Dearest friends,

I was at a Costco. I was also at a different Costco. Both Costcos were Costcos. The forms of the Costcos were substantively the same. 95% of the products were the same, as they sourced from the same regional distribution centers. And yet, despite this, there were clear class differences between the two, apparent not just from the clientele and the neighborhood, but in the internals of the stores themselves. If you took away all the people, you could still tell which would be the higher class Costco. One Costco had a 4.5lb chocolate pie and 6oz cupcakes and a sushi deli counter, and the other Costco had artisanal cheeses. Though both Costcos had a wide variety of steaks, one Costco advertised USDA choice and the other USDA prime. As one more divide, one Costco had employee vests with a message saying “Ask me about Costco”. I leave this one as an exercise for the reader.

I was discussing class with my dear godsister and nonna this morning. My godsister had found an interesting article about someone’s experience with (partial) upward mobility and their discontent about it. In order to facilitate the transition upwards from white trash to PMC/middle class, the journalist’s family instilled strict shaming protocols around white trash behavior like getting drunk and substance abuse. One-above countersignaling behavior is almost always a reliable class indicator because the strict countersignal is usually functional. If you have to worry about falling in with heroin addicts in your community, then signaling about heroin addicts is important and functional to create a divide so you don’t fall into the wrong crowd. But it leashes your status as only one-above what you have to worry about, and reliably, because abandoning that countersignaling would be *extremely costly for you*, as you would fall into heroin abuse, so people two or more levels of class above you can countersignal the countersignal to show they don’t have to worry about the problem. This journalist had distinctly prole physiognomy, but my first glance assessment of her was middle class. Why? Problem glasses. And that led me to an insight.

Some signals are so informationally rich that they overwhelm all the information that led a person up to that point. I will call these absorbing barriers. Wearing problem glasses and having SJW behaviors is an absorbing barrier, because information about what led someone up to that point now has minimal value. We can know that they’re white trash, or we could know they’re failsons from wealthy families, or they could be generationally middle class but underemployed, but their new tribal markers are reliable to signal a complete message about their new state of being and mode of living. Similarly, the alt-girls in Lower Womanhattan may come from a variety of backgrounds, but by putting on that particular style and living in that place and socializing the way they do, they have announced their new way of life is to try and snag one of the young junior bankers in the area and pair off. But I don’t mean to imply the main absorbing barriers are primarily in fashion. Indeed, most aren’t. Going to college is an absorbing barrier. Once you go to Harvard, you are henceforth and forevermore a Harvard graduate, which is your main identity until you pass another absorbing barrier superseding it. People, rightfully, stop caring about what GPA or extracurriculars got you into Harvard. All that information fades into the background. Another important absorbing barrier is your first job, or the first job you get at successively higher tiers of employer prestige. After your first corporate job, you’ll be corporate material for the rest of your life. After working at McKinsey, your Harvard education gets distilled into the larger signal of “McKinsey Man”.

We can divide putative upward mobility into three categories:
1. Lifestyle Branding: This is not upward mobility in any sense, but adjusting your consumption choices differently so as to project a higher socioeconomic status than you do. The Gods hate cheap signals and lifestyle branding basically gets you nothing except from credulous idiots (but there’s enough of those that a few people do get genuinely rich selling Bugatti videos on how to get rich after throwing on a $10,000 suit).
2. Absorbing Barriers, or Partial Upward Mobility: This is the most common type of movement mistaken for true upward mobility. This is where you’ve created a true costly signal by enacting a genuine change in your identity, like going to college or abandoning a provincial accent. However, while it is in the upward direction, it is not a total change of class. Sooner or later, people get reality checked because passing the barrier is not self-sustaining. While a lifestyle brand can be easily walked back by changing your consumption status again, an absorbing barrier is a barrier both ways. Once you cross it, you can’t uncross it again without being harmed.
3. True Class Mobility: True class mobility is distinguished from absorbing barriers because it is self-sustaining. One achieves true class mobility when you are able to sustain your lifestyle at your new class with your new resources and reproduce it for another generation. In short, you are now at a new stable equilibrium. Every class is a stable equilibrium socio-economic tribe. Absorbing barriers tend to be cultural or social shifts that can act as stepping stones towards economic mobility, but economic mobility is the most necessary part of true class mobility. Once you have the economic habitus of your new class, you are almost to the end, and the cultural shifts are mostly useful to enable that shift.

We can illustrate these categories with an imagined Regular Huwyte Man from Middle America.
1. This would be our humble hero considering himself an upwardly mobile elite because he moved to NYC and eats expensive hamburgers at the Shake Shack in Soldman alley. Fake and gay.
2. If our hero moves to New York, gets a job as an investment banking analyst, and then washes out and goes home, he has passed a number of absorbing barriers, but cannot maintain the new classes which he has genuinely experienced in part. This is not true upward mobility, but it is *partial* upward mobility. It’s a failed attempt to strive.
3. If our hero moves to New York, gets a job as an investment banking analyst, exits into another high paying, high prestige job, finds and marries a WASP woman, and has children after retiring to Westeaster County, he has successfully strived and achieved genuine class mobility. Good work, hero.

We can imagine upward mobility as a rocket ship ride to another planet, the Planet of the Aliens Somewhat Richer than Yourself. We must prepare enough supplies to get all the way to the next planet on our home planet, our class of origin. But absorbing barriers, despite not being true class mobility, do represent progress. We can imagine our planet as being encased by several atmospheric layers of thick jelly. These are the absorbing barriers. Because of their thickness and stickiness, you can stop to rest on them along your journey and you won’t lose progress. Once you graduate college, you can take a break and you won’t ungraduate college. But at the same time, you can’t rest too long, because this is not true ground. You are still being pulled back towards earth, and until you reach your new planet, you have no permanent progress. A college graduate who doesn’t use that degree to secure a college job is actually worse off than a non-college prole. They’re not just a barista, they’re a barista with a lot of useless debt and a lot of wasted years. Because passing through an absorbing barrier is the adoption of a costly signal, if you have to return to your class of origin, you have to bear genuine cost. In video game terms, they’re like a checkpoint where your progress is saved, but you still haven’t completed the level. And absorbing barriers obsolete the steps you took to break through the barrier. If we imagine our rocket travelling at a fast speed towards the jelly wall ceiling, then after it passes through, it loses most of its momentum. Anyone not going fast enough to break through hits the jelly ceiling and bounces off, back down to earth. Everyone starts over at more or less the same point after the jelly ceiling. All Harvard graduates are Harvard graduates. All McKinsey Men are McKinsey Men. People can have accrued advantages or disadvantages from their speed when they hit the ceiling, but these become modifiers on your speed rather than the main event, like a +10% or -10%. It’s like a new World of Warcraft expansion releasing. All your epics from the last expansion become slightly better leveling gear for the new content. Your prestige and your achievements may carry over, but the new content runs on new rules by new standards. Or Cookie Clicker or other idle games: there are points where you unlock new powers that make cookies 100x faster. Your old stuff still makes cookies, but being twice as good at the pre-barrier stage only carries over as a 5% advantage for the next stage of competition. Like a rocket, what you did to bust through a barrier is like a rocket booster, and the moment you don’t need it, you should discard it as dead weight, because it’s not going to help you in your next upward climb anymore. America has lots of bilingual and trilingual teenagers, because elite colleges mandate it. America has almost no bilingual and trilingual adults. Keeping multiple languages fresh is hard work indeed, and it stops mattering to your life once you get into your college of choice, because you only needed it to get in, so people ditch it. It’s a spent rocket booster.

People who pass through several absorbing barriers but don’t reach a self-sustaining point of genuine class mobility sooner or later get a reality check. Oops, you can’t consume the culture to which you’re accustomed to without going deep into debt. Oops, you can’t raise kids in the city and have to move back to your hometown. Oops, that college degree is useless without a good job to go with it. Because the change was costly, people end up in a worse position than when they started. To strive out of the ghetto, a ghettoid has to cut off their family, or else their hungry mouths (cousin needs a new TV, brother needs braces, we need mo money for dem programs) will drag them back into the crab bucket and the abyss. What happens if you cut off your family to chase upward mobility and then have to slink back to the ghetto? You’re even worse off than before.

