Just had an interesting back-and-forth with @rickwilliamscpa, worth a follow. There’s a lot of emotion and articles these days about (White) generational wealth and The Great Wealth Transfer to come. A lot of it is horseshit and I’d like to break it down in a short thread.
Yes, that’s a ton when you consider that 39% is wealthy boomers with a lot of seed corn to blow through. I’m in the same boat as you re: expected inheritance and not needing it, but it’s going to upset me if there’s no money left given the way grandpa chooses to spend his time.
If you go off of news articles and Twitter, a lot of people are already counting their parent’s money. This is a supremely foolish thing to do and basically comes from millennial entitlement and resentment. Most people are not inheriting a damn thing. White millennials are being indoctrinated into narratives of White generational wealth so they feel entitled to vast fortunes that their parents don’t actually have. It becomes a game of blame Old White Boomer (who usually has nothing to give). From the BLS Inheritance Report and the 2019 SCF. The overwhelming majority of people – including the overwhelming majority of Whites – do not get an inheritance *at all*. Only 20.7% of households and 24.6% of Whites. If you’re not at least middle class, count yourself out.
And of those who do receive inheritances, the majority are receiving middle class inheritances from middle class families. The median *inheritance* (so already cash in hand) is only tens of thousands of dollars. A million dollar inheritance is the TOP ONE PERCENT.
This is not money to live off, and people normally get this in their 40s or 50s (perhaps even their 60s these days). I expect to receive an inheritance of between $600k and $1mm depending on how many health problems Mom and Dad have, so in the top few percent. But the other side of this is Boomer selfishness, which is also very real. 73% of millionaires come from millionaire parents. The old Dave Ramsey stat about 80% of millionaires being self-made just means they didn’t inherit their money. And it’s true. I did not inherit my money. What most millionaires get is a good school, connections, cultural capital, the WASP money mentality, and a good job from their good school. This is enough, you don’t need a money handout. If we look at the BLS inheritance chart again, we see only 47.3% and 45.5% of the top two wealth categories got an inheritance from their parents. Averaging that out, we get 46.4%. Subtract the 27% that are genuinely self-made, and you get 63.5% inheritances in the latest cohort.
This will shift up and down based on the year, but it’s a staggering number. Boomer selfishness is real. It means almost 40% of the Boomers who *can* leave an inheritance worth talking about choose not to. Every real story of Boomers blowing their kid’s inheritance is from here.
The traditional WASP ethos is that you are the steward of a fortune that was not made by you and ultimately does not belong to you. It’s family money. And millionaires tend *not* to be self-made. So a huge minority of Boomer millionaires received a handup and blew it. They’re eating the seed corn given them by past generations to provide for future generations.
To sum up: Many boomers *are* dicks, and many millennials have delusionally high expectations and entitlement. I’m going to pin this as my last word on inheritance.
I think a key difference between being a Millennial and being a Zoomer is that growing up Millennial, you really did believe in all this shit. None of it was a bit, the invincibility and legitimacy of the narrative and the institutions was taken for granted. I loved the myths.
One by one, they’ve been taken away from me. America was invincible – until 9/11. But then we struck hard, struck hard, struck fast. America was Eagletopia and it could drop a McDonald’s right into the desert in a day. Mission accomplished.
Except it wasn’t, of course. The war dragged on. But people didn’t *blame America*, let alone *the military*. It was *Bush’s* fault. Bad leadership, not bad institutions, not a bad core. America was a fundamentally good and powerful country that was stumbling.
The bailouts were existentially crushing because we felt that this was a country that ran on fair play and competition and letting people suffer for their mistakes. Now we drop a bailout over the weekend and nobody blinks. But this seemed like a delegitimization of capitalism.
And why was that important? Millennials grew up in prosperity and more importantly, grew up expecting prosperity for themselves. Not ending up in their parent’s class or better felt like an aberration brought about by corruption, but a fixable corruption. You could protest it.
There were the creeping signs of ZSHC, but it felt like a fundamentally fair competition with corruption. My college rejections felt like a genuine letdown rather than a systemic failure and breakdown of meritocracy as an illegitimate idea. And then I got back on track.
After all, though I didn’t get into the best colleges, I still got into a very good college. What happened to that straight A, 35 ACT student would have been unthinkable – total rejection. I still got *an* admission in the end. I could rationalize, a bit, that I had bad grades.
When we graduated, the ceremony had genuine weight and feeling. Swearing oaths and taking the ring felt like being initiated into an ancient order to protect America. Some of us had clearances, some of us would have them soon, but all of us knew something very important.
For two hundred and fifty years, men and women had stood up to protect this country in different ways. Now you will too. Stand up. Having made this oath, you are bound to America forever. “Your honor will be loyalty.” And it was. For a time.
Do you know the sense of awe and reverence there was being taken, by one of the old men at your first real adult job, to see one of the slide rules used in the Space Program? It felt like seeing the tools of the gods themselves. Can Zoomers even feel awe and reverence?
A holy relic. A holy, secular relic to the civic religion of America, which we all believed in, left, right, and center. It was an America that was erring, but it was an America that was good, and whole, and holy. We had built and earned our city on the hill.
It’s not a joke. It may all seem like jokes to you now, but none it felt like a joke. And even as the America outside fell, the America in your heart lingered. You knew that this was wrong, that this is not how things were meant to be.
I graduated, I got a job immediately, and within a year, I had bought a house. The losers of the competition hadn’t settled down so easily, but there was some logic to that. Now you can’t go right into a house even if you get an entry-level job at the most elite firms in America.
Race relations. I grew up on a diet of Rush Hour and race buddy narratives. I saw Obama elected – what a moment of healing that was meant to be. I grew up in a *culturally homogenous* and largely *ethnically homogenous* community. There was a majority and there was assimilation.
Yes, any race could learn to become an White American in ways. Look at this Black, your classmate. Ignore that they are from an African royal family – they are functionally an AWFL. Isn’t that wonderful? Now, there were still the ghettos. But that was considered soluble.
Maybe they’d never be like us, but they could assimilate to White Redneck norms, or some kind of norms. You just needed more money for the programs, said sincerely. Yes, actually more money for programs, not just as a punchline to a meme or a greentext.
As it all started unraveling, the dissidence was sincere. You know what looking at Richard Spencer felt like? It didn’t feel like looking at a gay eunuch clown the regime trots out to push increasingly ridiculous plots as he wrangles with being a useless divorcee.
It felt like watching a man who could be a dangerous, a real Nazi. This was a man who could build a new America – and I almost believed it myself. And I worked for the fucking government, man. People were ashamed to be non-White racists. Now it’s a gag.
The idea of a WN coming out as Jewish (in the end, so, so, so many, almost all?) was like a sacrilege. You felt ashamed to be non-White in a White country, and even if the real America was no longer the City on the Hill, new Wignat America would be. I’m serious.
And the other people in this side of Twitter are ex-Berners, and they felt the same way. Bernie was their hero, their champion, not just a dried up husk of a man begging for cash in memes and jokes. He would bring about the Revolution that would redeem America with blood.11013.8K
Once the corrupt men of Wall Street were thrown out and replaced, everything would run smoothly again, and they would enjoy the middle class prosperity of their fathers and mothers. You had only to fight and to believe. It’s not just $27, but a sacrifice to the soul of America.
“BAP is a Gay Jew!” “We know!” “Nick Fuentes is a Gay S***!” “We know!” “BAP is a Gay Jew!” “We know!” “Nick Fuentes is a Gay S***!” “We know!” Every two weeks. It’s like an Abbott and Costello bit.
I am once again asking for your sincere belief America can be saved, and not just $27, says unemployed elderly socialist man.
And this Hillary email server. Lock her up. That was a genuine belief that you could, that the laws applied to *anyone*. And her getting away with it was attributed to her power, but it still felt like a blow to our collective honor, which was a thing that people had.
Elections were fair, or mostly fair. Secrets had to be kept, or mostly kept. Do you know how scared I was to try and warn people that the military had planned lockdowns and the COVID response in advance? Not only for my own freedom.
Hillary could leak because she was both powerful and corrupt. But me, even if I had some power, I was still a good man. I remembered. My honor was loyalty. It hurt me, but at the same time, the COVID response was a slowly unfolding horror.
Imagine leaking government secrets to win an argument about video games. That’s the norm now, apparently – because nobody gives a shit. They’ve killed even the America in their hearts. Now all that’s left is the signage.
We are like sleepwalkers carrying out the motions of a system nobody really believes in anymore, not sincerely. None of this shit used to be a joke. And I think that’s the difference between Millennials and Zoomers.
I was born in Heaven and watched it become Hell. Zoomers never knew Heaven.
Zoomers were born in the Wilderness, after we were cast out of Egypt by force. Zoomers have never known the sweetness of living by the Nile with its rich produce. They have known only the quiet solitude and struggle of the desert wandering.
I know why the Jews complained in the Sinai. Because many of them knew Egypt. They were not all slaves. Some were mighty men of Egypt. Did we forget Hyksos and our glory? Did we forget Joseph? We used to eat quail and garlic and onions, not manna from Heaven.
Aaron, my brother, why did you build the Golden Bull? Did you not trust me? Because I wanted to RETVRN. I wanted to go back. I have tasted the sweet things of Egypt and I miss them. Did you not grow up in the palaces of Pharaoh? We can never go back.
But any who knew those things would always be tempted. And so, they all had to die before the Jews could cross into the Promised Land, even Moses. Because they remembered and the ways of Egypt dwelt in their hearts, and they would imitate them in the New Land, despite themselves.
In my dreams, Satan tempts me and has tempted me with promises of many things. But there are only two things that really give me pause. One I will not say here. But the other, seductive temptation, is that I could return to, say, 1990 or 2000, before this. And live there forever.
I wish I could say I had enough personal strength and faith to resist this, but it is only the angels of the Lord that can sweep the Devil away at these times. I have tasted the fruit of Egypt and it will be in me forever.
Anyways, I’ve promised to shill, so I’ll shill even if I can’t link. The first volume of Von Haller is out now on Imperium Press! Pick it up today! And the complete writings of Spandrell are available now on Amazon. Look for “Bloody Shovel” in the books section!
When people talk about college and the college experience, they often talk past each other. And that’s because there’s several different college experiences and all differently class-coded. Before continuing, I assume you’ve read or are at least familiar with Michael O Church’s class ladders essay and Fussell’s SES class categories, since I will be using at least those terms in defining the different college experiences. First we have a kind of prole college experience, which is Hairdresser University or Cop College. That’s where you get a degree in something like Criminal Justice just to qualify for a credential. Jobs that require these credentials are things like nursing, social work, admin. If trade school is the path into higher paid skilled labor for male proles, then this is the path into a form of higher paid lower white collar labor often taken by women. It’s basically “Girl Trade School”. One complaint often seen online – and I do not know the truth of it nor can I verify it – is that women can’t marry because they can’t find college educated men. Most of the bias towards women in college actually comes from this cohort going to Girl Trade School. Their real class match is a lineman or plumber, but Manospherians claim they disdain these people for not being educated (they are actually approximately the same in education in real terms). Closely related to this is the “unselective liberal arts college”. America is dotted with very expensive, very unprestigious small liberal arts colleges that will charge you $60,000/yr for an English degree that doesn’t do anything. This is the “useless humanities degree”. Graduates from these places are often upwardly mobiles proles or sidewardly mobile educated middles who enter life saddled with a ten ton bag of student debt. To a large extent, their humanities degree disqualifies from doing labor work. This group is a frequent partaker in radical leftist politics. They usually eventually find employment in government jobs or in the administrative departments of large corporations, which is a material reason why they lobby for government expansion and more corporate regulation. These two college experience types are broadly working class/prole or lower middle class in Fussell SES terms. In terms of the ladders, Girl Trade School is L3/L2/G4 and Unprestigious Liberal Arts College is G4/G3. Next up you have the Frat Boy Sorority Girl Party School experience. Examples would be the University of Arizona and “The” Ohio State. There is a lot of emphasis on playing the ball and drinking the beer and having the sex. This is stereotypically “rich”, but it’s not elite. There are some E2 National Elites who partake in this culture, giving extremely generously to football teams, and they mostly are from Southern Elite/Cavalier culture. But for the most part, the rich here are L1/L2. They are very well-to-do tradesmen and small businessmen. Then there’s the authentic Small Liberal Arts College experience. Think Amherst (#22), Williams (#23), or Oberlin (#63, As Seen in Girls). Unlike the previous expensive unranked liberal arts colleges, these schools are genuinely prestigious and can open career doors. The essential counterfeit done by their less prestigious cousins is to swap “prestigious college” for “college” as the token of status, and then to superficially replicate all the *lifestyle* elements of an expensive liberal arts college. But you’re not paying for the lifestyle. You’re paying for the connections. The degrees here will create connections to bring you into the social network of the intelligentsia. After college, these graduates usually transition into G2 roles. Next we have Study Hard Mathematic 12 Hour school. Tell me why the Weihan grinds. The Weihan grinds because he is trying to enter the bottom rung of the elite. The Study Hard Mathematic 12 Hour school experience starts early, often in Kindergarten, with IQ test prep. You Study Hard Mathematic 12 Hour for 12 Year so that you can get admitted to Harvard. And what do you do at Harvard?
You Study Hard Mathematic 12 Hour again.
Of undergrad majors declared at Harvard, ~75% are either STEM or in Economics.
Gore Vidal said that, at his boarding school, and in the elite more broadly, there are the smart kids and the rich kids. Of course, everyone is, roughly speaking, rich. But the smart kids serve and guide the rich kids and are groomed for that early. Gore Vidal got his first NatSec job at 16, and by his early 20s, he was ready to call of this quits forever. And he did. Most don’t. I also got my first job in defense at 16. And the rich kid? The rich kid was his cousin Al Gore. You do this endless grind so you can get a job at a prestige firm and grind some more as a junior. After thirty years of grinding, you make partner and join the few, the proud, the true elite. At the bottom. You’re not Lord Rothschild, you just fetch his coffee. These are the people who are recruited into the MBB consultancies, FAANG, the Bulge Bracket banks, and BigLaw. In Fussell’s terms, they can be UMC or UC, and in Michael O Church’s ladders, they are Elite… but E3. The people competing by Study Hard Mathematic are E4. The last kind of college experience is also Ivy. It’s the Occulted Ivy experience. This is the experience of the kids who get into their dad’s secret society and the right dining club and the right social club. The value of the degree is the networks formed. They’re not just here to meet each other (they already meet each other), but also to be introduced to their future servants, the smart kids. This is a process that begins in boarding schools and private schools, but at college they mix up all the streams and pick up Stuy kids. This cohort is the E2s and E1s of the Church ladders. It is the Fussellian UC and TOOS. And they are the true lords of the earth.
Happy back to school season! Corrections and Additions: Gore Vidal and Al Gore were not cousins, this is just a joke Gore Vidal liked to make. To be fair to me, the NYT made the same mistake. There’s a substantial Greek life scene at the top small liberal arts colleges too. In fact, these can be thought of more as currents or styles present to varying degrees at different institutions rather than monopolizing. Two more types: State School Credentialer: Just needs a degree to qualify for certain white collar jobs and is trying to get it as cheaply as possible.
The Academic/Grad Student: In it for the long haul, aspires to professorhood. If I think about the four thousand unranked colleges and their innumerable students, it spoops me. Like academic dark matter or the bottom of an iceberg. They’re out there.
What are they doing?
This relates to the interminable “stealth wealth”/”grandiose wealth” discourse which I noted yesterday. It’s been a while, but it’s time for a class thread explaining the material drivers of class cultures and the expressions of luxury.
That 1400 sqft castle belonged to the Lord of the Land. The peasants had single room cottages. Guess what? So did most of the knights.
Not what “stealth wealth”. Why “stealth wealth”? The answer is as banal as it is overlooked. Going flashy is totally fucking ruinous. You can’t actually live the IG lifestyle unless you’re one of tens of thousands of oligarchs on earth.
I think one of the root causes of the semi-regular "big number posting" is because people have lifestyle expectations for "rich" that have totally lost any kind of connection with reality. The kind of lifestyle you see on IG takes a net worth of about $300mm to sustain. https://t.co/VIrimGsdrt
Once the good times roll again, if they do, I expect to make a seven figure income. Even so, I remain comfortably in the middle sixes. I couldn’t afford to “ball out” with the branded lifestyle even if I wanted to. Suppose you take home $20k/mo. You can’t spend $1k on a shirt. That’s basic math. Regular people who make $50k spend like $10 on a shirt. If you make 10x that, you can spend $100 on a shirt, if you want (and that will get you an Italian tailored shirt handmade by craftsmen carrying tradition), but $1000? It’s too much. Marx commented on this in Das Kapital as the death of luxury. In a capitalist economy, all consumption comes at the expense of capital accumulation. If you consume all your income, your capital stagnates, diminishes, and eventually disintegrates. Not so with estate rents. So the death of luxury and the dawn of stealth wealth started in the 19th century, as a response to the capitalist economy. The irony was that unlimited abundance was the end of material signaling in any practical sense.
But that makes sense. A signal only matters if rare. So if capitalist abundance is the end of luxury, how does luxury come about in the first place if medieval aristocracy was so goddamn poor? (And they were poor.)
The answer lies in the tweet I am quote tweeting at the start. Neither Rome nor Roissy was built in a day. Rather, the Lords of Roissy built incrementally. If we excavate the site, we find that Roissy did not begin life as a 1400sqft stone castle. Rather, like most medieval structures, it was a thatched cottage. But the lords prospered. As they conquered and accumulated territory, the thatch cottage gave way to a fine wood and plaster house, the equal of any merchant burgher dealing in Oriental spices. And they rose further still. As their demesne grew, wood was replaced by stone, though small at first. Once they had the enduring stone structure, each generation could expand the house. Room by room, the castle grows. You put down a garden, or a mud room. You add a chapel with some books. Around the perimeter, you replace the dirt moat with a wall, then add a water moat. Many preserved manor-museums show the lordly collection of some family. One head buys a finger of a saint at the bazaar one day. Another acquires a rhino horn from the unicorns of the Kingdom of Prester John. You build up your literal family jewels. Showing off wealth was therefore a literally true and unfakable signal that your family had, for generations, been able to divert some of its surplus value towards accumulating luxury goods. But for this to work, you need both continuity of taste *and* continuity of place. Modernity, even before the advent of capitalism, was undermining both. Without continuity of taste, any luxury goods you do accumulate are obsoleted as soon as a fad cycle finishes. Poor is the woman (almost always woman) slaved to the runway season, for all her wealth goes into fineries tossed away by the next year. But what drives continuity of taste and what undermines it? Continuity of taste is undermined by the Red Queen race of signaling spirals. The more easily your directly-below countersignaled class can ape your signals, the faster fads shift. Sumptuary laws fight fads. However, the underlying strength of continuity, which has to balance against the corrosive signal spiraling effects of egalitarianism, is continuity and distinctiveness of lifestyle. That is, your style reflects your lifestyle and ethos, which is handed down generationally. The attempts of Manhattan culture curators to enshrine, memorialize, and make tradition the memory of the punks of Alphabet City is an attempt to lock and freeze a culture in place to end a signaling spiral (almost always toxic), even if that’s not the conscious motive. But this has been a losing battle since modernity began. The cry for the aristocratic man, the man of profound excellence, or more crassly, the “smart jock”, is an attempt to recapture a lost way of life which flowered and died off with the Renaissance. The Renaissance Man was the culmination, completion, and death of the medieval aristocrat. The Renaissance polymath knew essentially the entire corpus of Western knowledge and was good at everything, and pushed the bounds in every direction. That can only ever be true once. The generation after the most superior man masters and expands everything, the most superior man now has a body of work just slightly too large to master everything. Human genetic excellence was now eugenically increasing more slowly than world info density. We like to think about medieval aristocrats as jocks, but that’s because we invented the idea of jocks. Jocks are specialists. By contrast, Queen Margaret of Scotland was both a queen and a deeply religious thinker who memorized the entirety of the Psalter. By 1500, the end and the beginning, about 80% of Provencal nobles had a university education. These were men who were learned, cultured, and deadly.
In theory. In practice, by 1600, most barons, these little lords, had to pick between chasing the heights of education, the commercial success needed to wield power, and the investment of time and valor needed to prepare for war.
The armor rusted.
The manor was a self-contained world led by a generational leader who was a man of universal excellence. But as the Middle Ages dragged on and eventually gave way to modernity, ties of tradition and oath were replaced by cash payments and specialization of labor. The other side of this is continuity of place. Continuity of place was also undermined by modernity. But this was not just about commercialization, but about power. Absolutism. When an elite is embedded in their local community, they begin to accrete luxurious wealth. But what does that look like? That looks like a fine mansion and collected antiques. But it also looks like the formation of social clubs and community bonds. The freemen and middling burghersr of a town could come together with its lord or lords and make some kind of club, like a Honorable Moose Club, or the Rotational Club. Together, by pooling wealth, they could make great works, like a church, a school, a park, or a monument. This kind of community building creates real bonds of loyalty. But civil cohesion can easily translate into martial power. The cohesive, harmonious town can summon the fyrd and go to war to defend itself – or attack.
