, in fact, a utopian world, but a fallen one, governed not by rational shekel-maximizers or wise kings, but human dickheads.
Behold! In an instant, USG vanishes with a greasy popping noise. Hot dog, says the state-in-wait, and a thousand would-be Kshatriya swarm the abandoned capital, eager for political loot. Behind them are their invincible robot armies.
Problem 1: Those robots are made by people. Tech people. Why should the tech people give full control to the new Kshtockholders and the proprietor they choose? Political power grows from the barrel of a gun. Just take the gun for yourself and now you rule. And what do techies love? The Cathedral. Back to square one.
Problem 2: Suppose the Kshatriya, through their immense handsomeness and muscularity, manage to take over with loyal robot armies. They split the country up into fifty million patch states and begin to rule. You know, ruling. Even though they abstained from the power process before and have no practice, I’m sure they’ll do fine. They have invincible robot armies!
My great-great-grandfather, too, had an invincible robot army. His model was the PEOPLE model, short for Privately Employed Organic Political Law Enforcement. They worked pretty well except for the part where they malfunctioned when impacted with too much blunt or explosive force. The thing is, each patch gets their own robot army.
Mmmm. Right.
It turns out, in such an environment, a little patch is surrounded by other patches. What do all the patches do? Well, what motivates patches (read: nobles)? Shekels? Nyet. Survival. Survival! Your first and foremost concern is to prevent your insides from becoming outsides. Every neighbor is a potential enemy. It is Central Park in the dead of night. There are no policemen. And the night never ends. The only promise of security is more robots. So you pump your patch dry to buy more PEOPLE-model robots. But you don’t have enough robots, so you need more resources. Where to get them? You’re already raping your little patch. Better grab another. So you invade another patch to secure the resources to prevent yourself from being invaded by another patch that wants to secure the resources to prevent itself from being invaded by another…
We call this environment “civil war”, and our thousand little proprietors “warlords”. It was a bloody, unpleasant unfair, and most of said proprietors lose, with modestly dire results for their descendants.
I am haunted by all the good wine not being drunk. By me. Every night, I go to bed unpleasured by like, fifty harem girls. It’s a dreadful world. Don’t subject your line to that.
Okay, okay.
Problem 3: So suppose that our proprietors, being rational, recognize after only a few defenestrations that civil war is bad for their life expectancy. They band together into one greater entity to bring an end to the war of all against all, and this entity rapidly expands to regional or global hegemony. Great! Wonderful!
The problem is that you’ve just made Stuart FEDGOV, with all the problems of a big, creaky FEDGOV. That’s not such a bad thing, because the Pax Americana, like the Pax Romana, is pretty wonderful. Napoleon Kai-Sulla rides triumphantly into DC astride a white charger, and the nations quake before his limitless might. Good stuff.
Do I think things will run better after that?
Absolutely.
The problem is that our new constitution still sucks. All the power is invested in the nobility, who have the power to remove the Proprietor with their shares. What is the cardinal rule of power? Nobles are dickheads. Leftist dickheads. Now they have absolute power. They’re just gonna make a new Cathedral, but blackjack and hookers. What does giving the aristoi absolute power accomplish? Does it restrain them? Hahahaha! Fuck no. Do you think the *people*, of all things, push the aristoi to make the Cathedral? How? The people are useful bioleninist shocktroopers for the ultimate goal – more power. Does anyone really think democracy can hold the aristoi accountable?
The truth of the matter is that aristoi power is already absolute. There are no meaningful consequences for the upper middle class. The only ways I can really fuck up are to commit a crime that denies FEDGOV’s monopoly on force or otherwise subvert it. And lese majeste is always a serious crime. Or if I arouse the ire of an even bigger fish. Besides that, everything is permitted.
Let me tell you a story of the upper middle class. There once was a girl who had everything going for her. She ended up going to the best school. But once there, she let herself go to pot. She dated black men to spite daddy, she neglected her studies, and worst of all, she got fat. Let me assure you that is an unpardonable sin, fatness. She bummed around with a useless Study Studies degree, obtaining no useful skills. In lieu of gathering experience, she did activism.
Does this story end with a Starbucks job and piles of debt? Ha. Of course not. She changed her mind, immediately stepped into a six-figure job, and lived happily ever after.
Even I am a pile of bad decisions and stupid risks. I have a humanities degree. A humanities degree from a second-tier college, not even an Ivy or Stanford. Not only that, I neglected my studies. My grades were below the minimum hiring cutoff for firms. As a worker, I am… slovenly at best, showing up an hour late, unkempt, with a penchant to wander in contemplation. And yet…
Monsieur le Baron lives rather comfortably, I’ll say that.
Perhaps it’s talent? Well, talent, just as much as wealth, is part of their inheritance.
One might protest that madame was merely being a good leftist in the Cathedral tradition. First of all, if you actually do the things we tell the proles to do – you’re an idiot. And second of all, Monsieur le Baron is a brash rightist. A card-carrying Democratic rightist, but certainly right enough for the Cathedral. But this, like pedophilia or other such maladies, is merely a sword given by its handle. Leverage. At least my sin keeps my conscience clean before God, even if it isn’t clean in the eyes of man.
The upper middle class is immune to consequences. And if you protest that you are a member and you are not… I have some bad news for you.
No, their power is unchecked. And it has not produced virtue, far from it.
The first generation of the new empire *will* be virtuous. And things will run well. But not for reasons of constitution. Give me a hundred constitutions and I’ll poke holes in them all. All arrangements are flawed and doomed. It is order and chaos. Foundings are acts of reaction because they impose order on order. The American Founding was just as much reaction as Stalin’s rise to power or the coming of the Normans. The Empire is vigorous as it arises from the sea foam, fully formed.
Leftism – the powerlust – rot – entropy – is universal. It is LEFTISM that rules over all things in the end. The tribe of the lion does not content itself to mortar the slumping edifice. It hungers for power. Only in times of chaos is the warlord finally welcome. But in all times, the warlord is born.
What does it mean to be Vernunftrepublikaner? It means abandoning hope in ideology. All regimes fail. Entropy devours all things. Chaos is the rule, order a brief exception.
But it means to love it regardless, for there is nothing else and nothing better.
It means tending the bonfire of Western civilization, nay, all of civilizations, the sacred hearth with its ever-burning flame. A flame that must constantly be stoked and fed, that demands patrician virgins and the noblest sons be given to it. It means understanding that being a defender of order means being a sucker, means giving yourself to a hopeless cause. It means understanding that it is so much more than that – it is becoming a ritual sacrifice, kindling for the flame. A life surrendered for one’s children, and all that will come after you.
And why? Because with the state came the end of the war of all. When the fire is brought to a rest and stoked, it becomes a hearth. Civilization is man’s home, the place where he can finally rest. It is the only rest he can know until he is finally recalled to his Maker’s side.
Thus, we carry the flame, insatiable as it is. And when Troy is ashes, we spirit the flame away across the sea to an unknown shore.
Cathedrals rise, Cathedrals fall.
The flame burns on.
Actually a disgruntled Krispy Kreme shill,
Monsieur le Baron
