Truth in a world of lies

By Alf

   

Welcome

Welcome, dear reader! Welcome to my site, on which I host exactly one story, written in blog-length chapters because that's just how I roll. Perhaps you are already familiar with neoreaction, the dark enlightenment or even some of my work. Perhaps you are not. Whatever the case, I assume no prior knowledge.

You ask: what is this story about? Pf, where to begin. The best comparison I can come up with is that it's kind of like how, in the movie 'the Matrix', the protagonist searches the internet for answers about the world he lives in. But instead of not finding them, he finds them. But you might argue that comparisons with the Matrix are cliché, and also you might otherwise disagree. Best you just read on, I suppose. Or not, who am I to tell you how to spend your time.

Now, let us begin. Like all good stories, ours starts dramatically: with the fall of a civilisation.

 

 

A Falling Civilisation

Imagine being born in 1200 BC bronze age Hittite empire, in what is now Turkish territory. For the first time in human history, empires have sprung up, and you are part of one. People are proud - why wouldn't they be? You have trade routes bringing in exotic supplies, people have figured out how to melt and shape metal. Your culture produces beautiful pottery, houses, chariots, palaces even. You breed strong horses, work the land. You worship and pay thanks to the Gods. It is obvious to you and everyone around you that your civilisation is simply the greatest in the world.

Or so you think. For the bronze age collapse is just around the corner. Just a few decades later, your empire falls apart, plundered and destroyed by its enemies. Its men killed, its women raped. And you, our formerly proud Hittit citizen, are either dead or fleeing. A stark contrast. Why didn't your civilisational self-image match with what was actually happening?

The obvious reason is that assessing a civilisational cycle is difficult. Especially if you're one of the first civilisations around -- how are you supposed to know empires have an expiration date? Sure maybe you've got some people preaching that the end is near, but then again you've always got some people preaching that the end is near.

But there should be plenty of objective signs of impending disaster, right? Stories about lost wars at the faraway borders, stock shortages, increases in distrust... That sort of thing. Yet still, many people will for the longest time insist that everything's just fine. We call this normalcy bias, which is Newton's first law applies to humans: objects in motion tend to stay in motion. When your entire life has been normal, you assume that the future will be normal as well and plan accordingly. You will behave as if the stability of the past is a good indicator for the future, because your entire life that has been true and naturally, you want it to be true as well. Indeed, the past tends to be a reliable indicator for the future. Unless of course, your civilisation is about to fall apart. Then, old rules no longer apply, and if you ignore the new rules too long, you will find yourself %#$@ out of luck when the %#$@ hits the fan.

At this point you have probably figured out: I am not just talking about some ancient civilisation. I am also talking about our civilisation, let us call it Western civilisation. You know, the one you and I both live in. Led by America and its allies in Europe and Australia, with its vassal states littered all over the world. A grander empire has never existed. Unfortunately, it is in the process of falling apart. It is quite the tale.

On this site you will find my version of this tale, the story of the fall of the West. Although this fall is extensively documented because of our information age, the majority of that documentation is nonsense -- a bunch of lies or bullshit indifferent to the truth. After all, if society at large understood why it was falling, it would stop the fall. Our misunderstanding of the situation is intertwined with our downfall. For instance, consider the generic explanation for the sudden bronze age decline: bronze age civilisations were invaded. OK, but why not repel the invaders? Well something something earthquakes and droughts. OK, why not deal with the earthquakes and droughts? Surely the invaders had the same problems...

We see the same lack of coherence in our current situation. Why is the West falling? Our experts give us a myriad of non-answers. "It's very complex", "the West isn't falling", "because global warming" or "because covid". But the West isn't falling because of global warming and covid. Much closer to the truth is: global warming and corona are either false or insignificant problems from an outsider's perspective, but they are made gigantic problems from our insiders' perspective. The climate only become more accommodating to human life, not less. And covid has never killed anyone who wasn't already with one foot in the grave.

But try to state such facts in the public sphere, under your real name, and you'll be ostracized. Which makes perfect sense: civilisational collapse goes hand in hand with a coerced inability to understand or fix that civilisational collapse.

Luckily, in this place I am anonymous and free to speak. So let me tell you the real story. Why is the West falling? How do we survive the fall? In this story I will answer those questions. They are not answers I have come up all by myself. As our story will reveal, they are an amalgamation of answers from a bunch of smart, mostly anonymous men who've had heated debates on obscure blogs on the internet. I am merely the messenger, condensing those answers as succinctly as possible.

So let us condense the answer as succinctly as possible:

That's the short version anyway. Now, the long version.

 

 

 

part I - Neoreaction

 

 

 

Mencius Moldbug and how the puritans conquered the world

Before we trace back the downfall of the West, should I present evidence of the downfall of the West? I could for instance mention that the US has a president with dementia. I could mention the spiralling inflation, or the European energy crisis following the war with Russia. But in the end the point of this story is not to prove that the West is collapsing -- that would be like proving the wetness of water. So, let's move on.

Where, when and how did things go wrong?

For a long while it certainly did not seem like things were going wrong. If we look past the slaughter fields of the twentieth century (which we really shouldn't), things in the West were going pretty good: more prosperity, more technology, more of everything. Of course in hindsight signs of decline were everywhere, but it is hard to notice them when you have witnessed firsthand how we have landed on the moon.

Although some people might have instinctively felt something was off about modern society, it was not until 2007 that we uncovered how deep the rot really went. Why 2007? Because in that year an otherwise unknown programmer from San Francisco started a blog called 'Unqualified Reservations'. This blogger would become known as the infamous Mencius Molbug.

Molbug had the disadvantage of being very verbose: some of his blogposts were longer than my entire story. But he had the advantage of being a smart man. He was the first to lay the finger on the sore spot: American democracy and by extension Western democracy, he said, does not exist. The way we are taught our society works is simply not the way it works. Well OK, fair enough, but that is hardly a new opinion. Plenty of people will tell you our government sucks. But none of them could adequately explain why it sucks, or how it in fact really works. Moldbug could.

Moldbug said that, roughly speaking, America is a communist state.

Bu-bu-bu communist? Isn't America capitalist and the land of the free and money? Well, consider: who is telling you that? Are they state-sponsored journalists and academics and bureaucrats? Are they telling you American capitalists are evil and need to be restrained even further? If you hadn't noticed, the American dream is long dead -- being an entrepreneur in America has become mostly impossible. Start-ups have been strangled to death, small business owners are crushed, and Jeff Bezos was chased out of New York for being an evil billionaire.

But, say you, people still have their own land and guns and money. At which point a voice in your head might add: although not for the lack of the state trying to take those away. Indeed, it is hardly a secret that very powerful people in the West openly promote agendas stating that 'you will own nothing and you'll be happy'. Neither is it a secret that, after legalising gay marriage, the only thing on leftists' wish list was the banning of guns, for which they have made a big effort, and have been, in Europe at least, very successful.

Still, your point stands. America's increasing socialism is not an exact replica of USSR socialism. Your property is being infringed upon, but it has not been completely taken from you. Moldbug was well aware of this -- it is a crude comparison. An introduction to the truth if you will.

Moldbug's hobby was reading old books. In those old books, he found history by those who lived it described very differently than he was taught in school or in new books. Very peculiar. In time he put together the puzzle pieces and on his blog explains them in what we will call the story of How the Puritans Conquered the World.

Puritans? Who are the Puritans? Well remember how this is a story about meaning? What did we, historically, derive meaning from? Well, 't was religion, or in our case specifically: Christianity. The Puritans were a Christian community in 16th century England. Christianity around that time was not as universal (aka Catholic) as it once was. In fact, major schisms had broken out all around Europe, between Catholics and Protestants, the latter insisting that the former had become corrupt and decadent. The Puritans were a Protestant group, and they were special in that they insisted that the mainstream Protestants did not protest enough. They insisted on further 'purifying' the church. To give you an idea of how pure the Puritans were: they forbade Christmas on grounds that it was too much fun. King Charles the first, a Protestant, was of the opinion that the Protestant church was fine as is, and pushed back against these holier-than-thou troublemakers. And so in the early 17th century, many Puritans fled to North America. They settled in Massachussets where they continued their religious practices. For instance, they established a school to train their clergy, naming it Harvard. Small little school, you might have heard of it.

This might confuse you if you're unfamiliar with the punchline -- isn't Harvard one of, if not the most powerful university in the world, where truth and science are held in the utmost importance? Well yes and no. Indeed they are powerful, for the puritans went on the conquer the world from their base in Massachusetts. However, that people think Harvard values truth is more a consequence of its power than anything else. Harvard today is very similar to Harvard in the days of the puritans -- it is an institute of meaning, specifically the descendant of its sixteenth century puritan meaning, spreading its religion to all corners of its empire.

The way you spread meaning is first and foremost by being a winner. The puritans were on the winning side for an impressively long time. First they sided against England during the American rebellion. Which conflict they won. Then they sided against the south in the American civil war. They won. Finally, they sided against the fascists and the communists in the twentieth century, and spoiler alert: they won. Mind you, we are fast-forwarding through two hundred years of history, so by this time the puritans have reinvented themselves a couple of times. At this point we know them better as the progressives, or social justice warriors.

What is interesting is that none of this is really a secret. Progressives have always been fairly open about their goals. See for instance this newspaper dug up by Moldbug, in which progressives are aptly referred to as 'super-protestants'.

What is the difference between puritans and progressives? To answer that question, we must first say what is the similarity between them: a zeal for holiness. They were holy nuts, from beginning to end. A holy nut wants power, but being a priestly man, he'd rather not hit you with a stick. He'd like to hit you with a stick, but he's afraid you'd hit him back. So instead, he simply proclaims he has more power. He is a better person, has better opinions than you, just an all-around good guy. In a nutshell: he is holier than you.

So for instance, because the puritans were holier than other Christians, they did not accept the authority of protestant bishops. Because they were holier, they did not celebrate christmas, took sabbath more serious than you, took essentially everything about Christianity more serious than you. They were simply better people than you! Charles the first disagreed, hence their banishment.

Just like any artist should reinvent himself to stay relevant, so did the Puritans. Back in the seventeenth century, everyone was Christian, so they were better Christians than you. But as Christianity's influence lessened, the puritans hopped on the enlightenment bandwagon, the idea of the enlightenment being that we had outgrown Christianity and had become rational and scientific. So today's progressives are rational and scientific. Only they are, of course, more rational and scientific than you. See if you recognise the following prog characteristics: - is very proud of driving electric because he cares for the planet - is vegetarian because he cares for the animals - is a feminist because he cares for women - partakes in civil rights activism because he cares for minorities - is horribly hypocritical.

I'll put in a small disclaimer: not all SJW's are bad folk. Some are good folk, some are good sometimes, bad sometimes. But it is just like with communism. Some communists are good folk, but all communism leads down the same path, for it's meaning, it's telos as some might call it, is always parasitism: power at the expense of others.

Or, the way Moldbug originally put it: Progressives are bad folk with bad intentions. Opportunists who lie whenever it suits them. BUT, Progressives are also the people who rule the world as prominent politicians, journalists and academics! Which, recalling our opening chapter, goes a long way to explain the trouble we're in.

 

Liars, grifters and charlatans

So, liars. Bad men. I know, making such a sweeping generalisation goes against modern upbringing: 'you can't say some folk are evil -- it is much more nuanced than that!' Well, sometimes you need fine strokes, sometimes you need broad strokes. And this broad stroke, we'll see, is an essential one. Our society, unfortunately, belongs to bad men.

But... How? Why? Do I have any proof? Well, yes. And so had Moldbug. Plenty of proof. An absolute abundance of it in fact. Liars always leave behind a trail of clues.

Summarising the Puritans' takeover of the world: supposedly, following the enlightenment, the West shrugged off its superstitious religiousness. We instead became a society grounded in Progress and Science. But really, the Puritans were religious zelots, who hid their religious fervor behind those buzz words. Not much has changed since then, even though the Puritans have changed names a couple of times, one such name being Social Justice Warriors.

Because of all this, it stands to reason that when you look closely at the institutions claiming to represent Progress and Science, will you find neither. To follow a religion that denies being a religion necessitates lying all over the place. In the long-term this means liars will be rewarded for bad behaviour, and honest people will be punished for speaking the truth. All of these lies pile up, and in the age of internet are easily found, hard to be censored.

Moldbug gave many examples. Many of them you are likely already familiar with. Like how our politicians are corrupt liars. Democracy, Moldbug said, is a terrible form of government. It is a prerequisite for bad stuff to happen, and it is no surprise that the collapse of the French monarchy coincided with the Enlightenment terror.

But 'democracy' is perhaps too easy to dunk on. What about a hotter subject -- say global warming? Did you know 99% of all man-made global warming talk is absolute bunkum?

Climate change is an excellent example of the invasion by liars phenomenon because it
a) pretends to be scientific
b) is very obviously a huge pile of lies upon closer inspection.

I'll illustrate with a simple multiple choice question: what is the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature?
a) Linear
b) Exponential
c) Inversely proportional
d) Logarithmic

If you know anything about climate change, you'll be going with either (a) and (b). After all, we are rapidly destroying the planet aren't we? Well, surprise: the answer is (d).

We know much less about the complexities of earth climate than you might think. We know some of the basics, mostly by inferring it through laboratory research. On the relation between carbon dioxide and temperature, we know that greenhouse gases increase earth's temperature by thirty degrees. Carbon dioxide makes up ten percent of that effect. Pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million, we are now at about 410 ppm. So that's about fifty percent rise in the last two hundred years or so. If the relation were linear, the math would work out to an equivalent rise in temperature. But it doesn't. What we see in the lab is that the relation is logarithmic, the log base being two, the multiplier being approximately zero point four.

Yes I understand the math will probably bore you, but I'm afraid we have to bite through the sour apple. I'll keep it to the point.

This specific log means that for every doubling in carbon dioxide concentration, temperature increases about 0.4 degrees. Since CO2 has not doubled over the past two hundred years, according to what we know from the lab, industrial CO2 will have increased global temperature with at most 0.3 degrees. And because it takes another doubling to increase it even further, we seem to have pretty much hit the ceiling in terms of CO2-related global warming.

In other words, what scientific investigation tells us, is that we just shouldn't be worried about the carbon dioxide concentration. In a different world, perhaps we should have been, but in this one, based on the scientific findings, we don't have to. Below graphs lifted from whatsupwiththat illustrate the point visually.

Graph one - graph showcasing logarithmic relation between carbon dioxide and reflection of heat in Watt per square meter

Graph two - same graph but starting from zero on y-axis. A logarithmic function is the inverse of an exponential function, meaning vertical growth slows to a halt.

Graph three - the same graph but in a way that displays the increase in temperature for every additional 20 ppm CO2. Every 20 ppm increase above 280 ppm gives us an increase in temperature of about 0.03 degrees, although the more ppm, the lower the increase in temperature.

Graph four - And of course, here comes the kicker: this is the IPCC climate model prediction stuck on top of our (now cumulative) previous graph.

The IPCC graph shows us what everybody is taught: that the world is going to end! We must act now! CO2 free society! This model is taken for granted, and is the foundation for pretty intrusive policy all around the world. After all, don't you want to save the world? But none of it is true! It is in fact, insultingly false, in direct contradiction with the actual experiments. Experiments which at this point go back decades. Yet no one driving these policies seems to care, no global warming expert will even mention something like logarithmic relation. In fact, they will dismiss these findings as 'conspiracy theories' or whatever, no matter that you can actually replicate the research in your own home. How incredibly strange.

Well, Moldbug said it wasn't so strange. He said, basically, that this is what happens when bad people take control: they invent a bunch of bullshit to justify taking your stuff. Global warming is exactly such bullshit, in which saving the planet is used as an excuse to take everybody's stuff. Yes, you have your share of useful idiots, but mostly it's a bunch of liars, grifters and charlatans robbing and destroying civilisation.