Centralized power does not like this. Central power divides. There is a great movie, The Devils, about the priest Grandier. This was a priest defending the rights and liberties and way of life of Loudun against the encroach of central power, as symbolized by its walls. Walls, as established, are a symbol of continuity of wealth and place. To sum it up, he loses. And dies. In “The Hall of Three Pines”, the author, a Qing aristocrat turned Communist professor, recounts his youth. His father was selected to assume power in the imperial bureaucracy and govern an administrative division. This meant being relocated across the whole empire to a strange land with a strange people. In those days, people mostly spoke their dialect. His father – and my forefathers – spoke Mandarin. This meant you did not understand the peasants and they didn’t understand you. Despite the power and wealth you might accumulate, you would be a stranger and an alien to them. A foreign occupier. Such an elite cannot meaningfully rise up against the central power. Absolutism, for political reasons, broke continuity of place. As modernity developed in Europe, the life script of living and governing your estate was replaced with going to college, being summoned to court, and taking a position of power in a strange place with hostile locals. This equilibrium was only broken with liberalism. Liberal nationalism replaced a thousand microcultures with one homogenous national culture, which made low level elites, the nobles, once again the same culture as the peasants they ruled, and able to command personal loyalty.
Liberalism saw a political collapse every few years. But continuity of place was dead. And it’s still dead. All those mansions disappeared and aren’t coming back because in this day and age, they’re just white elephants.
Material forces drive culture. The mansion and the castle came into being because the lord could compel either direct labor service or cash-in-lieu payments from a community to maintain it. These mansions require constant construction work as well as a staff of servants to clean and maintain them. You incurred such costs because the thing had real benefits. It was a protection for you and your community. It was a physical symbol of your power, wealth, and continuity. It was a place to live in generation after generation. Well, now there are no wars of local honor, anyone can build a McMansion for enough cash, and your kids are going to move away anyways.
It’s pointless. It has been obsoleted by the march of time. Keeping them around became a romantic, not a practical gesture. Some of my inlaws are in a perpetual battle, loaded with debt, to save the mansion back in Europe. It is a form of ultimate house poverty – fighting to protect a house you don’t even live in (Buc-ee’s check, you can’t make money in Europe). Many British families applied, successfully or unsuccessfully, to have the state subsidize their old homes as cultural landmarks or convert them into museums. The remainder of these old country homes?
Ash and ruins. The romantic gesture is ultimately a doomed one, because people live for the here and now. They must.
And that’s what happened to grandiose wealth, and why “stealth wealth” rules.
“And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”- Eternity is a terrible thing indeed. Eternity is a wondrous thing indeed. People often ask why a loving God might condemn mankind to Hell. This is a misunderstanding, I think. Hell and Heaven are both choices, and Hell is a separation from God. Absent this connection, the love of God is like an unending burning agony. This life is the time for toil and the time for choices, while we still have a body and flesh. Continuously, we face choices, where we must choose between good and evil.
These choices are, in many ways, the choice between The Good and The Evil. Though men act as if the choice is hard, the choice is often easier than we think. The wages of sin are death. We find often that sin is self-defeating. The greatness of the great comes not from their sins, but their virtues, which are often twisted. To paraphrase CS Lewis, what is Attila without his courage? It is the only things present in great but wicked men that allow them to do their deeds. And given these gifts, it is all the more tragic when they freely choose evil.
So what is eternity? Eternity is a time when choices end, and our existence stretches on forever. When we are wrathful and seethe, it feels like our soul is burning up, but it does not harm our enemy. When we are greedy, we obsess over wealth to no avail. So on, and so forth. What if we were perpetually locked in a state of cope and seethe? And moreover, we no longer have the fleeting distractions and pleasures of the flesh to assuage our pain, but exist in an unmediated spiritual state of cope and seethe. When we die, therefore, unless we have achieved a state of total depravity or Sainthood in our lifetimes, we exist in an impure state, but one which is either inclined to choose either The Good, which is God, or The Evil. Given this, what is our conclusion? Everything not fit for eternity must perish. What then is Hell? It is not the arbitrary cruelty of an evil God. Rather, God is full of love. When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became like God, able to discern Good and Evil – and thus sin. Nevertheless, God will save us.
What are our souls? Our souls are like rotting mansions, deep in disrepair. The roof is caving in, bed bugs and spiders roam the roams, every hall is covered in mold and grime, and it is terribly drafty. We do not notice. We are always out in the world.But one day, that long night will descend upon us, and we must go home to sleep, and sleep for the long sleep. What we will return to? Dwelling in our sin, we will tormented by the bugs and winds and rains forever, and the burnings shall never cease. But it need not be that way. God wants to repair our houses, however shabby they may be. He has sent His Son to us. After all, Jesus was a carpenter. Every time we repent of one of our sins, we are fixing one of the broken parts of our houses, making it fit for eternity. We are trading the temporary joys of sin – or oftentimes, the temporary excitement, less than even joy – for something permanent. Every time I discard a sin, I feel a new calmness descend into my soul. With truly holy people, one finds them almost totally at peace, unbothered by the swayings of the world. Such is fitness for eternity.
So why must Job suffer? For Job was a righteous man. And it was true that Job was blameless in his ways. But Job was not the Lord. His own right arm could not save him. His talents, in the end, do not come from within himself. Some lessons can only be taught by affliction. To continue, what is path dependence? Path dependence is a sequencing of events such that each step depends on the previous step. Certain things only unfold as they do because of the sequencing. What does this mean? On Thursday, you go grocery shopping but forget the milk. After a workout on Saturday, you suddenly realize how thirsty you are. In a panic, you rush down to the nearby corner store to get milk. You bump into someone. She becomes your wife. Very romcom.
The Battle of Midway. If the bombers hadn’t come then – if the planes – if they hadn’t – if – if – if The mark of path dependence is that you can’t really recreate it in a training situation. In exercises, they can’t make Midway go as it did. Instinctually, we crave path dependence and weave it into our stories. We love our serendipity. But we close ourselves to it in real life. What are our earthly plans? We have plans and goals. And an earthly plan posits steps that reach that goal.
The path dependent route of serendipity is more of a series of unexpected shocks that nevertheless advance towards the goal, such that you approach the end with a series of flourishes and arabesques. But embracing it means losing control. In retrospect, I can say that God’s plans have always been more glorious and satisfying than even my wildest plans, and if they disappoint, they only disappoint compared to totally disjointed and bizarre daydreamings which never had any steps or plans. Single moments must pass a certain way. And in this, we see the hand of God. He is the one weaving the past from the future and weaving the threads of fate into a tapestry.
Why did I link my Exodus threads to people? Because I wanted people to see them and be astonished. It was my vanity as much as anything else. My natural state is a rebellion against God. The line between Good and Evil falls in the middle of your traits. A man such as me wants to brag about the things I have made. But it took a man such as me to make them. We are called to be a lantern unto the nations. To shine that light, we must kindle our flames. People think of Christianity as a cucking, a meekness of humiliation, a submission and a lessening. But it can be a greatening. To stoke the fires of our greatness may burn us, may sear our very souls. The greater the glory, the more the risk.
As we face towards God and remember the purpose of who we are and what we do, we can kindle the glory of our flames while staying safe from the heat. I have a bone to pick with modern psychology. Big Five et al quantify traits vis a vis an imagined baseline. The presumption is human neurological uniformity. All traits are deviations from an imagined normal neoliberal man. Personality styles become personality disorders. The flattening is an attempt to have the positive sides of every trait without the negative. Instead, we medicate ourselves into being nothing at all. The Jungian is the archetypal. People are archetypes. What we have are not deviations, but natures. MBTI is by nature a typology positing a number of heroic archetypes. The purpose of psychology in this framing is not to level us out into being nothing, but to guide us to becoming our Heroic Self. When we become a light unto the nations, what we become is not flat, but the Heroic version that we ought to be. We are becoming more like ourselves, higher and brighter, and not less. We are becoming who we really are… and fit for eternity.
Artaxerxes, born Ochus, was not meant to be the Great King, the King of Kings. He had older brothers ahead of him in the succession. But he was a cunning and ambitious man. He used plots and poison to kill his older brothers, making himself heir. His father died of heartbreak. But there’s an obvious problem here. Ochus, being an Achaemenid, had legitimate right to succeed to the throne if he cut enough throats. This was equally true for any of his own brothers and cousins if they were ruthless enough. Ochus was a satrap, but he was one of many. As soon as he usurped the throne, Artaxerxes III had to put down a number of revolts from his brother-cousin satraps, his fellow ruling princes of the Persian empire. Why not? They had just as good as a claim as he did. And this is a common historical problem for kings.
Spandrell notes this often speaking of early Chinese history. The Chinese princes were one of the biggest threats to a new Emperor, being of his blood. After all, we’re all Lius here. Who’s to stop one of us from ruling Han? Nothing, if no one can stop you. The Chinese solution, which eventually was also the European solution, was simple. Disempower the princes. Instead of a nobility of your close relatives, use officials drawn from the lower aristocracy, the barons, to administer the realm, and select them by merit. The princes would either be sent into far exile, as in Ming, or be brought into the palace under strict supervision, as in Qing. Ottoman princes were kept in the harem, the gilded cage, to keep them from rebelling. The actual governing was done by mandarins or local lords.
Artaxerxes therefore had to spend much of his early reign destroying revolts from rival satraps who were eager to do what he had done. But this does not solve the problem of how to rule the now subjugated satrapies. Loyal, competent manpower is the essential politics problem. The baron/mandarin solution is one answer. But there’s another. Spandrell uses the example of Jomon in Japan. If you have an ethnic client group given force, they can enforce your edicts for you, acting as internal bandits, and they can never usurp you, as hated foreigners.
Artaxerxes did this. Persian armies led by Persian satraps of Persian royal blood are potential threats to your throne. But what if you brought in Greek mercenaries and gave them land and treasure to rule on your behalf? So one of his highest officials was Mentor of Rhodes. Still, even a foreign general is dangerous. Mentor delivered Artaxerxes’s greatest victory to him, the reconquest of Egypt, making him once again, as in the time of Darius and Xerxes, Great King from the Indus to Ethiopia. And what happened to Belisarius? So Mentor and Artaxerxes remained in constant communication during his campaign, Artaxerxes monitoring him and his war movements, and also remaining keenly aware of Mentor’s desire for reward. And when it was done, it was granted, and Mentor became a Persian satrap.
Mentor was wise. As Spandrell would say, Mentor gave Artaxerxes his sword by the handle. By constantly reminding his lord how greedy and ignoble a character he was, and how much he desired reward, he was really showing his loyalty by saying the price at which he would be bought. Mentor lived and prospered, whereas Belisarius did not. Be a Mentor, don’t be a Belisarius.
Another problem is wives. By nature, men love loving their wives. They love to simp for their wives. This means that the wife is always one of the most powerful, influential, and dangerous members of the court. The wife is the king’s chief agent and sometimes his puppeteer. As Spandrell notes, in Japanese history, the family of the wife was often the one that actually called the shots. The family of the wife could keep marrying into the Imperial or Shogunate bloodline and puppet the real ruler through the pussy. Marrying high is dangerous.
It was Persian tradition for the Great King to marry into one of the high noble families of Persia, thus binding together his family with a major power broker via marriage alliance. Your wife, at the very least, can’t usurp you, even if they can exercise undue influence. This is one of the reasons historians consider the Biblical Book of Esther a mere historical fiction, as Esther was not a Persian high noble, but a Jewess, so how could she marry Xerxes I? And besides, we know who Xerxes I took as wife anyways. Artaxerxes avoided this trap. Instead of marrying a Persian princess, he married an unknown and obscure wife and did not include her in his high pronouncements and artifacts. By doing this, he was able to avoid dependence on any of his rival relatives.
Of course, the ethnic patronage strategy can backfire. Ethnic minorities are often – but not always – loyal. For instance, Jews. During Artaxerxes III’s reign, the Jews rebelled, so he had to destroy their fortress at Jericho with Persian armies and deport thousands to Hyrcania. Curiously, Josephus does not name Artaxerxes as an enemy and oppressor of the Jews, but rather his chiliarch – Bagoas. To return to the Book of Esther, despite being a work of historical fiction, it has a number of interesting details about Persian life and how the Jews perceived their Great King, Xerxes. Details like the drunken feasts and oath-drinking of the Persians, who never lie. Or Esther using the cosmetic burners to beautify herself and give herself sweet smells. Or the terror of Xerxes, and his cruelty and bloodlust, although other sources say Xerxes I was a gentle man, as these things go, and a builder. Still, it’s a neat story of Esther and her fanfiction husband, Xerxes, or as they say in the Book, Ahasuerus. Suerus. Xer… xes. Aha? Aha xerxes? Artaxerxes?
In this light, a weird little story makes a lot more sense. It is the story of intrigue, political murder, and catspaws. Why does Artaxerxes deport the rebellious Jews to Hyrcania? And why do they multiply in number from thousands to a rhetorical millions? He could easily have crushed their ability to resist forever. After his conquest of Egypt, he persecuted their religion and taxed them heavily. He could have easily done the same to the Jews. Instead, he deports them to Hyrcania. Why Hyrcania? Hyrcania was his grandfather’s satrap, the place from which his grandfather rose to power. In short, he took the Jews and moved them to his *very own court*, the land of his house.
So what is the story of Esther? An ambitious Jewish baron, one of the officials made by Artaxerxes III, marries his daughter off to the Great King. Hamon, one of the Great King’s brother-satraps, constantly schemes against the Jews – who are the Great King’s ethnic clients. Nervous Esther is hesitant about her father’s requests, but her father is sure she won’t be hacked to pieces for defying the Great King. Trust the plan. Hamon, the King’s brother and satrap, dispatches an army of his loyal to destroy the Jews. How can Artaxerxes resist his beloved queen? And the man who saved his life? Hamon is put to death. And for good measure, put his sons to death too. Wouldn’t want any of these little shit cousins of mine to get any ideas about my throne…
But I can’t countermand my drink-oath (a thing done surreptitiously by scribes all the time)! No, Hamon’s army will still have to attack the Jews. But the Jews can defend themselves with their arms. And so, conveniently, Hamon’s loyalist army walks right into a trap. The Jews, forewarned and armed, massacre them. And then they go on to massacre people across Persia. Including the capital of Susa, which is another reason historians consider the Book of Esther to be fanfiction.
By now, Esther is clued in. She asks her beloved husband for more time so that the Jews might destroy all of their enemies in Susa. Why Susa? Isn’t that the capital? Why would the Great King ever sack his own capital? But at that time, the Persian Empire had four de facto capitals and four de facto courts, all with their own factions of satraps scheming to control the empire. Rebel satraps could be forces in themselves, ruling from their own courts as de facto independent rulers.
Let me render Esther’s request in plain English. “Beloved husband, I ask you give me permission to send the Jews to Susa, the court of your rival satraps, so they might destroy our enemies.” And the Great King smiles a cunning smile. “Anything for you, beloved wife.”
After the twelfth year of the reign of Artaxerxes III, the year of the first Purim, the Jews destroyed their enemies, who were the enemies of the Great King as well. There were no more rebellions for the rest of Artaxerxes’s reign. He was absolute from the Indus to Ethiopia.
Artaxerxes and Esther lived happily ever after…
…except he had broken one rule. Never trust a troon. Eunuchs are often elevated because they can’t have heirs, but that doesn’t make them loyal. The eunuch Bagoas had other ideas. He launched a palace coup, putting Artaxerxes III, Esther, and all his sons to death. In their place, he installed Darius III. But he did not profit by this. Darius III was the last Achaemenid. Alexander the Great came with fury. As per Plutarch, Bagaos had assassinated Alexander’s father too. (This asshole!) Darius had Bagoas put to death.
I think the frustration with sympathetic villains vs black-and-white villains hits at the core of the Christian vs Nietzschean vs Last Man dynamic and why people are so desperate to form a synthesis, as well as the pros and cons of such a thing.
First of all, why have a simple villain that is more or less pure evil? It puts the conflict as a stark contrast. It is mythic and fairy tale like. It reduces “subversion” by having clear good guys and bad guys. But all in all, I don’t find this interesting. Why is it not interesting? Because unless they’re some kind of monster/animal or demon or elemental, they need a motivation that goes beyond “their nature”. A human villain, by which I mean any moral sapient, has a reason why they do the things they do. Motives come in a number of forms. First, simple gratification of pleasures. This is a category of things like the pursuit of power, money, physical pleasure, aesthetics for aesthetics sake. This can be interesting in many ways, but we rarely pretend this is justified. Nor do we necessarily need to. Many people who *aren’t* fictional characters are just in it for the money or the sex or art or some other thing. I wouldn’t call these sympathetic villains, but they are understandable, and they can be very entertaining. A variation on this is the “tragic backstory”. Here, the villain has a simple desire, but justified by some tragedy. “I want power” because “my cat died”. “I want to turn Boston into a beautiful statue museum” because “I grew up in an ugly modern art collection”.
Where we really veer into sympathetic villain territory is when the villain is pursuing some good *that is a genuine good*. CS Lewis might call these people bent as opposed to broken. They have goals and are active agents in pursuing their vision of the good. The tragedy and the source of conflict is, that by putting *a good* above *the good*, they end up twisted and their goals create even further harms, because they can’t see beyond the limited scope of their own aims and ambitions. The reason why people complain about sympathetic villains is that the villain can easily come off as being “better” than the hero in a number of ways. More courageous, more justified, more reasoned, wiser. But why? But how?
For us to side with the hero over the villain, the story has to make an argument that the hero is more moral than the villain. It must offer, through the hero, an even more compelling vision of the good than the villain’s. The problem with sympathetic villains is liberalism. Under the moral norms of liberal modernity, the argument made must be to preserve autonomy or to be kind. The problem with the villain is not necessarily even their aims (progressives agree with Thanos about population control), but just their means and their transgression.
The hero, therefore, represents not a will to accomplish any kind of good at all, but just a referee, a coach, giving a red card to the players of the game while not doing anything besides obstructionism. The heroes in capeshit are merely the “Will to Not Power”. The goal is not any high goal, but merely to restore the status quo, whatever it is, maybe with some reforms around the edges. It’s the Will to Grill. These heroes just want to grill. This can be done well, as in D-FENS. But note he fails, and that’s why it’s interesting.
In order to escape this praise of the status quo, the morality of niceness, you need a corrective. What is the opposite of the Will to Not Power? One opposite is the Will to Power. Sympathetic villains are uncomfortable because they have vitality. They have virtue. The Hero, the moral ideal of today, is nothing more than the Last Man, but with superpowers. And because the pursuit of excellence is anathema, these superpowers are just something that happens. Magic. Cosmic rays. A vast fortune. Nothing earned through struggle and conflict. Against this, why not raise the flag of evil? But what we are attracted to is not evil, but good, the good in the villain that enables them to do what they do. What is Genghis Khan without courage and strength?
Try to imagine a villain with no virtue at all. The only ways to get one are some elemental force of unthinking evil, a demon, or something truly pathetic. Someone totally absent of virtue is not a threat, they’re just a pathetic soyboy. Sin dissolves, it cannot build. The villain therefore has his power through his virtue and the hero through fiat – the heroes of today are soyboys with magic powers. It’s a perfect inversion of the ways things should be. The real problem with the villains is that they are bent. They pursued their vision of their good so long they forgot what The Good meant. The opposite of this is not to pursue nothing. It is to pursue The Good. It is to subject your genuine virtues and genuine goods before The Good. And this is the meaning of humility. What is more compelling than a vision of a good? A vision of The Good in its totality. Not my will, Lord, but thine. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
As we head into the Apostle’s Fast, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about fasting. This fast is a more mild fast, generally, though obviously strictness comes down to one’s own spiritual needs and what is beneficial. It’s ultimately an optional practice to grow close to God.Fasting sounds unpleasant, and it really is at first. But the light is defined by the dark. Presence is defined by absence. One of the first lessons you learn about yourself is pain and how pain defines joy. In its own way, fasting reproduces the theme of the Cross.
By depriving ourselves for a time, we really come to appreciate the joys of food when they are renewed. It is a very fine thing to sup on red meat again after Lent. It gives us an appreciation of what we’re missing. It also gives us an appreciation of different, overlooked beauties. As we fast, we develop an appreciation for the often overlooked pleasures of a vegetarian diet, and the subtleties of that living. It gives us a general relish, such that our sorrow is joy, and our joy is higher.
