Saturday Sermon

No Exit 
(originally published on Dec 11, 2007)

Now that all the groups have disappeared, and every tribe has dispersed, we know ourselves as isolated but similar to each other, and we have lost the desire to unite.
—The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq

Reality is the only word in the English language that should always come in quotes.
—anonymous

Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?
—“Cowboy,” The Short Timers, Gustav Hasford

Oh the things you’ll see! Oh the Places You'll Go!
—Dr. Seuss

We arrived at that place, finally. That imagined place where dreams were made real. Dreams of incomprehensible wonder revealing new, miraculous dimensions of imagination. The dreams held us in perpetual, childlike awe. But there we also found nightmares, nightmares we ourselves had released with the dreams. Nightmares at once unimaginable and familiar.

Once released the dreams and nightmares grew beyond our control. They merged and blended, endlessly recombining to create grotesque hybrids, spawning deformed children; all the while growing in number and mass. The sacred and the profane bled into one another until they became one. The sum of every dream became a communal dreamworld, the product of every mind and the product of no single mind.

Art was separated from artist. Meaning was being made meaningless. The people no longer controlled their imagination; it controlled them. The collective consciousness eroded and crowded out the individual. Privacy and solitude were becoming relics of the past. The people were becoming one unindividuated mass, like the inescapable dreamworld they beheld. Yet they were isolated from one another and alienated from the whole.

Every desire, every impulse, every fear and conceit, all vanity, was released to collect in an unintelligible mass overhead, lowering down upon them as it grew. All eyes turned upward, first in wonder and then in despair. Some warned that the dreamworld was displacing the real. But it was no use; there was no returning, and the authorless dreams and nightmares grew and combined as one, crowding out the sky, like a great, gathering storm.

Reality has competition. The virtual and the representational are gaining prominence in the individual and collective psyche, cutting into reality's market share. "Virtual" reality has even gained practical value. Everything that doesn't require direct human contact is gradually, inevitably, migrating away from it; economic utility alone ensures this. Engagement with one's fellows is increasingly unnecessary, and increasingly superfluous. It is now possible for one to survive within and even contribute to society without physically engaging it. For each one of us the necessity of human contact is diminishing. Human interaction is being rendered unnecessary

This fundamental shift is transpiring in a historical blink of the eye--within the span of a single lifetime. The experience of our youth is already antiquated; the world our children will pass on, unimaginable. We are on a path that seems predetermined to end with—or merely pass through—the manipulation of perception at the synaptic level, where experience lives. It is all but certain that we will eventually master the interface between perception and reality. We are not cutting out reality but cutting it off, stranding it. We are not "playing God", but displacing him. Reality is being made malleable, becoming a mere "social construct." But "reality" and "nature" are not the same thing. This we forget. Even as reality is coming apart at the seams, nature remains, utterly unchanged and unfazed, as indifferent as ever.

In the future it may come to pass that the individual will have less need for sociality. Evolutionary pressures for it may already be easing. Technology and human vanity combine to ensure that procreation itself will inevitably become a commercialized, streamlined, efficient process, with conception and gestation taking place in vitro and managed by professionals customizing their product for a clientele ordered by wealth; a hierarchy of reproduction intensifying human inequality and its attendant social stratification. Today's already disingenuous prohibition against eugenics doesn't stand a chance; it will eventually become a curiosity, if it is to be remembered at all. As for sex, romance and love; their connection to procreation is all but severed; they are now primarily recreational. Family as we know it will pass into history, but the struggle for genetic predominance will continue. It may become a rout as some enjoy unlimited access, and others are shut out entirely.

There is no guarantee that in the future the individual will not select, and be selected for, solitariness. As it is, a growing percentage of the populace is disengaged from and irrelevant to the politics and governance of society. As the average person's personal liberty grows in the absence of any authority over it, such as by church or community, indeed, as personal liberty becomes the highest virtue, his political autonomy and influence lessens, and he is increasingly irrelevant to a polity he finds confusing, opaque, and unresponsive.

The common man concedes influence in exchange for being left alone; he can count not being pressed into the service of defending the nation or contributing to its welfare or governance beyond paying taxes. He enjoys unprecedented personal liberty and unprecedented social irrelevance. He is left to his amusements; lurid, hyper-lucid and hyper-stimulating ("more real than real")—sensually and morally deadening. Over the horizon somewhere another class, increasingly alien, works the levers of society and gathers privilege unto itself.

Culture today still retains its partly shamanistic roots—imposing the necessary illusion of order on a natural world fundamentally incomprehensible due to its sheer size and totality; that the human heart can be cordoned off from nature is an ancient dream we still pursue. This fundamental religious belief is what made civilization possible. Absolute truth had to be declared and established before it could be determined (and before we could set out on the path to where we now enjoy the conceit of declaring it nonexisent). Society had to drop anchor somewhere, anywhere, to establish an immutable reference point, to free itself from its primordial drift. But still it is an illusion, and as such it could not last. The illusion has been exposed; we are cut adrift once more.