Unfortunately, global warming is just one example. Evil people in power means evil activity around the globe. Moldbug summarised this collective of activity as 'the Cathedral', alluding to the scammers' tendency to dress up their lies in religious clothes. Naming the before then invisible beast turned out to be extremely helpful. Nowadays folk all around the world are familiar with the Cathedral, even though they might use a different name, such as the Globalist American Empire (GAE), the International Community, or, derisively, Globohomo.

Because he provided such insight, Moldbug's writing became the catalyst for the intellectual movement known as the Dark Enlightenment, or neoreaction. Reaction because it 'reacted' against democracy, 'neo' because this isn't the first time people have reacted against democracy.

 

A Story

Before we continue with the history of neoreaction and my humble role in it, perhaps it is good to tell you what this website is about now that you've already come a tiny way. This website is an idea, clothed in a story.

This means that, even though I may not be the best of writers, not a native English speaker, and at times I half-ass entire chapters, it's not such a problem. The form is not the most important thing here. I try to write as clear as possible for you, dearest reader, but what I am really trying to convey is an idea, which I can only vaguely summarise. Have you seen the movie Inception? It's kind of like that, where they try to plant the seed of an idea in someone's brain. Of course, whether or not this idea takes root, I have no clue. I'm just trying my best, y'know?

What this website is intended to be, is to summarise the story of where we currently are, as humanity, as life on earth. Our culture, our zeitgeist, whatever you want to call it. Our story will connect us back to the civilisational past of our ancestors, and project that into the future. This is a story meant to be passed on from fathers to sons.

Another way I look at it is to consider life a game designed by some omnipotent programmer, which is a rather popular metaphor these days. In any game, the objective is to get to the next level. And so is the purpose of this story.

Or, even another way to look at it: what is truth?

I know I know, it's all rather grandiose, possibly quite pretentious. I'm just trying to provide some context. I have tried this a couple of times before -- on my blog, and previously in a book called 'The Resurrection of God' of which I sold a couple of copies for good bitcoin. But this is my final product. Whether it succeeds at its intent, I'll let you be the judge.

Anyway, where were we...

 

NRx History

Moldbug was the first of those bloggers, and after him came the Neoreactionary Big Bang: Neoreaction was hot and happening. Blogs popped up like flies in spring. Everyone had a neoreactionary blog, discussed neoreactionary affairs and left neoreactionary comments. Lots of interesting concepts were developed, concepts which I can hardly all do justice. The best collection of posts I can suggest would be LD50's compendium called 'Rx*NRx: A miscellany of reactionary and neoreactionary writing', featuring an extensive selection of blog posts. It is a very pretty book, slick design, white ink on black pages... Here I'll show you mine:

Of course, LD50 was a physical, London based gallery. NRx, from the start, was antithetical to the power of the state. If you discuss how the West has become an evil empire, the elites of that empire are not going to like you. The great majority of neoreactionaries was and has always been anonymous, for this exact reason. As for the not anonymous LD50: they were eventually forced to close down because 'evil alt-right propaganda'. Would not be surprised if bricks and broken windows were involved. So I don't think you can order the book anywhere. But that suits our purposes fine, because I get to tell you my completely unbiased version of Neoreactionary history!

Needless to say, all participants were anonymous, white high IQ men. It felt dangerous to discuss politically incorrect questions, but for many it was just too darn interesting. I presume that, like myself, many felt society was heading off a cliff, but they lacked the words to describe how and why. Also, you could come up with a cool nickname so no one knew who you were. Such anonymity does have its limits, as for instance Mencius Moldbug was doxxed.

An important point of debate was: how bad is the situation really? Are we 50% f*cked, 60% or even 100%?

Well, pretty bad. As Moldbug would say: the cancer is everywhere, the patient is terminal. No transplant will save him. This was by no means a new discovery: it has been long-standing knowledge that democracy is dumb, even the form in which only land-owning men of good standing can vote. And we have a full-blown democracy where women, criminals and foreigners can vote. It is said that the problem with democracy is that it is the voice of the people, but that the people are dumb. There is truth in that -- sometimes you'll find the wisdom of the mob, which youtube dealt with by removing the dislikes, but oftentimes you'll find their madness, say at overcrowded festivals. Still, the even bigger problem in a democracy is that the people don't rule -- they never rule. An elite always rules. A vote, in the end, is just a small cross on a piece of paper. Sooner or later, you get a new elite that will find a million creative ways to generate a billion votes in their favor, be it through importing foreigners, propaganda campaigns or, how it always ends, with simple election fraud. And in line with what we've talked about: if your ruling class resorts to evil ways to stay in power, you bet your ass your ruling class is evil.

But the rot isn't just the political system. It's an entire belief system. Religious, cultural, everything. Every intellectual trend since the French revolution and the Harvard conquest of America has turned out to be maladaptive nonsense disguised as progress. Hence Moldbug's red pill metaphor: we had been living in the matrix and were only just coming to grips with reality. Personally the following he said always stuck with me: 'you'll keep coming back, because the truth is just too damn interesting.' So, if democracy and all it's associated values were bullsh*t, what was the truth?

Over time, a loose consensus was developed as to what Neoreaction, or NRx as the cool kids called it, meant.

 

Nullius in verba

Much of that consensus was based on Moldbug's writings. Moldbug, after all, embodied that central virtue that attracted so many to NRx: he sought and spoke truth. That seems arbitrary and even silly, but it was crucial. The truth is not often spoken, especially publicly, especially these days. I know I was starving for some truth. Could not find it anywhere. Could not find it in the universities, not in the newspapers, and only random snippets in books. Moldbug's story of how the Puritans conquered the world was the first explanation that finally made sense to me.

How did Moldbug figure that out? By returning to the scientific method. What I mean by that is that Moldbug observed, tested and adjusted his worldview accordingly. Which might sound obvious, but again, I could not find anyone else using the same method. For instance, while at university, I learned that most university research was sloppy, rushed and edited to force the required results.

The gist of the scientific method, on the other hand, is simple: you use your own eyes. This method, though as old as man itself, rose to scientific prominence in the seventeenth century when king Charles the second backed the Royal Society. The Royal Society was a collection of physicians, scientists and chemists who felt that the world could be explored through experimental investigation. For instance, through this method, its initial leader, Robert Boyle, rejected the established 'everything is made of four elements theory' and instead laid the groundwork for modern chemistry. Later presidents would include Isaac Newton and Ernest Rutherford.

The Royal Society's motto, in turn borrowed from the Romans, summarised their method: Nullius In Verba. Take no one's word for it. Which is the opposite of how universities nowadays conduct their research, namely through peer review, where an anonymous committee evaluates your work behind closed screens and you pretty much have to take their word for it.

But on the free anonymous internet, men are free to return to Nullius in Verba. And that's what they did. You'll note that our takedown of global warming theory followed this method. Lucky for us, there are several other topics where reactionaries successfully applied this method.

 

 

Economics

On a long enough timescale, lies are bland and boring. The truth is juicy. It sticks with you. After I got into NRx I simply stopped caring about mainstream media. I started to understand some very fundamental things.

Let's take economics. I never understood economics in high school. I mean, I understood the basic stuff like supply and demand, but not the more 'complicated' stuff like macro-economics, Keynes and Fisher. It was only through NRx that I understood that high school economics is not meant to make sense.

It is meant to justify the high school's boss, the state, getting up in everyone's business.

Take insurance: historically, the point of insurance was to have a closed group of trustees take care of one another. In modern times, the state forces you to take out many insurances from total strangers in the employ of the state. Insurance companies do not know their customers, their customers do not know their insurance companies, ergo no one trusts anyone and everyone tries to screw everyone over. Nullius in Verba tells us: do not get involved in insurance, unless you actually know and trust the company, which, let's face it, is rare. But high school economics, justifying the state getting up in everyone's business, says: yes well in order to pay for everyone screwing everyone over we just need more useful idiots paying money, so we should make insurance mandatory for everyone. This kind of 'let's solve a shitty situation with more shittiness' is par for a state in decline, and in biology is referred to as parasitism.

Many such cases. Take debt. It never made sense to me that a state could be billions of dollars in debt. If I was a billion in debt, I'd be: a) pretty sure I'ma never be able to repay that. b) hiding under my bed for fear of having my face smashed in. But the state does not seem to be affected in the slightest. In fact, it cheerfully continues to borrow billions more every year. What's going on?

Well, in a nutshell, because it is borrowing money from itself. The state borrows money from its central bank, the Federal Reserve, and in the case of the euro, the European central bank, or the ECB. Ask an economist and you'll be told these banks are of course very much separated from the state. Look at what is going on and you'll quickly see a revolving door in terms of personnel. For instance, who is the head of the central bank at time of this writing? In America, Jerome Powell, who previously worked for the US state department of treasury. In Europe, Christine Lagarde, who previously worked as the French minister of finance. You see the point.

But wait, it gets worse! For where do the central banks get their money from? I found it stupidly hard to find a straight answer. I was told vague terms such as 'quantitative easing' or a 'relief bill'. Which, NRx finally explained, are all euphemisms for printing money. Literally. Or nowadays even easier: digitally. Just add an extra zero. It really is that simple.

But wait, it gets even worse! For it is not just the central banks that create money out of thin air, all the other banks can do it too! The general deal is, for every dollar they actually have in store, they are allowed to lend ten dollars, no matter that the other nine dollars doesn't actually exist.

The path this leads towards in the long run should be clear: economic crisis, hyperinflation. Creating 'free' money has been tried many times throughout history, always with the same predictable results. As Moldbug explained: imagine you have one thousand dollars and I have one thousand dollars, and that is all the money in the world. Now imagine I print two thousand dollars. Previously, you owned fifty percent of the world's money. Now, you only own twenty-five percent. And because money's worth is directly related to its scarcity, you have become twice as poor. This is the standard manner in which socialist parties run their country into the ground: first you hand out free money, then the economy dies because hyperinflation. And socialism is as American as apple pie!

All in all, neoreactionary economics paints a picture of a rather shitty, duct-taped monetary system that relies on those in power not abusing it. And who did we say was in power again..? Oh yeah, bad folk...

So suddenly, that 1.9 trillion covid relief bill seems less appealing. Suddenly the government promising more money for this, more money for that, feels like they are offering your cigars to strangers. Which they are. Kind of depressing, no? Depressing, but very sensible. Much of NRx fit into that category.

 

Politics

Another topic, arguably the topic ninety-nine percent of NRx concerned itself with: politics.

As we've established, neoreactionaries hate democracy. We find it a shitty system of governance.

Which leads to the big question: why is it shitty?

There're many ways to answer this question. Some give historical examples, some quote Aristotle hating democracy, but I like to answer the question using another of those nifty NRx terms: natural law.

What is natural law? Essentially, it is combining all the insights of (evolutionary) psychology, politics and biology, and saying: 'just like in physics, it is only logical that there are certain laws by which humans and human society operates.' So, just like we'd say that according to E = mc^2, when m increases so does E, so in society it follows that certain societal changes lead to predictable societal outcomes. We call those natural laws, and that democracy is always correlated with a decline of society is such a natural law.

But of course that does not explain the 'why' of the law. So let's talk about that.

Neoreactionaries, really, are just a bunch of hippies wanting to live in harmony with nature. Of course, contrary to hippies, we believe nature is cold and harsh, and that the fittest survive and all that. Which is why we love eating steak, while hippies are malnourished vegetarians.

It is also why we view humans as risen killer apes, and while we may differ from other animals in important aspects, we are very similar in others. To conquer and kill, to build and reproduce, to seek power. "We are but meat golems for our genes" if you will. However poetic you want to wax about it, there is this fundamental biological aspect of humanity which quite accurately predicts what we want and what we do.

So we look at these man monkeys and we say: 'they sure are a busy species. What are they doing all the time?' Many things, of course, but the answer we're looking for is: they are cooperating. Humans, when cooperating, achieve amazing feats, and are much stronger than when alone. Societies, cultures, empires: they are all humans working together on a massive scale. But there is a catch.

Cooperation is hard. When you are merely responsible for yourself, it is also hard, but likely you can trust yourself to look out for yourself. It is much less so in groups. In groups, you need a lot of loyalty to be able to trust one another. Loyalty you probably don't have. Which is why many, if not most members of groups tend to be lazy, inattentive, looking for better opportunities, or whatever.

Now imagine how that scales up to a society...

Which goes a long way to explain how our politicians have the most idiotic debates imaginable. We are witnessing a cooperation breakdown.

But not every group is breaking down. There are in fact many examples of groups still working relatively fine: businesses. Whether it is the contractor and his team building your house, or Amazon delivering a package at your door, they do what they are supposed to do. They work!

Naturally, we look at what it is that makes these businesses work. Which is kind of obvious. Businesses are decidedly not democratic. They are hierarchical: you got the owner, his circle of trustees, and the grunts. It is the same model over and over, no matter the scale of the organisation, perhaps except that the bigger the corporation, the stricter it must adhere to its hierarchy in order to stay functional.

So now we are very close to the 'why' of 'why democracy sucks.' Can you imagine SpaceX having an election on whether Elon Musk can stay CEO and voting 'nay'? It would mean the end of the company. Yet that is exactly how we govern our society. We vote in temporary owners, who because they are temporary are not owners at all, and inspire no loyalty. They are immensely insecure in their power. Which creates a power vacuum that gets filled up by the bureaucracy behind the elected officials, who have much less power, but at least don't lose their position every four years. But it's not like bureaucrats are known for their efficient rule...

So what Moldbug proposed was quite simple: we ought to run our nations as companies, with a CEO at its helm, responsible to its stakeholders. Just like any ordinary business. Which might sound radical until you realise it's how we used to run things for the majority of history -- it's called monarchism. Kings are awesome. They feel responsibility towards their people, they have vested interest in seeing their realm do well, and they add that flair of personality that democracy so lacks.

I know, this triggers all kinds of alarms in a democracy. Kings are dictators! Dictators are bad! Evil! Well, we disagree. Kings are in line with natural law; just like the alpha gorilla leads his troop, so does the king lead his nation. They may not always be perfect, but they work. They are in line with how humans work.

It is said that every civilisational cycle is as follows: first a strong leader establishes order and peace. A monarchy is created, possibly with a dynasty. Because no king can rule alone, a strong and virtuous elite grows. After a few generations, the royal dynasty might grow weak and lack a strong successor, at which point the elite steps in and a republic is established. But as we've said, cooperation is hard, and after a few generations, the elite's trust in itself erodes as its ability to govern erodes. To maintain its legitimacy, a democracy is established as to 'share the power fairly'. The same erosion of trust happens with the voters, and in time, chaos and violence grows nationwide. At which point the people cry out for a strong leader, which eventually happens, and the cycle repeats...

Neoreactionaries like order and peace. We admire the great empires of the past, such as the Roman empire, the British empire, even the holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. We believe that all this wealth and technology we have today was a direct consequence of their rule, and our democratic leaders are rapidly flushing it down the toilet. And that is why all neoreactionaries are monarchists.

 

 

Democracy

Sadly, we do not live in a monarchy. We are democratic citizens, part of the global American empire. As talking heads on the tv'll tell ya: 'we proudly defend the values of our democracy!' Whatever those values may be...

Bad governing sucks. It sucks immensely. If those in power are insane, their insanity spreads and infiltrates to all facets of life. Architecture turns bad. Taxes keep going up. Art goes to shit, including music, film and video games. Prices keep going up. Goods become unavailable. You can't trust the police, you can't trust the law. Big projects no longer work. Big institutions no longer work. The list goes on...