Once you’re committed, there’s no looking back. You have to go all the way. If you cut the thrust halfway through, you’ll burn up on reentry.

We return to the example of our Lower Womanhattanite. Imagine a 7 from Minnesota, a blonde in the top 10% of attractiveness. In order to enroll in the game, she has to move to Lower Womanhattan and rent an apartment there. Once she’s there, she’s on the clock. Every month, $3000 will be deducted from her bank account and she’ll get closer and closer to the wall. If she runs out of time, she has nothing to show for it but a bunch of stories about getting pumped and dumped by a bunch of autistic men named Brad who are a little too good at math. She puts on her war regalia, a nose ring, a tastefully subtle tattoo which can be covered up, and a single streak in her hair. The moment she makes this choice, she has devalued herself to her tribe of origin. She is no longer a debt-free virgin without tattoos. People can, and do, cite all sorts of statistics about people being better and better marriage material the further up you go the socioeconomic ladder. It’s true. It’s also irrelevant. It’s cope. What our heroine is doing is trying to signal availability to a rival socioeconomic tribe, a higher status one. Goth girl brain is a form of striver brain. And it’s a very old brain. It’s the same brain that led French girls to try and marry the invading German officers. And what did the French do? They shaved most of them and hung a few, as examples. You can’t defect from the tribe to a new higher status tribe. You stuck up whore, you think you’re too good for us? You uppity bitch. The actual n-count is fucking irrelevant, man. Actual sluttiness is a different bell curve and rural country girls have plenty of sluts too. But this is a deep disgust instinct. Any tribe that didn’t punish women and humiliate them for trying to leave the tribe to a conquering tribe would have died out a long time ago, because every tribe has been conquered at least once in history. So yeah, fuck that uppity bitch. But you normally let them back in after that. Eggs are expensive and sperm is cheap.

Now you may be wondering why pretty women don’t skip all this and try to maximize their lustful attractiveness as much as possible instead of playing subculture games. It doesn’t have to be alt-girl-fashion, but you do have to play at least one cultural game acceptable to the tribe, like Old Money aesthetic, or Tomboy Archaeologist/Ranger/etc, or Girlboss Executive. Why not just get pretty? Men online like to tell women that all men want is a pretty face and that rich men love to marry waitresses. That’s bullshit. It’s not true. Mating is about mixing genes, and you don’t keep your status generation after generation by breeding with waitresses. But there’s more to it than that.

In the game Cultist Simulator, the goal is to ascend to occult godhood by passing through the Tricuspid Gate. But there is another door, the Wrong Door, the Spider’s Door. And while you can enter the realm of gods through the Wrong Door, you cannot linger. You have a guest pass to eternity. This is what women are doing when they try to move up by focusing on their beauty alone. These are the yacht girls trapped between parties on the Social Club circuit, the lost and the damned. Why are they outcasts? Don’t men only care about beauty? Certainly, every once in a while one of them succeeds. There are plenty of idiots even among the elites and the oligarchs, and they tend to vote Republican! A scant few of them will pair off with a Donald Trump or some kind of megakulak who owns a megadealership, but most are doomed to be the cumrags handed out in the bags of party favors. For one thing, someone like me finds it incredibly disturbing when a model comes up and asks if you and your friend want to spitroast her. But men are horny dogs and some people will still find that to be… marriage material. However, one need only observe the behavior of the wives to see why the yacht girls are doomed. The wives do not like the yacht girls, and not just because they are literally looking to create affairs. If that were the case, the wives would relax when the yacht girls mingled with the young men on the make. But the yacht girls are unwelcome even when they are promoted to a wife, because they’re never acceptable as a “real wife”. Why? Because they didn’t play the game. They didn’t accept the tribal competition. They never did the alt girl thing, they never founded some fucking Airhockey startup. They cheated. It would be like an West African woman’s daughter not circumcising her genitals or a girl from the lip plate tribe not putting in a lip plate or a Chinese woman in certain eras not crushing her feet. Oh, you fucking bitch. You think you can skip the line? We’re going to ostracize you. And that means ostracizing your idiot husband. He doesn’t get to come to the smoky backrooms where deals are done. He can’t attend the dinner parties where the world spins. He’s cut off from the tribe.

And that’s what it is. Class mobility is about changing one tribe for another, where the tribes happen to be approximately hierarchical. A ruling class is also a ruling ethnicity, a clan of clans, a family of families. In all the paths of upward mobility, people are exchanging a combination of cultural signals and intelligence in order to get real economic resources and influence. But you can’t directly show your intelligence. So really, you’re exchanging a combination of signals and signals to get real economic resources. That’s the game, exchanging signals for resources until your resources are enough to secure a self-sustaining wealth pump of some kind. In the past, that was a landed estate, and today it’s a white shoe job, and tomorrow it may be a GPU farm, but the concept has not changed as long as there are humans. Autistics and sociopaths are often better at this because they have to construct their social matrix from zero, whereas most neurotypicals just imprint on their tribe of origin and that’s that. And nobody can ever signal their new tribe as well as if they were born in it because there’s a billion subtle things that can’t be aped except by being immersed in it. The signals are a sign of showing your commitment to your new tribe.

And this answers the mystery of why social mobility is constant over time. If we study our NRx canon and read The Son Also Rises, we find that class is hereditary at .8 in Europe and Northeast Asia. Astonishing! But what’s more astonishing is that this mobility rate has not changed for hundreds and hundreds of years. Why? Across that time, we’ve seen the rise and fall of feudalism, liberalism, Communist revolutions, civil wars, technology – and it keeps chugging along. Part of that is IQ. IQ is hereditary at 0.65 or so, so we should expect this to be the absolute maximum level of class mobility, for class mobility to have 0.65 heredity. Smart aristocrats have smart aristocrat kids. But why has it not moved at all, despite vast institutional changes? Because all our attempts to change mobility do nothing about what mobility actually is. Mobility is allowing people to exchange signals for resources. Our attempts to increase class mobility are nothing more than making signals cheaper and more accessible. The prime example is college. College used to be a ticket straight into the elite, now it’s a gold star you stamp on your resume just to get into the door of an unpaid internship. That’s because signals are only valuable insofar as they are both rare and costly. A signal that is not rare and not costly is worthless, which is why lifestyle branding is pointless and people who signal their spiritual aristocracy by eating at Shake Shack and living in a city writing a blog do not move a single inch on the Great Class Ladder.

What class mobility is is a market. The supply of class mobility is however many slots in a higher class organically open up through failure to reproduce and downward mobility. The demand for class mobility is how many strivers want to move up. Every striver is every other striver’s competition. And the price? The price is signals. The more people want to strive, the more you need people to pay more in terms of signaling. The winners of the competition are the high bidders, more or less, just like a regular market. What liberalism and meritocracy did was not permit more class mobility. Class mobility isn’t a coup complete program, it’s a jihad complete program, because the amount of class mobility is the amount of slots that open up each generation, which is a product of how an ethnicity lives and breeds and expels unworthy talent from its tribe. Instead, these reforms made it cheaper to signal, which made the signals less rare and less valuable, which meant that people had to spend more resources to create more signaling currency to outbid their rival strivers, while simultaneously vastly increasing the pool of strivers. After the French Revolution, every fuck in your whole country could try to strive and become an aristocrat, and after globalization, the whole world could gun for your spot, theoretically. Humans are evolved for inefficient, localized status competitions. We want to compete with our monkeysphere. People are going insane.

So what can be done? If reforms aren’t about increasing class mobility, what are they about? Well, competition is good in that it creates more of what you compete over. Intensified signaling spirals create more of whatever good is incidentally created in the signaling spiral. The post-French Revolution period was immensely good for science and technology. Aristocrats around the world have convergently evolved to loving ideas as a signal of high status, because having complex, interesting ideas is a good way to convey intelligence, which keeps your tribe full of smart people, which keeps you on top. You’ll notice that most of the men who countersignal smart wives and focus on beauty are proles. Proles stay proles. Once the signaling spiral was let loose, you had to make as many ideas as you could to stay on top, which meant science went ballistic. But we don’t value genuine knowledge anymore, for many reasons.