Americans and other moderns are often attracted to fad diets. I think, deep down, they yearn to invent or reinvent religious dietary restrictions. These have a number of benefits. As you live more and more by a calendar, it creates a seasonality and rhythm of life. It’s a frequent joke that the hardest problem for couples is for the man to choose a meal. Some say this is correlated with leadership or take-charge mentality. This doesn’t seem true to me. Moreso, it seems that moderns are spoiled for choice. Restrictions take away that choice. It provides constraints in your decision making, which makes it less burdensome. Ironically, you see how bonds make you free, which is another lesson of the Cross – that in service to the Lord, we find our freedom.
To live wholly by urges is to ruled by the body. It is to be a slave to the passions. By fasting, we break the rule of the body and attain to the state of dispassionate reason which atheists took as their false, highest end. We see that only in God do we reach our ends. On fast failure and fast-cheating, which is commonly observed in the Middle Ages and in traditional villages in which villagers gorge on shellfish or seafood during fasts. You might tut tut at the hypocrisy, but this too is a spiritual lesson. Many vegetarian foods began as fast-feast foods, like almond milk. Medieval nobles would do things like turn fish into pseudo-duck, or make fake beef from vegetables. This is an instinct we have not escaped, but only secularized. And it’s not without merit.
The ability to feast while fasting is a reminder that we can make the best of the conditions God provides for us by Providence. It mixes in with our harder, less indulgent fasting days as a mini-mirror of our lives, with our intermixed joys and sorrows, our ascents and crosses. It is also a reminder that this is not the Law, we are not Jews, and we do not live like Pharisees. We bend the Law as we will, we make the Sabbath fit for us, not fitting ourselves to the Sabbath. The fast is ultimately of value for its spiritual fruits and lessons. The fasting law can be made so strict that all fail. Can any mortal man endure a forty day total fast like our Lord? But our Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, did it while being wholly man, without cheating, without invoking miracles. He lived on his own faith. By failing our fasts, we remind ourselves no man can be redeemed by his own works, or by keeping the law, because no man can actually wholly keep the law of fasting in its entire strictness. We are all imperfect mirrors of Christ’s sinlessness as a man and his perfection.
And finally, the total fast gives us a chance to see the truth of God’s words, that we might work wonders, that we can wholly live by faith, and the power of the Holy Spirit. We renew our bonds with God. During the total fast, you might expect the feeling of death, which does occur at times. But even more so, you feel life. The Holy Spirit fills you up, making your veins burn like fire. The Spirit alone is enough energy to sustain you and even make you vigorous by faith. By being able to carry out our normal duties and activities, hiding our fasting by metaphorically anointing ourselves and making rosy our faces, we show that the Lord alone is enough to keep us, and we bear silent testimony to us being able to be in the world, but not of it. For by not eating and not being harmed and no one knowing, we bear silent vigil and silent witness to the glory of our Lord.
THREAD STARTER: ZHP ESSAY ON SPIDERMAN https://wiki.chadnet.org/zendaya-and-the-art-of-multiverse-maintenance
Like me, you may be having some qualms about the queer monomyth. That’s because the queer monomyth is the queer story *as it self-perceives*. It sees itself as asserting its true own authenticity against an inexplicably hostile world. In reality, it is reenacting Lucifer’s fall.
The queer monomyth starts by asserting what the protagonist *is*. But in reality, it is an assertion of what the protagonist *is not*. Satan, envious of Man and God alike, wanted to be a woman and God and all he was not. Made to be a male dragon, he wanted to be a mother goddess. What the queer monomyth states as a triumph of love and acceptance is, in our Luciferian monomyth, really just the triumph of brutish power to compel others to socially affirm unreality. This is the mystery revealed every time a troon compels female pronouns. What is the opposite of this? On one level, the basic rejection. You Will Never Be A Woman. You Will Never Be A Spiderman. The queer coding of opprobrium to Spiderman is metafictional. Inside the story, obviously no one will reject or stigmatize them being Spiderman.
But the story feels queer-coded about Spiderman because of the *writers* and *audience*. The point is to assert these new characters as equally Spiderman, validly Spiderman. You are a Spiderman, Spidermen! Yas, slay, queen. But they’re not Spiderman. Spiderman is Peter Parker. When watchers pick up on Gwen Stacy being “trans”, they’re more right than they know. She’s not trans-*gender*. She’s *trans-Spiderman*.
And the question is “Why?” Because that question is ultimately a broader question than “Why Gwen?” It’s a question of why young women are going in the first place. Gwen always dies. Gwen is a sacrifice. To be a woman in a secular world is to be asked to sacrifice yourself – to be the receptive entity. You must sacrifice your youth, your body, your dreams, your identity, your very soul – for what? The atheist world provides no answer. There is no joy. Gwen always dies.
In comes the Serpent. You will be free of the curse of being woman: simply become un-woman. The only way Gwen survives is to trans. To become trans-Spiderman rather than Peter Parker’s doomed love interest. It’s a lie, of course. In reality, the doomed nature of a woman becoming a man creates a constant, unending torment. And this is, ultimately, the purpose. As the first troon, Satan wants nothing more than for more souls to join him in his eternal torment.
But the fear is real. The fear is ultimately that a young maiden is asked to sacrifice everything for what is ultimately the devouring mother goddess she is asked to become. Ungit cannot bear to look at her own terrible visage. The cure for this, of course, was for Christianity to cast down the idols. And what are the idols? Only Man in its nakedness. Ungit is deified, Ungit was only ever an unfortunate woman, Christ liberates Ungit from the terrible burden of having to be a goddess. Sacrifice need not be total self-abnegation. This failure to grapple with the subsuming is also the failure to breed. Having becoming one flesh, they still fear to make that flesh fruitful, because it will subsume the being they now are, just as marriage subsumed the individuals. And what does this point at? The lie at the heart of the queer monomyth, the reason why it is the trans monomyth. And this is also a mirror lie in the right wing. Much like the yin and yang, there is a piece of truth in the left’s narrative, and there is a lie in the right. The truth of the left is that authenticity really is the key. The lie of the right is that self-overcoming and self-transformation is possible. But the left lies about what authenticity is because it lies about what identity is. The left tells you that identity is an act of prideful willfulness while pretending it is innate. But Gwen is not really innately Spiderman. Your authenticity is to your true self. But what is your true self? It is a set of immutables and semi-immutables.
The immutables are where HBD plays in. There are certain biological realities about ourselves that we cannot change. Some are tall and some are short. Some are smart and some are dumb. Some are men and some are women. The left tells us this is all will. Social construction. The semi-mutables are our interpersonal existences, our relationships. They are only semi-mutable because they require the reciprocation of the other. You cannot be an employee without a boss. You cannot be a friend without their friendship. Here comes the need for validation.
The Lord rebuke you, Satan. You will never be a woman. You are a dragon. Come home.
Quis ut Deus?
I offer this up as my meditation on the Precious Blood and the irrevocable consecration of myself to Christ’s Most Precious Blood, which is the end of sacrifice, its completion, and reenacted. Let my waverings and doubts never overcome this, done with full knowledge and will.
Do I confess that I have seen the Lord? Yes. Do I confess I have felt the joyous presence of the Holy Spirit? Yes. Do I confess I have witnessed miracles? Yes. And yet I have crises of faith. Why?
When people have crises of faith, myself included, the issue is rarely the mere existence of God. Almost all atheists believe in a higher power or universal moral force deep down. Simulation theory, “progress”, “the Universe”, being a “decent person” – this is all Deism. I would guess 10% or less of atheists are real atheists, as in not believing in some higher force and only believing in a truly materialist world. And all of those are either autistic or sociopaths – the only paths forward in a truly empty universe. Rather, a crisis of faith comes from questioning one of two things: the Goodness of God or the Incarnation of God. Or it comes from trying to exalt ourselves to be like unto God.
One of the first doubts: Why is there evil? If God is good, why is there evil? This can come in the form of asking whether there is evil in the world or in our own lives. “If God exists, why Holocaust?” “If God exists, tfw no gf?” “If God exists, why car crash?”
Which is really just “If God good, why bad?” Most atheists aren’t *doubting* God, they’re *mad* at God. Evil can be explained away many ways. The first kind of evil, human evil, is almost comically evil to explain. It is not God that did that, but Man. Man, with free will, disorders the universe and creates evil. But then Man asks about the evils of nature. And there is a clean answer here too. Nature is a system of systems. Many evils are merely consequences of the system, the natural flipside of other positive things. If not for decay, flesh would pile up on the earth. The parasitic worm evolves to prey on free biomass. The earthquake must be because of Plate Tectonics. Because of the motions of the stars and the laws of movement, celestial objects must collide, sometimes with us. Sometimes as punishment, but sometimes… Just because. God’s love is that sometimes He bends the rules *for us*.
But all this is downstream of an even more fundamental question: “Why is reality, as it is, not perfectly pleasant?” And the answer given is always that this is the best of all possible worlds. But what does best mean? The answer of the doubter is that best should mean “most pleasant”. But this is an answer of consumption. Like a soyboy with his funko pops or a child wanting to eat candy every day. Still, why is endless consumption bad? Because in that, we forget what we *really* are. We are not called to live a hundred years of sweetness on Earth. Our home is in Heaven. And what does that mean? It mean we should be preparing for eternity, and everything not fit for eternity must perish. It means Earth is a training ground. Our crosses cause us to grow.
Life is not maximally pleasant, but maximally *interesting*. The contemplation of life and the universe is the most interesting *for eternal beings*. Imagine being not a man, but a spirit. How much joy – an eternity of joy – could you extract from just *watching*? You could watch the lives of Great Men. You could watch interpersonal dramas. You could watch the machines. You could watch the animals. There are a million times a million stories, and then you could consider alternate timelines and fates. It would truly be a fitting joy. In the end, surely, you would conclude that God was Good and Loving and that this, the literally canonical timeline, was the best of all possible timelines and all possible worlds. Not most pleasant, but most interesting, and most instructive.
The second question is not about evil, but more “Why not me?” “Why am I not rich?” “Why am I not cool?” “Why am I not strong?” “Why am I not attractive?” “Why does the Lord withhold some blessing or another from me and my nature?” “Why are we all different?”
I contend that all of us would have chosen our gifts and our blessings. When people ask these things, they usually are asking for things *they don’t actually want*.
People often ask for power, but what they want is not power. Power is ultimately responsibility. When you have power, you must always be wary of rivals and responsible for decisions. People think the strong are secure, but power is actually the ultimate *insecurity*.
People often ask for money, but what they want is not money to have, but money to have spent. Ask people what they would do with a million dollars, and almost all of them answer with how they would *spend it*. That means what you want isn’t really the money, but the other aims.
I have been tormented with not being attractive, as have many men. But what is being attractive? It is game. It is playing The Game. And why do you play the Game? To attract “Hot Girls”, which are not necessarily beautiful, but women with “Hot Girl” personalities. The reason why “Chad” gets “Hot Girls” and vice versa is because they fundamentally have compatible personalities. They’re not shit tests to “Chad”, and it’s not a game to “Chad”. They’re compatible people and they genuinely enjoy playing the Game with each other.
What I really want is not to attract “Hot Girls”, whose personalities I find fundamentally unpleasant, by playing “the Game”, which I find psychotic and unfitting to my character, but a very simple thing. I want her. I miss her.
A lot of the torment is not in being attractive or unattractive, but in sensitive young men, nerds, and others, trying to twist themselves into being attractive “Chads” when they’re not, or despairing and blackpilling about not getting something they don’t actually want.
People want strength just to be able to pick on the weak or be left alone. But strength is a duty to defend the weak and to use it. It is not an avoidance of danger, but being constantly called to it, which is also what trains and maintains strength.
People want brilliance of intellect not realizing that it raises questions everywhere, especially about God. And therefore intellect demands us to also settle our own doubts about God intellectually before we can be sated.
To be given blessings, to be given *talents*, is to be given the burden of making those talents fruitful for God, lest it be an indictment against yourself. And God will give us these talents even if they aren’t fruitful if *we truly want them*. But we don’t want what we want.
And people doubt God because they doubt the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the ultimate statement that mortal existence is also good and being Man is good, because God took Man’s shape. It is an act of Goodness and Mercy, but also consecration. Man is worthy of God too.
I have often been disgusted by the weakness of flesh and its flaws. I have yearned to replace my muscles with steel and to live forever. One is even tempted to imagine the material universe is a sham, an illusion, an evil thing to be escaped from.
But how weak is flesh, really? Muscles are efficient machines that *repair themselves* rather than needing to be repaired. Our brains are not just computers, but quantum supercomputers, and they compute so efficiently they operate near the thermodynamic entropy limits of heat. Your 110IQ midwit is roughly equivalent to three top of the line GPUs running at top speed, and he doesn’t melt his own skull like a chocolate bar in the hot summer sun. Our current chips are near physical conventional limits. We have molecular circuits. The brain is *better*. These things are mirrored across all of Creation. God is not just morally Good. God is the greatest of engineers.
Hopefully everyone enjoyed the Pope Head space last night! For anyone who missed it, I’d like to go over the exegesis of the Michael prophecy and the eschatology of the War Scroll again, because it’s extremely relevant to the current day and thinking about this conflict.
The War Scroll is one of a few Dead Sea Scrolls dealing with the Archangel Michael and the last days – collectively, we might call this the Book of Michael. It is essentially an expansion on the fourth prophecy of Balaam in Numbers 24, which it quotes as its centerpiece.
“I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel. He will crush the foreheads of Moab, the skulls of all the people of Sheth. Edom will be conquered; Seir, his enemy, will be conquered, but Israel will grow strong. A ruler will come out of Jacob and destroy the survivors of the city.”
Let’s break this down. What does this mean? I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near. Michael will rise up (also see Daniel 12:1) in a distant time and a distant place, not the Levant.
Who is Moab? Moab is a rival kingdom to Israel, descended from Abraham’s nephew Lot. They are a frequent rival of Israel battling for the Holy Land. And Edom? Edom comes from Jacob’s brother Esau, their brother nation. Today we might call these Levantine Arabs and Palestines.
And Seir? Seir refers to Mount Seir, and the people who came from Seir were the Horites. The Horites founded Sodom and dwelt therein. So Seir here means the denizens of Sodom, or the Sodomites. The survivors of the city of Sodom will also be destroyed.
When Bibi refers to Isaiah, he is referring to a similar passage from Isaiah 11. “They will swoop down on the slopes of Philistia to the west; together they will plunder the people to the east. They will subdue Edom and Moab, and the Ammonites will be subject to them.”
And what about Sheth? Sheth is a “Hapax legomenon”, a word that does not show up elsewhere, and thus requires specific outside interpretation. Luckily, it has a specific meaning. Sheth refers to Indian bankers. Well, that’s kind of weird.
It is, however, funny that Bibi refers to Isaiah. Ultimately, what is the center of Isaiah? The prophecy about the humiliated, rejected Messiah who will be a light unto the gentiles and save not only Israel, but the whole world.
Read straightforwardly with the Old Testament alone, the Jewish Torah, these passages together are basically just a prophecy of victory in tribal warfare and the genocide of Israel’s rival nations so that it can win control over the Holy Land. This is how Bibi reads it too.
But in the context of the fulfillment of Isaiah, the Messiah, the Christ, all of these passages take on a new light and a second meaning. Each of the tribes in these tribal wars represent something in addition to being an ethnos.
After all, the straightforward reading of Numbers 24 requires Michael to destroy not only still extant peoples in the Levant, which is easy enough, but also the Sodomites and Indian bankers, which seems very strange in the context of some desert warfare.
And if it’s just about Israel triumphing in a war in the Holy Land, why specify not only a time far in the future, but a place far away? It’s clear that the reading the Old Testament is *incomplete*. And Christ’s coming *completes* and renders whole the message.
In a Christian reading of the Bible, Israel does not only refer to the descendants of Jacob, but to what they did – believe and stay faithful to God. Israel refers not to an ethnos, but to the Church, the community of believers.
Similarly, the various rivals to Israel are not damned because of bad blood or evil genetics. Indeed, if this were so, then Ruth the Moabite would have made David accursed. From the beginning, even then, a righteous Moabite would be grafted onto Israel.
What was the crime of Moab? The daughters of Moab seduced Israel and induced its sons into sexual immorality and the worship of false idols. By harlotries, they were made to sacrifice children to Moloch and to worship Asherah, the Earth Mammy. Moab refers not just to the Moabites, a people, but to their crime. Anyone who indulges in sexual immorality and is tempted thereby to idolatry is spiritually a Moabite. The Longhouse is made of “Would”.
What about Sheth? It can refer to Indian bankers, who now flood the shores of the West and overrun the bastions of Jewish finance, certainly. And what a weird thing to prophesy in the Bronze Age, isn’t it? But in other variants, it is rendered as “the noisy boasters”. FUCK YOU BLOODY! FUCKING MOTHER BLOODY FUCK BITCH! Bitch y- FUCK YOU YOU! FUCKING BLOODY BASTARD… Benchod bloody BENCHOD YOU!! Everyone who indulges in this kind of shitflinging, in the spiritually brown lambo poasting, in online boasting – these are all sons of Sheth.
Why was Esau accursed? Why is Edom despised? Because Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of pottage. He saw the gifts of the Lord and spurned them. Esau is everyone who abandons God for the sake of a worldly pittance, the short term gain of worldly goods.
And I think the Sodomites are self-explanatory. Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
So in the context of the New Testament, this prophesy of tribal genocide takes on a new meaning. Instead of tribal Israel annihilating its neighbors in the Levant, it is a story of the struggle of the Church in the End Times.
In a time far in the future, in a place far away, Michael will rise up, and the Church will struggle against its enemies: The Longhouse, those who sell out God for pittances of the world, the noisy boasters, and the Lavender Mafia. And it will triumph.
So surely we should welcome this time, right? Not quite. Americans often look forward to the End Times, largely because they see them as a joyous time. This is mostly because of the belief in the Rapture, where the believers will be whisked away to Heaven to watch Earth burn. This is not quite Biblical. Christianity is about bearing crosses and suffering for the Lord, exemplified by Christ himself. It’s not exactly bearing a cross to enjoy a life of the Prosperity Gospel and then to watch your fellow man suffer on Earth from Heaven. But it goes deeper than that. Ultimately, Protestant Christianity has forgotten half of God. In this famous Orthodox icon, we see the duality of Jesus. Jesus is fully Man but also fully God. He suffers, but he also avenges.
They fixate on Jesus Christ as totally loving. Jesus forgives. Jesus loves. Jesus will have mercy. But Jesus is also the Judge. Jesus comes with a sword. In too much art, Jesus is only the man part of the icon. He is a soft gentle man who will forgive and love. But we are reminded not only to love the Lord… but to fear the Lord, for the Lord’s wrath is terrible indeed. Protestants have so forgotten the fear of the Lord that oftentimes American Protestantism can slide into “Jesus is my boyfriend” theology.
A detour. There is more to American theology than American Protestantism. There is also the esoteric. Masonry. I don’t like to go into Masonry too much these days because it’s largely a dead movement, irrelevant to modern elite politics. But the symbols do still live.
What is the meaning of the black-and-white checkerboard? It is a belief in the duality of evil and good, and that by walking through both evil and good, you gain a complete understanding and go to the true altar to commune with the true God, not the demiurge. Masonry draws upon gnostic theology. Inside elite occult circles, they share and discuss the Gospel of Judas, which posits that Judas was the actual elected disciple to see the true secrets of Christ, and that he founded his own hidden church. The hidden church, like Judas, is tasked to be the dark squares, to play the role of the Satan, the accuser, the Enemy, so that the game can be won and mankind can cross past the chessboard and rise to meet the true God. By playing the bad side, they can immanentize the eschaton.
Why do I bring that up? Well, even if this is no longer the dominant sect, the symbols and cultural language it created still exist as a sort of typeface for American art and occult sites and images. For instance, the Denver airport.
Just as pictures of Jesus tend towards the saccharine, the sweet, the all-too soft, like a modern youth pastor, so too do paintings of Michael droop. Very often, he looks bored, and certainly not fearsome or fierce. He languidly slays Satan. But preserved in this Masonic symbology is another side, another depiction. It is not just a Michael said to be an angel of compassion, an angel who opens up healing springs. The rainbow, the promise of peace, revoked. The dove, the bird of peace, slain. And all the world in terror. This is the face that made 1st century BC Jews whisper, in hushed tones, of the Prince of Israel, the Prince of Fear and Terror. BE NOT AFRAID.
The Day of the Lord is terrible indeed. Pray that it be postponed.
I can’t sleep so I’m just going to write about the much alleged 30IQ communication gap. I don’t think it exists as a communication gap per se. What I do think exists is an inability to truly get into the felt experience of actually living as an IQ level too distant from yours.
We’ll start with my IQ level and how I think, because this comes most naturally to me. At +3SD, I effortlessly and simply think of things with consideration to potential 2nd and sometimes 3rd order consequences because reality is arranged for me as a system of systems.