Take crime, which has increased greatly over the past century. A London mayor might tell us that it is 'part and parcel' of modern life, but that does not mean it has to be. In fact, it wasn't. As Moldbug pointed out: the Romans and Victorian English would be horrified at the amount of crime we suffer in our cities. The notion that you don't feel safe in entire neighbourhoods, even in your own house? Unheard of. And when you are robbed or beaten these days, good luck going to the police. You'll have to invest much time for zero return.

What's even worse, on the off chance you'd catch a thief in your house and knock his teeth out, you may rest assured that you will stand trial for being violent. Moldbug called this state of affairs 'anarcho-tyranny': there is anarchy on the streets, but anyone trying to restore a sense of order will quickly feel the tyrannical fist watching over the anarchy. Just ask the McCloskeys.

The heart of the problem is that democratic government is in conflict with natural law. That is, democracy is simply not built into mankind. People do not, in their hearts, believe rule by mob is fair, just like no gang of monkeys will be found voting on who their leader should be.

This ties into our natural law on hierarchy: cooperation requires the rule of a few, for a few can rule cohesive. It's an old Machiavellian principle: there is always an elite in control. In a democracy, we are told, the people are in control. But that's just not how life works; it's a lie. In practice we see an elite still in control, telling us what we should think and on who we should vote. Because this entire shtick is based on deception, you might imagine how it grows unstable with time. Democratic politicians cannot not lie -- the job simply demands it.

But since this ruling elite can not officially call itself the ruling elite (after all, it is you, the voter, who is in charge!), their power is insecure. Any lone news reader, any journalist or professor or bureaucrat is expendable. All it takes is one scandal, whether manufactured or not, and out you go. That's just what you get in a low-trust environment. So an unhealthy equilibrium develops, in which everyone is primarily concerned with a) covering their own ass and b) expanding their own power at the expense of everyone else.

It is because of (a) that you will find the bureaucracy so goddamn unhelpful. In any interaction with a state employee, either you are completely rule-compliant or you are a potential liability. Which would still be OK-ish if it were not the case that because of (b), the rules are ever-changing. After all, the only way a bureaucrat can draw in more power for himself or his department is by making more rules.

It is this bloating aspect of democracy that makes it so ugly over time. There's always the same, predictable pattern.

Say there is a problem. It might be a natural problem, it might be iatrogenically caused by the state. The problem might be real, it also might be imagined. These things do not matter so much. What matters is that someone, somewhere, sees an excellent excuse to get involved and expand their power. Members of the state follow an easy four step program:
1. We see a problem.
2. We have to solve this problem.
3. To solve this problem, we need more power.
4. More power.

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What does 'more power' mean in practice? It means more rules, regulations and committees. All of which are created because the state wants power at the expense of others, not because the intent was ever to solve the problem. So inevitably they worsen the problem. Which becomes an excellent excuse to repeat the four step program once again. Everyone loses, but the state wins!

This pattern is ubiquitous in democracies, and you would not be wrong if you thought it resembled socialism. Late stage democracy is indistinguishable from socialism. Take the following examples:

Medicine: the market cannot be trusted to provide healthcare, the state must provide it! But the market can always be trusted for good healthcare, whereas the state always fails at it. Long waiting lists, even longer working hours, unsustainable costs, bloating management. -- state healthcare turns hospitals into the same dysfunctional bureaucracy the state is.

Housing market: the market cannot be trusted to provide houses, the state must provide it! Never mind that the free market has always provided plenty houses. Never mind that open border policies and environmental regulations caused the housing crisis in the first place. Never mind that state buildings have that inevitable brutalist touch to them as no state architect designs with beauty and functionality in mind. None of this matters, except that the state sees a fine excuse to get one more finger in one more pie.

Education: people cannot be trusted to educate themselves, the state must provide it! You'll note that nobody ever learns anything useful in primary school, high school, or university, only that one should sit still, shut up, and recite whatever is written in some state book nobody really cares about. A drop in educational standards you say? Don't worry, the state is closely monitoring the situation, and we can trust it to come up with a solution!

Law: people cannot be trusted to do the right thing, the state must coerce them! As is often complained, in a democracy, you only ever get more rules, never less. It is said that every man breaks, on average, several laws each day. Our societal laws and rules have grown so immensely intrusive that every man is a criminal by law.

The pattern is predictable. It is shameless, it is society-wrecking, it is evil. But what are you going to do? Democratic bureaucracies gonna Democratic bureaucracy. Here's a visual representation.

 

Biology

OK, one more reactionary topic. Biology. A tricky one.

Why tricky? Because a central, if not the most important meme the Cathedral operates on is denial of basic biology. Which is to say, it forces you to lie about very obvious truths, such as that a man can also be a woman. A key reactionary insight was that lies are a fairly effective way for cooperation: if you nod and say 'Caitlyn Jenner is a brave woman' you both signal your allegiance and become complicit in the lie. If, on the other hand, you recoil in disgust, you have put a target on your back as an enemy.

NRx blogger Spandrell explained this strategy very well -- he called it 'bioleninism.' Leninism, he said, is how Lenin and the communists ensured loyalty: the party gave power to the poor peasants, who had never had any before. The peasants knew that they would have nothing without the party, of which Lenin regularly reminded them, and so they stayed loyal to the party. The inverse being that anyone with any nobility, money or status would be excluded from positions of power. After all, if someone can get by fine without you, why would he be loyal?

Our progressive overlords use a very similar trick, only they hand out power based on biology. Hence, bioleninism.

Of course to understand bioleninism we need to address the elephant in the room. What does it mean when we say that 'some people can't handle power based on their biology?' Sounds hella racist. Are we saying that some people can't handle certain tasks based on their genetic makeup?

Yes, that's exactly what we're saying. Nature trumps nurture. You can't train a chimpansee to build an airplane. In a saner world that was common knowledge. In fact it was common knowledge for the longest time. And today still, people instinctively know it to be true and many have trouble squaring the circle of these weird progressive trends. But in the Western elite, bioleninism is the standard, so we get these grotesque spectacles that everyone has to clap along to.

Unfortunately, to reject that, we have to accept being called racists. And truly, we are fine with that. Like many progressive slurs, we think they are just nonsense words that convey no other meaning than 'You belong to the outgroup.' Might as well call me a poopyhead.

The good news is that once we get beyond this black box of bad thoughts, we can actually reconnect to the great scientists of the past and learn a great deal about the world. Neoreactionary interest in biology is, after all, more than opposition to progressive madness. In NRx the study of human biology was called HBD - human biodiversity. I'll admit, I was not a hardcore reader of these blogs. They were fairly technical. Scientific biology is complicated and our absolute knowledge of it quite limited still.

Luckily we don't need to be versed in the Proto-Indo European Y-haplotype in order to talk race. We can just fall back on nullius in verba and say what our own eyes tell us! And one thing they tell us clearly, as Darwin explained a while ago: different races have different ancestry, different abilities, different loyalties. And no, they are not equal.

Let's start with one that pisses off Progressives greatly: blacks. Negroes are, evolutionary speaking closer to plains apes than are most other races. Take IQ for instance.

 

Black IQ is notoriously low. It is just too low to uphold a complex civilisation. And you can barely change that. General intelligence is about as fixed as height, meaning that you might add a point of two through nurture, but mostly it's just a manner of the body reaching its natural potential (which potential might be screwed up rather more easily, say with bad nutrition or simply brain damage).

It shows in many more things as well. They are more agressive, more prone to short-term thinking, quicker to reach maturity. All this succinctly explains why Africa is by and large a shithole, and why NRx consensus is that Africa did better while still colonised by the white man.

(You might imagine what happens when you put Shaniqua, a ghetto, obese, low-IQ girl, in a high-paying position and tell her she is strong and empowered. She'll receive far too much pay for far too little work. Which means that there will be plenty of people whispering that Shaniqua does not deserve her position. Since Shaniqua likes being important, the whispers will anger her and serve to increase her loyalty to the party, because the party tells her she can do no wrong and contrary to the whispers, will not fire her. That is bioleninism in a nutshell.)

Anyway what are my impressions of the other races...

Asians in general -- conformist, don't cause so much fuzz. Chinese are industrious and smart, but also greedy, sneaky and they seem to have a sadistic streak. Japanese are big children but I totally get why their culture appeals to Westerners. South-east Asians are friendly to be around. Indians and Pakistanis, I trust them as far as I can throw them.

Arabs, I've always found overly rigid in their thinking. But I like their straightforward masculinity. Of the Arabs I like Iranians the most. No mystery there: they aren't actually Arab, they are Persians, distinctly whiter than their neighbors and with a history of empire to back it up.

Generally I dislike Africans. On the northern side of the Sahara they overly aggressive sell you hasjish and all but rob you in broad daylight. On the southern side barely anything functions because of aforementioned reasons.

Eastern Europeans I find comparable to Arabs, though smarter and less cartoonish in their masculinity. I don't know why they play so much counterstrike.

Western Europe I have the most experience with. French and anything further south -- they're relatively lazy and prouder of their culture than they should be. But I generally have no problems with them, even if the EU needs to burn to the ground. North-Western Europeans work hard and are among the smartest. Yes I am patting myself on the back. What can I say, I like living in a country where everything functions. We are a strung-up bunch at times, I'll say that.

Let's see who else... South Americans, I have little experience with. For North America, I have mostly covered the races that traveled there. Otherwise, American women tend to be loud and obnoxious which I guess is what feminism does. As for the men, I am greatly fond of the 'Amerikaner' stereotype which is the gun owning Christian family on the countryside. Less fond of the big city liberal.

Oh yes, the Jews! The Jews are a peculiar people. We will get back to them much later. For now we'll say that NRx initially was slightly shocked to discover that Jews have a disproportionate role in cultural degeneracy. Something about a tribe that is forced to roam the earth seems to lead to trouble always...

Finally, gays. Is homosexuality genetic? Is it nurture? Tough to say. One of those open questions still. What we can say is that NRx returned to the biblical position on gays. Homosexuality is a lifestyle of sin, STDs and unhappiness which tries to assert itself at the cost of heterosexual families. Gays should return to the closet, for their own good and the good of society.

Now, there is one group of humans we ought to talk about. Are they a separate race? Not really... But they occupy a large portion of our mind nonetheless... I am talking about women off course.

What is interesting is that early NRx did not discuss women so much. Moldbug spoke honestly on the races, but avoided the women question. Which was a shame, because perhaps I'd have read early Moldbug if he did. Instead, I have to confess that twenty-year old me had little interest in these dense political discussions I have hitherto summarised. In fact, I did not get into NRx until Moldbug was pretty much retired from blogging, and I had to resort to reading all the backlog. What was I doing before then? Well, my interests were rather more banal... I was trying to get laid.

 

 

 

Part II - Women

 

 

 

Game

It's fairly typical of our time that no one has a good plan for their life, whereas everyone has a bad fantasy of what their life should be. And so did I: I'd been raised to trust the system, and believed what I was told. So I figured that it did not matter what I studied. Surely, I would land on my feet! I did not realise that universities in the 2000's were a complete scam.

But while I was coming to terms with becoming the state serf my college education was steering me towards, I at least had one pursuit that filled me with excitement: game! What is game? Why, it is the art of seducing women! Which is exactly as cheesy as it sounds. There's just as many losers, snake-oil salesmen and general female haters in that business as you'd expect. But there also seemed to be answers I desperately sought. I had been rejected by girls all throughout high-school and dumped by a girlfriend late in college (she 'needed space'). It frustrated me because I was doing everything the way I was supposed to: you were supposed to be a gentle and nice to girls and then they'd reward you with sex.

And then I discovered game.

The history of game is pretty funny. In the early 2000's, a bunch of misfit men try to approach clubbing like playing a video game: every woman they talk to is a mission to see how far you can get. It is robotic and silly, but some men 'crack the code'. One such man calls himself Mystery. He plays the character of a magician complete with eye shade and tall hats. He gets laid and teaches his method to men. A journalist, Neil Strauss, followed Mystery around for a while, wrote an entertaining book on the subject, and boom, the 'gaming community' was born. Turned out there were misfit men everywhere trying to get laid, and plenty of gurus online willing to share their secrets. I found loads of information on the internet. I was very impressed. I read about being alpha, pestering the girl a bit ('neg') and escalating for sex. Stuff I sort of instinctively knew, but repressed because only bad men did stuff like that. Now this is by no means a how-to-get-laid-instructional, but what I learned, and it took me years to really understand this lesson, is that girls love a bit of an asshole with options.

Since game was hot and happening, there were websites where you could find wingmen and even entire communities. The quality... Varied. I remember joining a meet-up where we did 'day gaming' -- approaching women by day, in the streets. Requires massive balls. I met this kid, like really a teenager, who was really into game theory. Wouldn't stop talking about it. He'd stop girls, and start asking them straight up if they had a minute to visualise 'a cube'; which was some story designed to create rapport. It was terribly cringe, and at the time I felt bad for everyone involved. It was also really funny and to this day I respect the brass balls on the kid.

In time I found a group of like-minded men to hang out with. Some of these guys were natural players; one of them, call him 'Tinder Tim', pioneered the art of sex on first Tinder dates, which we found mind-blowing. He casually explained: 'you just meet with them on a square, take them to your place, have some wine and then boom sex.' Others were having threesomes, pulling pretty girls from the club and even having success with daygaming. And I wasn't doing so bad myself either; I actually got laid! With different girls!

That members of our gang were successful was inspiring, but it was also a hint towards a grander sad state of schemes: you couldn't help but notice how quick girls were giving it up. And not just the 'sluts', as haters always point out. It was good girls, bad girls, girls of all types, who were giving it up. If a girl did not give it up for player A, she gave it up for player B. Society encouraged girls to experiment, and all we did was act out the roles of the badboys they could experiment with. Back then I could not put into words what I can so easily now: we were pumping and dumping an entire city of daughters.

As for us: as happy as we were supposed to be, we weren't. It sounds cliché, but having sex with a rotating harem doesn't make you happy. The girls would always cause drama. The men had player burn-out. We were running into the exact same problem Mystery ran into -- you can get laid all you want, but you're still depressed underneath. Turns out that, in the end, we all just want the same thing: love. I know, barf right.

So in the end, I found one girl I particularly liked, and we hooked up. Must've been about eight years ago now. I still love her very much. We have two small kids now. One's watching cartoons on the couch next to me right as I'm typing this. So game worked out pretty well for me.

 

The difference between men and women

It might sound strange, but my adventures with game were directly tied into neoreactionary theory. There is after all, something strange about a young man like myself having to search the internet for instruction on how to deal with women. Why was I not taught by society? Why was I not taught by my father? Why did finding love mean I had to 'unlearn' most of what I knew beforehand?

I am a practical man, in that I treated learning game like I'd treat learning how to repair a car. At a certain point you know the basics and you can move on with life. For many men, however, game remains this 'dark art' reserved for losers. I have some sympathy for this point of view, although I disagree. Ideally, you'd not have to point too much attention towards it. People fall in love, get married, have families. It's the natural circle of life, right? But I mean... Look around. Just look around. We got incels, simps, divorcees, broken families, women whoring themselves out... It is an absolute mess. Somewhere, ancient knowledge regarding love and relations has been lost. And it was game, later incorporated into NRx, which rediscovered that knowledge.

So, what is this knowledge?

It is of course impossible to summarise women, as any woman will confidently tell you. Yet at the same time, it's not that hard either. So let us give it a try.

Let's start with the fundamental difference: eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. We are Darwinists here. If the biological goal of life is to survive and procreate, women have a slight edge over men, because a woman's womb is where procreation happens. A woman has but to offer her fertile womb and she shall conceive. She starts life with a fixed number of eggs. Every month, one may be fertilised, until there are none left. Of course, conception for her comes at a high prize - motherhood is a long energy-intensive process.