For the ancients it was the indecipherable chaos of the capricious elements upon which a semblance of order had to be overlaid; a mythology of cause and effect had to be created, and eventually the gods were born. Scientific revelation, in laying bare the patterns underlying the confusion and demystifying the sacred mysteries of sky and stars, incidentally exposed and killed the gods. But nature's indifference and caprice still haunt us. New mythologies are hastily erected in the form of sociological conceits: ideology, philosophy, social theory and criticism. But they are ad hoc, cobbled together; they fall as rapidly as we put them up. Mystery is no longer the overriding feature of the physical world. Now it is the confusion of a species whose awareness has outstripped its evolutionary pace—that has outrun nature but cannot overcome it. We are still uncovering patterns, still killing gods.

Nature means, literally, everything. Out of necessity we create false layers of remove between ourselves and nature; arbitrary, imaginary divides. But, as with all human artifice, their erosion begins before they are even finished, before they come into being. Nature works upon us even through the very barriers we erect. The clock is always ticking. Human convention is no less a product of nature than anything else, and in nature there is no such thing as permanence. Nature has time we don't. Literally, all the time in the world. Nature is time. Flux is its only permanent feature.

Meanwhile, we have grown bored with merely manipulating our physical environment. The pace of change has made a mockery of permanence, so we mock and deride the social conventions attempting to preserve a semblance of it, otherwise known as community, habitually. This exposes a lack of confidence. Of faith. Paranoia is imprinted in our genetic code; we sense there's something else out there. We attempt to give shape and form to this vague fear.

What should be the ultimate practical concern, the physical environment, takes on a religious, millenarian air; mainstream environmentalism prophesies catastrophic wrath to be visited upon us for our sins if we do not admonish ourselves and atone. Alarmed at our very real and apparently boundless hubris, we fashion myths of a vengeful nature wreaking havoc on us and reclaiming the land.

Global warming and AIDS have both become political and social movements predicated on a mythology of hubris and social injustice bringing about catastrophe. But beneath this lurks nothing so much as a profound lack of confidence, not entirely misplaced perhaps, in the ultimate wisdom of human society. Beyond hardcore political activism, the unacknowledged subtext of AIDS as a social phenomenon is the hope, now revealed as hopeless, that the disease would, finally, chasten humanity to temper its headlong descent into sexual immorality and chaos. Remember when "AIDS changed everything"?
Likewise global warming is being invested with the hope that it will spur a revolution in the production of energy, just in time to head off the next global conflict and make a Third World as rich in resources as it is in hostility irrelevant.

In the end, catastrophe mythology is not, as it appears at first glance, misanthropic conceit, but collective vainglory. We give ourselves too much credit. Nature will indeed reclaim the dominion it never really relinquished, but it will have nothing to do with us. We are not even bit players in nature's tragicomedy, but mere scenery. It is we that we need to keep our eyes on.

Violence permeates the culture, but the reality of daily life for the vast majority is excruciatingly dull in comparison to the alternate reality of cinema and video games. For sensational appeal, it simply cannot compete. The innate aggression and paranoia of the average man is increasingly aroused in inverse proportion to its decreasing necessity.

We have not conquered but insulated ourselves from the physical world, and have begun the logical next step, crafting an alternate reality—a reality manipulable at the individual level. Meanwhile nature still inhabits this false idyll, untold patterns unfolding still. We delude ourselves that nature has been marginalized, finally made small and comprehensible, but we can no more escape her than we can escape ourselves.

In a culture with no center, taken over entirely by commerce, prominence of place is awarded entirely by mass appeal. The vulgar shares space with the formerly sacrosanct. The common cannot be ennobled by its elevation, but its opposite cannot avoid being trivialized by being made common.

Decency cannot survive an order determined by sensationalism. Real life horrors compete for attention with their fictional counterparts. The collective imagination conflates and confuses them. In the end, it all must combine; beauty and ugliness, truth and fiction. In the historical memory they will be indistinguishable. In our minds they nearly are already.

So, what then? I propose no action, no change of course, no return, because these are impossible. There is no going back. It is only for us to gaze in wonder and hold on tight.

Alternative America Phrasebook

"Your guide to the idiom of mass delusion."

Civility, n., hackspeak, The silence or acquiescence of one's political enemies.

Pain and Soros

Soon after the first #blacklives disruption of a campaign event--a double header taking out two white males, Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders--speculation arose as to whether Hillary supporter George Soros was behind the hit. This only increased when Bernie was shut down again in Seattle, in front of 12,000.

Then news came Hillary's secret service agents turned away #blacklives protesters at an appearance. It must be nice to have secret service agents. Bernie had one gouty old Seattle progressive to defend him.