Others may view things as insights or have some deep feeling of techne that explains away what’s going on, depending on thinking style and personality, but the effect is fundamentally the same: easily grasped intuitive complexity and innate multifactor analysis. Everything is kinda easy because you don’t have to apply much brain effort to get things done, and complexity comes naturally. At +3SD, you are basically playing life on easy mode. You have to try, but not very hard.
Extrapolating upwards, I can attempt to understand the thinking of people like Moldbug, Einstein, or Spandrell, who would test in the +4SD range, at least for their strengths. Whereas I see intuitive complexity, thinkers in this range seem to shift paradigms.
Every complex model or system of systems have implicit holes which can be followed to reveal multiple worldviews which might explain the creation of this system of systems. An entire worldview is hard to digest or articulate. A +4SD thinker seems to be able to do it. Because of this, they *invent* some big idea like Relativity or Bioleninism or the Cathedral or any of von Neumann’s fifty concepts or some such. It recontextualizes the entire system of complexity and gives it a new clarity while not undoing any of the derived models. It is difficult for me to keep up, because sometimes their words seem like magic to me. I literally cannot follow. Much of the time, it takes thought-effort.
Which leads me to… +5SD. People like Terence Tao or Chris Langan. I have no idea how these people work. Listening to a Terence Tao lecture just makes me clap and go “I like your funny words, magic man.” Functionally, this man is a wizard to me. And yet both of us are trying as hard as we can to communicate, and we can communicate.21292.5KMonsieur le Baron@Mssr_le_Baron·But even if I see his conclusions, his own description of his thought process drops so many steps that, well, it may as well be magic. Tell me more, magic man.
Now going down. I will apologize in advance for any condescension. First we have the +2SD zone. In many ways, this is the zone that makes the most “sense” as an intellectual. I know what it’s like to be +2SD because that’s how good I am at math and the technical, which for me is an area of weakness. At +2SD, there’s a nice clean effort-reward curve. If you put in the work, you can construct complexity. How would I describe this?
By thinking at it, you can put together the bricks to make a crystal castle in your head, in which all the parts come together and click, but a lapse in concentration will bring it all crashing down. But with that effort, you operate at the same level as +3SD innate complexity. The rest of the time, you mostly have Good Ideas. Good Ideas are natural one step solutions to one step problems. It’s nice to be this smart. It means that if you try, you solve your normal problems, if you try hard, you can be brilliant, and you fail if you’re lazy. Nicely fair.
+1SD is the learner zone. At +1SD, you can learn things pretty easily. I know what it’s like to be +1SD, because I was a learner too. This is what I was like when I was between the ages of 5 and 9. Basically, you hear what teacher says and you repeat. You get a pat on the head. This pat on the head is very rewarding and you learn things well, so you go on learning things and repeating things. Are people in this zone capable of original thought? Actually yes, and I’ve seen it several times. What I think creates the midwit problem is a validation trap. In order to come up with their own Good Ideas, the midwit has to think and think hard, and some of these Good Ideas are actually Bad Ideas. This is naturally frustrating. It is best to just copy the ideas you hear from the Experts, who naturally have Good Ideas. To communicate with these people, I naturally revert to what Ribbonfarm would call Babytalk, but from my perspective, they actually are just my baby self, so I have no other frame of communication reference. I have to be the Expert Authority to get my ideas across.
Which leads us to 100IQ. Normal people. The Everyman. The CHUD. I have no idea what the internal experience of being this is. It seems magic, but in the other way. If they lived their lives purely intellectually, it seems like they might drown looking at the sky. But they live. What I’ve concluded is that, for the most part, they operate off a mixture of animal instinct, gut check, emotion, and peer pressure, which coalesces into something called “Common Sense”, and is basically the evolutionary wisdom of tradition. It works very, very well. Most of the time, these people are more functional in important ways than +1SD learners because tradition is anti-fragile. I believe the anti-intellectualism of the common man is because it takes them effort to be Learners and Learn things, and it actually does very little good.
-1SD: ???
A friend of mine has DMed me an old heuristic that every +1SD gained halves learning time (and thought effort?). I think this makes a lot of intuitive sense. At some point, the juice is just not worth the squeeze.
More on 0SD and -1SD from info from DMs. Sources anonymous.
0SD: I think they do something they would call “thinking” which is like the puzzle block assembly of concepts from words or the assembly of more complex intellectual procedures from simpler ones. Thinking at higher levels is more like concept-smashing, I believe. 0SDs also can reason-by-analogy to determine solutions to novel problems. The instincts can be heuristics applied to new situations.
At -1SD. people apparently become completely incapable of this kind of instinct transference or manual override thinking process. They can’t seem to assemble complex concepts at all. A sufficiently dumb person can’t assemble the concept of “time” or “future”. Without this, they depend on ritual. A -1SD person can be perfectly functional within a system of strict rituals and routines, but they will have no idea what they are doing, and if the environment is disrupted and becomes novel, they will become dysfunctional.
Another DM: the community is often the source of this tradition, and if tradition fails, alternative solutions. This is part of why the radical autonomy favored by well-meaning liberals falls so flat on its face. Saw this chart, and I think “Mastery Learning” seems to be a good descriptor of 0SD. They’re not readers. The person I know best in that range does not read, but she does learn. By repeated encounters and practice in a scenario, they build up an intuition combined with thinking.
So they have gut instinct plus mastery developed from practice plus the process of “thinking” to guide them.
Akhenaten was a pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, one of the last such pharaohs. His reign saw the instatement of one of the world’s first monotheistic religions, Atenism. This was a period of social upheaval and political instability that saw the collapse of the 18th Dynasty. Aten was analogized to the Sun God, but was not entirely the same as previous understandings of Egyptian deity. Instead, he was a sole and supreme creator god. Unlike Egyptian polytheistic gods, he was not to be depicted with graven idols, so he was symbolized by the sun. Interestingly, Akhenaten was not the eldest son of his father. He had an older brother, Thutmose, but for some reason, Thutmose did not inherit, despite not dying in infancy, and living to adulthood. But some time in his adulthood, the crown prince, Thutmose, disappears Akhenaten’s reign is troubled and he is succeeded by a chaotic succession of pharaohs, including women and his child son, “King Tut”. Eventually the chronology dissolves into a muddle entirely, with all manner of alleged (rival warlord claimant?) pharaohs, before the 19th.
There is a myth, the Osarseph myth, which is said to describe this time of instability and the end of the 18th Dynasty. The rightful pharaoh, Amunhotep, the name of several pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty, including Akhenaten, desires to see the true God. He is given a prophecy in which Egypt will suffer ruin unless he drives out the unclean people. For some reason, he does not drive out the unclean people, but instead enslaves them and sends them to quarry for no reason. Then, also for no reason, he gives them a city, Avaris. Because he is schizophrenic, he decides to besiege Avaris, but his army turns against him and he cannot press the attack, and instead, fearful of the gods, he flees into exile for twelve years. At this point, his child son grows up into adulthood and restores the throne. The leader of the rebels, Osarseph, is driven out. Ramesses, the child pharaoh, restores the worship of the Egyptian pantheon and brings peace to Egypt.
This is said to be a mythologized history of the Amarna period and Akhenaten. Ramesses is a new founder, so he needs a myth. Instead of being Ramesses I, random warlord done well, he is Ramesses I, son of Amunhotep, rightful pharaoh, restorer of Egypt. Osarseph is said to represent Akhenaten, because he destroys true religion. But Amunhotep also desires to see the Gods. Well, whatever. There is a duality of Osarseph and Amunhotep both being the pharaoh and possibly Akhenaten and this being some sort of complicated mythmaking around Osiris and Horus, ending in reconciliation. Great. Except why make one figure into two?
And there’s one more thing.
Although the Egyptians called him Osarseph, Manetho says that he called himself… Moses.
Gentleman, we have a mystery on our hands. Why would Judaism and Atenism both come about, independently, at about the same time? Two cultures inventing monotheism simultaneously? Perhaps the two are related. Perhaps this myth deserves more attention. Josephus identifies the Jews with the Hyksos, a Semitic Sea People that invaded Egypt, establishing the 15th Dynasty. Confusingly, the 15th Dynasty coexisted with the 16th Dynasty and 17th Dynasty, only ending with the founding of the 18th Dynasty and their subjugation. So now we have a name for our mysterious enslaved people and a motivation to keep them down. After all, these are foreign raiders who conquered Egypt, and your dynasty restored legitimate native rule. And if the Hyksos are the Jews, then of course they set up in Avaris. Avaris was, after all, the capital of the 15th Dynasty.
But why would Pharaoh be unable to overcome them? Why would he struggle to siege the fortress and have a weakened reign? Perhaps his soldiers saw the strange leader of the unclean people as more legitimate. Where does the name Moses come from? It is not Hebrew in origin. It’s Egyptian. It derives from the Egyptian Mose or son. And it was said that Moses was an (adoptive) Egyptian prince. Perhaps the Pharaoh could not overcome the great host at Avaris because it was Hyksos warriors. And perhaps Pharaoh could not prevail over Osarseph, or Moses, because his soldiers did not trust him. Perhaps Osarseph is not a strutting Priest of Osiris gone bad leading a band of lepers that can somehow overpower Pharaoh himself, but a Prince of Egypt. Prince Thutmose. What then? The story of Exodus, as narrated by both Egyptian and Jewish sources, becomes the retelling of a story of dueling legitimacies between Princes at the dawn of monotheism, a belief so explosive it ends Egypt with all manner of (possibly divine) calamities. Why do the Jewish slaves long to worship the pagan gods again and wax nostalgic about Egypt? Would a crushed slave people do such a thing? Probably not. But a people that remembered *ruling* Egypt would. Especially if many of the living were not slaves, but of a prince’s retinue. And Moses’s tablets. Are they just fictional? Or are they evidence of an already present writing system? One that is said to be derived from the cultural meeting of a Semitic people with Egyptian culture and its hieroglyphics? Maybe this happens by trade. But maybe not.
But we are modern people who believe in modern histories, and not silly stories like Exodus. Exodus has been deboonked. There is no evidence tying the Hyksos to the Jews. It says so right there. Josephus and Manetho, despite being ancient scholars, are far less informed than us.
What is the true origin of the Hebrews? Well, obviously, the Habiru. Who were the Habiru? Well, they were a social caste of outlaws, mercenaries, thieves, and laborers, and their name meant unclean, and they lived like Roma. Modern scholars sound awfully anti-semitic.
One problem with the Habiru theory is that the Habiru were explicitly not a people, but a social class and a descriptor of a group outcast from society. But they do have some evidence that, at some point, there is an ethnogenesis moment where the Habiru organize into a people. At this point, this band of thieves and nomads spontaneously transforms into an organized people which run an complex agricultural society and kingdom. I am sure that if we observe the Roma long enough, this will also spontaneously happen, one day. Okay. So how do we know this and when does this happen? It’s simple. The Amarna letters. Amarna? Why are they called the Amarna letters? Well, because they date to the Amarna period. The late 18th Dynasty. The period of Akhenaten. What a strange coincidence. So right at the time that the mythical Moses is said to be leading his people out of Egypt, first to Avaris then to exile in the Syrian Levant, the Habiru, heretofore nomads, spontaneously organize into an settled agricultural people. But wait, there’s more. What did Manetho call these followers of Moses? Lepers? Outlaws? Unclean people? … Habiru?
The Great Retreat in the 14th Century BC. Behind you is a palace, a kingdom, a people, and your own family. Ahead of you is an unknown future full of struggles, pain, and long wandering. All you have to guide you is faith in God. But your reward? Immortality. No looking back.
Now, is this true? I wouldn’t be able to tell you definitively. Do I think it is plausible? Yes, absolutely, and this was a scholarly hypothesis people generally held only fifty years ago. It was debunked alongside Carthaginian child sacrifice and Aztec human sacrifice rites.
The modern hypothesis is that humans come up with these highly complex myths with no basis in reality for no reason other than self-legitimation or to slander or praise other ancient peoples. But maybe they don’t. Maybe all the myths are in some way essentially true. And that’s a greater point I want you to think on. How winners and losers write history. How we frame the past. What myths mean. And fundamentally, how do we, as peoples, remember.
There can be miracles when you believe.
PS Exodus says the Jews dwelled in Egypt 430 years. Stratographic layer G, where the temple to Set/Hadad was erected by Canaanite settlers in Avaris, dates to 1780BC. 430 years from that is the reign of Akhenaten. So I was talking about this with a friend, and he pointed out that the garbling (and there must necessarily be some garbling) could easily be a garbling of Amunhotep/Akhenaten and Horemheb, the last pharaoh of the 18th – in a sense. He was not related to the dynasty.
Horemheb, like Manetho’s Amunhotep, is exiled, and eventually names his “son”, Rameses I as the next pharaoh, even though he is not the same as Amunhotep/Akhenaten. If this is the correct interpretation, then some more things come into focus. While I am more romantically attracted to the idea of Moses returning and dramatically confronting his brother, ala Prince of Egypt, the Horemheb/Ay theory clarifies the verse where God tells Moses that all those who sought him are dead. The death of Ay in 1320BC is the death of the last of the Thutmosids and related pharaohs. The dynasty is now thoroughly extinct. Nobody who would remember Moses is left. This would be a mercy from God. When he returns to Egypt, 40 years after 1360BC, he is confronting a stranger.
It is also a time of persecution. Egypt is destroying Atenism and its temples to return to the old ways. If Atenism is related to proto-Judaism, then certainly, these are now an oppressed people. Why does Horemheb pass his throne to Rameses I? Because he has no surviving sons. Now, like the previous interpretation, this takes some garbling – this time to mash Akhenaten and Horemheb into the Amunhotep figure. But I think, regardless, this era is the right era, and the figures are broadly correct. More corroboration? The wife of Amunhotep III. Tiye was non-Egyptian and had unusual religious views. Jewish? Or rather, Hyksos? If so, then perhaps the mother of Akhenaten and Thutmose was Jewish.
The Aten moment would have been the big eruption of a cultural syncretism reaching back centuries.
Yes, centuries. After all, the Hyksos flight is downstream of another interesting event – a shogunate in the land of pyramids and sand. But that’s a thread for another day.
Editor’s Note: At the time of compilation, I have completely accepted the Horemheb hypothesis and accordingly praise the great mercy of God, who spared his beloved Moses from confronting his actual brother. One of the proto-Semitic stele is also a praise of God (as Ptah-Osiris) and Amunhotep, Moses’s father. This is very sweet.
The 13th Dynasty, which began in 1803BC, was a time of great unrest. It was contemporary with the 14th Dynasty, and was characterized by great decline, plague, and famine. It would eventually retreat south, leaving the north to the 14th Dynasty.
The 14th Dynasty was a dynasty of Egyptian origin which ruled over the West Delta from Xois, and lasted 184 years. Little is known about it, and it was ultimately subsumed by the… the 14th Dynasty? Wait, let me check my notes. The 14th Dynasty, which began some time between 1800BC and 1725BC, was a dynasty of Hyksos origin which ruled over Northern Egypt. Its rise to power is obscure and so is its collapse. Like its contemporary, the 13th Dynasty, it presided over a period of famine. Though while the 13th Dynasty was declining, this 14th Dynasty was rising. It came to rule over all of Northern Egypt from its capital, Avaris, and eventually pushed the 13th Dynasty out of even historic Memphis, looting and pillaging the city to decorate Avaris. This is why the 13th Dynasty moved its capital south to Thebes, since it had lost Memphis, and why it proudly proclaimed its rule over Memphis in its twilight hours. Wait… what? The 13th Dynasty was in decline almost as soon as it was founded, as the 14th Dynasty emerged early. The 13th Dynasty was tremendously short lived by its monuments. The 13th Dynasty was tremendously long lived per Manetho, with a staggering 76 pharaohs. Hrm. Eventually both the 13th and 14th Dynasties are swept away by the rising of the 15th Dynasty, which, per Manetho, comes to power without conflict. Huh? How can the 15th Dynasty displace the powerful 14th Dynasty without issue? The 15th Dynasty is founded by a “Salitis”.
Some have attempted to connect this name to “shallit”, one of those titles Joseph had during Genesis. Obviously, we don’t believe such silly myths – the Bible is a work of fiction. We are hard-nosed realists who only believe in power politics. But for curiosity’s sake, what does “shallit” mean? It’s simple. It’s the Hebrew word for shogun. What were the problems plaguing the 13th Dynasty? Famine. The loss of crops. Why is Avaris a power center? Because Avaris was built with massive granaries, making it a focal point of Egyptian power in a time of mass starvation. It was a natural spot for a capital. Manetho doesn’t recognize our archaeological 14th as a dynasty – because it wasn’t one.
Avaris was not the seat of a dynasty, but the site of a shogun using control of grain to rule over northern Egypt. Why did the 13th Dynasty claim rule over Memphis until the end? Because, from their point of view, they had never lost Memphis. It was administered by the shogun. Until, of course, it wasn’t. How can the 15th Dynasty overthrow the 13th Dynasty and 14th Dynasty without a violent struggle? Because it *was* the “14th” Dynasty, the shoguns making de jure what was previously de facto. Who was going to stop them? Look at me. I am Pharaoh now. Of course, no action comes without a reaction. Why are the Hyksos enslaved? Perhaps, as Manetho describes, the population experiences them as cruel foreign tyrants who “got the granaries of Egypt into their possession, and perpetrated many of the most horrid actions there.” Nativist dynasties arise to oppose the Hyksos 15th Dynasty, the 16th, 17th, and eventually, the 18th Dynasty. The Hyksos were destroying the temples of the native gods and blaspheming the Egyptian pantheon. The people were appalled and begged to be saved.
Except Rameses isn’t the capital of the Hyksos. Or is it? Avaris was renamed and rebuilt in the 19th Dynasty. Its new name? Pi-Rameses.
In Manetho’s Aegyptica, Osarseph/Moses, rebel priest of Osiris, leads the Habiru army to Avaris, city of the Hyksos. In Exodus, Moses leads the Jews through Rameses, aka Avaris, on their road to freedom. And do you recall Prince Thutmose? He was a priest of Ptah. Ptah-Osiris.
With this in hand, we can construct a Biblical chronology.
1780 BC: First Canaanite settlers in Egypt in Avaris ~1800-1700BC: The Hyksos Shogunate begins with Joseph 1750BC(?): Joseph invites his brothers to dwell in Egypt, settling in Avaris ~1650BC: The Hyksos Shoguns overthrow the 13th Dynasty and proclaim themselves Pharaoh Middle 1500s: Ahmose I subjugates the Hyksos. The Egyptian captivity begins. This is in the 18th year of Ahmose I. If Ahmose begins his reign in 1539BC, this is 1520BC. ~1390s BC: Crown Prince Thutmose is born. He is made Priest of Ptah-Osiris. 1360 BC: Thutmose disappears from the record, possibly “killed” by Annan, Priest of Amun(?) in a power struggle 1320 BC: Thutmose returns as Moses. He delivers the Israelites from slavery.
Sanity check. “Now the length of time the Israelite people lived in Egypt was 430 years.” 1320 BC is 430 years after a possible date of Joseph settling his brothers during the Hyksos Shogunate. Seder Olam says the time the Jews were in slavery was 200 years. 1520-1320BC. The chronology of Exodus is internally consistent so far. What about the arrival in Canaan? 40 years from 1320BC is 1280BC, and the Conquest of Canaan takes 7 years, so that the people of Israel are settled in the Promised Land in 1273BC.
Except there is an alternative explanation. Early Exodus holds that the Jews depart in 1447BC, wander for 40 years, make war on Canaan, and Jericho falls sometime shortly after 1400BC.
Why 1447BC? Because that is 851 years from the ruin of the Temple, and the LORD says that Israel will be exiled one year before it grows old (852 years). The first exile begins in 597BC, so the exile happens 850 years and change beforehand, in 1447BC. And this too is consistent.
And for this chronology, they have the ruins of Jericho. The 1550BC dating of the sack is rejected because within Jericho exist scarabs of Amenhotep III, which means logically Jericho did not fall until his reign. And it did not fall after, otherwise there would be more scarabs.
Except… 597BC is a secular date. If we are counting with Rabbinical years, why not start counting backwards from the Rabbinical year of exile? By the Rabbinical tradition, the sack happened in 423BC. And what is 851 (850 inclusive) years before that? 1273BC. Our settling date.
47 years before that? 1320BC, when we have Moses returning to Egypt. Game. Set. Match. As a bonus, Pharaoh’s daughter. It’s two different people. One is the mother of Moses, the other simply is another Pharaoh’s daughter. Not all of Akhenaten’s daughters have tombs.
Neferneferuaten Tasherit is unaccounted for and she would have been 25 when Moses returned to Egypt, with no other living relatives. A perfect candidate to marry one of the Jews and get pregnant, rather than a 100 year old woman being seduced and impregnated. One last loose end. How can Jericho can be sacked by Joshua when it was sacked in 1400BC, before Moses? The dating of Jericho depends on the scarabs. So it must be at least the reign of Amenhotep III. Except there’s one thing. Amenhotep III was the last Pharaoh to issue scarabs.