For men, it is much more hit or miss. Some men will not reproduce. Some will have a few children. And a very few will have dozens if not hundreds of children -- King Solomon boasted a harem of hundreds of wives.

Men produce seas of sperm at a low price/cost. What's more, they have the option of a hit-and-run; just nut in the woman and disappear! So even though the woman has the power before sex, once the sex has happened, the power dynamic shifts in favour of the man.

But what about the intra-competition between women? And for that matter, between men? You might tell yourself you're in a league of your own, but rest assured she's comparing you to other men. Similarly, you're comparing her to other women. What is each sex looking for in the other?

What do men want? Well, let's be honest: we are simple creatures. Men want a young, pretty, feminine woman. Young means her eggs are at their healthiest, pretty means she has good genes and feminine means she will be a good mother and lover. There is more nuance of course - you might also prefer intelligent women, for instance, but you get the general gist. When a woman sizes up her competition the first question on her mind is always: 'is she prettier than me?'

What do women want? Well, like we've discussed: they want a bit of an asshole with options. But what does that mean? It means that women want the strong horse -- the top dog. Women want the men other women want. Men tend to organise in hierarchies, and women want the guy on the top of the hierarchy. This does not necessarily mean the official hierarchy; it means the real hierarchy, with the alpha on top. What determines who is the alpha? Well, there is some nuance, but it is quite accurate to focus on one single aspect: the ability to do violence. Of course there's more: beauty, intelligence, creativity and whatnot. But the single best predictor for whether a man is getting laid is and will always be his ability to do violence. Power, in the end, all boils down to violence. Women like an asshole because he is not afraid to use violence. Women like powerful men because they have the ability to organise coordinated violence. Women are simple like that.

It is for this reason that women rather sleep with the good-for-nothing drug dealer than with the corporate careerist. The drug dealer will hit her if she gets uppity. To a woman, that means he's sexy. And men know this -- one reason the club is so degenerate is that all the men, in their attempts to impress women, pretend to be violent thugs.

Just to be clear, you don't have to pretend to be a violent thug. Here's what NRx blogger Aidan had to say on the topic:
"You do not have to larp as a dumb thug. Your heritage as a European is smart men who were very good at war. Embracing your masculine love of violence as a high-IQ man feels incredibly good. You are going to have much more success with women within your IQ communications range anyway, so might as well learn to live with it. Go for smartiepants girls, and get yourself a group of male friends."

I fully agree.

 

Shit-tests

This is not an instructional 'how-to-get-laid' story. However, there is one piece of advice that has always stuck with me throughout the years. And that is how to deal with a shit-test.

What is a shit-test? It's this thing women are notorious for doing, of which men often complain and say: why did she create that drama? It made no sense! Well, it actually does make sense from a female's perspective.

A woman wants to know who the baddest man in the room is. But that is easier said than done. If she asks the men, they will all tell her: I am the baddest man around here! So she has to find out more discretely. Which she does rather ingeniously, by stirring up drama. If you are too weak to deal with the drama, it is obvious you are not the baddest man in the room. If you effectively deal with the drama, and many bonuspoints if you recognise her for creating the drama in the first place, you have passed and might just be the baddest man in the room.

Women throw all kinds of shit-tests at their men. It's just an instinctive thing. Although I have been together with my woman for many years, she will still ocasionally throw one at me. I find it helpful. Keeps us sharp. But naturally, the heaviest shit-testing is always reserved for the early mating phase, when you are both still unsure where to go. Sometimes she will suddenly act weird, she might insult you out of the blue, she might change her opinion a couple of times. Women are wonderful at inventing plausibly deniable shit-tests. They are easier to deal with when you keep in mind that her throwing a shit-test at you means she is interested in you. She just wants to see how you deal with her shit, because if you are able to deal with her shit, you are likely able to deal with the rest of the world's shit. Which is not to say that some women will demand absurdly criminal behavior from you to pass their shit-test. Sometimes it's healthier to just walk away.

Now here is the tricky part: sometimes it's not a shit-test. Sometimes she is just genuinely bothered by something and wants it addressed. Knowing the difference when to take her serious and when not is, to my mind, the biggest sign of a man who knows his way around women. Yes, you can swat her down all the time -- works better than the opposite. But women are intelligent and helpful, and they see many things that men tend to miss. I have learned many things from my wife, and I intend to keep doing so.

So in conclusion: in dealing with women, a man's got to have one fist of steel and one hand of velvet, and to know when to use which one. And that's all the advice on women I offer.

 

The prisoner's dilemma

Here's a different, but similar way to view love and relations: economically, as a market. We rate everyone's attractiveness on a scale from 1 to 10, and watch how numbers of similar size match up. It's a bit crude, but it makes intuitive sense, right? There's supply and demand of women, just as there's supply and demand of men. It's the free market at its best!

Only, as we've seen, the dating market can be a difficult place to navigate. Especially these days. Something seems to have gone very wrong. We've gotten heaps of divorces and broken families. Lots of unhappy women who slept with many men. Lots unhappy men who slept with very little women. What is going on?

Well, as the theory goes, flowing from the previous chapter, there is not exactly an equal exchange of goods on the dating market. You might imagine that a 6 hooks up with a 6, an 8 with an 8 and so on. But men and women are different! They want different things, they behave differently. Sperm is cheap, so a man will grab what he can get -- might not be the prettiest woman, but hey, still had sex. Eggs, however, are expensive, so a woman is picky. Which means that in practice, women are always looking for the biggest alpha. But the pyramidical nature of the male hierarchy means that she is looking for mister 1-in-30, ignoring misters 29-in-30. Another problem is that mister 1-in-30 is an asshole with options, and so the relation is unlikely to work out. In other words, in the free and unrestricted sexual market place, women hook up with badboys who pump and dump them. Which a woman tends to keep doing until she hits thirty and her beauty starts to fade. At this point she has a 'change of heart' and is ready to settle down with the nice guy she ignored for so many years. Naturally, she will compare the boring nice guy to all the adventurous badboys she's been with, so you might imagine how that works for the stability of the relationship... Hence the common complaint that modern women are bitchy, unhappy, and unfeminine.

Here's a visual illustration of the principle:

There's also this meme statistic of how women and men rate each other differently on dating sites, which illustrates the same point: men rate women on a bell curve with its peak in the middle, women rate men with a heavy skewer towards the top.

With this in mind, the craziness of modern dating makes a lot of sense. The average man, in today's dating market, simply loses out. He is not mister 1-in-30, and so the best he gets is leftovers, if he gets any. Which is why many men are either incels (involuntary celibates) or even drop out of dating completely as MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way). Better to play video games in mom's basement and jerk off to porn than be rejected time after time after time.

As I alluded to, I refused that fate and turned to game. Which we now understand, is nothing more than you learning a bunch of tricks to pretend to be mister 1-in-30! Well, pretend is the wrong word, because women are pretty good at sniffing out pretenders. But statistically, it is impossible for every man to be the biggest alpha, and so putting on a little show is an inevitable part of seducing a woman. Which again, I personally attest, works.

So at this point you might think: 'OK, so the average man loses out, the average woman loses out, but I guess mister 1-in-30 is the only one who wins? Well, no, not really... Players are unhappy for the simple reason that it is better to have one bird in your hand than ten in the sky.

The extreme version of a player is a pimp. A pimp is a loser -- he is constantly managing women's impressions: acting as if he is capable of much violence, as if he is mister 1-in-100, because that is what women want. All pimps dress as if they are mister 1-in-100, all pimps hit their women: because that is what their women want. But it is very tiring for the pimp, and most woman will eventually call your bluff: if you're really that tough, why don't you kill this other man competing for my attention? And most of the time, for reason X Y Z, you are in no position to kill the other man. There's always mister 1-in-200, and for mister 1-in-200, there's always mister 1-in-500...

So in short, everybody loses! The only way to win is to grab yourself a pretty lady and get out as soon as possible. But it is easier said than done...

There is a way to model this problem with one of the few mainstream ideas neoreactionaries actually are fond of: the Prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma, in a nutshell, is when two parties (two prisoners) have the choice to cooperate or betray one another. If they cooperate, they'll get a bit of prison time, but not that much. However, if one prisoner betrays the other, he'll receive a reduced sentence, while the other prisoner will get maximum time. But, if they both betray each other, they'll both get maximum time.

Reactionaries love this model because it illustrates a core problem of society: getting people to work together is hard. Ideally, you'd want both prisoners to be in cooperate/cooperate equilibrium (top left in the picture), as it is the best for all parties. But choosing what is best for you at the expense of others is just so tempting! And if that's what both parties do, you end up at defect/defect and everybody's worse off...

Which is exactly what is going on with the modern dating market: men and women are stuck in defect/defect. Women date the guy all her friends warn her about (defect) or end up lonely spinsters with cats. Men play the role of asshole (defect) or end up lonely bachelors with video games.

The end result is that you get a culture with cheap hook-ups, one night stands and insecure relationships. A society filled with sluts, incels, broken families and so on. That is what defect/defect equilibrium gets you, and it fits our theme of a society in decline perfectly.

 

From PUA to the Manosphere to NRx

Although we have pretty much completed our journey from getting laid to the intricacies of the dating market, let's summarise this journey in chronological order.

At first, you had the Pick-Up Artists, or the PUAs. They were kind of sleaze bags who figured out that if you'd said things an asshole would say, women would have sex with you. They then taught men these 'secrets' for money.

But even though PUAs had a fairly good understanding of female psychology, they were not yet able to see the bigger picture. There was an infamous incident in which Julien Blanc, a coach from a big PUA company got caught up in a scandal. What he'd do? He posted a video in which he boasted to his students that, while in Tokyo, he'd push women's faces towards his crotch and yell 'Pickachu!' Not exactly a class act, but very much in line with what we know works with women. But the video went viral and the media attacked full frenzy -- he was a rapist, a woman-hater, a predatory man. In fact, it grew so big that Julien was banned from entering the UK, Singapore and Australia!

In order to calm down the situation Julien went on CNN in which he apologised profusely for his terrible, terrible deeds. At the end of the day, the PUA industry is an industry after all, and Julien's publicity was costing his company money. Accepting his public humiliation, the media frenzy went away and Julien's company, although laying low, continued selling its courses to men.

PUA Mystery

But marvelously, on the internet, information wants to be free. You can sell all the $999,- (OFFER ONLY LASTS TWO MORE HOURS) courses you want, soon all these PUA 'secrets' were openly discussed on the internet. Men did start to think about the bigger picture -- what did it mean that Julien was treated like an international terrorist? Why was he cancelled for teaching men how to get laid? An online movement started to grow, collectively known as: the manosphere.

The manosphere took PUA teachings to the next step. Since women and men really were so different, it made no sense to treat them as if they were the same. The manosphere rejected feminism. Instead they promoted traditional masculinity: muscles, beards, sunglasses, slapping uppity women, that sort of thing. To be part of the manosphere meant to unapologetically be a man.

It also meant to rebel against society. A manospherean, unlike a pick-up artist, would tell the media to go f*ck itself when attacked and/or banned from countries. Which is exactly what Manospherean Roosh V did when he was accused of very similar things Julien Blanc was accused of.

Manospherean Roosh

The manosphere understood many other issues the PUAs missed. They understood that modern dating life was lose/lose. While Pick-Up Artists would say hilarious bullshit like: 'you must leave the girl better than you found her', Manosphereans talked about the 'thousand cock stare' you could see in certain girls' faces. Again, the metaphor of the red and blue pill returned: blue pill meant being deluded about the nature of women, red pill meant to accept it.

But as much as the Manosphere rallied around these truths and rejected modern society, they ran into the classic problem of the contrarian: what was their alternative? Did they have a solution?

Well, somewhat. It was generally agreed upon that things used to be better in the past, when men and women got married early and did not party away their best years. But that went further than rejecting just the latest wave of feminism. Frivolous divorce goes back at least 50 years. Female suffrage goes back over 200 years. Understandingly, manosphereans had a hard time figuring out what life in that time was like. Generally, the reasoning was that 200 years ago, society was patriarchal, so patriarchy must have been good. But what did that look like? And how the hell were you supposed to accomplish that in a society that only allows the exact opposite?

Some manosphereans had some ideas. But it seems to be a rule for intellectual movements that they can only rally around their founding idea. The manosphere meant opposition to feminism, embrace of masculinity. Once its members understood that, they might expand on those ideas, but find little or rather scattered support in the community. So in the end, manosphere activity fizzled and ended.

Nonetheless, I, like other men, did feel like expanding on those ideas. For there was somewhat of a shared goal men were coming to, that goal, despite all the tough man language, being almost cute: 'I just want to be happy, with a wife, some kids and a nice house.' But how to get there...?

 

 

 

Late stage NRx

Around this time I felt I understood the women thing and it got me wondering what else I was lied to about. One blog led to another and that I how I rolled into NRx, to which, as I've said before, I arrived late. Now I did not understand it at the time, but NRx in its late stage was suffering from the same problem as the manosphere: it had exhausted its founding idea, namely: opposition to democracy, embrace of monarchy.

But it has to be said: that is an extremely potent idea. At its peak, the neoreactionary blogosphere was a rich ecology of many different branches. Let's enjoy ourselves and take a bird's eye view of those branches, shall we?

There were three NRx 'factions', so to say. All of the factions agreed on the founding idea and really agreed on many other things as well. But they emphasised different parts of the story.

Let's start with the techno-commercialists. It included folk like Nick Land and Moldbug. The techno-commercialists imagined what would happen if Steve Jobs or Elon Musk ran the country. They wanted countries to be run like CEOs run their companies. A CEO-king. Which makes much more sense than you might think. Everything that has ever been made has been made by tiny CEO-king. Every single company, after all, works as a monarchy, led by a CEO. There is no such thing as a company that works democratically, because it would go broke within a week. Monarchy works, and all the stuff you use proves it. So, use what works and drop what doesn't. Smart people doing smart things. CEO-king. It's monarchy, but with stockholders and double-entry accounting.

But then you had this other group, the theonomists. The religious folk. It had guys like Nick B Steves and Jim. They said: 'well that's all fine and dandy, but you nerds have no tribe, no sense of loyalty. You are fighting an evil religion, and to fight an evil religion you need a good religion, like Christianity.'

In mainstream philosophical debate, this used to be where atheists would respond 'shut up religion is dumb'. But in NRx, the theonomists' point could not be denied. Progressivism really is this evil religion in which, for instance, children are sacrificed to demons. For instance, progressives demand that your kid sit on the lap of a drag queen, and if you refuse you are a racist and bigot. Or, higher up the ladder, you've got actresses boasting that they wouldn't have gotten their golden statue if she didn't have that abortion. Such things are very intuitive to understand as demons demanding sacrifice. Note that I'm not saying that demons are real. Just that it is very interesting that modeling reality as if they were real works out surprisingly well.

So all in all, religious morality suddenly made a lot of sense. But since many neoreactionaries were not Christians, there was a slight communication gap. Nick Land came up with the solution: he proposed 'Gnon': Nature or Nature's God. Gnon was a deity that presented both God and natural law, natural law meaning mostly Darwin and the insights that follow from evolutionary psychology, and God meaning... Well, God.

Finally you had the ethnicists-nationalists. Spandrell was in this camp. They were into HBD, physiognomy and eugenics. The guys who were most at risk of being called Hitler. But again, their arguments made too much sense to be ignored. And they had very little to do with Hitler anyway. If it weren't telling enough that Moldbug is of Jewish origin, the NRx opinion on Hitler is simple: Hitler was a leftist. Like pretty much everyone in the twentieth century, all the cool kids were communists or socialists at the very least, be it in the West, center or East. Hitler happened to be a national socialist who emphasized socialism for the Germanic worker class, but he was a socialist nonetheless, and all his policies showed. Calling neoreactionaries nazis is thus in the same camp as calling them racists -- might as well call us poopyheads.