So why strive at all, if it’s so fraught and if failing has real consequences? Because Man is not content with his lot. Because the mark of an ambitious soul is to peer out past the foggy crests of the mountains and wonder what lies beyond, to look at the setting sun and want to chase it into the strange unknown, to see a throne and imagine yourself atop it. To never settle, but with a restless murmur, carry on, towards an unimagined and unimaginable infinite.

Though I’ve flown one hundred thousand miles, feeling very still,
Monsieur le Baron

PS: The Costco with the “Ask me about Costco” vests was the wealthier. If you got it wrong, check your gut instincts.

Dearest Friends,

I was gobble gobble gobbling over my Turkey Day, and as always, there was an argument. Or we might call it a spirited debate. Let me take you through it.

Imagine a man. He is a stereotypical resident of a stereotypical neighborhood we’ll call the Upper Rest Side. The man is a professor at You Pork University, one of the best “State Schools” in the country, despite being inexplicably private. He wears square glasses and a tweed coat, is balding, and he collects African masks. He is a very wealthy nouveau riche, but his family is from the shtetl. Every year on Thanksgiving, he gives a lecture on an obscure African tribe and their sociology and praises Hashem for His grace.

Is this man high status?

Everyone agreed he was.

Now imagine another man from another place. This man is from Snark Pope, a neighborhood across town. He’s rich, but he’s not as rich, and at any rate, the money is vulgar. Not only is he shtetl people, he’s first-generation rich, having made a few million as a marketing executive. Nevertheless, he is also thankful, for he does also live a blessed life. His hair is starting to go salt-and-pepper and he has a body that, while not as chiseled as a Grek bodybuilder’s, is well-maintained from regular aerobic exercise and clean living. His business affairs prosper and his dinner is well-attended by both friends and family. He gives his own speech, and this one is about Black Lives Matters. It is cribbed from MSNBC and consists of platitudes and cheap slogans.

My interlocutor asserts this man, the Snark Poper, is higher status than our first subject. He’s more socially dominant, which I am forced to agree to. When the two meet, the Snark Poper owns the Upper Rest Sider. And not only that, he’s more evolved! What? How can he be more evolved, man? This guy is just worse than the Upper Rest Sider. Well, exactly! I object to this. Of course I object.

If you don’t believe the Snark Poper would own the Upper Rest Sider, I will provide an illustrative example:

Upper Rest Sider: So you see, the tribesmen of the Ombombo eat the tree fly as part of their coming-of-age ritual because the tree fly has a particular life cycle in which the larva embed into the fruit and emerge fully grown – accordingly, the youth is told to eat the fly to gain its nous, so that he may also taste the sweetness of life.

Snark Papist: Are you saying that Africans eat flies because they have no food? That seems really inappropriate.

Upper Rest Sider: No, you misunderstand. This is an example of their rich culture, they have different moral standards from Weste-

Snark Papist: Oh, so they don’t have morals and that’s why they eat bugs? That’s racist. You’re racist!

The Upper Rest Sider sags in defeat. Later that night, he will return home, log onto his anonymous Bird.com account, and write an esoteric racist shitpost.

Well, think about it, continues my interlocuter. His status-seeking features are more refined. The Snark Poper is doing prog-to-mog. If you’re optimizing yourself to be a mogging machine, then objectively the actual knowledge, money, etc is dead weight. It’s much better and more effective to become a bigger asshole. In fact, we can go further.

Imagine a third man, from a neighborhood adjoining Snark Pope: Billionswurg. He has no money. He has no taste, at least not any taste an art critic would grasp. His favorite painters are Bart Simpson and the guy who draws graffiti dicks on the brick walls of alleyways. He knows nothing about Africa, instead cribbing racist jokes from his favorite podcasts. But this guy is cool. He’s way cooler than the Snark Poper.

At this, I was speechless.

This is what happens when those two meet.

Snark Papist: Hey there young man, do you know where the subway station is? I’m afraid I’ve gotten a little mixed up.

Hipster: Why the fuck are you bothering me?

Snark Papist: Oh, I’m just trying to figure out where to go. I’m not from here, I came down to see the Art of Niger exhibit.

Hipster: Whoa bro, did you just say the N-word? The NIGGER word? C’mon man, you can’t do that.

Snark Papist: No, no, it’s Niger. It’s a country in Africa.

Hipster: I don’t think you know anything about nigger. Name every African.

Snark Papist: I’m sorry?

Hipster: Damn right you’re sorry. Ooga booga bix nood mufugga watermelon chicken! Gronk! Snood! Do you even know what that means? That’s Nig-Nog, the language of the Nogger tribe.

Snark Papist: Well, ah, uhh, um, that’s why I’m trying to learn more, so I can grow and thrive.

Hipster: Ummm, you’re Chinese.

Snark Papist: I… I am? No, I… I’m Jewish.

At this point, the Hipster begins aggressively pelvic thrusting towards the Snark Papist. The Papist flees in terror. When he gets home, he wonders if he was raped. He resolves to be a better feminist ally in the future.

What is status? Social dominance. And what is social dominance? Social dominance is the ability to force your way in social situations. If everyone agrees on something because it benefits them all, that doesn’t take any social dominance to do. What takes a lot of social dominance? Pointing at a deer and calling it a horse. Or better yet, pointing at an empty box and calling it a horse. Not just a horse, but the most majestic stallion you’ve ever seen. And the act of exerting social dominance and getting away with it is itself both a signal of and a producer of more social dominance. The act is its own social proof if you don’t get called out on it. Roughly speaking, we can say social dominance has two components, which I will call Nerd Power and Cunt Power, and your total social dominance, which is your status, is a function of the two factors.

Nerd Power is your ability to generate objective value. In a relationship, it’s your ability to provide, to bring home the bacon. In the white collar tech world, engineers have the Nerd Power. But it’s not just things like that. If the standard of value is muscles, then the jock has a lot of Nerd Power. In fact, it is commonly observed, and true, that many jocks are just Nerds for Sports. The value of Nerd Power is the ability to give people carrots. In the carrot-and-stick of social dynamics, your Nerd Power is how many carrots you bring to the table. One problem is that without a stick, a lot of your carrots can be bullied out of you for very little. And the traits that make people good at things often make it harder for them to defend what they make. Cooperativeness, high trust, and affability generate value in most parts of life, but it’s easy to be walked over if you do. The most conscientious person on a work team ends up carrying the project. But there’s an even worse failure state. Sometimes people don’t want any carrots out of you. At that point, you reach Nerd Power’s failure mode. Nerd Power’s value comes from objective Survival Constraints. The more you need that value, the more you’re going to have to negotiate with someone with Nerd Power, and the better their conditions will get. The classic example of Nerd Power achieving utter social dominance is when you have Employee #1, the only one who groks the mainframe. People like that set their own rules and name their own price. But much of the time, Nerd Power can be pushed around by the other source of social dominance: Cunt Power.

This is what happens when Nerd Power has no carrots the other party wants.

Let me tell you a story. How many layers of recursion deep can we go? As many as it takes to fry the brains of the censors. There was a junior investment banker who had a girlfriend, a journalist, he wanted desperately to please. But no matter what he did, none of it ever seemed good enough. Not that he had enough time. He hated that. Every day, he woke up – too early – and rolled out of bed, sometimes clothes still on from the last night, and dragged himself into the office.

He wanted to die. He was counting the days until that bonus check hit. Was it worth it? Could it be worth it? Was this all there was to life?

He was neglecting her. Was he abusing her? Was this abuse? He hated himself. He didn’t want to hurt her, he really didn’t. He wanted to love her. He wasn’t worthy of loving her. He wanted to be. He couldn’t. He hit himself, a lot. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Stupid! Even his nights didn’t belong to him. He could leave the office, but he couldn’t escape the office. Ping. Ping. He checked his phone. It was Teams. It was his boss, actually. He was supposed to spend some time with her. He wouldn’t get to. Was this his fault? He should have checked his work more. He should have asked for comments before leaving. Stupid. Stupid!

I’m sorry, he croaks. I have to do this. Ten minutes, babe. Twenty, tops.