The sack of Jericho can not occur before Amenhotep III, but certainly it can occur after. And carbon dating has a margin of error of 150 years.
PS:
When I wrote this thread, I never expected to find a smoking gun. There’s a smoking gun! There’s been a smoking gun for SIXTY YEARS. Gerster I is an inscription of Sekhemrekhutawi in PROTO-SINAITIC in 1760BC asking El to give rest to his companion Heber.
THE JEWISH PHAROAH ASKS EL TO BLESS HIS COMPANION, HEBER, ONE OF THE DESCENDANTS OF JACOB WHY IS THERE A JEWISH PHAROAH And I found this being used as evidence AGAINST THE BIBLE
Our Pharoah in a Coat of Many Colors, circa ~1700BC, the time of Joseph From Avaris, the capital of the Hyksos, surrounded by 12 tombs https://madainproject.com/avaris_statue
The Jewish Pharoah with a coat of many colors, blesses Heber. I thought his coat of many colors would be more stylish. Kinda dorky.
But it would change people’s characters. Why are there distinctions in character? Because all those traits have purpose. That which is purposeless is slowly selected out. What we call evil is often us failing to understand how things, by nature, can have bad consequences.
because conceivably, if that knob is so low in me, it could have been made just as low for everyone else. it wouldnt actually violate anyones free will for God to design a universe where in people just didnt think of doing that, the way i dont think of doing it.
Those bad consequences do not come because that thing must always be bad, but because the badness is from a disordering from the circumstance. The evil is because the thing is out of its place. If only everything could be in its proper place, then there would be no evil. Why is aligning your will with God’s the highest good? Because God is love and his order *is* good. If we were all in place, the unfolding of reality would be like a beautiful dance, with intricacy beyond knowing, fractal complexity which, nevertheless, is sweetness and light. Yes, you were not born a sexual sadist. But is it not right that some are? Because sexual sadism is only the disordered expression of an urge that can be channeled in a positive way. Every day, I have the choice to either smite evil or indulge sexual sadism. What tells my brain that sexual sadism is pleasurable is also why I take great pleasure to exert my power against evil. This is also what witch hunters on Twitter and elsewhere are doing, but they have misidentified evil. But if they were hunting real witches…? These women aren’t the descendants of witches. They’re often the descendants of Puritan white women who burned witches.
Tell me the witches shouldn’t be burnt.
Go on. The monsoon brings fertility to the land. Isn’t it the fault of our stupidity and reckless desires to put ourselves in the way? The wolf regulates the deer. “Natural evil” is merely the consequences of natural laws playing out in a way *we* find undesirable. How prideful we are.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? To what were its foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone
But why have that dynamic at all? Precisely because it is a dynamic, a negative feedback loop, a cycle. When you have a cycle, it can adjust – the high part of the cycle or the low part can become the new baseline in response to shifts in environment. The homeostasis can change. Humans don’t design in dynamics, they design in statics. We like to pin things down and make a machine. Machines break. Machines are fragile. When a machine finds an unsuitable environment, it cannot adjust to the new parameters. A dynamic can, because its high can become low. A disordering is never as disordered as it *must be*, because the brilliance of God’s design allows to reclaim goods from evils, even when we choose the evils. Our children and their children can find goodness after adapting to a new, imperfect order. But we deprived ourselves of what could have been without the Fall. What else is dynamic? Music. God is using the laws of reality to play a great symphony, but he depends on us to play the instruments. Yet so great is His majesty, he can turn sour notes into a stunning movement.
Let’s have an example. The founder of the Plantaganets, Geoffrey Plantaganet, Count of Anjou. We’ll call him Jeff. Jeff, like many nobles, was autism golem. Like many autism gremlins today, he wanted succubus gf. You should not want this. But he did. This was an evil desire, and because of this, the House of Plantaganet was cursed with the madness of their demon blood. But yet, good came of it too, because when their nobler members submitted to the will of God, England was brought to greatness. Their qualities were leveraged. Richard the Lionheart was a great man *because* of that which also made him terrible, but it was his Nephilim character that was harnessed to do great and just things in the Crusades, so long as he submitted to God, who takes our clay and makes it into a pot.
Another analogy. Our houses are like structurally unsound houses that have not yet fallen in. God is trying as hard as He can to save our all houses, but we insist on dwelling in them, and we also love the way the roof sag complements the drapes. We adore the dismalness. My soul is like a house in ruins! God is the Contractor of my soul. If I let Him in to do His work, I can yet be saved from the consequences of my own actions, like my sinful desire to masturbate to /gif/. But the house may yet fall in, and thus, I am damned, because of *myself*. I chose to OWN that guy or tell myself I’m not so bad or so many other things which are like a man running the sink to overflowing in a home, causing flooding and water damage, and yet I blame God for the consequences of my own actions? Absurd. We all see the NPCification of people who get addicted to weed or video games or gambling or any other pleasure. We see the NPCification of those who indulge in pride (virtue signaling) or greed (get rich quick schemes and shitcoins).
Only by abandoning our pride (our virtue signaling and conviction in our own virtue) can we achieve real virtue. Only by abandoning get rich quick schemes do people actually start getting rich. Our disordered desires keep us away from the actual goods they pretend to point to. There’s a unifying theme there that I can’t put my finger on, but I’m not just rambling, I swear. It’s all one thing. Or another thing. Why do famines and plagues come with the falls of empires when they are natural phenomena? Isn’t that weird? Well, they hasten the collapse of that regime. But why would that be good? Can you name a single bad regime that lasted more than a century? Yes, famine is very bad. But the disasters that strike down failing governments are like amputating an arm.
Imagine how bad the Thousand Year Lib Reich would be if the trends we see now continued for another thousand years.
Who will starve? 1. People who have no friends and family that love them AND 2. Who refused to see warning signs and prepare for themselves In some sense, it is a *targeted* attack that nevertheless obeys natural laws.
January 1st, yet again.
“And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”-
Eternity is a terrible thing indeed. Eternity is a wondrous thing indeed. People often ask why a loving God might condemn mankind to Hell. This is a misunderstanding, I think. Hell and Heaven are both choices, and Hell is a separation from God. Absent this connection, the love of God is like an unending burning agony. This life is the time for toil and the time for choices, while we still have a body and flesh. Continuously, we face choices, where we must choose between good and evil. These choices are, in many ways, the choice between The Good and The Evil. Though men act as if the choice is hard, the choice is often easier than we think. The wages of sin are death. We find often that sin is self-defeating. The greatness of the great comes not from their sins, but their virtues, which are often twisted. To paraphrase CS Lewis, what is Attila without his courage? It is the only things present in great but wicked men that allow them to do their deeds. And given these gifts, it is all the more tragic when they freely choose evil. So what is eternity? Eternity is a time when choices end, and our existence stretches on forever. When we are wrathful and seethe, it feels like our soul is burning up, but it does not harm our enemy. When we are greedy, we obsess over wealth to no avail. So on, and so forth. What if we were perpetually locked in a state of cope and seethe? And moreover, we no longer have the fleeting distractions and pleasures of the flesh to assuage our pain, but exist in an unmediated spiritual state of cope and seethe. When we die, therefore, unless we have achieved a state of total depravity or Sainthood in our lifetimes, we exist in an impure state, but one which is either inclined to choose either The Good, which is God, or The Evil. Given this, what is our conclusion?
Everything not fit for eternity must perish. What then is Hell? It is not the arbitrary cruelty of an evil God. Rather, God is full of love. When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became like God, able to discern Good and Evil – and thus sin.
Nevertheless, God will save us. What are our souls? Our souls are like rotting mansions, deep in disrepair. The roof is caving in, bed bugs and spiders roam the roams, every hall is covered in mold and grime, and it is terribly drafty. We do not notice.
We are always out in the world. But one day, that long night will descend upon us, and we must go home to sleep, and sleep for the long sleep. What we will return to? Dwelling in our sin, we will tormented by the bugs and winds and rains forever, and the burnings shall never cease. But it need not be that way. God wants to repair our houses, however shabby they may be. He has sent His Son to us.
After all, Jesus was a carpenter. Every time we repent of one of our sins, we are fixing one of the broken parts of our houses, making it fit for eternity. We are trading the temporary joys of sin – or oftentimes, the temporary excitement, less than even joy – for something permanent. Every time I discard a sin, I feel a new calmness descend into my soul. With truly holy people, one finds them almost totally at peace, unbothered by the swayings of the world.
Such is fitness for eternity. So why must Job suffer? For Job was a righteous man. And it was true that Job was blameless in his ways. But Job was not the Lord. His own right arm could not save him. His talents, in the end, do not come from within himself. Some lessons can only be taught by affliction. To continue, what is path dependence? Path dependence is a sequencing of events such that each step depends on the previous step. Certain things only unfold as they do because of the sequencing. What does this mean? On Thursday, you go grocery shopping but forget the milk. After a workout on Saturday, you suddenly realize how thirsty you are. In a panic, you rush down to the nearby corner store to get milk. You bump into someone. She becomes your wife. Very romcom. The Battle of Midway. If the bombers hadn’t come then – if the planes – if they hadn’t – if – if – if
The mark of path dependence is that you can’t really recreate it in a training situation. In exercises, they can’t make Midway go as it did. Instinctually, we crave path dependence and weave it into our stories. We love our serendipity. But we close ourselves to it in real life. What are our earthly plans? We have plans and goals. And an earthly plan posits steps that reach that goal. The path dependent route of serendipity is more of a series of unexpected shocks that nevertheless advance towards the goal, such that you approach the end with a series of flourishes and arabesques. But embracing it means losing control. In retrospect, I can say that God’s plans have always been more glorious and satisfying than even my wildest plans, and if they disappoint, they only disappoint compared to totally disjointed and bizarre daydreamings which never had any steps or plans. Single moments must pass a certain way.
And in this, we see the hand of God.
He is the one weaving the past from the future and weaving the threads of fate into a tapestry.
Why did I link my Exodus threads to people? Because I wanted people to see them and be astonished. It was my vanity as much as anything else.
My natural state is a rebellion against God. The line between Good and Evil falls in the middle of your traits. A man such as me wants to brag about the things I have made.
But it took a man such as me to make them.
We are called to be a lantern unto the nations. To shine that light, we must kindle our flames. People think of Christianity as a cucking, a meekness of humiliation, a submission and a lessening. But it can be a greatening. To stoke the fires of our greatness may burn us, may sear our very souls. The greater the glory, the more the risk. As we face towards God and remember the purpose of who we are and what we do, we can kindle the glory of our flames while staying safe from the heat. I have a bone to pick with modern psychology. Big Five et al quantify traits vis a vis an imagined baseline. The presumption is human neurological uniformity. All traits are deviations from an imagined normal neoliberal man. Personality styles become personality disorders. The flattening is an attempt to have the positive sides of every trait without the negative. Instead, we medicate ourselves into being nothing at all. The Jungian is the archetypal. People are archetypes. What we have are not deviations, but natures. MBTI is by nature a typology positing a number of heroic archetypes. The purpose of psychology in this framing is not to level us out into being nothing, but to guide us to becoming our Heroic Self. When we become a light unto the nations, what we become is not flat, but the Heroic version that we ought to be. We are becoming more like ourselves, higher and brighter, and not less.
We are becoming who we really are… and fit for eternity.
Militant Politics by Class: I’m going to break out it by more than social class here, because the relation to the means of production matters a lot, a lot, a lot when the rubber actually hits the road and civil war is afoot. Aristocracy: It’s Bolshevism. I’ve talked at length about the OGs, the Oldsheviks, but the pattern repeats elsewhere. Communism has taken root not where feudalism is weak, but where feudalism is strong – because the feudal element pushes it. It reinforces their class interests. There’s a meme about Early Life for cultural subversives. And if you dig into Communists, Early Life often reveals a rather… blueblooded origin. Che Guevara’s family has had a castle in Ireland for a thousand years. Do you have a castle? Fuck off. We even have the evidence of revealed preference. In WW2, more old titled Italians fought for the Communist partisans than for the Monarchists. Given a choice, the noble officers of the Reich surrendered to the USSR, in defiance of Hitler’s orders to keep fighting. The morale collapse came from the top. And not only that, once they surrendered, they immediately turned coat to form the NKFD, the Free Germany Committee, hoisting the Black-White-Red in defiance of Hitler. Count Einsdel, Bismarck’s grandson, gave a speech at the founding. What happened to them? They won. Combined with the SDP partisans, they were appointed the new ruling class of the GDR.
More like the Prussian Aristocratic Autocracy.
Uncle Joe didn’t let them keep the flag though. A real shame. Petit Bourgeois: They’re Fash. If you look at the voting patterns that put Mussolini and Hitler in power, strength came from the middle class and lower middle class. The sample size here is small. There is no scholarly consensus for the base of Peronism – too current. When people talk about Italy’s Fascist nobility, you have to remember that Mussolini created a new nobility whole-cloth out of his supporters. That doesn’t change their class character or interests. It’s like if all the “kshatriya” of NRx got titled. They’re still what they are. Anecdotally, my time observing the Alt-Right does suggest that a petit boug class character is approximately correct. They’re disgruntled suburban kids who are getting chewed up and spit out by modernity. They do a lot of the WASP-as-ethne thing rather than WASP-as-noble. In practice, some may say Fascist and Communist regimes are similar. In practice, who wears the boot matters. кто кого? Will the middle class oppress the bluebloods or vice versa? Of course, the latter is the natural order of things. Soldiers: Soldiers like juntas, soldiers support juntas, junta leaders come from the military. I would put Nationalist Spain and WW2 Japan under the military junta umbrella rather than Fascism. Japan had signalling spirals among officers – not so in Germany. Spain is obvious. Peasants: For lack of a better term, Non-Aligned Libertarianism. There’s not necessarily a clear ideology here so much as there is a desire to tell the government to fuck off. You see this in peasant revolts where they don’t necessarily oppose divine order, just local oppression. Bundy Ranch et al, that’s about a land issue. Don’t tread on me. Get out of my face. Spanish anarchism, which had a real government, was rooted in the Spanish hill country, with people that trusted their villages and hated the G Men of the monarchy. The Russian Civil War era Green Army was less ideological anarchism or libertarianism so much as it was resisting the unjust and ruinous taxes and drafts the Bolsheviks were imposing to win the war. It’s less of a positive vision and more “stop oppressing me, bro”. As Moldbug puts it, they just want the dick in their ass to pound softer. That’s the extent of the demand. Political changes rarely come from any kind of spontaneous rising of the lower element because they’re, by nature, pretty disorganized and non-ideological. They get used. Bureaucrats/Eunuchs: Technocratic Liberalism, which actually precedes liberalism anyways. Bureaucrats want the reign of the unelected bureaus. I hate them. They want to expand their bureaus and suck up more tax dollars into them ad infinitum. They don’t value posterity. Because they lack long-run interests, their loyalties, like soldiers, are to their institution. Unlike soldiers, their pay depends on the creation and failure to solve problems. Bureaucrats create their own poisons and every eunuch regime has trended towards anarcho-tyranny. The Janissaries plundered the Ottomans and the Serbian revolt started because they were robbing Serbia blind. When the noble lord of Serbia fell, the (Christian Serb) soldiers elected one of their own as Duke, and he wrote to the Sublime Porte to swear fealty. Well, the treachery of bureaucrats and the rest is history. His oath was rejected, he revolted (win or die!) Eunuchs regularly despoil China in periods of imperial decline. If bureaucrats ever solve their issue, they get defunded. It’s a self-licking explosive ice cream cone. “Resist” techniques are nothing new. After Lenin took power, the remnants of the treacherous socialist left, along with the Kadets, tried to organize bureaucratic resistance to his regime. They got shot. Good riddance.
Never try to out-lawfare these people. You can’t win. The Late Janissaries had stopped being an army and had become a bureaucratic class – should specify that to avoid confusion. Big Capital (The Haute Bourgeois): As opposed to the petty or even much of the middle bourgeois, they’re not Fash. They’re Liberal, with a capital L. All that is solid melts into air, yadda yadda yadda. Wokeism is simply the most liberal of all liberalisms to date. Liberalism tells you that everything is universal, nothing has a nature, everything is a choice. In a sense, it is the opposite of materialism and the spirituality-cum-pastoralism of Soviet realism. Just consoom, bro. Everything is a consoomer product. Identities are products. Woke Capital was woke before woke existed. Back during segregation, segregationists, obviously, held the whip hand. Nobody was forcing Coca-Cola to support the Civil Rights movement. They did it anyways, in defiance of local authorities, because it serves their class interest. Priests: Insofar as anyone can be real, pure Reactionaries, priests are it. I don’t mean “Brahmin” – those are usually NGO-bureaucrats or regime officers. I mean literal priests. Reactionaries believe in some divine, ordained order – the Tradition. Well, priests obviously are very likely to have sincere belief in the religious, civilizational traditions of their culture. And beyond that, as the interpreters of said traditions, a real Reactionary regime gives them immense power. That’s a win-win situation. Not for nothing were priests so powerful in Ancien Regime French government. A Pope could make the Holy Roman Emperor kneel in the Middle Ages. Priests were like lords in their own right. A RETVRN to the Three Orders (Those Who Fight, Pray, Work) would be immense power. Conservatism isn’t an ideology, but the resisting of any movement towards a pure ideological power. It has its class basis among no single class, but the unradicalized.
The White Army was a ragtag array of mild monarchists, moderate liberals, fascist cadets, and Cossacks. The characteristics of a regime reflect the class coalition that supports it. In practice, you will see a lot of hybrid ideologies and admixtures. Pure colors are rare. As the situation grows more dire, class consciousness rises, much like in Vicky. People come to align themselves more with their class.
When push comes to shove, people act according to their material interests (I would say that, being a Marxist, itself is my class interest). “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
True. America, not totally without reason, sees itself as a classless society. It doesn’t have the class elements for socialism. The class elements for socialism are not proles. America is overflowing with proles. Where America had an unbowed nobility, the WASPy Northeast, Red infiltration was everywhere.
When you look at things with IMMORTAL SCIENCE OF MARXISM-LENINISM and MATERIALISM, things make sense. To my beloved kulaks and oppressed proletarians, I cordially invite you to form a red-brown alliance to oppose the tyrannical, totalitarian regime.
Yours, Monsieur le Baron
How should a state be governed? What is the nature of good rule?
It is often instructive for us to ponder the writings of past leaders.
I present the Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu.It may surprise you, but despite being a clergyman, Richelieu was pretty bullish on the aristocracy. Being raised with plenty gave them generous temperments which loved virtue and honor.
Nobles in positions would act with mercy and not disdain the small stuff as beneath them.
Of course, the clergy had their advantages. Nobles could be indolent and unserious. And most importantly, a consideration so important it could singlehandedly make Richelieu recommend clergy for the highest posts – clergy were loyal. Here is the seed of the bureaucrat problem.
So a significant amount of the Testament is dedicated to the noble problem. And specifically, noble relief, for the nobility was suffering from severe debt burdens which made it difficult for it to carry on in a virtuous manner and sustain itself.
Part of this was the lavish living of court life. This may sound familiar to anyone who knows someone who ruined themselves to enjoy the HUSTLE AND BUSTLE of the BIG CITY. But there was another problem. The university system was totally corrupt and this was proving ruinous to the state. It needed to be reformed. Those who became educated became prideful, refusing to engage in productive work, as it was now beneath their dignity.
The proliferation of colleges was doubly injurious. Firstly, it allowed mediocrities and dullards to be awarded the dignity of professor and spread false doctrines. Secondly, it meant all had to study despite a lack of talent for letters, lest they be stigmatized.
If France was to prosper, the schools would have to be brought in line. And once brought in line, the King must keep a firm grasp on them, for they are one of the most vital organs of the Ancien Regime. The power must be divided and watched lest these problems emerge again.
This excess of schools created an excess of sophist lawyers, mad monks, and greedy bankers. Instead, more ought to be doing the mechanical arts (STEM) and becoming soldiers (France had a shortage of cavalry officers).
Sophist law professors created men without integrity, training young men who merely parroted opinions they did not understand. Law became onerous and expensive, allowing the rich to abuse the poor through the court process itself.
The financiers thieved the wealth of the nation by turning their tricks towards converting all enteprises into interest farming schemes, replacing real commerce with financial trickery.
The mesalliance of the nobility and the financiers was one way in which noble families attempted to avoid their ruin through multiplication. To solve these issues, Richelieu proposes pro-natalist financial support, primarily through the military.
Send failsons to boot camp.
Fortunately, since our modern times are so enlightened and our leaders so educated in statecraft, we have avoided these problems and the ruin of our own state. Enough about the problems a King must solve, the forces of entropy that constantly tear down a state. What should a good minister be? What are the qualities of a fine ruler? They are competence, loyalty/integrity, courage, and dedication. To find someone excellent in all qualities is needed for a great state – merely being good results in mediocrity.