So what were the ethnicists-nationalists saying? They said:'that's all nice and dandy about having a religion, but we don't have one. Christianity is cucked, probably dead. Islam is hip and happening. Tribes are mostly genetic, and have you been paying attention to the borders recently? We are flooded with immigrants who share neither our culture, our history and our genes. They have average iq's of about eighty points and no loyalty to our customs whatsoever.

Ah yes, the biology thing. As the saying goes, whites invented and maintain the electrical grid, browns can barely maintain it, blacks can not maintain it. As the other saying goes: proximity + diversity = war.

There are many reasons why leaky borders are an excellent marker of civilisational decay. There's the historical reason: the Roman empire declined in direct proportion with its inability to keep barbarians out. There's the biological reason: a functional body is picky about what it allows in. This goes for all forms of life, including cells, of whom the effectiveness of their cell membrane is a direct reflection of their health. Yet here we are, as nations, with virtually no functioning border, and with every politician informing us of the 'need to care for refugees'.

It is worth a small pat on the shoulder that in NRx, the permanent problems of mass immigration were discussed in the late 2000s, early 2010s. The actual immigration crisis, as in how everybody discusses it nowadays really only started around 2015. I remember this distinctly, because before that time it was lonely to be a neoreactionary. I would argue that society was going downhill, but average folk, especially in the Netherlands, would say that we are living in the wealthiest, happiest, most advanced cvilisation in the history of mankind. Reactionaries would retort that technological advances mask social decay, but it was no use. You were essentially making the argument that the world was crazy, not you. And so, when the immigration crisis hit, I was almost happy: 'you see, I told you sh*t is f*cked up!' And oh boy did I get to say that again many times...

The thing was that ethnicist-nationalists had no solution to this problem, short of mad fantasies of ethnic genocide perhaps. Spandrell especially put it very straightforward: maybe it is simply the end for the white race. There is no rule that we have to survive. Maybe we won't. Which others disagreed with. But it was telling of the situation NRx eventually found itself in. On the one hand you had these riveting discussions of truths long-lost. On the other hand they were reaching a depressing conclusion: we weren't going to have a monarchy. We weren't going to stop demons. We weren't going to turn around mass immigration. As Spandrell would say: we were all drowning, and help was not on the way.

 

NRx dies

Despite the pessimism, most reactionaries would still like to fix the problem. Surely, something should be done! Heated debate followed. A general point of agreement was: you cannot fix the system from within. For instance, since democratic right wing parties are effectively controlled opposition, it is of little use to join them. Starting your own right wing party and participate in democratic politics was equally frowned upon. You would be stopped in a thousand manners that would be highly illegal, but reported upon in the media as just and fair. As for protesting and rioting - forget about it! Only works when those in power want you to riot and reward you for doing so. If they don't have your back, it will end bad. All this theorizing would be confirmed as accurate a couple years later, when BLM protestors who burnt and looted neighbourhoods were protected and saintified, while covid protestors were knocked down and arrested.

So what do? The obvious solution was to build new systems. But how do you do that? Especially when this old system is breathing down your neck? Moldbug had a few ideas. One of them was building a so-called 'antiversity', as a counter for the university. Just like universities spread lies, so would the antiversity spread truth. Truth, insofar it is useful truth, can assist in the gain of power, so in time, the antiversity would become a powerful institution to which people, and most importantly, the elite, flocked. The idea was that you do not challenge power directly, but instead offer a better alternative. In Nietzschean terms, you'd become worthy of power, and thereby in time assume power. Or as the Chinese called it: those worthy of rule will receive heaven's mandate, or Tian Ming.

The gist of this idea still stands, and really is the core idea of any reactionary movement. We are in the business of spreading memes! In this sense, this entire site is a proud antiversity branch.

But the solution went further than just the spread of memes, even if that is a core part. We'd need not just alternatives for universities, we would require alternative systems for all the instititions overtaken by progressives, up and until eventually the political system. Unfortunately, this turned out to be quite the challenge...

The first real attempt at reactionary organisation was Hestia society. Hestia was a secret society, explicitly serving as an antiversity for the gain of power. It's online flagship was Social Matter, on which articles were posted. They even had a public forum. I was not on the inside, so I can only describe what I saw from the outside. Which is that it started out well enough, with some established names taking part. The website design was very slick. Initially they had some quality articles, including one by an undercover Moldbug. But in time, quality deteriorated. They made some questionable choices, for instance to exclude 'dangerous' reactionaries for the sake of PR. Fewer articles were posted and the forum died. In the end, the website's plug was pulled.

What happened? Well, as the story goes, the organizers simply did not agree on what direction Hestia had to take and it fell apart due to infighting. I do not mention this because I want to point any fingers. Rather, I appreciate the effort and would like to use it as a learning opportunity to name a very persistent problem in human cooperation: entryism.

So far in cooperation we have encountered one big problem: that a movement can only stick to its original idea, and if that idea is exhausted, the movement falls apart. But here we have our second problem: entryism. Entryism is when the original idea is subverted by those hostile to it. These days it is better known as 'shilling', a shill being a paid mole. The thing about shilling is that there are many levels of it -- yes, it is standard operation procedure for governments to employ shills. It is very useful, both to gather intel and to disrupt enemy communications. But shilling comes in other forms too. For instance, although one may not rule out paid shills in Hestia, it is fairly safe to assume they were not yet important enough for shills to be sent to. Yet, Hestia did have an unpaid shill problem.

In terms of the prisoner's dillema, a shill is just someone who is secretly defecting on the group. He does not necessarily have to be paid to do so. Using the group for your own gain is often beneficial, and if the group has no safeguards against that kind of behavior, it falls apart, the safeguard of course being adherence to the original idea of the group.

In the case of Hestia, we must admit that the original idea was very vague, arguably making it impossible to protect against shills. 'We must become worthy to attain power.' What does that even mean? I guess there was some sort of many-year plan to build a network of based monarchists, but in practice I'm sure it was a bunch of dudes downing beers, spitting hot takes. Or rather I'd hope.

The death of Social Matter coincided with the death of NRx. People pretty much discussed what was to be discussed. Blogs shut down, conversation wilted. So, what were the final takes?

There were a couple of them. We've heard about Moldbug's one: build the antiversity, convert the elite, put a crown on the head of a billionaire CEO. Moldbug has always stayed true to this vision. He did get doxxed and is nowadays known under his real name, Curtis Yarvin. This has caused him predictable grievances, such as that he was denied his own bank account. But otherwise he has impressively turned himself into a reactionary pundit and has been a guest on several right-wing media outlets.

We've also heard Spandrell's take: shit's going down, we're not going to save Western civilisation. Maybe the white race will disappear completely, who knows. Move outside American hegemony before it's too late. This is, last I heard, also what Spandrell himself has done.

Then there's a couple of other takes. For instance, Nick Land, among many other ideas, promoted accelerationism -- the idea that you might as well encourage trannies and gays and whatnot, because the sooner this wretched scum of a society crashes, the better. Personally, I like it when society functions, but it's an interesting take nonetheless.

Here's a fun one from ReactionaryFuture: absolutism, which was essentially neoreaction on steroids. "It's not just that we need a king, it's that all our problems can be solved by channeling as much power as needed to that king." I always took this as a shill take -- no one man should and could have all that power. There is a natural limit to what one man can do, and he does best not to overstep it. Sun king Louis the XIV was an absolutist, and he ran into all the predictable problems that those who want to fly too close to the sun run in to. Chief among them was that he could only be in one place at the time, but since he wanted to control everything he created an army of bureaucrats to help him out. Of course it was this same bureaucracy which, two kings later, led to the overthrow of the French monarchy... Which is why NRx generally advocates feudalism, or more specifically: that the king delegates responsibilities to his elite as much as he can as not to overstretch himself.

Another take, by Jim. Jim's advice was initially similar to Spandrell's, all be it that Jim also advised having several fake identities including fake passports and fake addresses. But over time Jim hoped for a strong leader to take control and re-establish order. This was a somewhat mainstream NRx idea espoused by Moldbug too. The historical parallel was the late Roman republic, which was decadent and corrupt until Caesar crossed the rubicon with his army and took control. But Jim opined that just having a strong leader was not enough -- he had this yin/yang idea in which a strong warrior can not reign without a strong religion. "When our Caesar arrives, he will need a priesthood to back him up". But what priesthood? Spandrell's response to this question was that, yes, we need a new religion, but since we don't have one and since Christianity is dead in the water, it's simply not an option. Jim however insisted Christianity was not dead, and that we should return to it.

Finally there's my take, since at this point I was contributing, yay. I'm not going to tell my take yet though, for it is still too early and too cringe. We'll get to it in time. Suffice to say that although I did not consider myself a Christian, I was an immense Jim fanboy. I saw Jim as the natural continuation of Moldbug's ideas, and over time as much more. I mean, maybe you thought we've covered all there is to cover, but oh boy are we about to go down the Jim rabbit hole and discover a whole new level...

 

 

 

Part III - Jim's blog

 

 

 

Make women property again

So in what way did Jim differ from Moldbug? Well let's dive right into probably the biggest one: the women question. If you recall, Moldbug didn't touch the WQ. To my great frustration, because here were these two worlds, the manosphere and NRx, that I had trouble merging. That is until Jim addressed the issue. Jim was never one to beat around the bush and his stance on women was simple: 'make women property again'.

Perhaps this still offends your sensibilities. But perhaps not. After all, for the majority of history, women were property. Let's walk it through, shall we.

Last time we discussed women, we addressed a problem that we did not completely solve. Namely, that women
a) like violent men
and
b) in a free and open sexual market keep relationship-hopping until their looks and fertility fade

On the male side, we see that men either drop out of the dating game completely or that they play the game of players and bitches in which they bang girls for a short while. We compared this situation to the worst outcome in the prisoner's dilemma: defect-defect. Everybody loses.

How to turn this around? Well one way is to learn game, wade through a sea of sluts until you find a woman you like. This is what I did. But it is a rather depressing method. Should there not be a more sustainable way? Yes there should be, there in fact was, and there could be again. And that is Jim's solution.

Just like Moldbug called out global warmists as charlatans, so did Jim call out the emancipation movement. Jim argued that emancipation, historically, has always been a sign of civilisational decay. Not only has it never worked, it actively ruins relations between the sexes. This millenium-long tradition of patriarchy which feminists always railed against? It worked. It was great. But I am strong and independent! says woman. Well you are quite strong but you are also quite dependent.

What it all comes down to is that, for whatever reason, society is at peace when women are treated as property by men. Well, not for whatever reason, because in a way it is very obvious. It is a natural law: cooperation is hard, and in order to cooperate, just like any society needs a king, any family needs a patriarch. It seems like some kind of evolutionary specialisation mechanism is at play: by not being responsible for big decisions, women have specialised in operating within the framework of these bigger decisions. Like how a woman never knows what she wants in life, but exactly knows what bathroom she wants. Similarly, a man might have all these grand ideas of how he will grow his business, but he cannot even clean his socks. Specialisation.

The working theory is that life on earth started out unisex, as tiny cellular organisms that multiplied through mitosis. As time went on, life grew more complex, and recombination of DNA proved to be more effective at evolutionary adaptation than cloning. So sexual bifurcation happened, although fluid at first. Many species of fish can switch between sexes at will. But again, as time went one, sex specialisation proved to be more effective at evolutionary adaptation than arbitrary sexes. One sex specialised in violence, the other in family. Fast forward a couple of million years: mankind descends from killer apes, who cooperated to murder the male apes from other tribes and take their women. And we today are not far off from that. Women have always been spoils of war. Boiling it down as simplistic as possible: men are war-machines, women are breeding-machines. It is the war-machine that safe keeps the breeding-machine, not the other way around.

Perhaps there are more elegant ways to say this. But then again, perhaps not. It's just one of those things that everyone with a happy marriage knows, even if they are unable to verbally express it. Women like being owned, and men liked to own women. It's not like owning a piece of furniture nor like owning a dog. It's like owning a woman, y'know?

So what are some implications for this meme? Well first of all, we can explain why females like violent men: it is because violence is the best indicator of strong ownership. He who is violent tends to be the boss, and women want to be with the strongest boss.

Why do females shit-test? Because they want to make sure that their men are still in control of the situation, so they test their resolve. From this perspective there is no erratic, emotional or hormonal behaviour: it is all very logical. Women depend on their men, so they occasionally test whether their dependence is still justified. If a man shows repeated weakness, fails several tests, she'll start looking for another man.

Another implication is the Jimian 'emancipation-fertility hypothesis'. If women *like* being owned by strong men for evolutionary reasons, it follows that there must be a biological pay-off, eg they procreate when owned, and will not, or very little, if not. Which is exactly the pattern we observe all over the world: emancipation directly and most strongly correlates with lower fertility rates. War, poverty, technological progress, nothing makes as much a dent. But not emancipation. Women want to feel owned, and if they do not feel comfortably owned, they do not feel comfortable in having children. So feminism is not just a matter of inconvenience, it is a matter of survival. Emancipate your women, and they stop having children. Today's women are having about 1.7 children, which is well below the infamous 'safe zone' of 2.1. Trace the line over the past century and the dramatic downward trend is undeniable. What only makes matters worse is that in the absence of male owners women vote in favor of mass immigration, in hopes that perhaps they will take ownership. After all, evolutionary speaking, Stacey's current office job with no kids and one cat is an evolutionary dead-end, while if she were forcibly married off and have five children... Well she wouldn't exactly be in a worse position, would she? At any rate, Western demographics speak for themselves. It resembles what I'd call slow, ritualistic suicide. A mirror of the decline we see in other aspects of life.

Jim says: return the property rights of women to their rightful owners. An unwed girl is the property of her fater, and later, when she marries, she is the property of her husband. There is no such things as marital rape: a husband is free to do with his wife as he pleases. That does not mean women have nothing to say. Quite the contrary: nature has, after all, given women precious eggs, and men thirteen a dozen sperm. Women by nature have too much power for men to ever take away.

By universally acknowledging property rights, you instantly solve this whole modern dating mess. No more sleeping around for young women -- if she is caught doing so, she'll be shotgun married off to the man she was sleeping with. No more incel armies -- if a young man is an upstanding member of his community, he will find plenty of women whose fathers will approve their marriage. And finally, no more fear of frivolous divorce, for if a man is publicly expected to pass a woman's shit-tests, he will actually be able to pass those shit-tests. Happy wife, happy life. It is win-win all around.

One last thing. Some folk you can never convince of such obvious truths. Where do you get the preposterous idea from that women like to be owned? If that were true why did they fight for emancipation? Well I mean... I simply observe it. When I treated girls as if they were independent, they dumped me. When I treated them as if I had the rights to their body, they loved me. As simple as that. The one nuance I can give is that women are very often blissfully unaware of their own behavior. For instance, women naturally put up resistance against men taking ownership of them. This resistance completely disappears once ownership is successfully taken, revealing it was a test all along to see if you were strong enough to take ownership. But some see only the resistance and conclude that women do not like being owned. To this I can only say: to each their own. People have their reasons for being blind to the truth, and some of them are surprisingly valid.

 

Socialism and capitalism

 

But Jim had a lot of stuff to say on other subjects than just women. For instance, being a former communist himself, Jim had some excellent stuff to say on the horrific slaughterfield that is twentieth century communism.

Moldbug used to say: every cool person in the twentieth century was, to some extent, a socialist. Moldbug did not mean every cool person was a hardcore Stalinist, but he meant that as an ideology, it was hip and happening. A hipster socialist did not want to liquidate the kulaks, he just wanted the working class not to get screwed over. Well, OK. Now that the twentieth century is over and we've had some experience with its results, what are the conclusions?