He spends the next hour turning comments. By the time he finishes, she’s bored. She’s gone.

He wants to crumple up and blow away. He can’t. Yet another thing he can’t do right.

When they make love, he thinks about death a lot. Mortality. Death would be the end of his pain. At least he could die right. Everyone can. But death also seems like a door. Who knows what’s beyond death? At night, he dreams about a different, far off world. It is full of fairies and dreams and sweet princesses and noble princes. Everyone lives happily ever after. Is that the place beyond death? Maybe this is his sleeping life. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with his life. She’s out there, in the woods. She’s waiting for him to wake up. Death. He tells her this, once, well, at least the first part. He thinks of death when they make love. She looks at him with sheer contempt. He never brings it up again.

He takes her to the Hamptons by Blade. That helicopter service. He thinks it will be magical. The house is his parent’s, but it’s his for the weekend. She thinks it’s too loud. Her hair gets messed up. She blames him. She mopes. He wakes up before dawn. He stands in the sand, water up to his ankles, and looks out, waiting for the sun to rise. The cold wind nips at his face. He subscribes to Jezebel. He wants to understand her better. He doesn’t understand the articles. Stupid. Stupid!

He’s going to do it. He’s going to quit. He’s going to love her like she deserves to be loved. He’s going to move to New Hampshire and become an English professor. He’ll have a large dog that he walks every morning. He’ll grow his own flowers. They’ll sip coffee and watch the swaying of the trees. They’ll be happy. Come with me. He tells her.

She leaves him. Later, she writes an article about him. My experience dating a toxic finance bro who pretended to be a feminist!

He cries. He wants to die. He takes a fluffy, woolly blanket, and wraps it around himself until he feels safe. Then he picks up his pencils. And he begins to draw.

A world where the pain will stop.

Nassapaqua Hills.

INTERMISSION

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

Autumn 2022.

I am on the train heading into New York City.

Summer is over. It’s always better to spend as much of summer outside the swampy, murky mess of New York summer as you can.

I am pacing the halls back and forth, agitated. Bored, mostly. You lose signal sometimes – often, frankly too often. The infrastructure in this fucking country. You can’t put cell towers all along a fixed railroad route? Of course they can’t. They used to have booze on the trains. It was something to do. Killed time. They got rid of that a little while back. Still, I can’t hate the train. I love the train. I love cross-country trips by train, and I even love little commuter hops. I love the sleepers and I love the Amtrak food.

At the very least, you might run into someone interesting, someone to talk to. You meet all kinds of people in the train. I’ve met Italian dukes who run painting contractors (there’s a lot of money in that, apparently). I’ve met retired medical professors. I’ve met ranchers headed back to their vast herds in the trackless Midwest. You never know, you know?

I walk up and down the seats. I see someone reading. Tall kid, young, white. Square jaw, but a bit of softness around the eyes. Well, you don’t want to interrupt that, it’s rude. They’re reading. I spy the title of the book on the front. Kirstin Lavransdatter. Oh, what the hell. I know that book.

“Hey,” I say. “Is that Kirstin Lavransdatter?” He doesn’t respond. The hell is this? “I’ve read that book,” I say again, loudly, staring directly at him. He jumps a little up in his seat, looks like he’s about to bolt. Maybe that was a little much. I think about conquering the world while he opens his book more widely, then reaches a hand into his coat pocket, retrieving… a fucking flower? He places it slowly in the inner fold of the book, then pauses, then picks it up, adjusts it slightly, and gingerly moves it so that the bloom of the flower isn’t disturbed by the book. Then he slowly closes the book around the flower.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t realize you were talking to me.”
“I’ve read that book too. It’s interesting,” I say.
“Really? I can never get enough of it. You know, the way flawed people… women, they can find grace. People getting caught up in themselves, but… it works out.”
“Well, that’s the beauty of the Catholic tradition, I think. It doesn’t demand perfection, but penance. Grace is a gift, freely given, to sinners, if only they reach out for it. Lord have mercy.”
“Lord have mercy,” he repeats.

There is a silence. There is only the rumbling and shaking of the train.

“I’m Clive,” he says. “I teach this book at a local liberal arts college. Local to Nassapaqua, I mean, not New York. It’s, uh, the subject of my doctoral work. I find it really interesting… women, feminism, sacrifice… coming to terms with a broken life. I don’t- well, that is, I mean… it’s not feminist like that, not in… It’s not clear that she’s right or wrong. Can any woman be happy with a disappointing man? But can she do anything but blame herself when the man she does pick… he’s… well… It all comes down to the grace of God, I guess. What do you do?”

“I work in finance.” He winces.

We pass through the internet dead zone. I sit down in a row I can have to myself, whip out my phone, and doomscroll the Bird the rest of the journey.

When I arrive at the station, I call an Uber. The app spins a bit, then picks up a driver. Because I’m an Uber Diamond Rewards customer, Uber upgrades me to a black cab automatically. A tank-like SUV pulls up to the curb. “Ahmed?” I ask. He nods. He repeats my name back to me. I confirm. We’re on our way.

I’m headed down to Dimes Square. Dimes Square is a microneighborhood, a little lemon wedge squeezed next to Chinatown, a little slip of a place. That’s what it is geographically. Culturally? It’s the scene.

All cultural roads lead to Dimes Square. Here is the intersection of Trumpism and breast milk and tradcaths and racists and leftists and dirtbags and poasters and troons and and balloons and drugged out freaks and artists and geeks. It was, in short, the worst place on Earth and the only place to be. Anyone who was anyone was there, and there were there to be a tastemaker and a tastetaker.

And me? I don’t know. I supposed I wanted to see it. Just to know about it, and that it was there. Grandly, I thought, I would give voice to the voiceless stories. Lowly, I thought, this was my version of Little Honey Boo Boo. The truth is probably something in between.

I showed up at the door, only to be checked by some bro in a jacket.

“Do you see this jacket? Do you know what that means?” he screamed.
“No,” I said, nonplussed.
“That means I work at BOAR’S HEAD, BRO. I make SANDWICHES. I decide who pees! You want to pee, I’m the bathroom king.”

I just wanted to go inside but this guy wouldn’t let me. But then, a black man looked at me, then looked at him, and spoke. “Ay, what do you think you’re doing? Crazy motherfucker,” he said. The Boar’s Head Guard stammered. “I’m Black,” said the black man. He was black. The Boar’s Head Guard’s eyes widened in realization as he realized the black man was black.

“Sorry,” he murmured. “Right this way,” he said, ushering me in.

I went inside. I scanned the room. Some people were clearly and visibly dysgenic, their physical mutations no doubt only matched by their mental ones. The others were not. They were attractive. Art hos. The place was swarming with journalists. They loved it. They hated it. It disgusted them. It was that curious mixture of emotions that was closest to them being collectively aroused. They were aroused by this, The Scene. And they were here to observe it, write about it, fawn about it. I wasn’t sure which group disturbed me more. This was not a place of honor. A man was hitting himself in the testicles with a hammer. That was his art. Another was reading his poetry. The poetry was about masturbating to his dead cat, who reminded him of Garfield the Cat, who he was sexually attracted to. It climaxed and so did he. I sidled up in that awkward mixer way to someone to strike up a conversation.

“So what’s your deal?” he asked.
“I work in finance,” I mumbled.
“Pfft. You know where I work?” he asked, puffing out his chest. “I work at a fucking movie theater, man. A mo-vie the-at-er.”
“Like for ar-” I started.
“Man, we show the best pictures. Probably. I make the popcorn. I pop the popcorn. I put the butter on the popcorn. Does a faggot financier even know what butter is? Fucking retard.”

I started to talk again, to tell him that I did know what butter was, but he interrupted me again.

“Butter is,” he said, crinkling his nose. He paused. He was thinking. “Butter is that yellow delicious stuff.” He looked me up and down. “So where do you live? Can you even afford your own place? Loser.”
“I live on the Upper East Side,” I said.
He smirked condescendingly. “I live in SoHo,” he said. “My rent is $15,000 a month.” Then, triumph crackling in his voice, he said, “Daddy dearest pays for me.”

He scoffed, concluding I wasn’t worth any more of his time, and turned around. It didn’t matter. The King had arrived.