This is not necessarily possible, so one is happy to find the best you can get.
Competence may seem self-explanatory, but one thing may surprise you: trust not geniuses. Geniuses are often too enamored with the past and with theory over action. Like, a genius might be reading some old book by some dead church faggot.
History rhymes, but it never repeats.
The second fault, common to both geniuses and idiots, is that they don’t listen to others. A good chancellor must be an excellent listener, so as to learn the good advice of all around him, and to be aware of the problems which plague the state.
Integrity is not about having a soft heart. Indeed, doing what is just often requires doing that which is ruthless, for the enemies of justice are the enemies of all, and to pardon injustice is to license all manner of crime and disorder.
A person with integrity does not uselessly complain or pridefully virtue signal. They are not vindictive. They do not seek recognition, for none will give it. They possess the strength of strength.
They bear up under the unbearable.
Hrm.
What is political courage? It is the strength to do small things, not just big and grand things. It is the ability to disdain snark and love sincerity. And above all, it is the strength to face opposition and not bend one’s course. To resolutely hold one’s stance.
Finally, a chancellor must be dedicated, which means to have a certain purity of will. They must fully align their being with the state. They do not react, but act to steer the ship of state. They do not play favorites or petty social games.
A ruler that lacks all four necessary qualities may appear fit, but soon disaster will strike as one of the disordered natures reveals itself. There are many more exciting insights in the book itself, like how to persuade and discussions of early modern logistics and army management.
That’s all for now.
This is my response to @ConceptualJames Repressive Tolerance series. I do this not because it is weak and I wish to dunk, but I believe it is a fair presentation of liberal views, and the reason why James Lindsay resonates with so many Americans is because Americans are liberal. So repressive tolerance and Popperian intolerance. The liberal society is Popperian, which is to say, it must intolerate intolerance. Those who act outside of liberal norms using violence rather than reason must be suppressed. Liberalism cannot tolerate illiberalism.
Repressive tolerance takes this a step further and says even ideas which promote intolerance must be intolerant – which they define as the right wing. Therefore, there is an asymmetric tolerance of the left but not of the Right. We can agree that this if enacted violates Popper. But the fact is, they didn’t enact their ideas until very recently. The Weather Underground did some bombings, but these acts were *irrelevant* to the final victory of the Left, what brought them to the point they are at now.
The Left won because it was persuasive. In the non-violent battle of ideas, the marketplace of ideas, where no fists were thrown, progressive ideas successfully marched through the institutions and seized power, thus allowing them to instate formal state progressivism and arrest people who try to fight Antifa. And why is that? Is it that liberalism has worse ideas than progressivism and loses the battle of reason? No. But unfortunately, these battles are not won by reason. People pick their ideas because of material reasons: gains in money, status, or base animal desires.
By advocating progressive ideas, you are admitted into the company of the cool kids saying cool things and you can get a sweet job at one of these leftist institutions (at this point, all of them). You can get a crappy paper published. Who cares if it’s true?
And animal desires. Marcuse has children as an oppressed category because they lack autonomy – autonomy to do what, exactly? To have sex. Vaush wants to diddle kids. People like that will adopt any idea that allows them to justify their own desires to fuck kids. Reason loses.
So pure Popperian recognition *fails* to stop progressivism because progressivism, wokeism, does not need to resort to violence to win, *even if it advocates violence*. If you accept that advocacy of violence alone constitutes violence, you have recreated repressive tolerance.
But even if you don’t, what if you keep to the Popperian principle alone? Then persons like myself will point out, correctly, that you cannot stop progressivism without repression. But because we will be precluded from violence, the progs will win. De facto repressive tolerance.
In effect, you have created the ratchet which can go only left and never right. Popperian intolerance is only a specific case of the general: Schmittian friend/enemy distinctions. All regimes necessarily must repress that which would dissolve them. You implicitly recognize this.
“His thing is the blue pill now because it has power.” Because Marcuse’s ideology has power now, it has become the “blue pill” silencing all outside thought. And this is why Marcuse was right about totalitarian democracy – liberalism really MUST silence him to survive.
And because liberalism ceased silencing those like him, he was able to spread his ideology which then took power and now attempts to silence you and those like you. Power must be exercised. It cannot go unexercised.
But maybe this is fine? You recognize subversiveness is fine against Fascism. You say white supremacists and fascists must be defeated. If this is the exception that permits liberals to repress, then progs will simply paint all of their enemies as fascists. Republicans Fash!
But I think you are too smart to make this kind of unforced error. Why then appeal to wokies? Why sympathize with Marcuse? “He has a point here, of course, but he goes too far.” “The world Marcuse is criticizing is also the world we’re living in. He’s created the monster.”
Which brings me to my second point: values. Values, not just tactics. I think you and other liberals often sympathize with progressives because you share a value: liberation. Progressivism is liberatory. Both progressivism and liberalism cheered the Civil Rights movement.
The difference is that liberalism settles for equality in bourgeois legal rights while progressivism demands equality of outcome – “equity”. And progressivism demands not only equality in rights, but equality in actual treatment. To undo wrongthink. But racists have rights too.
Should racists have equal rights? You take for granted the far right is about the triumph of unreason over reason, of arbitrary oppressions. But we have far right writers today, albeit suppressed ones. Noticers. And they compel us ask questions. Reasonable questions.
Why does hyperfeminist Sweden have such unfeminist ratios in its female labor force? What if white boys really can’t dunk? What if different things really are different? What if humans are made differently and tabula rasa is false?
If most females, say 80%, really do want masculine men and not feminine men, then patriarchy is not an imposed oppression but a social innovation to get men to be manly instead of, as now, simping for OnlyFans thots (they called them temple prostitutes in the old days).
If that is so, then those liberatory values are not so clear cut – not merely unreason vs reason, but one set of trade offs against another. And what are my values?
Faith. Family. Fatherland. Labor. I believe that the purpose of politics is to allow an average person to raise a family in peace and prosperity.
Which brings me to my third and final point: What comes next? Because, to be clear, I do not hate America. There is and there was an America that could satisfy those values. It existed once and it can exist again. Once, every working family got more or less a fair shake.
Some people accuse BAP of being a neocon, but this is a wrongheaded accusation. He is merely adapting his politics to America. Fundamentally, America is a liberal nation. You fear Communism, and Americans fear it in their gut. It may be impossible for America to become Communist.
BAP’s adaptations go deeper than just partying hard for the McLarty Party People. Why advocate for Trump? Because of what Trump could be. And what it will take for liberalism to save itself. If liberalism wants to save liberal values from progressivism, it will have to repress.
That means a dictator, one with the power to discern the exception, a sovereign. But not just any sovereign, but a liberal sovereign. A liberal emperor. A Bonaparte. If Trump had so chosen, he could have been the American Napoleon. Hence, BAP’s support.
If you agree that progressive hearts are fundamentally in the right place, then progressivism is a part of liberalism and cannot be disavowed. It will be your responsibility to police them and keep them sane. You will have to provide the exception.
And if liberalism produces an American Bonaparte, I swear upon the sacred honor of my family’s blood, I will go and join him. Because as much as I bluster and boast of my illiberalism, even one of my stock coming from my autocratic lands cannot help but be changed by America.
In @BuyBookBuyBook‘s Mine Were of Honor, the Soviet general Odinsky asks Wrangel to join him, for they must fight for Bolshevism to save the Tsarist idea. And Obolensky, in One Man in His Time, receives a similar offer from a Soviet admiral, who toasts the Imperial Guard.
But Obolensky refuses. Because the American idea is genuinely beautiful and can be genuinely transcendent. Even a Prince could renounce his birthright for America. A German baron died at the Alamo. But that was the old America.
I love the American proletarian. I love the revving of his jet ski, which is like the tinkling of bells. I love the slow croon of country music on a night drive through the backwoods. I love to see the proles at work on their trucks. And what has happened to them?
You revile Communism, and so do most Americans. But why did Communism come about? Because Russia was embroiled in a disastrous war. Because proles were fighting the senseless war of a bunch of elites. Because the grain economy was collapsing and vodka in shortage.
Because the country was ruled by a cabal of madmen entranced by a Satanic mystic and they were seizing the children of the peasantry, some as young as 7, to use in their perverse sex rituals. Because Russia had become a sinful place, not the Holy Russia it was meant to be.
No noble with a conscience or sense of duty could let that stand.
And what happens now in America? The good jobs have been shipped away. People do not have any wealth or buffer for disasters. And petty tyrants have been locking people up for more than a year, and plan to do so again. They destroy businesses kulaks worked their whole lives for.
They glorify criminals while leaving the honest to die of opiate addiction. They despoil and they plunder and they laugh about it from their gilded mansions. And they worship the Great Enemy.
Can liberalism do what must be done? Can liberalism provide an answer, a Bonaparte? Because if it cannot, then I, or someone like me, will. And you will not like that answer. But it will be necessary.
I make this argument because I am willing to argue my points with reason and in good faith, because I do love America and its people.
Fidei populi, vox Dei. Salus populi vult Deus.
Let’s talk about purges. Let’s talk about Stalin.
This came up during a recent @GoodOlBoysPod episode where @Maarblek and @bog_beef were debating Stalin, and I think it’s an interesting and serious question.
So why does Stalin purge and how secure is Stalin’s power, really?
That comes down to another question. Who the fuck was Trotsky and why did he matter? Well, Trotsky was the Left wing of the Party. He was originally a Menshevik, but joined Lenin when events became clear. But more importantly? He was Soviet Commissar for War. This motherfucker built the Red Army with his own two hands. And if you know anything about power, then control of the military is extremely important. At the end of the day, laws are only laws when men with guns enforce those laws. Without a loyal army, you have nothing. That’s a problem if you’re Stalin. Another problem? Lenin probably wanted to make Trotsky his successor, not you. And Trotsky has a damn good claim to things. More problems. Trotsky has loyalists in the power structure.
What does this mean? Trotsky can overthrow you. If you’re Stalin, you have to get rid of Trotsky. And he does. But that still leaves a weakness in your grip on power. All those generals are fucking loyal to Trotsky. He was their leader through the Civil War. He’s their guy. And not only that…
The Red Army is full of aristocrats, who have a real material interest in seeing politics change – again. I mean, being a noble right now, it’s alright. But you know what’s better? Going back to serfdom, but this time with way less nobles so we all have massive estates. This isn’t an idle threat either. Trotsky, at one point, proposed reinstating serfdom. Politics is a constant juggling act because you have to keep all your guys happy, and they have to keep their guys happy, and so on. What have you done for me lately? Have you given me a dacha? Once you have a change in politics, the balance of power changes again – which means new configurations can potentially destabilize it. Enemies of today can become the allies of tomorrow and vice versa.
So you gotta get rid of these potential malcontents. Stalin needs to purge the military and he needs to get rid of Trotsky. But purging people is hard. You need people who are loyal enough to you to get rid of people. Or you need help. Trotsky’s in the Left Opposition, right? Well, enlist the help of the Right Opposition. Who’s the Right Opposition? Bukharin. Who supports Bukharin? The kulaks.
I think the game plan becomes clear from here.
Using Bukharin’s support, oust Trotsky and send him out of the country. And what does this mean? Bukharin was strong enough to help you oust Trotsky. That means Bukharin is fucking strong. His support base, the kulaks, are fucking strong. You can’t have that – he’s a threat.
You gotta get rid of the kulaks. They’ve proven themselves dangerous. But what if Stalin weakens his grip? The more absolute power is, the more dangerous the power struggles to get it. Insecure power must make itself secure before someone offs it. There’s not a lot of political violence in America because power was divided. The problem is that power in Russia is expected to be absolute. No weak man can be Tsar. This was proven only a few years ago by the fall of Nicholas II. If you try to divide power, making concessions, you look weak. The most dangerous thing for a king is to look weak. So strike first, strike best, and strike last. Wipe out resistance before it even has the possibility of realizing itself. The dynamics of purge show themselves not only with Stalin, but with Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Almost every civil war is followed by a purge. After a civil war, there’s no legitimacy. There’s no Schelling points of how things are supposed to be to calm down conflict and prevent organization of credible revolt. The throne belongs to the strongest. That means you can’t show weakness. Mercy must come from total strength. Which leads me to an important point I’ve wanted to make for a while. On the Right, there’s been a lot of handwringing about giving up our principles. What is the difference between Brahmin and Kshatriya?
Nobility is not about cultivating superb internal attributes. This is the essence of being a warrior noble. The bloody, brutal game of power. It is a game of unprincipled exceptions and getting yours before you get got. The only currency worth spending here is loyalty and all the prices are in blood. The reason why there must be a distinction between “priest” and “noble” in a political movement is because we must not try to execute the ideal within the bounds of the real, which is real political conflict, which is a war. War is politics by other means and vice versa. Someone not pragmatic gets crushed. And yet, to abandon all principles is not a good thing. These principles must be kept, but we cannot allow the ideal to forestall real action. And similarly, we cannot allow the real to taint the ideal. To confuse pragmatic actions with the actual ideal conditions of our ideologies or beliefs is to taint thought with the practicalities of a fallen world, and so make monstrous the thought forms. If we define compassion as mere human compassion, we pervert it to meanness. I intend to expound more on this in a companion essay to an upcoming book release. That’s all for now.
Reward your friends, punish your enemies. Loyalty is the lifeblood of politics. Nothing else matters.
Anyways, I’d like to elaborate on this. If you’ve been following me, you know I have a one main schtick, which is Leninist class analysis. It’s almost a truism that rich people lean Left. “Coastal elites”. But there’s a lot that gets lost in “rich people” and “Left”.
I’d like to break this down using a historical example.
Let’s compare the Bolsheviks with their main rival on the Russian Left, the Social Revolutionaries.
Broadly speaking, neither were peasant or workers’ parties, with both being dominated by middle or above elements. But not all “middle and above” elements are the same. What was the class composition of the Bolsheviks? Broadly speaking, the class coalition of support came from a coalition of proles, peasants, and nobility. And what about the members themselves? 1/6th of Bolsheviks came from the highest estate, the nobility, the top 2.4%. 2/3rds of them came from either the noble estate or bourgeoisie, which together were 13% of the Russian population. The remainder were mostly workers and peasants. The top Bolsheviks were 27% noble. So what about the SRs? Aren’t they similar? Only about half of the SRs were workers or peasants, a similar proportion to the Bolsheviks. But a lot is hidden in those figures. The SR party, by comparison to the Bolsheviks, was middle-heavy.
It had a lot of “PMCs”. 24.2% of the SR party was clerical workers or minor professionals. Only 4% of the SRs were nobles or high professionals, as compared to over 60% of the Bolsheviks. But that’s not the best part. 15.9% of them were students. That’s right.
The SRs were fucking grad students. And not only students. 2/3rds of these students were first generation college students. The SRs were your classic overproduced elites – new entrants trying to get seats at the table at a time when the pie was shrinking. But I’ll get back to the shrinking pie later. That was class composition. But there’s more than that. The age distributions of the SRs and Bolsheviks were also different. The Bolsheviks were substantially older. 40% of SRs were under 20. 89.9% of SRs were under 30. The Bolsheviks were wealthy people with a stake in things. The SRs, by contrast, were younger people who were well-educated but barely holding onto what they had during a time of economic collapse. They were willing to do radical terrorist actions to stir the lower classes to action.
As a rule, the lower classes did not care for this. Finally, the ethnic component. The Bolsheviks were predominately a non-Russian party. Probably 65% of them were non-Russian in a half Russian empire. The SRs were 65% Russian, so the opposite skew. The Mensheviks were almost all minorities, and 1/3rd Jewish. And the distribution of ethnic identity in the Bolsheviks was not random. The 2/3rds of them that were minorities also tended to be the bourgeois and noble element of the party – most of the Bolshevik workers were Russians. Whereas the SRs were predominately Russian PMCs. So who was the Tsar’s support base? It was fucking rich assholes, right?
Ah. Not quite.
It was the peasants. Of the 68 peasant deputies in the Third Duma, 34 of them were right of center (Right, Nationalists, Octoberist) and another 15 were Progressists or Kadets (center). What the fuck? How can that be true?
To answer that, we need to look back at those unstable, chaotic years leading up to the Russian Revolution. But from a new perspective. There are many narratives of the Russian Revolution and Tsar Nicholas. Broadly, they are as follows: Menshevik-SR (and our textbooks): The Tsar was a bad autocrat who oppressed the peasants but was overthrown by DEMOCRACY which was snuffed out by totalitarianism Bolsheviks: The Tsar was a bad man who oppressed the workers and we shot him White Army: The Tsar was a good but weak man puppeted by the warlock Rasputin and our honorable forces could not overcome Bolshevism
But what about the Tsar’s side? There’s a very interesting book that’s been republished by @TsarPress. While I don’t agree with all of its interpretations, it brings up a number of interesting facts, all verifiable, which start to make all the pieces of the puzzle start to click. What does Last Tsar by S. S. Oldenburg say? It says that Russia got richer. A lot richer. This is true. It says the Russian peasants were prospering like never before. This is true. Also very true.
It says the court, possessed by madness, grew more hostile to their Tsar. Madness? No. Patronage.
Reward your friends, punish your enemies.
How could the peasants be getting richer? They needed property. And what is property in this time? In an agrarian economy like Russia’s, it meant land. One problem with land: they’re not making any more of it
You have to take it from someone. What did the new Tsar do when he took the throne? He told the assemblies of notables, the zemstvos, to go fuck themselves. He did land reform. Complete land reform? No. But he did it. Noble land ownership declined by a quarter. That land went to the peasants. They became kulaks. That’s all great, except they’ll remember that. They’ll bide their time. And they’ll never support you. Where was Lenin radicalized? His school. His gymnasia.
Almost 70% of the students there were the children of nobles. Well, whatever. For the time being, you’re still rich. Except… as the rest of the world mechanized, agriculture became more efficient. Why did Lenin admire American industrial farming in its large plots? It produced a lot of grain. Grain flooding global markets. What does that mean for the landed gentry? Only bad things. Your estates didn’t produce as much income anymore – but your costs don’t go down! You still have to send your kids to college. You have to get them good jobs.
That’s a bad situation. Nobles became more radical. So why didn’t the Tsar fall immediately? I’m a big proponent of the elite lens of political analysis, but elites are not omnipotent. Without popular buy-in, they cannot overthrow the government – the mob would lynch them.
So long as Nicholas II had the peasants, he was safe. So what is the final narrative of the Russian Revolution? Nicholas II, the benevolent Tsar, lost the trust of his peasants.
They were lured away by the siren song of peace, land, bread.
And down, down, down falls Humpty Dumpty.
Why do different classes matter? In a pure democracy, they don’t. One vote is as good as another. But the more the raw state of power asserts itself, the more the distinctions between classes asserts itself. Class is primarily occupation and role – so classes have powers
What can the peasants do? They can farm. But they’re also tough. The peasants would form into units of Black Hundreds and be a paramilitary force for the Tsar and the Hard Right. So long as Nicholas had that, who could challenge him? Only a fool.
But what do nobles do? They provide high professional labor. Okay, so they’re lawyers and doctors and engineers – who cares? Gonna sue the Tsar? But in war? In war, they were the officer corps. And Nicholas II went to war. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t…
When classes aren’t politically reliable, they won’t perfectly execute your orders. They won’t give it their all. And the more your grip slips, the less they care about your orders. Early on, sure, let’s fight a good war for the Tsar. But as the years drag on…
Well, maybe when a Bolshevik agitator shows up, you look the other way. You go out for a smoke. Sure, you’re the CO or the XO, and you *can* impose unit discipline. But you won’t. You can lead a horse… Whole units went bad. A fish rots from the head down.
Remember the different narratives? What is the White Army take on Rasputin? This was a scandalous warlock, a magician and devil-worshipper who hypnotized the Tsar. And the Red? The same. But the Tsar’s? Rasputin was a healer who saved my son and a peasant in an evil court.
The peasants agreed. But what happens to Rasputin? The court kills him. The only peasant to rise into the court and have the Tsar’s ear, and the court kills him, even though he was healing the Tsar’s son. Maybe it’s time to tear the whole *system* down.
In brief, a materialist class analyst of the Revolution, based on the Pokemon powers of each class. The Tsar falls, the SRs rise. The SRs are backed by the Russian PMCs. What are their powers? “Push papers.” Helpful.
Kerensky purges the Army for being politically unreliable. Over 100 senior officers are fired. Some call him foolish for this. But to be fair, they *were* politically unreliable. How can you trust a hostile Praetorian Guard?
Hey. Guess what happens after Lenin coups Kerensky? Over 100 senior officers volunteer to join his new Red Army. Ha. That’s a lot of generals.
And more than that, Lenin moved to get the loyalty of the legionnaires. He offered them 25 rubles. A day. That’s $450,000 a year in today’s money. The Germans gave him billions in gold. He spent it all. And he got the grass crown. Secure your essentials. Reward your friends.