They are atrocious. Quite simply, atrocious. Communism does not work. Strange, considering that it seemed such a good idea at the time. Not really strange, says Jim. It was always a bad idea, or rather, the atrocious outcome was always baked into the idea.

Communism, like much leftism, is essentially weaponized envy. Most people are not by nature overly envious. But some are -- they see others who have it good, who have what they do not have, and they want to steal it for themselves. Or, if they cannot steal it, they'd rather burn it so no one can have it. As the comparison goes, leftists, when they see a successful apple vendor, will try to push over the vendor's apple cart, and in the ensuing chaos steal some apples for themselves, but mostly they're just glad to have hurt the apple vendor.

The eternal problem with socialism is, of course, that once you normalize knocking over one apple cart, what is to stop your elite from knocking over every other apple cart? And why stop at apples -- why not knock over every fruit? Why not vegetables? Why not... Everything? Which is what always happens. Robespierre, the butcher of the French revolution, was in the end himself executed for insufficient loyalty to the cause. Trotsky, same story. The 'purest' end stage of communism is Pol Pot's cambodia, in which escalating mass murder killed a quarter of the population. Hence the saying that the left eats itself, although perhaps the saying could also be that the left, in the end, eats everything it can get its hands on.

Now history has shown it is possible to stop such a leftist spiral in its tracks. It tends to take a lot of violence, but it can be done. Take communist Russia. Lenin's pitch was classic: 'hey, peasants with one cow. Don't you envy the peasants with two cows? Wouldn't it be nice to get rid of him? Some of them did, and because the czar was weak, it happened. But to the peasants' great dismay, Lenin then also got rid of the peasants with one cow. And soon there were, predictably enough, no more cows.

When Stalin rose to power the leftist spiral was twirling at full speed, which explains his very justifiable paranoia: he was in constant fear of being eaten by his own comrades. So Stalin did what every man in such a situation must do: he killed off everyone who as much as looked at him funny. And this, in the end, stabilized the spiral. Comrades, we have done it, we have achieved communism! he would say. Stop f*cking knocking over apple carts, I don't want to get killed is what that translated as.

As interesting as all that may be, what does that make of capitalism? Clearly something must be deeply flawed about the communist analysis of the rich? And indeed there is.

The main thing about businesses is that they are not strong in terms of power. In fact, they are notoriously vulnerable, for all their power is dependent on a functioning pipeline from resource to company to customer. It is hard as hell to mass produce a product of value. Every step of the way, something might go wrong. Customers don't like your product, they stop buying it. Competitors pull nasty tricks on you? Part of the game. But the biggest problem of all is that merchants are dependent on the protection of warriors and priests. Merchants have a hard trouble organizing among themselves, for they are each other's competition. Neither warriors nor priests have this problem. At the end of the day, power comes out of the barrel of a gun first, out of a judge's verdict second, and out of a wallet third.

And at some level, communists know all this very well. They go specifically after corporations because corporations are vulnerable. Big juicy apple carts, so to say. But whenever you hear a commie going on about how corporations are bribing politicians and whatnot, there is a very simple retort: if the merchant class was so powerful, why would they need to bribe politicians at all? Not the one who bribes, but the one who is bribed holds all the power. To a person like Hillary Clinton, money is like toilet paper -- she merely need to stretch out her hand and grab it whenever she needs.

So at the end of the day, the Jimian take on markets is that they ought to be as free as possible, as protected as possible from negative interference, for not only are the goods they produce great and awesome, they are in fact very vulnerable to their envious enemies. Those who create value deserve reward for their services, and those who envy those who create value deserve contempt or worse. Hey ho capitalism!

 

Warriors and priests

 

The division between warriors and priests was another idea, discussed in NRx, that Jim fleshed out, or rather revived, as it used to be well-known in the Medieval ages. The idea is essentially that in order to have a functioning society you need two parties working together: first, the warriors, meaning the king and his army, ready to use violence on anyone who challenges their position. And second, the priests, who give the rationale for why it is good that the king and his army are in charge. The priests are important, but ultimately, the king is in charge. As the old joke went, NRx were a bunch of nerds who argued that it was good that the jocks were in charge.

But we've talked about the king part. Let's talk about the priest part. What does it mean to be part of a priest class?

Well, obviously it somehow relates to a religion. We have touched on the religion part briefly before -- in NRx, religion is taken seriously. Very seriously in fact. Well to be fair, not by all in NRx. Sadly, this is where we definitively say goodbye to Moldbug, for Moldbug did not touch this topic either, even though it became a crucial discussion point in later NRx.

The NRx love affair for religion is perhaps easiest to explain through the concept of social technology. Just like you have technology to build cars and airplanes, so you have social technology to build families and societies. A technological manual might instruct you on how to repair a leaking valve. A social technological manual might instruct you on how to repair your marriage. Said differently, social technology is but the collection of a society's norms and values, which, hopefully, serve to help you navigate the complexities of life as best as possible.

Religion, according to the Dark Enlightenment, is the most effective manner of social technology. Think about it - it is authoritative, in that each religion claims to be backed by the most powerful deities in the universe. It is complicated, but at its core very easy to understand -- everybody knows the story of Jesus. It creates a tribal feeling - 'us' Christians, 'us' Muslims and so on. And also it is literally filled with life lessons -- don't steal, don't covet, don't blaspheme, turn the other cheek and so on.

For all these reasons, religion, more than any single philosophy, has stood the test of time. This is also what separates NRx from all academic philosophy -- it's not that we don't think some philosophers, some times, say smart stuff, it's just that we don't think philosophy is effective social technology. Does anyone, besides a few philosophy majors who are up to their shoulders in debt, care about [insert philosopher name]? I did not think so. Long esoteric books don't scale well outside niche college networks. Said differently, neoreactionaries think philosophers are failed priests.

So naturally that means neoreactionaries tend to think of themselves as priests. But for what religion? Ah, that's where it get's interesting... But just before we delve into that, one final remark. Religion is in large part about separating good from bad. It has no problem saying this is good, this is evil, and one might even argue that that is a core function of religion. It makes simple moral judgments. You'll note this fits reactionary analysis like a glove -- whether you believe commandment [A] must be obeyed because God said so, or whether [A] must be obeyed because it is in line with natural law makes little difference. Both lead to the same desirable outcome: peace and prosperity. So even from a non-religious standpoint NRx led to a simple conclusion: there is good in this world, and there is evil. If you do not remain on the look-out for evil, for instance if you convince yourself that there is no evil, just shades of gray, you will be overrun by evil. Which is exactly what any religion worth its salt will tell you.

Which leaves only one question: which religion should we follow?

 

Christianity

Yeah I suppose you could see that one coming from a mile away.

But hold up. Isn't Christianity dead or at least close to dead? Aren't the churches emptying, the cathedrals burning, the leftists feasting on its carcass? Well, yes, I'll be the first to admit that current day Christianity is in bad shape. But in order to understand Jim's position, and the position I came around to eventually, we must first look at old type Christianity. For history has been rewritten on nothing as much as it has been on Christianity.

Christianity was for nearly two thousand years Western civilisation's reason for existence. This much we can all agree on. After all, churches and cathedrals adourn the centers of pretty much every European city, and everyone with the slightest knowledge of history knows that Christian faith dominated world politics.

Was that a good thing though? Christianity was big, we can all agree, but perhaps it was a force of evil? 'The Dark Ages', the oppression of Galileo, the crusades and so on. The progressive take is exactly this, that Christian society was ignorant and backward, or at it's most positive that it was like your retarded cousin who just doesn't know any better. As one progressive once put it: 'what would I say if after all it turns out God is real and I'd meet him? I'd say: "Bone cancer in children? How dare you."'

But that's not our take. Our take is rather the opposite: Christianity was a force of good. An immense force of good, in fact. Everything good we have these days, all this luxury and technology and momentum of a peaceful society, we owe to Jesus Christ and Christian society.

Let's see if I can condense the argument for that.

Essentially, the bible and its assorted rituals are social technology. It started out as Jewish social technology, e.g. the Old Testament, which among other stories details how Moses led the Jews out of Egypt to conquer their own lands. It is full of rules, laws, and wisdom. In fact, it explicitly discusses how to find wisdom, how to be a good person and how civilisations that stray from God, and this includes the Jews, will end up killed and/or enslaved. The Old Testament, in other words, is a manual for life.

At this point you might interject and say: But Alf, do you genuinely believe God literally came down from the heavens and gave Moses the ten commandments? Because if so, I've got a bridge to sell... Which I'll admit, is a strong counter-argument. In fact, it is the exact argument I made to Jim. Quite fiercely if I might say so. We had a fight over it and everything. So we'll get to that part, I promise. But first we must look at the historical story, separate from the claims of intervention from above, for we must understand the beauty of Christianity before we delve any deeper.

So. The old testament. Was it a useful manual for life? Immensely so, for very few of the Israeli tribes exist to this day, whereas Abraham's descendants, as God promised him, are as bountiful as there are stars in the skies. I know I know, plenty of wrong to be found in that general statement, but the point stands: self-named Jews have survived for millenia, retaining their Old Testament identity. From a practical, evolutionary perspective, it is an impressive feat. A good prelude to what came next.

Jesus Christ's teachings did not appear out of thin air. As a Jew himself, he understood very well the value of shared wisdom and of a shared creator. Like the prophets before him he went on to add to the bible's wisdom through his own life. As we know, he did not die for his tribe, he died for all of mankind, in doing so giving the previously Jewish God to all the world. From our practical perspective: he greatly improved upon Jewish social technology and shared it with the whole world. Pretty much like Prometheus stealing the fire from the Gods and sharing it with mankind. The Jews of course never forgave him, even though at this point they very much should.

The Old Testament essentially argued that God likes powerful and smart men. Men with slaves, who rule wisely, who obey God's laws. Those who do not, die. And many people die in the OT. I skip over much nuance, but in essence the Old Testament God is a very stern father figure who tells us to rule with a somewhat iron fist.

The New Testament, while not disagreeing with anything from the old one, has a slightly different tone. God, as Jesus' father, is not just a stern man, he is also a loving man. God cares for us, cares for us all, if only we accept Him and His son into our hearts, unconditionally. Again, I generalise greatly, but the New Testament tells people to be nice to each other. And this message was exactly what people all over the world, two thousand years ago, needed to hear. Need to hear today still. Cooperation, Jim would stress, is hard. War is easy, peace is hard. Making an effort to get along is hard, stubbornly insisting everyone else is wrong is easy. Jesus said: turn the other cheek. Walk the extra mile. Love your neighbor as you love yourself and you will bring about God's kingdom on earth.

So essentially, the Jimian position is that Christianity solved the prisoner's dilemma by enforcing cooperate/cooperate equillibrium among Christians. Mind you, this is not the same as being a doormat for others to walk over - you have only two cheeks to turn. But it requires you to live in good faith. And that, we believe, is what caused Christ's teachings to spread like wildfire.

You might imagine that such an interpretation leads to the conclusion that Christianity was an immense force of good. Which returns us to the earlier objections. Let us briefly address them in order.
- The Dark Ages were primarily dark because the light of Roman civilisation had faded away. And it might have faded for many more centuries were it not for Christians building it back better. So you might argue that the sixth century AD was a dark age, but no neutral observers would argue the same for the 17th century, even though Christianity permeated society much more in the latter. The dark age argument can only be made in profound historic ignorance.
- The opression of Galileo was a dumb move by the church, meddling in affairs it should not have. Churches and their leaders do dumb stuff, it happens all the time. It is not such a big deal - we are not Catholics, we don't believe in the church as God's representative on earth. The big deal is the hidden implication behind the argument: Christians hate science. Which again, is an argument that can only be made in profound historical ignorance. Pretty much all the great men of science prior to the 18th, 19th century, I'm thinking of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Maxwell, Charles Darwin, they were all Christians. In fact, we argue that the prosperity created by Christian society is what directly led to the industrial revolution and later the digital revolution.
- Finally, in the matter of the crusades, the Christians turned many cheeks towards Muslim agression. And agressive they were! Islam is a faith of agression, opposed to Christianity in many ways. Muslims took Constantinople, they took south Spain, they almost took Vienna... No society lives in lasting peace with Islam, and it should not behave like it can.

But honestly, even if convincing, most of these arguments are a bit technical. A grand claim that Christianity was an immense force of good needs grand evidence. Which there is. In fact I think it is really obviously all around us: in architecture.

I mean, just look around. Look at old buildings from past centuries. Old churches, old cathedrals, old official buildings, houses, farms, cities, villages, you name it... It is for the overwhelming part beautiful. Traveling around old Europe, I never fail to be impressed. Traveling around new, post-Christian Europe, I never fail to be depressed. Here I'll give a collage. These are just some random pictures, there's about a million to choose from, but I think they show the transition from old to modern just fine.

People just take it for granted these days that modern buildings and cities are ugly. The ugliness reflects its lack of meaning and cooperation: everyone involved in modern architecture knows it will turn out ugly, but lacks the ability to do something about it. The beauty of older, Christian architecture reflects an abundance of meaning and cooperation: its architects were consciously involved in building something that reflected their collective sense of self-worth. That, to my mind, is the easiest argument in favor of Christianity. It is a bit like fish noticing the water around them -- if one pond is gorgeous and the other one dirty, you can't help but wonder why that is.

Of course I realize that Christianity isn't just good solely based on its architecture. It's just such a ubiquitous feature of human society -- buildings and infrastructure are all around us, and for me at least, they greatly impact the way I feel about my surroundings. And instinctively we know this, all of us, which is why we try to protect ye old beauty. But old buildings reflect the old Christian lifestyle, and modernity is simply not suited to such a lifestyle. So many such buildings are falling in disrepair or even burning down, and we are building ugly, cheap flats around them. And this is ubiquitous all over the West. Taking a walk is all one needs to observe the 'progress' in progressivism.

 

Science and miracles

 

But OK, let's say you find all this eminently believable. Christianity, a force of good. Sure. But that's a thing of the past right? Surely, Christianity is not compatible with our modern society? Can **I** be a Christian? Well do I have some good news for you: it's not a thing of the past, it is compatible with our society, and you can be a Christian. It's really easy in fact. Truly, all it takes is a family prayer before dinner, and anything on top of that is merely a bonus.

I mean, let's be straight: I myself was quite skeptical on Jim's proposal. I had previously considered myself to be more of a Spandrellian, who argued that Christianity is dead and that we need a new religion. In fact I had a fight over it with Jim. So what turned me around?

Well, what made me look away from Christianity in the first place? I was raised in what I'd typecast as a conservative-progressive family: there were Christian roots (because there's always Christian roots), but around the era of the boomergeneration the Christian faith had dwindled. My parents ocassionally took us to church when we were young children, but it was more a sort of leftover momentum than it was because they felt connected to the church. In time, we stopped attending church entirely. I did not mind - I remember church as boring. This disconnection from Christian community is of course not unique to my family - it is what is happening all over the West.

Why? I'd summarize the reason as that with which we opened this story: a society needs a reason for it's existence. Christianity was that reason. But as society lived in harmony with that reason, bringing about God's kingdom on earth as Jesus commanded, an abundance of new knowledge and technology entered into our culture. This was great, but it also created a creeping problem: through the scientific method, it became clear that many amazing things, such as flight and cars, were possible, but it also became clear that others, such as, say, turning water into wine, or walking on water, were impossible.