Forget it Jake, it's social justice now*

So is it proof Soros is not behind the guerrilla tactics? Do I have to discard a perfectly sensible conspiracy theory? Thankfully, no; the Astroturf Amazons telegraphed their moves, then conveniently failed to execute them:

The group had initially told The New Republic that they had planned to interrupt Clinton’s event and ask her about her drug platform, and campaign staffers inside the room were aware of those intentions due to the magazine’s publication.

Because the former secretary of state and first lady has Secret Service protection, her events are typically sealed once she enters the building — and the group of activists apparently did not make it to the event by that time. They were standing under a tent outside the school doors as the event began, but eventually made it into the building to watch in the side room.

Hillary gets a "Hillary meets with protesters" headline and Bernie gets "Sanders humiliated by girls." I can still smell bullshit. It's playing out now as if the point isn't to take down Sanders, but for Hillary to curry favor with blacks. Oh if only the Republicans were a serious party, capable of and willing to field a serious candidate to run on a law and order, implicitly pro-white platform. The scary thing is their biggest fear of that is that it might succeed.

*important note to SJWs headed to Ferguson and other social justice hotspots: "Bulletproof, Black Lives Matter" tee is not actually bulletproof. It is, however, 100 percent cotton and available for just 28 dollars!
But again: not bulletproof.

Gettin' Paid

The meek passivity with which the white Left has absorbed the aggressive entitlement of "black lives" wreckers harassing the Sanders campaign (the socialist has real-life counter-revolutionary wreckers, but he can't say it!) reveals a new stage in the ever-evolving Democratic coalition of the fringes.
Addicted to black outrage, the party is compelled to adopt an organizational model similar to the Mafia, where a dominant individual or "family" commands a percentage of all criminal activity in a given domain. The black faction (which is not to say black Democrats but everyone involved in black advocacy, including Soros the consilgiere manipulating a clueless, volatile godfather) is the crime boss and nothing goes down in the boss' territory without his approval--and nobody so much as sells a dime bag without the boss getting his taste. That's why you don't say "all lives matter"--you're cutting out the rightful originator of the grift.

Old Bernie was just getting the held-by-his-ankles-out-the-window treatment to remind him to whom he must "kick up".

The Importance of Legacy

From Steve Sailer:

ABN comments

I get the sense that there is a lot of psychic stress experienced by the Talented Tenth, i.e. bourgeois middle-class blacks like Ta-Nahesi Coates. They basically live among white people according to white norms, but this creates in them a need to “keep it real” by defending and excusing the dysfunction of underclass blacks. It’s like how the most anti-colonial element of society in the former European empires was the Westernized native elite rather than traditionalist tribal elders.  

 In a saner world, the Talented Tenth would have an aristocratic attitude of protective paternalism toward black proles, in the spirit of Booker Washington. In actuality, black ethnocentrism, despite being a fundamentally conservative trait, gets filtered through the ideology of the white liberals who run post-white America. 

So instead of straightforward tribal noblesse oblige, gentry blacks like TNC (and Obama) live by the fundamentally dishonest and passive-aggressive code of leftism: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. They lie that D’Shawntavious is their social equal, and the implausibility of that claim means they have to lie again by claiming that Whitey is a wrecker. I actually kind of pity middle-class blacks who wish to be champions of their people even as they operate within an ideological framework created by leftists who despise their own people.

But the Talented Tenth patronizes its people as vociferously as any elite group and is probably less alienated from its poor relations than, say, Wasps before they undertook the Great Cuckolding. Whatever doubts the Tenth is capable of regarding defense of the murderous and the mediocre, it appears they are lessening over time along with the credibility of their arguments and theories, and are easily and readily sublimated into political action that, coming full circle, has become largely about translating black failure into political power. Failure, fed through enforced faith in the equality of the races, is black political power. The black elite and their white allies love black failure, even if they don't know it.

The Tenth is unique among elites in that their legacy has become suffering, and they hold fast to that legacy because it’s invaluable–the perception that black Americans have suffered uniquely among peoples has them dominating politics and culture; not despite a history of failure but because of it. It’s the greatest con ever. Combined with black dominance in culture and sports, it has this population hitting above its weight like no other. By "weight" of course I mean its contribution to the commonweal.

Conventional thinking on race doesn’t exaggerate the problem, it inverts it. Reverse the arrow of causation, reverse the arrow of moral responsibility. The uneasy Left senses this. It isn’t that white America cannot honor its debt to blacks because the sins are too profound, it’s that black America can’t honor its end of the bargain–to become peaceful and productive–due to a lack of human capital and will. Anchored to a moralistic fallacy--black intellectual inferiority is unthinkable ergo impossible--we can only go down, and we do, scrambling to define deviancy down and adapt mores to accommodate black behavior.

It’s also a proven political model, adopted to all manner of newcomers; black failure is the gift that keeps on giving. Some angry, Suge Knight type guy should be fuming through his cigar right now over how the brothers aren’t getting paid for this.

The Banned

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Band


Dixie, Bob Dylan


I'm Thinking Tonight of the Old Folks, The Monroe Brothers