What did the SR government do against Lenin’s military putsch? They threw a government strike. On November 8th, the government worker’s union went on strike. Shortly afterwards, the Russian banks froze all the Bolshevik bank accounts. Lenin had the Army. He had them shot.
Ultimately, the class composition of your coalition is not just a curiosity, but determines who, in civil unrest, will take your side and fight with vigor, which in turn, determines what powers you have. Nobles can lead armies. Peasants make food. Workers make steel.
Kerensky had grad students, government workers, and bank tellers. Kerensky lost. The SR party *vastly* outnumbered the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were a tiny fraction of a tiny party. But they were disproportionately elite. They hit above their weight class.
And they secured essentials. They got the support of the most vital elements of a polity: those who make basic goods, those who make food, and the security forces. You may not *like* cops and soldiers, but you *need* them. You do not need leftist teenagers and paper pushers.
Finished reading “The Persistence of the Old Regime”, a book @WolfgangHutter2 recommended. Solid book account you should follow if you don’t already. First of all, this book is interesting as one of the first instances of a growing genre I’ll tentatively call “continuitist” The first half of the book is about the “persistence of the Old Regime”. The standard Marxist historiography proposes that the Ancien Regime was overthrown by the bourgeois revolution, after which the bourgeois became the new ruling class and imposed commercialized democracy.
Just as the bourgeois displaced the aristocracy, so too will the proletariat displace the bourgeois. This is a view of history which I think is largely discredited outside of hardcore Leftcoms, Reddit, and “Spiritual Aristocrats” on Twitter lamenting the bourgeois butchers. Here, I more or less endorse all of Mayer’s facts, if not his explanations or conclusions. This is a groundbreaking claim to put forward because it was a *challenging claim*. This was an upending of traditional Marxist framing, which still held sway among Marxist academics.
The gist of the argument is that the nobility, far from being in decline, had successfully integrated rising bourgeois elements. Not only that, it was finding success in the new economy anyways, and its members were often successful businessmen. Furthermore, the state of capitalist development in 1914 was overstated by traditional Marxist analysis. Capitalism had only *just arrived* at the monopoly-managerial stage of production, finance capitalism. Monopolies were infant. The manufacturing sector remained small.
Although he overplays his hand, I think, and often overstates the case, one must remember the *context* in which he was writing. He was presenting the antithesis to a strong thesis of Orthodox Marxist historiography. He was being revisionist. Where do we disagree, and strongly disagree? I had an uneasy feeling when I bought the book and noticed it was published by Verso and dedicated to Herbert Marcuse. Fortunately, the book mostly sticks to hard numbers in the first half. But it is clearly building a thesis. The thesis is thus: the aristocracy’s mode of material production was obsolete, but it managed to survive and hold power through cultural hegemony. It did this by privileging modes of cultural production which exalted the rituals of the nobility and made bourgeois assimilate. The low rate of ascension of the bourgeois, 7-8% elite turnover per generation, is contrasted to the rapid rise of the bourgeois and lower elements in Germany afterwards, during Weimar. The nobility is supposed to have suppressed meritocracy to maintain dominance.
There’s a problem with this though. What is the long run turnover rate of the elite? 7-8% maps almost perfectly onto a 10 generation, 250 year half-life of decay, which matches the empirical results found by Professor Clark and others in studies of various non-Indian countries. In fact, almost half the salarymen at the zaibatsu are samurai descendants. Normans continue to have disproportionate influence in modern American politics. Half of the Boston Brahmin surnames were Norman in the 19th century, almost a millennia post-Conquest. Can all this be the product of aristocratic cultural hegemony? Perhaps we still live in an aristocrat’s world! I doubt it. One of the signs of aristocratic cultural hegemony? Everyone tried to be aristocratic. If you couldn’t be a hereditary noble, you wanted to be noble-like. Thus, non-nobles styled themselves gentry if they could get away with it, bought manors, aped aristocratic norms, tried to get into noble educational institutions, invited to society balls… But who holds that kind of dominance today? Do our engineers call themselves lords? No, not even those who would be lords proper in the past call themselves lords, let alone the aspiring shopkeeper with pretensions of gentility. What do they call themselves instead?
[Baron Thread quoted]
Monsieur le Baron@Mssr_le_Baron·Apr 29, 2021Let’s talk nobility! Imagine! Grand palaces! Luxurious feasts! Dictating the course of world history with your whims! Conquering! Being a tiny king in your own right! Yeah, I’m not talking about those guys. No counts or dukes or princes today. I’m talking about the baron.
If there is a cultural hegemony today, it is a cultural hegemony of the middle class, and especially its newest component, the PMC. All other classes are renamed in its likeness. Proletarians become the (lower) middle. Aristocrats become the upper middle. We are all middle. Not only that, all life stories are filtered through the middle class lens. “We” can’t afford houses. “We” struggle with our student loans. As if all Americans came from hereditary homeownership but now struggle or had student loans. Most Americans lack a bachelor’s degree. Medicare4All/single payer is something for “all”, even though below the middle class, people get government healthcare, and above the middle class, people get platinum plans through their work. Particular class interests are universalized, because their class has the loudspeaker.
And yet it moves. If cultural hegemony could keep the nobility in control and economically secure, why can it not do the same for the increasingly precarious PMC? Why can they not speak their bread into existence like the nobles? Because materialism, not idealism, is true.
The first Muller cabinet is 0% noble. That’s right. 0%. This presents us with a conundrum. Either the Weimar government was persecuting nobles far worse than the Bolsheviks, or, if we suppose it was a pure meritocracy, the Bolsheviks were pro-nobility. To some extent, the latter is true. But that does not rule out the former. I have a question: if the Weimar government was a pure meritocracy, then why did it achieve nobility numbers so low they cannot be replicated in today’s free and fair democracies? Here you have your democracy, folks. Come pick it up.
Here is the fate of the szlachta under Soviet occupation vs the German nobles under Weimar. Those bloodless middle class bastards of Weimar, motivated by black envy, inflicted such cruel humiliations and indignities! You can never trust these “socialists”, they have no honor. After the purges, one could live a dignified life running a collective farm under the Soviets. It’s a fine enough life. Weimar… these people wanted nothing more than to undo the old order and reduce the great to subjection. It gives one sympathy for the Freikorps.
Minecraft your enemies or else forgive them. The Soviets cruelly executed many Polish szlachta. But the survivors, they could live. Some even held office. The Weimar liberal-socialists broke the aristocracy and reduced them to welfare dependant caged animals, like a zoo exhibit.
@WolfgangHutter2 I think you’ll find it deeply interesting that the course of the 21st century, to a large extent, came down to the decisions of minor aristocrats during the ruinous end and aftermath of WWI. In Germany, disaffected minor nobles saw the Socialists as the traitors who had doomed a successful war effort. By joining the Freikorps, they ironically guaranteed the survival of the new Weimar government that would destroy them. Years later, they would correct this mistake. And in Russia? The victory of the Bolsheviks was ultimately the victory of the Red Army. And what was the victory of the Red Army? That came down to its ability to create a successful officer corps. Per Mayer, ~70% of Russian generals were aristocratic. 28 of those senior officers immediately enlisted in the Red Army in the first volunteer call up in February 1918. Ultimately, 775 Tsarist generals would join the Reds, a substantial number of the pre-revolution senior leadership.
Arno Mayer’s conclusion is about the origins of the First World War. Here, I find him totally off. Obviously, as a Leninist, I am partial to the imperialism/economic rivalry explanations, but the diplomatic entanglements and intrigue of the prewar also matter a great deal. Mayer’s conclusion is more or less that the aristocracy launched WWI as a preemptive strike against the meritorious middle that was rising up to replace them, and that their martial ethos and bloodlust led Europe into war. I think this is totally ridiculous. Mayer makes this argument assuming the interests and ideology of the aristocracy lie in preserving the dominance of the manorial economy and landowning and the conservative social order, despite noting (and dismissing) the fact that many hardliners came from a peasant background.
The question that he didn’t ask (and I won’t fault him too much for it, given he was early to ask the other questions) is that, if Marx was wrong about the sequence of history, then why is Marxist historiography correct about the ideology and class interests of nobles? Far from being staid and ultraconservative, nobles were often on the forefront of radicalism in both post-war Russia and Germany. The collapse of the Ancien Regime was often the collapse of socially necessary *constraining institutions* for the madness of nobles. The next cycle of history will have to put those fetters back on, one way or another. No privilege without responsibility. No power without connection to the people.
Had this chat with Rupert before the ban, but I noted, with shock, a few weeks ago, that the homebuyer purchase rate (a function of the prime rate) had surged above my own borrowing rate (semibond + 4), which meant it was now cheaper for me as investor to finance purchases. This is bad, because it means the same house is now *cheaper* for Big Capital to finance than a homebuyer. It was already bad enough when Blackstone could brute force the issue using printed funds. Now even small hedge funds and private investors can outbid homebuyers. Credit is tightening across the board. Last December, Citi revoked my preferential World Elite Mastercard interest rate of 10% APR and raised me to prime + 22%.
They also regularly send out emails offering $5000 cash to deposit $1,000,000 in a cash or savings account. Prime class A CRE, which is used to secure countless “safe” AAA bonds, is teetering on the brink. If it is forcibly revalued, all those bonds will breach covenant and default, resulting in a trillion dollar real estate crash. Class A was overbid by institutionals and millennials. For the past decade, these groups have tried to put lots of their money into “safe” assets, fearing another subprime default. This caused a radical glut of money flowing towards “class A” real estate, basically blue chip luxury apartments and offices.
These are now worthless. Very quickly, the real estate curve inverted. Normally, you pay a premium when renting, the surplus being the profit an owner derives. You can price out this yield based on location and tenant risk. During the past decade, class A yields became *negative*. How is this possible? When you’re not getting cash-on-cash yield every month, your return comes from increases in your equity. That meant that class A property became dependent on constant price spiraling. Accordingly, rental income became irrelevant. It was dwarfed by price increases. In fact, under such circumstances, renters can be liabilities. A renter locks in the nominal value of the income stream and poses risks that can reduce the valuation of the building. An empty building is a “more valuable” building under conditions of an inverted rental curve. But you can’t keep raising nominal rents forever, nor can you infinitely increase the multiple. A 3br in Manhattan now costs 110% of my post-tax monthly income. As a VP at a bulge bracket. With cash yielding investments.
There’s not enough people on Earth to rent those homes. The market *must* rationalize. This means de-inverting the rental curve, such that rents now drive a profit above costs, the profit matching a curve following location and tenant risk.
That, of course, means the ruin of those who aped into overvalued assets. Luckily, nobody important has bought massive amounts of real estate at record valuations, otherwise we’d have to keep printing money forever to keep those asset prices from rationalizing, or at least long enough to annul the debts used to lever up.
Inflation forecast 2022: 20%.
Some of you may have read my blog and wondered what the rationale for industrial judgeships and self-regulating guilds might be.
I don’t like to be too pedantic with my explanations on the blog. Fortunately, there’s nothing too pedantic and spelled out for Twitter. Let’s talk about Uber. What is Uber? A taxi company. But what did people conceive of it as? A tech company. Why was this advantageous for Uber? Because it allowed it to skirt the regulations that normally apply to taxi companies. Uber drivers are “contractors”. Is that really true? Some may claim Uber is just a platform. But real platforms, like Fiverr, permit free latitude in contracting and many customers. On the Uber “platform”, a “contractor” is given a standard set of terms with no contracting. What distinguishes contractors from employees? Contractors are independent, which mean they do not depend on one customer as their source of business, freely set their contract terms, and do not depend on the client’s provided tools as their primary source of sustenance. Uber “contractors” do not fit these criteria. Uber contractors are employees. But why would Uber want to designate employees as contractors? To avoid regulations. Employees receive many more rights and benefits than contractors, by law. Similarly, Uber styled itself as a tech company, not a taxi company. The taxi industry is heavily regulated, while the tech industry was not, at least in regards to providing taxi service. Did that make Uber not a taxi company? No, not at all. So why mess around with such word games? It’s simple.
Any rule or metric used to confer benefit or harm will be gamed, because the incentive distorts it as a measurement.
Once employee became tied with benefits, it created an incentive to skirt having employees. This isn’t just an Uber thing. Many sectors of our economy now have these reclassified operations where the new firms are substantially equal to the old firms, just with some razzle dazzle word games to justify calling new and disruptive.
But it’s still a taxi company. For instance, take banking. After Dodd-Frank, debt hedge funds began popping up left and right. These debt hedge funds, “shadow banks”, perform a role that would be considered banking. But they evade the legal definition such as to avoid Dodd-Frank regulations. And before Dodd-Frank, there was a proliferation of complex derivatives to achieve relatively simple tasks. You can do things the easy way, or a hard way through a complex series of derivatives.
So naturally, we’ll do it the hard way… You may be thinking: So now you’re going to tell me we need to close the loopholes and regulate more. Not quite. What is it called when business happens in an illegal, unregulated environment? A black market. But black markets do not pop up arbitrarily. Is there a black market for groceries? Why not? But there is a black market for cigarettes. Lots of people selling loosies. A black market appears when regulation makes illegal business significantly more profitable or easier to do. And this has to be a high bar because being on the wrong side of the law poses significant costs and risks. Therefore, business will operate within the law if easy to do. We have to ask, therefore, why there’s so much regulation that makes business impossible. Is it to protect the workers?
In normal negotiations, there are the owners and the workers. Both will attempt to pass rules that make their own stake more profitable. But making business impossible is in nobody’s interest, because they have to split the pie, and destroying the pie means no pie. Therefore, neither party will knowingly and willingly kill the golden goose, and they have a fairly good idea of how the business works. But who writes regulations? Not workers. Although it’s claimed, ostensibly, to be written in the interests of workers, bureaucrats write the regulations. And the more regulations there are, the more bureaucrats can be employed. Therefore bureaucrats have an incentive to regulate. This incentive operates independently of sectoral profitability. All regulations impose costs which shrink the pie, except for the regulation of overuse of the commons. Workers and owners are both in a position to see what fair rules are, as well as to decide what the commons is. But the bureaucrat doesn’t have a direct relationship with the industry’s pie. So they can and will write as many regulations as they want, until it kills the golden goose. The thing is, businesses usually exist because they provide some essential service that people need. So when regular business becomes impossible, it doesn’t destroy that value stream. Instead, it moves to a new form which can argue itself to be unregulated. A black market.
And that’s why workers should write their own regulations collectively rather than the government.
Today I was reading the Real Deal and last year set the all time one week sale record for luxury homes in Manhattan. Can you guess how many sold? No cheating. 27. All time one week sales record. The inventory? 5000.
5000 luxury homes are trying to be sold in Manhattan. Folks, the math doesn’t add up! All around the country, there are empty luxury homes. The fact of the matter is that the math can’t add up. The median sales price for one of these was $6mm. The median Goldman partner makes $1.5mm. The 3x rule applies, but we can apply some cash down payment fudge. There are not many partners at Goldman. The higher you go, the more rarefied the air. Beyond mere luxury is “Billionaire’s Row”. There are 700 10mm+ units for sale lining Central Park. There are only 5000(?) or so billionaires on Earth. Total. Are they all going to live next to Central Park? Massive amounts of capital are being deployed to build these castles in the sky. They make no sense. They can’t make any sense. It takes someone like me to buy an *entry level* luxury home. Folks, the math doesn’t work! Or Manhattan apartments. An analyst does not meet the 40x standard requirement to rent even a studio alone. This week, I finally figured out the reason why clouds of analysts huddle in Murray Hill. They split the peculiar multi-bedrooms there that are built as attached studios. People packed, sardine-like, just to make rent. And these are the lucky ones. But I’m sure you’ve heard enough rants about unaffordable cities and ZSHC. That’s not what I wanted to talk about. That’s not what this thread is about. This thread is about TikTok. The reason why I bring up the homes is because they are empty shells. They exist as an idea of the attainable, but they’re not really attainable.
A day in the life where I spend so much money, I could not actually afford it on an entry-level salary if this was the typical day. It’s bullshit. But this kind of bullshit is so *pervasive*, it has supplanted our ideas of the real. The image we built of reality has come back as hyperreality, as Galatea haunting our dreams. And it is now so strong, nobody even remembers what the real is. People act wholly on illusions and the real is dismissed as fantastic. Let me give you an example. I fly into town and stop by Nobu, available by reservation only. This is the real version of our mythical Dorsia of American Psycho fame. I have a delicious meal by very talented chefs that rightly merits the head chef’s Michelin star. Parallel to me, an American middle class tourist has an Instagram moment. They photograph themselves at Saltbae’s eating a golden steak. The steak is bad. But it is gold. I spent $150 for a seven course meal. Or maybe $225. Or $100. Depends, obviously, on the day and market prices. They spent $1500 on their photo op imitating this idea of the real. The symbolism of the idea has become more important than what spawned it, ostensibly. I’ve raved about the food and Instagram before. But what occured to me today is that the image, which is fake, can be manipulated to market the real. We have created a reality bubble enveloping the vast majority of Americans… to sell things. A few months ago, I shopped for clothing, as many Americans do. I went to Nordstrom Rack. I am a millionaire and I was with a millionaire. My classmates also shop at Nordstrom Rack. There are clothing pieces there, allegedly at vast discounts. Even at some of the most famous and prestigious private schools in the world, the kids wearing real, full freight ultralux designer are rare. It’s a few nouveau riche brats with indulgent absent parents. How much in sales can they possibly do a year? Not enough. You sell a few dozen or hundred of these $3000 shirts or pants to rappers or rich kids or whatever. It doesn’t matter. The ultra high end is a simulation. The ultra high end exists almost solely to market the high end, which is the real luxury that exists in the world. People *do* buy these $200 shirts or $1000 handbags, but the “entry level” is the real level. The “real” luxury is just an idea *invented* to sell the entry-level product, which is the real product. It’s like the Costco chicken, it gets you in the door. Most Teslas are Model 3s. Most Beemers are 3 series. Most luxury home sales are in the couple million range. Talking to young people, I am perhaps the only one who habitually takes black cabs. But they all have the idea of balling out in black luxury SUVs, showing up like bosses.
Here’s the problem: Uber is upgrading me for free. Because I’m rich. I don’t pay sticker. But these hopefuls, with dreams of Dom Perignon and black cars and black cards… do. And they pay handsomely for the privilege. Uber probably makes 10 or 20x as much profit on these rides as a normal cab ride. The entire luxuries segment is built on vast, pervasive deception. And yet, like the man waking up to his champagne room bill after a drunken night at the strip club, the bill must come due. To sum it up, I want to point out the case of The One mansion in Bel Air. The hyperreality is now so powerful, it has consumed its creators, the merchants of magnificence.
A developer built a $500mm mansion. The deck alone was 10,000 square feet. The problem? The home of Bezos, then the richest man in the world, was only a third of that price. He built a megamansion for a hypothetical triple Bezos that did not exist. The customers for this ultraluxury do not exist. People write cultural analyses about these shrines of excess, they bemoan our decadence, they revel in “not being poor”. But it’s all fake. A house of cards. Up and down the glittering downtowns of Tier 1 cities around the world are luxury boutiques selling things no one can buy to no one. And they are closing. The dreamers are consumed by their own dream. It’s time to wake up, America. You’re hung over and you just spent $17,000 at the champagne room of Sapphyre. And you didn’t even get laid.
While I think it’s always lovely to read books, a significant amount of the discourse about Always With Honor seems to be driven by the desire to cast the present conflict as the Russian Civil War and relitigate it as the White Army.
Is some of this romanticism? Yes. But I think the roots of this run deeper than this. Many of our modern reactionaries sympathize with the White Army because they are precisely in the position of your typical White Army recruit: a young junior officer – the precarious aristocrats of the Russian empire.The question of how the White Army could have won the war is thus a question of how a young aspirant PMC on the Right could win in our coming chaotic political situation, and thus is a fascinating one. The White Army, originally the Volunteer Army, fundamentally had a manpower problem. Actually, both armies had a manpower problem. The issue was that peasants didn’t want to fight in this stupid war. The Soviets came up with one answer: commissars. Another answer was criminals, but this was fundamentally a bad move in terms of both yield and image. An army is a creature of morale. The criminal element is an unsavory element, unfit for prolonged service without heavy supervision. It’s also not a large source of manpower. In the initial callup, the Red Army was 8% Tsarist officers, 62% veteran grunts, and 30% criminals. This was not a working solution. The Red Army needed more meat. It actually never had a shortage of officer candidates, only an initial lack of political desire. The peacetime Russian Army was 3 million men with 56,000 officers and 1,000 in the General Staff. The 1917 Russian Army had had 15mm serve, including 250,000 officers. 75,000 of those officers and 1726 of the General Staff would serve in the Red Army. What does that mean? That means that a huge number of officers served with the Red Army. In fact, 8000 officers volunteered for the initial callup, while 3000 joined the Volunteer Army. And the Red Army share of officers was *higher* in more elite cohorts. The General Staff of Russia was disproportionately drawn from the top performing cadets of the military academies, and not only that, but from its most noble members. The General Staff officers joined at a higher rate than regular officers. The Generals even higher. The more senior the officer, the more likely they were to go Red. From “The Formation of the Russian General Staff. 1880-1917. A Social Study.” It was these *more aristocratic*, *securely placed* officers that forced the Tsar off his throne.