OK, perhaps impossible is the wrong word. I wasn't there personally. But I've always put it this way: the bible has a rather high occurance of events that we today would say violate the laws of physics. Miracles. God intervening directly. There's like, what, over a hundred miracles in the bible? And don't even get me started on the countless tales of miracles throughout medieval society... Thousands, if not tens of thousands of magical happenings. Now here is the thing that is strange to me: the moment mankind invents videocameras and invents smartphones -- those miracles disappear. Overnight, they disappear. Can't be found anywhere. How incredibly strange.

But of course, it's not strange. Everyone with a heads on their shoulders and at least one visit to a magician's show knows exactly what's going on: it's just human nature to want to believe. And there's still plenty of places where you can find that want for miracles fulfilled, like, I don't know, in some alley in India where a guru heals your tumors with his magic hand power. Unfortunately, they still show up on the CT. It's a miracle..?

I know I know, this guru is a false prophet only pretending to do miracles, unlike all the Christian miracles which were totally real and abundant except that they have never been caught on camera. It's like, c'mon guys... C'mon.

The Christian inability to openly discuss this is understandable yet its great downfall. Understandable because many would argue that miracles are a crucial part of the bible, most notably Jesus' resurrection. If Jesus did not return from the dead, is he still really the son of God? Such questions open up a whole can of worms and thus Christians reject them. But you can only ignore the obvious questions for so long... Back in the day liberals asked the questions loudly and answered them just as loud: 'did Jesus return from the dead? Of course he did not. Just like Moses did not really part the sea, Lot's wife did not turn into literal salt and Jonah did not spend three days in a whale. They are oral stories, passed down by generations, augmented and changed to reflect what the storytellers and their audience wanted to hear.'

And here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the central problem in combining our need to solve the prisoner's dilemma with Nullius in Verba: sometimes, cooperation leads to knowledge that undermines the reasons for said cooperation. Which was the argument I brought to the table against Jim. And Jim was fairly sympathetic to the argument. He was after all the same man who once hypothesised that Christ's apostles bribed the tomb guard in order to move their teacher's body. Yet at the same time, he refuted it and in as friendly as possible informed me that my position was heretical. You are free to believe what you want to believe regarding the whole miracle business. But as we are Christians, we respect our Christian forefathers, and we publicly pay tribute to Lord Jesus Christ, the only son of God. So put a sock in it. It is not as important as you make it out to be.

At the time I did not understand what exactly he was saying. Nor, I think, did I understand what I was saying. We did not reach consensus and I took a break from commenting at his blog, and equally so will we take a break from discussion in our story. But do not fret, dear reader, for as our interlude we have arrived at a very fun chapter.

 

 

 

Part IV - Mainstream

 

 

 

The rise of Donald Trump and the alt-right

 

Ah, the fun part. Orange man bad, but also orange man awesome. Now you might be wondering. Why are we going to talk about Donald Trump? Well, because the rise of Donald Trump marks the breakthrough of NRx into mainstream consciousness. Before Trump, we were just a bunch of anonymous keyboard warriors. After Trump... Well we were still anonymous keyboard warriors. But as the intellectual branch of the alt-right, suddenly our memes became a lot more visible, a process continuing to this day.

What's there to say about Trump and the alt-right that hasn't been said yet? Not much probably. After all, this is the part you are probably as familiar with as I am. But let's head to Pepe town anyway, and see how Trump memed his way into the white house, and how he ties into our story.

Obviously, the alt-right existed before Trump, the alt-right simply being the folks on the right who were done with the two party system. Maybe they couldn't articulate the 'why', but they understood that the system which was supposed to protect them in fact hated them and acted as such. This was something the alt-right and NRx completely agreed on. The only difference was that neoreactionaries generally regarded themselves as too smart to go out in the streets and protest, in line with what Moldbug said: this patient is already terminal, protesting his death is only going to get you locked up. But what're you gonna do, just roll over and die? People were angry, they were fed up with an evil ruling class. The alt-right became the accepted name for this big tent of right-wing voices who lost faith in the Republican party, which party in NRx is indeed considered controlled opposition. Trump, being an outsider, was not a part of that controlled opposition. In fact, he promised to 'drain the swamp' as well as build a wall on the Mexican border (and Mexico will pay!). Thus it is not hard to imagine how the entire alt-right, as well as a large part of America flocked to Trump and his charismatic antics.

In hindsight, Trump's election campaign was the highlight of his presidential career. The childish taunting, the drama, the zingers... It was hilarious. Trump threw rallies that drew immense crowds. Whenever he was debating his political opponents you could feel the testosterone in the room rising, but none could ever match teflon Don. He bullied Jeb Bush into the ground. He said he'd lock up Hillary Clinton. The media hated him, but he ji-jitsu'd their hate campaign into a 24/7 Trump show. The simultaneous hatred, fear, confusion, enthusiasm and hope Trump conjured was amazing. It was an exciting time. And it culminated in an election that to this day warms my heart.

It was an immense pleasure to not only see Trump win, but to see all the journalists, pollsters and media moguls struggle with the impending reality that Donald Trump was going to be their president. The disbelief and shock in their eyes... Man oh man, it was the ultimate middle finger by the people. Truly democracy at its best.

Nonetheless it is fair to say that neoreactionaries did not get their hopes up. Trump's bid for presidency was more of a test of NRx theory than anything else, and if the theory translated to practice, we would expect to see: - the Republican party fights Trump almost as bad as the Democrats - the entire Cathedral apparatus runs a 24/7 propaganda campaign denouncing him as dumb and evil - Trump has all of his orders ignored and most of his confidential conversations leaked - If Trump plays by the rules he will lose

Spoiler alert: that's exactly what happened.

 

President Trump

 

Future prediction is tricky business. General predictions are the easiest to make (eg, 'our society is in decline), but even smart men can botch specific predictions. Such it happened that Spandrell, Jim and I disagreed on Trump's presidential path. Spandrell predicted four years of Trump, I predicted eight and Jim, the madman, predicted that the Trump dynasty would continue for more than eight years. So I made two bets; with Spandrell, the loser would have to write a blog post on either the white pill (if he lost) or the black pill (if I lost). With Jim, the loser would pay 10 mBTC to the winner.

I say this to illustrate that even though in hindsight it makes perfect sense how Trump's presidency went down, hindsight is 20/20. In the heat of the moment all kinds of options are on the table. Most neoreactionaries however generally agreed on the following assessment.

Trump was a good president. He had sound policy, good economics, strong leadership. Like his slogan said, he put the country he was leading first, like any leader should. So there was little debate on that subject. There was however a lot of debate on the following subject.

Trump was a fifties Republican -- he wanted to turn back the clock to that period. Less woke, less state intrusion, focus on economy, not having a border like swiss cheese. He was a simple, honest man like that. The NRx analysis however was: you can't go back to that. The state has swung way too far left, to the point where the president is just a puppet of the permanent bureaucracy. Trump refused to play the role of puppet, but of course that would only immensely anger the permanent bureaucracy. We predicted that Trump would want to make a deal with them, but they would never make a deal with Trump. After all, this is a religious thing where the Progressives deemed themselves infinitely holier than that hamburger-lovin' prole. So what would happen once that became clear? Well, we saw only one path forward: Trump would have to pull a Caesar.

Julius Caesar, when he became entangled with the corruption and decadence of the Roman republic, made the decision to illegally cross the river Rubicon with his army and march on Rome. He committed a coup. High treason of course, but none dare call it high treason when it doth prosper. Although Caesar was later murdered, him laying the foundation for the change of the Roman republic into the Roman empire extended the lifespan of Roman civilisation by centuries.

But Trump did not have a loyal army. He was hard pressed to find even one loyal general. And it seemed like he wasn't in much of a hurry to find one either. He was busy fulfilling his campaign promises and doing what a businessman like him excels at: making deals. But we did not care. The only question on our mind was: will he grab real power or not? His opponents sure seemed intent on keeping him away from power. The media especially turned into an anti-Trump frenzy -- one of their many stories being that Trump only won the election because of interference by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Which was illegal, and therefore Trump ought to be indicted.

Enter Jim. On his blog, Jim was the only one who offered Trump consistent advice on how to pull off a coup. Jim was overly hopeful on the subject. Yet, even if Trump would never pay attention, perhaps a future leader will pay attention and know not to get distracted by noise. I remember how back in 2016, Jim was one of the first to make the Caesar comparison. These days, everyone talks as if a Caesar is inevitable.

Still, at times president Trump acted in ways that much resembled the steps Jim proposed. He fired a few high ranking people. He hinted at the possibility of a never-ending Trump presidency. And his biggest victory, which I remember fondly, was at Lafayette park on June 1st, 2020.

Around this time, BLM and antifa protestors wreaking havoc around the country. The official reason for the violence was the accidental death of black criminal/drug addict George Floyd by a cop. The unofficial reason was that the party that uses violence is stronger than the party that does not. The Cathedral desperately wanted to show dominance over Trump and push for indictment, which Trump was impressively resisting, so they let loose their ground troops of thugs and criminals, with the police receiving orders to stand down. The ensuing looting and arson was not a side effect: it was the intended effect.

These protestors were also directed towards the front of the white house, in Lafayette park. They were doing their usual thing: throwing bricks, burning cars, taunting Trump... Rumors were spread that Trump was hiding in a bunker. What would Trump do?

What Trump did was not to back down. He sent in the police and tear gas to clear the protestors out of the park. He then triumphantly paraded through the park with an entourage including general Mark Milley and attorney general William Bar, as if it were a military victory. He stopped in front of a nearby church which windows were barricaded to defend against 'peaceful protestors', and held up a bible. 'We have a great country' is all he said to the flashes of photographers.

The whole thing was textbook Jim. Jim's plan was basically: our democracy is long dead, and the first party to realise that and act upon it wins. Men with rifles outrank men with gowns, so Trump should make sure he has the men with rifles on his side. But since the deep state coordinates primarily through their religion, Trump should also bring his own religion, which of course should be Christianity. Trump holding the bible high after taking back Lafayette park had all those elements. It brought a small twinge of hope to my heart.

Of course, the moment passed. General Milley immediately afterwards grovelled to the media and said that Trump had bamboozled him into an unwilling photo op. Moreso, Trump did not follow up on the silent threat he made in front of St. John's church. What's worse, his enemies were about to find their most useful weapon against Trump.

 

Covid-19

 

A couple of things regarding Covid-19's origin are shrouded in mystery. It originated from Wuhan. Initially, the story was from a local bat market. Later, turned out there was an American biolab in Wuhan, specialized in researching Corona viruses. Even later, turned out that the lab received lots of money in order to create new corona viruses.

When news of a new virus broke we were not aware of any of that. So you do the logical thing and investigate. It seemed the first version of the virus was the most lethal one, although most lethal being a relative term. 'A heavy flu' was word on the street. It was lethal to old folk who already had one foot in the grave, or obese men. Also, certain medication seemed useful in treatment. All in all, not the worse thing to come our way.

Politically however, something else happened entirely. Covid was played up as if it were the new black plague. Mass hysteria was engineered: travel was shut down, business forced to close and people were locked up in their houses. Under the guise of an emergency, states all over the world endowed themselves with authoritarian power in order to combat the virus. Strangely enough, none of these measures actually did what they intended. In fact, they only caused more destruction. Medication that doctors on the ground said were helpful were forbidden in state policy. Face masks with zero efficacy became mandated in all public places. Nursing homes filled with vulnerable elderly were forced to take in Covid patients. Official statistics were bloated and garbled so that covid would seem as dangerous as possible. And so it quickly dawned on us that this destruction was not a side effect but the intent, in order to get rid of Trump.

Knowing what we know now about the Wuhan lab, it is very possible this was in fact the plan from the start, and to his credit, only one commenter at Jim's blog, the Cominator, called this early on.

Unfortunately, many of us caught on late, including Trump. In hindsight, he should have fought the covid hysteria from day one. But it is hard when a potentially deadly disease is thrown into play -- many people were scared and fooled, and many still are scared and fooled to this day.

As weeks went by it became clearer that Covid was evolving to be even more harmless -- literally, the flu. Death statistics showed a minor bump in excess deaths, exclusively among the vulnerable, which bump shortly disappeared as people developed immunity against this new Covid strand. The pandemic was over well before it began.

The political pandemic was however just ramping up. Statistics were edited, cherry-picked or even conjured out of thin air. If a dead man with a bullet in his head were tested positive for covid, he'd be registered as a covid death. Here's another favorite of mine. The red line is the 'projected future intensive care patients if we do not lockdown immediately':

After the shutdowns, lockdowns and even curfews, came the grand finale: the 'vaccines'. I put quotation marks because it was never a real vaccine. A real vaccine inoculates against a disease -- you get the shot, the disease no longer affects you. With corona, no such shot exists. What was instead developed by big pharmaceutical companies were highly experimental injections such as the mRNA-shot. These were forced upon the populace through segregationist policies: the unvaccinated were not allowed in restaurants, or in some fields fired from their job.

Did the shot do anything? It seems that under very specific circumstances, within a very specific time frame, it slightly alleviated covid symptoms. But mostly, the shot had side effects.

If the side effects were exceedingly rare and harmless, OK. But of course they were not. The shot had serious side effects, such as heart inflammation, bloodclots or menstrual irregularity. All of which, of course, was censored in official media. Well except for the part that the shot lost its negligible effect after a few months -- because that meant people would simply have to get a new shot. Once again, it strangely seemed easier to interpret the whole vaccine push as a deliberate attempt to force evil upon the world.

And indeed, the whole covid ordeal can be elegantly interpreted as the summoning of a demon; the covid demon. Just like in the stories, such a demon always wreaks havoc, always causes more trouble than it's worth. And who knows, maybe in the future it will yet turn on the masters that summoned it. Unfortunately, it has fulfilled an important goal it was summoned for. For the time came for presidential re-election. Trump's campaign was hampered by the virus (no more big crowds), his opponents strengthened by the virus (Biden had an excuse for the absence of big crowds). But mostly: because of the virus, Trump's opponents pushed through the legalization of massive mail-in ballots. Which proved to be the final nail in the coffin of Trump's presidency.

 

Fishing in the Rubicon

 

Depending on who you are, your beliefs regarding the 2020 election may vary. The truth is rather obvious: the election was stolen from it's rightful winner, Donald Trump.

Jim, once again, called it correctly preceding election night. Trump will win, but the media will announce a Biden win, he warned. In other words, last call for Trump. When a democracy nears its end, those who vote count for nothing, those who count the vote count for everything. Like many, I thought Trump was so obviously ahead that they could not plausibly fake enough votes for a Biden victory. Trump rallies were booming as ever, Biden rallies were dead. Biden even stopped campaigning more than a week before the election. None other than Spandrell said I would probably win our bet.

But we underestimated the rot, underestimated how determined the permanent government was not to allow Trump another win. Trump, to his great credit, handled many attacks with charm and mastery. 'Russiagate' and 'impeachment' disappeared overnight. Corona, unfortunately, he mishandled.

To those suffering from normalcy bias, things still looked good for Trump. His opponent, Joe Biden, was as corrupt as they come. He was also uncharismatic, creepy, and in obvious cognitive decline. We expected a Trump landslide: they could not possibly fake that many votes in favor of Biden.

But of course, that is exactly what happened. On election night, several key voting bureaus were shut down, and hundreds of thousands of fake voting ballots were bussed in. It was anything but subtle, as witnessed in the stupendous amount of total votes Biden received, but it did not need to be, because might makes right. Trump was powerless to stop it. The media declared Biden the winner, called Trump a sore loser, and what was Trump going to do about it?

Trump rightly called the election fraudulent. Unfortunately, he put his faith in the judicial system. Having a Republican majority of supreme judges, Trump expected the judges to be on his side, expected the system to deal with this situation in a fair manner. But exactly as NRx predicted, the supreme court refused to even hear his case. Trump was shit out of luck.