The King was the coolest guy in this crowd, the New York scene, which made him the coolest guy in New York, which made him the coolest guy in the Western World. He wasn’t just a tastemaker, he was *the tastemaker*. At least until someone knocked him down. But that would be hard to do. He was a magnificent specimen. His hair formed a greasy Jewfro. His eyes were beady and poorly spaced, so it was never quite clear what he was looking at. His jowls were too fat, and bulbous, and he looked around the room with the cool, dispassionate gaze of someone who knew he was the shit. Idly, he picked at himself with his fat sausage fingers.

With him was 2022’s It Girl. Everyone knew he was the most beautiful woman in New York. He had broad shoulders, like a linebacker. His jaw was thick enough to crack granite. He was wearing a wig, which was starting to fall off. He had a hairy chest, which the King licked with lust. He was hot with desire for his Queen. They began to make out. As one, moved by this sight, the crowd stood to clap. And clap. They kept clapping.

I kept clapping. They kept clapping. We were clapping. Seconds passed. Sweat dripped down my forehead. I shouldn’t have worn my coat. But I couldn’t take it off now. I was busy clapping. What, was I gonna stop to take off my coat? But still, that was making me thirsty. My arms were getting tired. I was clapping. How long were we clapping? Five minutes? Ten minutes? Clap, clap, clap. Finally, one of the journalists, she began to slow down. She stopped clapping. Bit by bit, the crowd slowed too, then stopped.

The King locked eyes with her, his gaze steely.

The next day, she was cancelled on Twitter for transphobia. Soon afterwards, she was fired from her job.

Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.

HE WASN’T THE FINANCE BRO SHE WANTED HIM TO BE.

Cunt Power. What is Cunt Power? If Nerd Power is the carrot, then Cunt Power is the stick. Cunt Power is how much of a dickhead you are. The more you can cunt people out, the more power you have over them, because people will do what you say to make you stop. Cunt Power is bragging, Cunt Power is being overbearing, Cunt Power is shaming people into line. One of the reason why women like assholes is because without any ability to be an asshole, people will just walk over you and take all of your value. They will win by Cunt Power. But absent the survival constraints, Cunt Power tends to dominate Nerd Power. Any time Cunt Power interacts with Nerd Power, Cunt Power will simply own Nerd Power. You can only deal with someone pushing you by pushing back yourself.

The problem with a pure Cunt Power strategy is that people can easily disengage with you. Social status is not a one person game, but requires other to acquiesce to your will in order for you to be high social status. You can cunt people out, but if they have no reason to stay, then they will stop interacting with you. So most people have to balance carrot with stick, and on balance, they tend to need more carrots than there are sticks. But cunt power can spiral out of control if there’s no need to bargain for the other person’s social presence in your life. That creates an inherent power imbalance. So someone’s Mother-in-Law can get a very high social status by cunting out their Son-in-Law. If his status is high, then her status becomes his status + 1, which is very high. The ideal status-maximizing position to take there is for the Son-in-Law to be a real catch, but still not good enough for your daughter, and have to sit and take it while you ream him out. That’s the visceral feeling of winning. Similarly, a Bridezilla is essential to her own wedding, so she can feel and demonstrate high social status by making everyone else’s life hell. That’s, on an animal level, the definition of winning. And we are just status apes deep down.

But we can go further. What if you could cunt out total strangers? What if you could achieve maximum cuntiness all the time with people you don’t even know? You can. All societies have sacred myths which they find legitimate. In ours, wokeness and progressive morality plays that role. By becoming holier-than-thou in the reigning ideology, you can cunt out random people, and if they resist, you can shame them inside the dominant moral paradigm, bringing down force against them. Damn, that feels good. You’re winning as an animal. There is, however, a problem. Status showing behaviors almost all come at a cost to the signaler. A peacock’s tail is a drag on the peacock. Philanthropy comes at great expense if you do it for real. The ancients used to have their Big Men throw grand feasts or make sacrifices of their fine animals to the gods. To show off your status usually makes you poorer, not richer. Even pure social shows of status rarely turn out well for the signaler – nobody really likes a braggart. But we still do it. High status means high mating chances. And those hipsters mate like crazy, for what they bring to the table (nothing but how cool they are). The problem with constantly degrading your own life when you already have little, though, is that you break right through rock bottom and keep going. In some objective sense of life achievement, these are some of the worst losers you can imagine. They’re not smart, they’re not successful, they’re not learned, they’re not working to benefit society, they’re not good company, and they’re not nice.

I suppose that gives us a good working definition of a true Status-Maximizing Sociopath. A Status-Maximizing Sociopath is someone who looks at that and thinks “Good deal”. Love of the world, or perhaps, love of the world loving you.

But almost everyone will do something for a few status points more, unless they’re literally fighting to survive.

Later that night, I had the opportunity to own my interlocuter. And I took it. He was complaining about venture capital. How come he couldn’t raise a bunch of VC money? It’s because he didn’t have the right credentials. Someone like my friends had the right credentials. But his ideas were good. I took this opportunity to own him.

In fact, his ideas being good were the problem. I was in that world long enough to know that many of the companies that raised the most money came from the stupidest ideas. Why? Because it’s, again, status signaling. It takes a good VC to make money. But it takes a great VC to lose a lot of money. First, because you need that money to begin with. And secondly, the stupider an idea, the more “visionary” it seems to champion it, which benefits the VC’s status. I had won.

But I had also lost, in principle, the argument I had made earlier in the night. And so, to my interlocuter, who I know will be reading this, consider this essay my concession speech. You have won the traditional Thanksgiving political argument, and proven yourself to really have become an exceptional young adult. I am thankful for another year passing – after all, we only get so many.

May all of your lives be blessed and may we all get through the coming trials.

Thankful,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest friends,

Do you know why the caged tire man sings? Probably because we keep poking his rubber fat rolls. But why does he sing for his supper? Because he must, because we all must. And what does he sing for?

Well, often for the Japanese. Japan was a place where the Tire Man food guide found a lot of traction. Why? Because the Japanese, like the French, found a lot of success in the technique and artistry of food. The presentation and the experience of food was given a lot of focus. In the Japanese, the French had found a kind of kindred spirit. And what they had in common was a very important thing.

What is high and low cuisine? High cuisine is defined not just by its deliciousness, but about the care of preparation, the quality of ingredients, the presentation, and especially the technique. While many 3 stars exist in the realm of novelty and experimentation (the chefs have ascended to the food equivalent of modernist composition – is molecular gastronomy not akin to atonality?), the far more common 2 and 1 stars are almost always very delicious. But deliciousness itself does not make something high cuisine. The aforementioned elements of high cuisine combine into one thing: the pursuit of a perfected dish. It is not only dumplings or whatever, but the attempt to create dumplings with such art that they are really what they ought to be. By contrast, low cuisine is cheap, mass produced, and delicious. Fast food is delicious, but in a crude way. Hearty peasant foods are delicious, but able to made by an ordinary, non-professional chef household with commonplace tools – they do not emphasize strange and exacting techniques. Stewing and roasting are popular – cheap on attention, even if they can take a long time. Between high and low cuisine is middle cuisine, which is often not delicious but is a statement of fanciness – you go to show that you are a person who can go to fancy restaurants.

Of course it was always a fit for Japanese culture. Japan is a culture of monomania – it’s not just the katana meme. While Japan pretends its claims to fame are all ancient, many are really imported. Oh, you think you know trucks? We’ll take those trucks and make the perfect truck. Oh, you think you know noodles? Those noodles are bullshit. We have made the perfect ramen. This fruit, the grape? Watch this. We will grow a grape the size of a fist, watching the skin every day to make sure it doesn’t split open. Beef? You think you’re a beef eater, Texan Man? Behold my marbling! The case of the peach is instructive. Peaches are not from Japan, but Japan loves its peaches. And Japan has a myth about peaches. But as one normally imagines myths, we have a problem – peaches showed up in Japan in 1875. The peach blossoms were not used to grow real, eaten peaches prior to then. How could real, modern humans invent a myth? I suppose the same way one invents a religion.