28 of those senior officers immediately enlisted in the Red Army in the first volunteer call up in February 1918. Ultimately, 775 Tsarist generals would join the Reds, a substantial number of the pre-revolution senior leadership.
And why would more senior officers join the Bolsheviks? Because of class affinity. The same classes that disproportionately comprised Bolshevik leadership would, in the Army, form a discontented revolutionary core.
Anyways, I'd like to elaborate on this. If you've been following me, you know I have a one main schtick, which is Leninist class analysis. It's almost a truism that rich people lean Left. "Coastal elites". But there's a lot that gets lost in "rich people" and "Left". https://t.co/z3knqxINyn
So how did the Red Army get recruits? It built a robust system of military conscription and discipline enforcement run by a mixture of NCOs and senior officers, conceding an advantage in field leadership to the Whites. The Reds won by logistics – the forte of the General Staff. The Whites, by contrast, had more junior officers, the field grade officers. This ultimately made them very well commanded, but they had a *severe* manpower shortage. The Red Army ultimately peaked at 5 million men.
The White Army… didn’t. Why do you need CHUDs? Because the CHUDs fight the wars. The CHUDs are the grunts. You need *some way* to get the CHUDs in line, even if it’s just dekulakization and terror. But even with terror, you need trigger pullers who will *enforce* the terror. The Red Army had NCOs. The White Army did partially solve its manpower problem. It got Cossacks. The Cossacks were an ethnic minority that, for some reason, was convinced the Soviet government would oppress them. Of course, history would prove this an unfounded assertion, as the Reds ruled with love.
It’s the Holodomor
Play the game carefully, because the price of losing is high.
If I might offer some free advice to our modern would-be Whites, it’s not to spurn the CHUDs. Ultimately, an army has to be *an army*. Armies, by necessity, are made of large numbers of CHUDs. CHUDs are the ones with the mettle and lifestyle to serve in the military. If you want them to defend your lifestyle as a precarious lesser aristocrat, you have to give them a good reason. Otherwise, you’ll be the grunt.
To reiterate, the Feds have a number of tricks to hide the football in inflation, and probably have even more that I miss because they’re sneaky about it.
Let’s go over some. t.co/Nfb4MqP5zk1. Hedonic Adjustment: This is when the price changes are adjusted to reflect real (or, importantly, fictive) increases in quality or product enjoyability. It’s a technique invented and most suited for electronics, where there was and is massive improvement each year. 2. Government-set Prices: The components of the CPI include markets, like healthcare, where the government has a large say in the prevailing prices. By refusing to change Medicare and Medicaid rates, the government can hold elements constant or increase them less. 3. Consumer Basket Substitutions: When prices for some goods increase, the basket they use to measure CPI is reweighted to substitute cheaper goods for more expensive. This is invalid because goods are rarely true substitutes, but exist as preference substitutes. This is a little harder to explain, but if you like pork and only switch to chicken when pork is too expensive, you have experienced a degradation in your subjective quality of life. The *bundle of goods* American consumers really consume is non-arbitrary. True costless substitution is only valid in industrial inputs, where different oils are treated as perfectly interchangeable inputs, different carb sources are just building materials, etc. There can be real substitution only caring about cost. But consumer value is subjective. 4. Cost of Housing: Owner’s Equivalent Rent, aka voodoo. This is a measure of the hypothetical rent the owner would have to pay if renting. Instead of using YoY home price increases and YoY same-unit rents, weighted by home ownership %, they use this hypothetical number. Let me put it to you this way: How often are rental and sale Zestimates off? And that’s with all the resources of Zillow behind it, and Zillow has all the revenue sharing of the whole MLS services funding that. Huge amounts of ML go into it.
It still can’t account for factors. OER fails because of the calculation problem: prices are a fast heuristic to measure true value because they have huge incentives to correct mispricings, so they have bounded wrongness. We are not good at calculating hypothetical situations and values. This problem is much, much worse when you calculate OER by doing a survey of homeowners (which they do, they literally ask people how much they think rent in their area is). People *consistently* underprice rents for the same reasons Boomers think candy should be a quarter. Our emotional memory of our home price is built when we actually cared about these things, which is when we bought them. The less it matters to us, the less the average person will bother keeping their idea of market rent or market price accurate (they won’t, ask Boomers prices). The CPI print for June says YoY shelter was 5.5%. In Manhattan, 23.1% own and the rest rent. If we take a 10% drop in YoY closed sale prices and a 36.9% increase in rents, we get a ownership weighted increase of 22.4% in cost of shelter. If we could do that for every market and weight by population, we would have a true and traditional cost of shelter index. OER is a new method of calculation that fundamentally and systematically underestates housing cost inflation, which gets pegged to close to 0% by design. 5. Shrinkflation, Classic and Hidden: Classic shrinkflation is when product sizes go down or become less substantial. It’s relatively easy to catch size decreases if they care to (they don’t). Watering down is hardy, but you can measure by active ingredients or headliners. What we are seeing, new to this economic depression, is Hidden Shrinkflation. This operates by quality fade. Every product has a QA process which determines what products are rejected or accepted. Products that receive less QA or pass lower bars are graded accordingly. How does this operate in practice? For a branded product, the best grades will end up in their flagship brand. Slightly less high end, but still high end, is often resold to Costco under the Kirkland brand. The middling cuts go to a middle market brand. Below that, store brand. Below that, you get factory rejects sold at their factory outlet as “funny vegetables” or other similar products. Or they get industrially reprocessed – dog food veggies, product bag textiles. The worst stuff is discarded. What happens with QA fade? Everything moves down a step. What would be rejected is processed, what would be processed is sold as store brand and sometimes literally rots on the shelf (don’t eat dog food, kids). Everything seems to go bad faster or break more often than it should. That’s because QA costs money through reject rate. 6. Direct Intervention Analysis: The BLS has discretion to factor out “outlier events”, discounting massive one time, temporary shifts in price.
Good thing we don’t hear anything about that lately. Eheheheh. It’s hard to know how much they’ve adjusted with this technical method, because the details are proprietary. Assume, however, the worst, and that the magnitude is similar to other adjustments listed.In conclusion, these statements do not represent the views of my employer, a bulge bracket bank, nor do they constitute investment advice. They are legally not statements of expertise, they are personal opinions.
I’m shitposting, lads.
Besides how obviously fucked the situation is, I’d like to take a moment to make an aside about Society. What is Society? The social grouping of the combined upper and upper middle classes (sometimes with an fashionable upper-only component, Real Society), and *its values*
in the meantime, enrollment in petroleum engineering programs has absolutely collapsed. Right now, the University of Calgary has one exactly one student entering pic.twitter.com/7AOjAnBC39
Man does not live on bread alone. The choice of a career is not just a money calculation. Otherwise, the labor crisis in the trades would have ended a long, long time. I feel it every time I pay $80/hr rates to an electrician. Put another way, me and an Australian miner make a similar amount of money, although we spend it differently. Do you think my parents would be happy to see me hit the Outback underground? Ha.
No, they wouldn’t.
And why not? Because a career is more than a job, it’s an identity. I *am* a Miner. I *am* a Banker. Part of why being a NEET is so spiritually corrosive is because you end up saying I *am* Nothing. Your work says a lot about who you are. And who you are has status connotations. What does this have to do with Society? (High) Society is a set of values which prescribes certain lifestyles and ideas. Part of this means assigning status in different amounts to different professions. In short, the norms of Society decide what jobs our elites take. So far, I’ve said Society as if it was unitary. But it’s not really. In the US, there are – or were – three main Societies. The WASP/Eastern Establishment, the Southern Planterocracy, and Texas. Beyond that, a minor Society develops where there is new, alien wealth. Eastern Society comprised the following cities, plus every city where people from these cities engaged in further settlement/colonization: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. The genteel of Socal are those who moved south from San Francisco, for instance. The Planter aristocracy is not urban, but was founded by the Cavalier plantation owners. After the Civil War, it reorganized, switching to industrial production in order to drive out or assimilate all the Yankee carpetbaggers. It succeeded. The Debutante balls go on. Lastly, Texas. Where did Texas come from? Why is it just “Texas”?
Let’s go on a detour. Within the main Societies, there are local variations. Furthermore, there exist minor Societies wherever wealth accumulates culturally independent of an existing Society.
In midcentury Detroit, they said everyone in Detroit was a parvenu. Three generations of parvenus. Where did the parvenus come from? From the car money, of course. Life in Detroit Society revolved around the Fords and the car business. The charity balls were all run by that Grande Dame, Mrs. Ford.
So obviously, who comprises it? The people who can make a lot of money in cars. But it’s not just Detroit. This kind of divergence can also happen *within* an existing Society. Connecticut is hardly a barbarian frontier. But Hartford Society was about insurance. And whatever you were outside, inside, you were defined by your rank at Travelers or Aetna. You could be a pure bred Count and it wouldn’t matter, because here you’re just a junior executive. You think you deserve a Rolls Royce? Fuck you.
Get back to work. Why are these elites elite? Partly because of breeding. But especially in the case of parvenus, who lack breeding, it is because of one thing: their wealth. And why are they wealthy? That sounds like a stupid question, doesn’t it?
But think about it. This money comes from coordinating the production of socially useful labor. In fact, it always has. A significant amount (between a quarter and half) of the gentry of China were dam engineers. A warrior aristocrat is an aristocrat is a society where the industry is war. You make money in cars because people need cars, man. It’s important. You need competent army officers to win wars, and this is of the utmost importance in an agricultural society constantly at war. And what happens with a Society specialized for a purpose? It gets better at its task, so long as it is not decadent. When you breed a Car Guy with a Car Girl, they get even better at Cars. They accumulate genetic fitness and cultural traditions about how Cars work. If being The Best Actuary Guy is the highest status thing you can be in Hartford, Actuary Guy gets the ladies, and everyone will gush. All the Debutantes will giggle at his approach.
“Hey ladies. Did you know the years of additional life on a 75-year old man with gout?” An aristocrat is every bit as much of a thoroughbred as a good race horse. It is a creature shaped over generations and raised from birth for its tasks. The perfect Hartford Aristocrat is the holistic fulfillment of the Hartfordian Civilization, the Actuarial Race. The WASPs were literally breeding The Faustian Man, who would be a guy, the Faustian Guy. He would be a new kind of guy who would exemplify the world-historical mission of our civilization. To a great extent, they succeeded too. Look at the Winklevoss twins.
They are autistic guys because they almost invented Facebook and they were bitcoin early adopters. They are tech entrepreneurs. They are bankers. But despite being autistic, they are also Chads. Based. We did it team, pack it in. So to end our detour, where did Texas come from? Oil. Black gold, baby. Texas Society was born in oil and oil fortunes. It was made by good oil engineers, who knew where the oil was and how to get it out. They spoke to the earth. They knew the land and were its sons
But what about today? Does anyone today believe Texas A&M is the peer of Harvard? No, but outsiders never did. The important question is whether *Texans* believe Texas A&M is the peer of Harvard. And I don’t think they do. That’s a problem. The traditions of the earth were hard won insights. Many things cannot be taught from a textbook, but must be felt and shared from a master. Where will the oil engineers come from? From the masters. But to apprentice, apprenticing must be held to be worthy. It’s not about the money. Oil engineers make plenty of money. It’s about the status. It’s about knowing you are a true highborn son of Texas. You’re better than any East Coast blueblood because you are a blackblood and your heart beats industrial modernity. Fuck them outsiders.
When everyone takes cues from Harvard, and Harvard sucks up the talent of the nation, that’s dysfunctional even when the talent really is the talent and Harvard is what Harvard is supposed to be. Because Harvard is not going to teach kids how to be good petroleum engineers. When everyone goes to Harvard or sees Harvard values as the highest status values, you get the Harvard distribution of elite labor. Enjoy your apps and financial derivatives.
The Three No’s: 1. No Culture By Steam 2. No Politics By Memes 3. No Fulfillment of the Dream
No Culture By Steam In a near-off past, fools dreamed of a world-computer that could compute all the correct decisions men would make. It is the dream of every technocrat. This is the government-by-steam, a contraption to rule men. But men are not automatons, so to make the government-by-steam, you must have men-by-steam. Are we to be clockwork men, machine men, ruled by our Heart Machine in the hideous underdark? Will we submit fully to Moloch? But that’s a normative judgement. I will go farther – government-by-steam is impossible, precisely because of *normative judgements*. To have government-by-steam presumes that man is, like a rock or a machine, governed by purely physical laws. But it is not so. We make choices because we have free will, and what drives our choices is some idea of the good, or The Good, which is the Holy Spirit. It attempts to collapse human subjectivity into objectivity – our thoughts are merely the collisions of atoms, and therefore the universe could be predicted from the first state if we had a complete Theory of Everything.
And what is Culture-by-Steam? Merely the same thing. It presumes memetics is governed by purely physical laws, rather than being a thing of Man and therefore Manmade in a contingent way. The laws of culture are not like the laws of physics. What a perfect theory of memetics would give us is a prediction of what *sort of thing* might thrive in an environment, but not the shape of that thing in particular, contingent reality. To wit: Objectivism and Orthodox Marxism are, dialectically, the same ideology. Ayn Rand and Karl Marx are the same kind of person, NEET-Prophets of the Industrial Future, which now is the Industrial Past. Both of these ideologies are ideologies of High Modernism. Both of them exalt the productive over the idle, the machine over the plantation, because both exist in and are reactions to the age of the machine. And yet it’s clear that Objectivism is not Orthodox Marxism. What material conditions create are cultural ecological niches. But though different animals across different continents convergently evolve similar shapes to meet similar environments, they are not *the same animal*. The mistake of Culture-by-Steam is to imagine these laws are deterministic, that they dictate a path rather than laying out a set of possibilities that conform to the material pressures of the time.
You must forgive me for being shallow and pedantic, but I feel the need to spell it out, even though it should be obvious now what the role of the artist from the above. Obviously, if a path is contingent, what moves it? Happenstance events and the choices of *men*. And what men here? I am a little slow, so I have to work it out, but it seems clear that it is artists. This is why DALL-E et al cannot replace the artist, because the artist is not creating bulk art, but is envisioning an aesthetic and *translating* their aesthetic into something which can be perceived. An aesthetic is an imagined future, an imagined possible, a statement of an ideal. So the act of art is an act of vision, of perceiving the transcendental values of a given age. What the artist tries to capture in a scene of a battle is not the battle, but what the battle represents: Valor. To do otherwise is like the bulk landscapes of hotel rooms… kitsch. The material conditions create the ecological niche, they create a certain moment. But the artist’s goal is to draw out the essence of the moment and render it.
It is clear to any man of passing intellect why RW Artist Twitter is wrong then. But, again, I have to work out my gut assertions sometimes, because my brain is a little lacking. Imagination is not action. Words are not deeds. By being men of imagination, the artist divorces himself from the real. So too does the intellectual and the propagandist. What matters is no longer the real, but the words around the real. They are charting the map and not the territory. They are guiding imaginations, which set out a distant horizon, but to get to that horizon, you must steer the ship.
What is the revolutionary’s task? The revolutionary is the one who sees changing material conditions and re-adapts our present state to conform to God’s will. We are evolved for a more or less feudal structure, and feudalism is the natural form power takes, but material conditions killed Feudalism 1.0. We are designed to live in certain ways, but modernity and technical progress alienates us from our nature. The job of the revolutionary is to reattach ourselves to our nature and God’s plan for us, given that things are so unlike the natural state of things.
He sees the ideal of community, but he does not resurrect the old village commune and other obsolete things. He is not one who retreats from the world, but one who confronts it. He is not a reactionary, he does not react. He is the one who dictates. From Alexander to Caesar, from Washington to Lincoln to FDR, from Napoleon to Lenin, the revolutionary is the World Spirit on horseback, the one who cuts the Gordian Knot of an age’s contradictions, and leads it to a new settlement.
The Revolutionary rules by the Divine Right of Kings, for a Revolutionary, in truth, is the natural King. Just as there is always a natural aristocracy, there is also a natural King, the man who is the master of the age.
No Politics by Memes What does this imply? The ruling class, the real elites, are not primarily men of words, but first and foremost, men of action. And what is action? Action is something that must exist in the world of the real. The artist is a man of visions and imaginations. But the king is a man of property and a leader of men. The artist dreams of Valor, but Darius dreams of cows, and frets about the trade routes for wool merchants. This may seem snarky, but it’s not. High ideals are not the place of princes. The prince is on the ready line at all times. I sneer at those who talk about being natural aristocrats because they are natural idlers. The prince sleeps on the ground and eats beans with his men. He must bleed blood for blood, and clash iron against iron.
Above all, the prince must be rooted. The thing about ideals is that ideals are impossible. You can measure how idealistic a person is by looking at how much they sacrifice for their ideals. It’s easy to say you’re honest because you always tell the truth when it benefits you. But that doesn’t make you honest at all. An ideal is held true when it costs something. A true idealist is not a sunshine soldier. And so with art. The best artist must understand best their subject. But because their subject is an Ideal, a Vision, an Aesthetic, it unroots them from reality. The artist does not swim in reality. Originally, we came up with symbols to depict and describe reality. Then people learned those symbols absent experience with those realities. Eventually, those symbols take on a life of their own, becoming hyperreality, an image reflecting reality run amok, taking on a life of its own. Bill Gates is real, the media depiction of The Billionaire is a symbol, and the 50 Shades of Gray Billionaire Romance Novel Character or The Cabal is hyperreality, that media depiction coming to life. Symbols have become detached from their referents. But if we go by the symbols without referents, we are only combining together these memes without concern for reality, what they originally described. Ridiculous constructions like Ancap Marxist-Bidenist or Hoxhaist Appalachian or Barbie Girl Nationalism are products of this sea of symbols without referents. Rather than evolving from pressures in the material world, describing material reality, they come about from the conflict of these symbols with each other, and the contradictions and tensions present within the symbols. People pick up these labels not to propose some policies or change things for their loved ones, but to own other people online who exist in the sea of symbols.
Zealots are the most extreme idealists, because they will actually shed blood for their ideals. But most men are not idealists, let alone zealots. That is why politics is driven by material concerns or status (which is our lizard brain approximation of material conditions that will lead to us mating). Men will not die to meme, but they will die to protect their material concerns. Men have died to protect their property, men have died to protect their class, and most of all, men die to protect their people and their family. In doing serious politics, we must start from serious concerns rooted in the real world.
For these reasons, Lenin said we must focus on praxis. And a man with praxis but no theory is a better king than a man with theory and no praxis. Why do ordinary soldiers and ordinary businessmen make better kings than a reedy intellectual? Because their lives have forced them to confront the real at every turn, and therefore they know reality by her shape and feel, even if they aren’t capable of intellectualizing. A king is an executive, and certain pursuits demonstrate, by necessity, executive capacity.
No Fulfillment of the Dream The Left always wins, I say from my Soviet dacha. I mean, uhhh, my star fort. Long live Louis XIV! My free love commune.
Oh, none of those things lasted?
The thing about the eschaton is that you can’t immatenize it. The Left always wins, but every particular Left fails to accomplish its goals, because its goals are the imaginations of an artist, and what must exist in reality is some manifestation that can be real. Therefore, the utopias of every particular Left will fail, and in time, the Left of a time becomes the Right, in some sense.
All these different aesthetics and visions are arbitrary vectors in an impossibly complex multi-dimensional space, but we can’t actually reach the infinite end of the proposed vector. The mission of our civilization is always beckoning us forward, but at the end of forward is always collapse, as the contradictions of the idea pile up and undo it.
Fully Automated Space Luxury Gay Communism is no more the end of history than Fukuyama’s ramblings or Louis XIV’s absolutism. The main difference, I suppose, is that the Left that was Absolutism had less delusions about its own impossible megalomanias. There is no end of history. Rather, history is a record of contingent events in sequence, and dialectics is a process of continuous cyclical adjustment. It is like the roundabout approach of prices towards equilibrium, even though equilibrium never comes. Nevertheless, it is approached. It is the process by which the sine wave moves around the changing line such as to continuously approximate the best response for a given set of material conditions. Part of why every great modern leader gets an “-ism” is because that is what a leader must do. A leader must divorce from the impossible demands of the artists and their symbols without referents and enact practical solutions to practical problems. Paradise never comes, so it behooves us to take care of ourselves in the world as it is.
Walmarts across the country are getting bomb and shooting threats. What’s up with that? Not a peep from the MSM. Multiple suspects already arrested. Who’s coordinating this? Mass hysteria?