While Shinto is fake, what we might call the Shinto ethos is real. That is, objects that are real and physical can deserve worship. And that mastery or perfection can be obtained with physical pursuits. I’m sure you’ve seen things like the “God of Swords” or the “God of Spears” in anime or manga. What the peach man is growing is not a peach, but a Peach. Not an ordinary peach, but the God of Peaches. So of course the God of Peaches can have a myth and dwell in mythology. That is rightly where it belongs. Like the Bronze Age brave, the peach man undergoes a quest to the realm of the divine. Through ritual, the physical passes into the realm of the mythical, much like burning offerings changed them from the meat of men to the meat of the gods. The mythical is a realm of stories, and these stories are true lies about what composes a culture.

To the extent you can invent a religion or a myth, it must be reflecting of the deep nature of a people, such that it can survive the quest to the mythic realm. That is the secret of the Gloranthan hero quest. The safest way is always to reenact the myth as told. But if circumstances dictate, you can introduce novelty to the realm of the gods, and in doing so, hopefully find the answer fitting your own time. However, the novelty must conform to the realm of the gods – what is introduced must reflect the deep nature and essence of a myth, which is the people that produced it, in the same way, or it will be ejected from the Godrealm – painfully.

Consider that a warning for all our would-be right-wing Brahmin.

And what is this mythic realm? It is an imagined place, certainly. But it is also an imagined time. It is a particular imagined time, which becomes the Mythic Age. It is an idealized past from which all things of antiquity must descend. The common mistake is to imagine this Mythic Age is always the Ancient Age, a distant, far-off place beyond human recording. But that is not so. The Mythic Age is deeply tied with the birth of a culture, not the strictures of absolute time and absolute technology.

The birth of a culture, like the death of a culture, is a long, drawn-out thing, and it is hard to draw bright lines. Take, for instance, the long, strange death of Late Antiquity. Rome fell, Rome will fall, and Rome is falling.

“We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.”

Ryan Gosling

An honorable culture, like an honorable man, must seek an honorable end. When did Rome fall? 476? And yet, for a while longer, the lingering energy of the empire and its institutions persisted. The men who felled Rome did not think they were felling Rome. They admired Rome. They wanted to be Rome. When Rome fell, they styled themselves as continuations of such. Successors.

What happened to the legion? The legions started out as free men of property mustered to serve Rome. Marius transformed them into a standing army of career professionals. But as Rome decayed, it proved incapable of paying and upkeeping the classic Marian legions. There was a shift to a two-tiered system. There would be interior legions which more closely resembled the classic legions combined with the limitanei, troops that manned permanent border fortifications and which could quickly muster to confront threats. When Rome fell, the limitanei did not. They stayed at their posts because no one relieved them. When the Merovingian Empire rose, it found willing servants in these final legions. The nature of birth and death can be seen in the evolution of the Merovingian military. Roughly, it had several components: royal retainers (belonging to one or many kings), the retinues of the magnates, the yeoman levy, and the Roman legions. Each of these had different operational ranges. The yeoman levy had to stay close enough to home to return to do farm labor. The magnate retinues had no business but war, but had a magnate master who would not allow them to do tasks disagreeable to them or stray from their control. The legionnaires were professional soldiers but had a home base in the fortification they manned. The royal retainers were highly mobile and well trained, but few in number. The Merovingian army was primarily an infantry army, with 10-30% cavalry. The Merovingian legionnaire was an armored heavy infantryman with a throwing axe or javelin that was used to break or disable an enemy’s shield before closing into melee combat.

What is the life or death of a culture? While a culture lives, it is vital. It self-reproduces and evolves and comes up with new variations. It is, like a living thing, learning and growing older. A dying culture is not the same way. We can see this in the decline and fall of the last Roman legions. Youthful Rome had an inexhaustible supply of manpower, but had not yet found its way – it had not yet invented the legion idea. Marius’s mules were strong, vigorous, and many. As Rome passed through adulthood to enter old age, the legions changed again to this center and border model. But the fall of the Rome, the death of Rome, did not usher in a new form of legion. That is what it means to have a dead culture – despite the radically different world, the legions did not become radically different. Rather, they were conserving a fixed supply of vitality inherited from their dead world which ebbed over time. When Romanness was the living culture, the ability to raise legions was – while not unlimited – certainly not a problem. Strong and willing men could be recruited and *formed into* legions.

When the early Merovingians summoned these legions, they found this still to be the case, and were able to form a few of their own. But while Rome mustered whole armies into being, the Merovingians, despite holding substantially similar territory, could only create a few legions. A living and vital culture has the power to assimilate and absorb. The legions could always reproduce the culture of the legion through their institutions during the time of Rome. During the Merovingian night, the institutions and their military science disappeared – but there was still military tradition. And this tradition was alive enough that it was understood, and being an understood tradition, it could be used to raise more legions. As this vitality waned further, no more legions could be raised. The last reinforcements had arrived in that long, dark night. What legions remained could only reinforce themselves, reproducing themselves. The military traditions still survived, but they were now merely dead tradition. The preservation of fire had become the worship of embers scattered among ashes. The ability to teach military drills and maneuvers had forgotten the purpose and reasoning of such things. You were a legionnaire because your father was a legionnaire and his father before him, going back into a forgotten antiquity. And you would do your duty until one day, the Emperor returned to relieve you. The one thing that could not be taken from you was an honorable death.

The wars continued. Bit by bit, the last Roman legions were chipped away, lines ending before they could renew themselves. And some time in the final decades of the 7th century, the last legion fell, two hundred years after their emperors did. Only in death did duty end.

As the last embers fade, a great relearning must occur. Traditions are a culture’s answers to the great problems of life, and those problems do not go away just because an empire declines and falls. Who now speaks of the Merovingians? Because the Merovingians are only the shade of Rome, rapidly fading away. The traditions are necessary because the problems remain. But the old, dying culture cannot adapt its traditions to meet changing times, and more and more, they fall out of step with a world deeply unlike the world that created them. Meanwhile, the rising culture is confronting the constant problems of life and happening into solutions that work with those problems while reflecting the reality *it* is born into.

This early misty age, when the culture exists but is not aware of itself, is not conscious of itself and what it is, becomes the Mythic Age of the culture. Cultural Antiquity, the age which we consider a thing to have existed since time immemorial, is not a fixed thing, or even a time relative to the present, but refers back to the Mythic Age of the culture. The Romans had their own Mythic Age in the founding of Rome, the kings, and the early Republic, the early Republic becoming the moment of consciousness. What is the British Mythic Age? It begins with Late Antiquity and King Arthur and ends with British self-awareness in either Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror. The mythology of Britain thus hearkens back to an imagined Romano-British age, which has a *fixed chronology*, despite being mythical. You can place the unreal events in a particular time and a particular place. It is the mythic Britain behind the real one, as C.S. Lewis might say. And the Mythic Age and the Mythic place are perhaps not real, but they are a reflection of what should be real, the Britain that Britain imagines it should be. For the French, this Mythic Age is a time spanning from that same Late Antiquity to Charlemagne, when the new culture realizes it is born and that it exists.

When writing new myths, they place themselves into that Mythic Age. Stories set long ago, in a vague past, are set at a particular time, the Mythic Age. It is the symbols of that Mythic Age that confer legitimacy. The scepter is not a universal of rule, but there must be a thing that fills the role of that scepter. For instance, the Dahomey, a gunpowder culture, coming of age in the Early Modern, had a shotgun of state as a symbolic weapon conferring legitimacy. In their primal myths, metallurgy and the forging of iron are very important, developing into themes of duality, reshaping, and a metaphysics of creation. From a real historical viewpoint, it does not make sense to have iron and gunpowder as primal, metaphysical elements when they were created in real history at a real time at a documented place and were not eternal and coexistent with the universe. But from a mythic point of view, there was only one thing the Dahomey could call their god of iron, war, and ur-masculinity: Gun.

What is America’s Mythic Age? The Early Modern period through the Civil War. When do we set our Disney fairy tales? For the most part, they are set in the Early Modern era, the time preceding the American and French Revolutions, but succeeding the Medieval. Like European Gothic civilization before us, Americans struggle, on a folk and gut level, to comprehend a past beyond the Early Modern. When medieval painters painted antiquity, they dressed up the figures in a style familiar to them, and they could do nothing else. To really live and perceive the past beyond that would mean reaching into a time where their culture did not exist, which they cannot recall and which does exist in the scope of their oral and cultural traditions. When Americans imagine the past, everything before our infancy is blobbed together with the events of the Early Modern, becoming one theme park of Pastland, the world of a vague yesterday. When we try to imagine the Medieval, we get not the Medieval, but knights in shining armor (Late Medieval/Early Modern) and regulated grand jousting tournaments (Late Medieval/Early Modern), and to top it all off, we call it… a Renaissance Faire. Nice. America does not remember the world before the New World. The Old World is shrouded in mystery. There are Mythic figures for America from the Colonial Age and the settling of the West and Manifest Destiny, but with the Civil War, we were forced into being one nation. We exited childhood by seeing our parents fucking – traumatic.

So it doesn’t matter if peaches came to Japan in 1876. The peaches have a peach spirit and they’re a part of myth now.

So we return to food, and with that, the safe exotic.

What is the safe exotic? The safe exotic is a thing which is culturally distant that does not transgress the axioms of the culture, thus becoming a boundary limiter between us and the alien them. Whenever the benefits of multiculturalism are brought up, the safe exotic is cited, ignoring the fact that the safe exotic is necessarily of the host culture and not alien. When people say chicken tikki marsala is as British as British gets, they’re right, but they’re also lying, and this is obvious because they cite it as a benefit of multiculturalism and thus the alien. The safe exotic exists in the boundary, the liminal space between us and them. But it cannot be them, because it being them would make it unsafe, would actually end up challenging the assumptions of the host. Honor killing is not the safe exotic, because it transgresses the cultural frame and values of the host culture, despite being another ubiquitous product of mass immigration.

Why did Chinese and Japanese food find wide adoption in America? Because, for America, they are a safe exotic. They are different – but not too different. Not every cuisine takes off in America. Chinese food is a safe exotic. Chinese dishes are a lot like regular American State Fair food – here’s some shit, fry it. Fry it some more. Drown things in oil. Blunt, meaty flavors. Japanese food is an analogue to French food, a relationship the French also acknowledge. It is a safe exotic mirror of French cooking, a traditional style of fancy food for Americans. So in your small town, you will have a fancy European (Italian or French, usually Italian in a small town) restaurant, a diner or burger place, a pizza place, and their safe exotic analogues: a Chinese takeout place and a Japanese (or, more often, an “Asian fusion”/”fusion hibachi”) restaurant. It’s a way of leaving the comfort zone without actually having to confront the alien. In the fictional small town of Twin Peaks (population 5,120.1), you have a Thai-Italian restaurant (fancy, also combines the safe exotic with the local version), a BBQ restaurant, a tavern, and a diner.

The safe exotic doesn’t just apply to food, but the boundary markings of any culture or subculture. Another kind of culture is class culture. Some people assume things which are expensive are things consumed by the rich or high class. This is not the case. UMC people do not buy and wear T-shirts with large Gucci logos, despite their high price tags. That is because that item transgresses their cultural values. Rather, those items are for proles who get rich. The gold-covered, flashy aesthetic is an expression of prole values given a lot of money: that’s why they love Donald Trump. These items constitute the safe exotic for the prole. If you get rich and consume these luxury items, you are not a class traitor because you have not transgressed our cultural values, you have not violated the taboos of working class life. But if you do something far cheaper that goes against prole values, like becoming a blue hair – even if that lifestyle only costs $50k/yr, you’re still a class traitor. Because class is not just an economic condition, or even purely a relation to production, but is the tribe which forms out of those people who have a particular relationship to production and socioeconomic status. There is no necessary material condition that demands high professionals from Wall Street and Silicon Valley wear those stupid vests, but they do because it symbolizes their membership in a particular tribe with particular values. Antiques are not much more expensive than new furniture (or throwing out IKEA every few years), but buying antiques signifies membership in the world of Fussell’s Uppers (the upper middle and upper class), new furniture is a liminal space, and IKEA is firmly middle class, despite the lifetime costs being roughly similar. After all, people – in an economic and material sense – can only ever afford to spend so much on furniture. The divides are not primarily price, but cultural and tribal.

What is the thread uniting the safe exotic and the Mythic Age? I’m sure, dear reader, you have already figured it out. But sometimes it takes me a bit to puzzle out the implications of my own statements.

It’s boundaries. Both these concepts establish the bounds of the familiar. The Mythic Age is the boundary age of our culture, beyond which all things belong to an unreal past. For the modern progressive, dictatorships are a real fear, but feudal monarchies live only in storybooks. The latter precedes the Mythic Age and thus is too alien to be real in any gut sense. It’s fantastical. The safe exotic establishes a boundary for a culture and its people, while the Mythic Age sets a chronological boundary. And these boundaries matter. Across the boundary, those “in the know” will assume everything is alien (Those who are less cosmopolitan, like hicklib progressives and Protestant Universalists will assume every culture is more or less like ours, which is definitely untrue. There’s more to life than all bleeding red.). Thus, paradoxically, the distant is familiar. When we deal with the truly alien, we are often shocked by how familiar, human, and real it all seems. Rome is often as alive to us as the friends we greet each day. That is because, across the frontier of the alien, we assume everything must be strange, and thus chalk up peculiarities to them being different from us. What remains are the human universals, and we marvel that Romans were humans just like us. Amazingly, the Romans bleed red like us, and we marvel. They, too, cry and die and love and live and scheme and sleep, perchance to dream.

That is the familiarity of distance.

That which is near to us often feels more alien precisely because it is so familiar. It is chilling and dreadful for a progressive to remember slavery, because to remember slavery is to know that people almost identical to yourself, living the same lifestyle as you, in the same place as you, in the same time as you, condoned it.

What does that say about you?

In conclusion, I got a dinner reservation at prime hours on a prime day at Dorsia (MICHELIN STARS AHAHAHA). Fuck you.

Loves to humblebrag,
Monsieur le Baron

Dearest Friends,

What’s the deal with brown white supremacists? Har har har.

No, but seriously.

Why are all the Fascists Jewish or homosexual? Come on. You know it’s true. As Gorky said, “Exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish.”

The answer to both these things is the same, of course. It’s classic dialectics.

I believe we are now able to express dialectics in a more formal way, dispensing with the obscurantism of German Idealism while capturing the essences in a straightforward, plain English way, because our understandings of certain phenomena has grown far, far more advanced in the machine age. By observing convergent evolution and adaptation in technological contexts and genetic algorithms, we are able to gain an understanding of our own cultural development. Memetics was a paradigm shift in the idea of cultural development. But it doesn’t really answer why certain memes are fit and propagate, especially the propagation of memetic supercomplexes, the most interesting memes, the complex life of memetics. What a modern understanding of dialectics will provide us is a fitness equation for memetic evolution.

We will propose Three Laws and Three No’s of Dialectics:

The Three Laws:
1. Signaling
2. Cultural Hydraulics and Escape Pressure
3. Dynamic Cycling

The Three No’s:
1. No Culture By Steam
2. No Politics By Memes
3. No Fulfillment of the Dream

Signaling
The dialectical process is the dominant law of sociological and cultural processes. It is why Cubism does not become “Super-Cubism”. Physical processes usually follow a cycle, linear growth, exponential growth, or a logistic curve (S-curve), but social processes do not evolve that way. Instead, social processes seem to operate by dialectics. What does dialectics describe? Dialectics describes a process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, a unity of opposites. What is the main dynamic of signaling? Signal, counter-signal, counter-counter-signal, with the counter-counter-signal being opposed to the counter-signal, but in a way that distinguishes it, and thus incorporates it, by reflecting the imagined Other in what it counter-counter-signals. The counter-counter-signal always bears the mark of the counter-signal in the way that the signal does not, because the purpose of the counter-counter-signal is to signal against the original counter-signal, which incorporates an opposition or criticism of the original signal not addressed by the original signal. The original signal is naive to the opposition, the counter-counter-signal bears adaptation. Signaling is the basic law by which culture moves. As culture moves, trends are opposed as lame or tacky and the cultural vanguard defines themselves against the old trend. But what determines where the new opposition heads? What fads catch on and what fads die? Signaling is well worn ground, but this isn’t.

Cultural Hydraulics
The Unity of Opposites is more illusory than real. Phenomena like brown white supremacists or anti-white whites only confuse us because we confuse the map for the territory. Concepts are the map. Concepts are the means by which we try to transform real things, which are messy objects, into word-categories, the basic building blocks of meaning from which we construct language and logic. The problem is that, having mapped reality to concepts, we confuse our map for the territory. But what is real is not our concepts, but the objects themselves. We might conceive brown white supremacists as contradictory, but what makes it so? Only the opposing concepts of “White person” and “Brown person” and the negating concept of “Racial Supremacy”. But there is no law of the universe which makes a brown person explode if they put on a swastika. Water and fire are held to be opposites culturally, but water can worsen an oil fire and fires can burn on top of rivers. Water has a reason to be considered an “opposite” to fire because water puts out fire, but that’s not because water is the opposite of water. Rather, the water reduces the heat of the fire and smothers it of oxygen. To wit, opposites are only truly opposites when there is some physical reality that compels the oppositional relation. Otherwise, all we have is conceptual opposition. And it is in conceptual opposition that the Unity of Opposites might occur, because nothing keeps the opposites from uniting, and by uniting, a tension is resolved. Let us define two kinds of physical opposition: Strong Physical Opposition and Weak Physical Opposition. Strong Physical Opposition is when some scientific law creates a physical impossibility. For instance, water putting out fire comes from a physical law. The law of gravity is a physical law, and someone countersignaling gravity will meet a very stupid end. Weak Physical Opposition is when some person or a group of persons in an institution take it upon themselves to enforce some conceptual opposition. For instance, under the Third Reich, Nazism and Judaism had a Weak Physical Opposition because the state was enforcing this relation by murdering Jews. Nevertheless, Weak Physical Oppositions are imperfect because they require the constant enforcing of the law. They require the actions of men to remain true. The Third Reich had many ethnic Jews serving it because there was no scientific law that caused their heads to explode if they became Nazis, and absent that, they could cross over if Hitler did not have them killed and they found it interesting and agreeable. Conceptual Oppositions are often rooted in past historical Weak Physical Oppositions. People think that rich people cannot be Communists – which is a ludicrous idea both now and historically – because Mao and others enacted a classicide. That’s like saying investors can’t buy high and sell low because that means getting wiped out. As Galileo would say: And yet it moves. To some extent, we must suffer the blind spots that Conceptual Oppositions impose on us, because we cannot reason without the map. Only by simplifying and categorizing things into these rigidities can we do any sort of analysis, even if real objects are too messy for the categories, but the messiness of the realities always strains our attempts to categorize and lexify them.

The structure of most midwit arguments:
Person: Rule
Midwit: Exception?
Midwit: Therefore no rule
Did you know your generalization is not perfectly accurate? Wow whoa.

The reason why this is a very, very stupid line of attack is that without generalizations and categories, we cannot think at all. The midwit likes to make this attack without realizing *all of their* concepts are equally flawed from this perspective.

So far, we have only established the Non-Contradiction of (Conceptual) Opposites, not their Unity. The Unity is a process, the process of dialectics. In the signaling/counter-signaling process, there are unguarded avenues. Because we are blind to the illusory nature of Conceptual Opposites, we are always surprised when Nixon Goes To China. But why should we be? Not only can Nixon go to China, only Nixons can go to China. There is energy from outflanking. Where do the rich go when the middle imitate them? The rich countersignal the rising middle by adopting the fashions of the poor, which their adversaries cannot adopt, because that would collapse the cultural distinctions signaled between middle and poor, which the rich have no fear of. Similarly, Nixon has no fear of being accused of being a communist, because he is the anti-communist. Political arguments break down into two sides, pro and anti, friend and enemy. Centrists are merely those who have different friends and enemies for different issues, rather than some wishy washy mystical not-pro, not-anti position on an issue (this can only be maintained by indifference, which conceptually is negative liberty, the basis of libertarianism – the state shall be indifferent to most matters). In a very abstract sense, you can conceive of Left and Right as basically two arbitrary teams, and one’s level of Leftism or Rightism is a level of purity. That is, on how many issues does this person deviate from their “team’s” friend/enemy distinction? Of course, deviation requires a fixed reference point, and this is where culture matters, because the cultural vanguard sets what the “goal” of maximally pure ideological Rightism or Leftism is for an era, which in turn determines who is “more Right wing”. The Unity of Opposites occurs when someone from the Left or Right adopts some stances of the other side *without accepting the overall frame* (this is just changing sides otherwise), thus rotating the issue such that both the original Left and Right positions are invalidated compared to the obvious correctness of the new position. The correctness is obvious because the synthesis position incorporates the good components of both sides, and both sides in a hard fought political conflict must have at least *some points* that carry weight. In short, the Left outflanks the Right from the Right or vice versa. The White Army was forced to champion mealy mouthed liberal democracy while also being castigated as incompetent Tsarists because Lenin had outflanked the Right from the Right – he was the perfect autocrat and democratic centralism was a (more) perfected autocracy, undermining any argument that might propose the virtues of Tsarist autocracy.

After Caesar, there are no Populares or Optimates because the issue is simply obsolete. A new political distinction must and will come into being.

But why?

Dynamic Cycling
Men and machines think in straight lines. But nature thinks in cycles. Why? Aren’t cycles inherently inefficient? Yes. In the overshoot and the undershoot, there exists inefficiency. As the Austrians might say, prices approach perfection in a roundabout way, always going over or under, alternating between wasteful glut and shortage. The classical Marxist-Leninist Plannerist might say the solution is obvious: Pick the perfect, correct price using your intellect and calculation. And they have, historically, directed their energies towards increasing calculation power as to *find* that perfect price.

But there’s a problem with that, even if perfect calculation was possible.

It’s simple: the perfect price *changes*. Nature loves a cycle because nature does not know what the ideal carrying capacity of an environment under changing conditions and imperfect information. Even if you could calculate a perfect price, or even a system of perfect prices, a change in conditions will perturb the whole system so much as to shake it apart. The flaw in planning is the same as the flaw in the supply chain: hyperefficiency, even *when real*, is fragile, because reserve is robustness to change. And the negative feedback cycle, so loved by engineers, is better than inventory or reserve, because it is not only robust, but adaptive. Small changes are absorbed and used to reach the new ideal equilibrium. Machines are fragile because they are built for perfection. Even the best and most robust machines have assumptions about operating conditions. Biology and cycles are anti-fragile. They learn.

To wit: Human history in a graph.

If the carrying capacity of the woods increases, then the amount of deer genuinely can increase. And the characteristics of our physical environments are always changing. The business cycle isn’t just healthy because it clears out deadwood with every brush fire. No, it’s also healthy because bubbles and busts don’t have natural lengths. The pendulum is swinging, but when the pendulum swings back, it can either swing back to its original position, or nearer or farther depending on what has changed. We can think of the entirety of the Industrial Age as a “bubble” or “boom” driven by the changed conditions of cheap energy and machinery. And if we fall from here, we nevertheless stand far beyond our ancestors in the levels of knowledge and mechanical sophistication we have attained. The new equilibrium of our bubble burst is not the old 16th century stasis, because we know how to build many fascinating machines which could exist in a low energy paradigm, but which we did not conceive of back then. The future is not quite the Ancien Regime, but perhaps the Ancien Regime and however it might be altered by trains and organ-sized vacuum tube computers and machine guns and any other low-energy, high intellectual sophistication technology. The dodo dies, the mammoth is reborn. And in a distant, unremembered future, youthful Mormongol adventurers slay Rationalist GPT-3 Technoliches still guarding the ruins of Harvard TS/SCI labs, plundering ancient secrets from beneath the shadows of vast and trunkless legs of stone, the thickened lips of a Pharaonic Floyd still gasping for breath, and the lone and level concrete flatways swarming with gray goo techno-slimes.

Sing, O Wild Horse Woman.

Dusting off his sandals,
Monsieur le Baron