And what happened? Well, some flailing happened. There is this article floating around on the internet that describes the chaos in Trump's last days. Surrounded by too many unreliable men, not knowing what to do, hands in his hair. Sad stuff.

Among the masses, Trump was still popular. In a last act of defiance they stormed the capitol on January sixth, 2021, likely encouraged to do so by the feds. If there ever was a moment for Trump to pull off a coup, it was at that point. But Trump was only fishing in the Rubicon. The whole ordeal led to nothing but an excuse for the permanent government to arrest pro-Trump people. Biden was inaugurated, and Trump's run for God Emperor was over.

 

The black pill

The best kind of black pill is given in existential horror fiction, like HP Lovecraft or Kafka. Worlds where God does not care about you, where you are an unimportant insect caught in events much bigger than you. There is always an underlying truth that the universe is cold, which truth either kills, depresses or drives insane those who realise it. Naturally, in fiction the feelings of dread are dramatised. But in the real world such feelings may dominate just as well. Why shouldn't they? Does God care about us? How should we know! For many folk, life is pretty shitty. Modern life generally is shitty. You go to school the first quarter of your life, get to be a wagecuck the next half of your life, and finally you get to see your pension go up in smoke just as you retire. Long periods of misery are in no way an exception to human life. Read the bible and you'll find most of it is God telling people they are fucking up. People just don't give many shits about anything except themselves. Societies often barely function.

And let's be honest. Even if you escape all that, say you're rich and independent and free, and you even get to live a pretty relaxing life. What does it all really mean? The simple truth is we don't know. We just don't know. All we know is we are born on a rock floating through space, if we're lucky we grow into healthy adults, and then we slowly deteriorate until we die. And that's about it. The meaning of life, at its core, is a big question mark.

So what do people do? They ease the pain of not knowing. They lie to themselves. They tell pretty stories that hide the coldness of the universe. Religion, being such a story, is a drug meant to keep us happy. Civilisations can and in fact have been built upon those lies. Pretty lies are preferred above cold truth, even if it means missing important truths. We see this exact phenomenon in our current, declining society -- people are in denial of its collapse. Even as prices skyrocket and freedoms are curtailed, most people hold firm to their belief that it's just a temporary fluke, that everything will be a-okay. And when it can no longer be denied that everything is okay, they'll be in denial about a great deal of other events. Shit never changes.

I mean, what am I doing even writing all this? Expecting shit to change? For the one and a half reader who actually read this? For my own ego? Am I delusionally wasting my time? A good case can be made that I am. Just occupying the mind as time ticks away... At the end of the day, man is but a tree. Unable to change, unable to move. He justs sits and breathes and waits for his time to come.

 

 

 

Part V - Jimian Christianity

 

 

 

The great Christian empire

 

At the end of the day I am not a black piller. My take is, if the meaning of life is a giant question mark and up to us to interpret, the white pill and black pill are both equally valid interpretations. Life can be a happy and exciting journey, it can also be a disappointing and depressing jail. Sometimes it is the latter, but hopefully you work towards it being the former more often. I don't think anyone is a full black piller -- if one is fully black pilled, life is meaningless and there is no reason to live, means suicide is the only logical choice. But suicide is sad. So by not committing suicide, you reveal that you are hopeful about life.

But there must always be a balance. There is always a merit to the cynical, Machiavellian interpretation. Hopefulness where none is merited is delusional. There is a reason pride is the number one sin. Not to mention that with the current state of the West, a healthy dose of negativity is merited. Thus, an honest cynic must be given as much credit as he deserves, which is less than the cynic thinks, but more than the naive optimist thinks.

Interestingly, God seems to agree with this. The white pill has always been more successful than the black pill. Nations and scientific innovations and industry were built in praise of life, rarely in spite of it. Christianity itself is a giant white pill: God loves us so much, He came down to earth in the form of his son! Cynicism just does not lend itself well to cooperation.

While we are on the subject of cooperation... It was at this point, after Trump's presidency, as Jim graciously paid his part of our bet, that we set aside our differences. I had come around to his view of Christianity and started to see myself as Christian. I'll try and explain my train of thought.

The core problem remains: I do not believe the miracles of the bible. Yet an essential part of being a Christian is believing in Jesus' resurrection, not to mention countless of other stories in which God acts directly on earth through miracles. What I came to realize was that although that seems a mighty important part of any church I might attend, it was not an important part of what Jim was saying. Jim consistently interpreted the bible in a subtly different manner. One which paid respect to the bible's story and would never take away from any of the supernatural happenings, but also one that saw the bible as the best social technology around.

Let's say you are a barbarian warlord who wants to institute civilisation. 'lol' says your rival tribe, 'over our dead body'. So that's what you do. But even though you are now the king, you notice the defeated tribes are already conniving against you. You wave your sword and they fall silent, but that sword only takes you so far. This is the warrior's conundrum: they need effective social technology. They need priests to help build their synthetic tribe of civilisation, so that natural tribes do not aim for each other's throats.

Christianity became this social technology. When we talk about our civilisation, we talk, broadly, about Western civilisation, about Europe and North America and Australia. But really, we are talking about the Christian empire.

The Christian empire started as early as king Alfred or Charlemagne, who encountered exactly the problem described above, and solved it exactly with Christianity. It was incredibly succesful. The Christian empire lasted many centuries, more than a millenia even. It was arguably longer than the Roman empire, undoubtedly more successful than the Roman empire. It survived bad kings, included some great kings, it was so successful it created several 'empires on which the sun never set'. The Christian empire propelled forward our exploration of the world. It propelled forward our understanding of the world. It was the Christian empire which led to the industrial revolution, later the electrical revolution, later the information revolution. Christ said: 'bring God's kingdom on earth' and so men did. Compared with any other period in history, the period of the Christian empire was the pinnacle of human achievement, which achievements to this day benefit us immensely.

Unfortunately, today we no longer live in the Christian empire. As we have discussed, the Puritans spiralled Christianity out of control, and their memetic descendants, Progressives, have lost all semblance of Christianity. They are post-Christians. Some wear the skinsuit of their Christian forefathers, such as how Joe Biden considers himself a Catholic. Others openly look down upon and despise Christians, such as how Hillary Clinton refers to them as 'easter worshippers'. And with the loss of the social technology that forged the Christian empire we inevitably witness the fall of that same empire.

So. What do?

 

God and Gnon

 

I am going to paraphrase Jim's vision in my own words. Which is always risky, but I suspect he does not mind.

Jim draws a parallel between human civilisation and coding. In coding, if a program is highly complex, has some bugs, but works, it is almost never worth the effort to start over from complete scratch. Or rather, you are free to start over from scratch, but you'll find that it is immensely more time consuming and troublesome than you thought. You will have to re-invent the wheel over and over. You will discover that much of the code you thought was bunk in the original actually served a function. You will run into all sorts of unforeseen problems which the old code had solved because even though it was not perfect, it was time-tested. So what you do if you encounter a new program-crashing bug is you reboot the code to an older version when the program did not crash, and you go from there.

Exactly this reasoning we apply to Christianity: our current version of Post-Christianity is messed up and anti-civilisational. But at the height of the Christian empire, from which Jim prefers the English rule by king Charles the second, Christianity as a program worked great. So what we do is we reboot to that version of Christianity and work out things from there.

It is this practical approach that eventually convinced me. I sometimes compare it to a second rennaisance -- a re-connection to our Christian forefathers who built the greatest civilisation to ever be, which connection is so sadly lost these days. Moreso, I eventually realized that this approach actually addresses the miracle problem: since Jim views Christianity more as a society-building tool than a complete literal identity, he has no problems with the bible making all sorts of extravagant claims. Christian society developed nuclear warfare and brought us to the moon, so clearly the old miracles and the new science can coexist. Moreso, if you want to get technical about it, the problem has already been specifically addressed in the era of the Christian empire. Jesus is in the gospel of John referred to as the incarnation of 'logos', a.k.a. 'reason'. Thus Jesus actually represents the very science which Christians supposedly hate.

Is this approach perfect? No, of course not. If I ask Jim about Christ's resurrection, his response is 'you cannot know it didn't happen because you weren't there', which is hilarious if you know anything about Jim's usual standards of debate. You'll note this is also a rather different approach to Christianity than say the founder of Gab, Andrew Torba espouses.

Torba's approach is perhaps the more complete literal Christian identity, while Jim is applying slightly more grains of salt. Yet at the same time, and this is the important part, they are compatible versions of Christianity. Jim should not mind that Torba believes in miracles, and Torba should not mind that Jim is slightly less extravagant in his faith. And all of a sudden, boom, we have rebooted into a version of Christianity that works for even the most critical of intellectuals.

Suddenly, we have resolved almost all of our issues. The bible, to the surprise of few, is staunchly Darkly Enlightened. It gives solutions for all of the problems NRx observed. For instance.

On women:
thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
- Genesis 3:16

Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord
- Ephesians 5:22-33

On sodomy:
If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.
- Leviticus 20:13

On transgenders:
The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.
- Deuteronomy 22:5

On the fate of evil people:
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
- Corinthians 6:9

And so on and so on. It turns out that all the social technology we were looking for already existed, right underneath our eyes. We have only to pick up a bible and read it, to see what made our ancestors' society so great, as well as what is making our current society so rotten.

But wait, there's more! Jim also has a crystal-clear interpretation on Christ's message. Christ, according to Jim, railed against Jewish legalism, which is the habit of following the letters of the law in order to abuse its spirit. Jesus accuses the Jews, especially the pharisees, of being hypocritical. He says: 'you strain out a gnat but swallow a camel', e.g. you make a huge deal out of very small points, but ignore much bigger and important issue. They were, in other words, using their holiness as a stick to hit people. By no means did Jesus conjure this accusation out of thin air -- the second half of the OT is basically God growing increasingly more pissed with the Jews and their behavior. But Jesus did specify the kind of bad behavior the Jews were engaging in. As Jim puts it, the Jews were Jewing God. Quite prophetically, legalism turned out to be the exact reason as to why the Jews were eventually thrown out of Israel by the Romans.

What happened is that the Jews were claiming a piece of land that was not theirs, because their laws did not allow them to walk over the land that was theirs, for it was contaminated with chicken blood. A dispute ensued, and a Roman cop was called in to resolve the dispute. Whom the Jews killed. Which set in motion the chain of events that led to the Roman-Jewish wars that led to the expulsion of the Jews.

In other words, they stole land, murdered a Roman and started a war, all because they refused to walk on land contaminated with chicken blood. Legalism much?

Interestingly we may draw a parallel to many Christians these days who engage in the exact same behavior. They are so preoccupied with kindness for strangers that they destroy their neighbors. They turn so many cheeks you could make a doormat out of them. They know the words of the bible, but have forgotten its spirit.

 

Demon worshippers

 

As much as Jim insists that he wants to return to the old type Christianity and not conjure up some new type Christianity, it is pretty much impossible to follow his vision without implementing some of his ideas. Many of these ideas we have discussed before -- the red pill, even though it is referenced a couple of times already in the bible, is a big one. The return to good and evil is another.

We have discussed this plenty of times already, of course. In order to give meaning to our life, we must distinguish between good and evil. Yes, there are shades of gray, but some of those shades are distinctly darker than others, and sometimes, there is a clear black and a clear white.

All too often the 'there is no evil' argument is used to justify evil. For instance, it will be said that global warmists just care so much for the environment, and it is only that they hate industry because they care so much for the environment. Nope, they hate industry and rationalise their actions by saying they care for the environment, just like commies rationalised their hatred of kulaks by saying they cared so much for the working class. It always works out the same way.

Now you can interpret this behavior through the lens of evolutionary psychology. So you might say that the commie envies the life of the kulak and wants to steal his stuff -- which makes perfect evolutionary sense. But for whatever reason it turns out that their is an even easier way to interpret this behavior, namely, demon worship. So it is not that the commie wants to kill the kulak for any rational reason, no, he is simply worshipping the demon of socialism which compels him to do evil.

Which line of reasoning might make you go: huh. That's a bit weird. But what can I say -- it works. It is effective. There is a reason why the first two of God's ten commandments warn for the worship of false idols. If you do not worship the one and true God, you are lifelong at risk to fall under the spell of demons.

Now, are these demons really real? As in, do literal creepy red creatures with horns and pointy teeth really walk among us? Well, yes and no. It is a little bit complicated. But not overly.

The most important thing is that in many situations, especially in these modern degenerate times, you can model reality surprisingly accurately by designating certain behaviors as 'being possessed by demons.' In fact it is sometimes the most accurate explanation you can find. For instance:

Apologies for bringing news from my native country. The article roughly translates as: "EU to pass legislation for more legal immigration, whether EU citizens like it or not. Brussel wants to tackle labor shortages this way. Countries like Egypt, Tunesia and Morocco are targeted." This is in 2022 -- when the housing market crisis , the immigration crisis and the inflation crisis are all at unprecedented highs. And here we have our elite, unironically advocating for more immigration like it is the greatest thing ever.

Now you could present some logical argument in which it is rationally beneficial for Eurocrats to import brown criminals. But try it and you'll find none of those arguments hold true. For instance, You could say that they do it because the immigrants vote for leftist policies. But as we've established, the votes no longer matter, only the persons counting the votes. And it was not as if votes mattered for the Eurocrats anyway.

Another argument would be that it's the billionaires shoveling in cheap labor. Well some of that is definitely going on, but guess where the west-European capitalists get their labor from? Eastern Europe. Poles do good work. Merchants like employees that do good work. Merchants don't want Africans because they don't do good work.

So what's going on? Well it's not very hard to explain, for instinctively you already know. Instinctively, what you think when you read that headline is: evil! Pure unadulterated evil! Which it is. And the only rational explanation that covers that gut feeling is: these people are demon worshippers. Now perhaps these demons are only metaphorical. Indeed it is best not to take demons too literally -- by taking them too literally you give them more power than they deserve. But you may bet that demon worshippers act as if they believe in literal demons, and those on the side of God do best to acknowledge that. Ours is a holy war, a war of good against evil. We shall cast out these evil worshipping demons and send them back to the hell they came from.

Notice how powerful that sounds? I love being on God's side.

But maybe the immigration example is too abstract still? We can get on the nose, of course. There's a lot of demonic stuff out there, stuff that we ought not to give too much attention too, but stuff we should not deny either, especially considering that it is our elite performing the demonic rites. We talked about pizzagate already. Here's another strange one --

Just your average satanic performance art at a birthday party. Now you might think -- OK, that's pretty crazy. Who would want that kind of performer at his party? What guests would want to attend such a party? The answer is San Francisco's elite, including its mayor, its political elite and even its NFL athletes. Does that mean all the attendants secretly worship Satan? Well, yes and no. From the video, some absolutely do and act as such. Others merely participate out of political necessity, others are merely swept up in the moment, and no doubt others are creeped out by what is happening, although they won't speak out against it, because they know on which side their bread is buttered.

But that something creepy and unholy is going on, that much is clear. Demonic rituals, or people pretending to perform them, are not a commonspread practice, but they are not too rare either. And they are disturbingly common among our progressive elite. The good news is, there is no need to go out of our way to deal with every practicioner of the black arts. From one point, yes, the guy getting a pentagram cut in his back is evil, but from another, he is an utter loser. But given enough power they become fairly dangerous losers, and the demons they summon must be dealt with.

So there's a couple of demons we are already familiar with. Perhaps you're already familiar with Moloch, an ancient deity who demands the sacrifice of your eldest son. I think it's fair to say at this point that Marx has also been reincarnated as a demon, although Jim argues that no commie really believes Marx' theories anyway. There's the demon of feminism, an ugly shrieking blue bitch. There's the demon of Gaia worship -- taking care of the earth under the wing of God is an obvious task we're given, but without God's guidance, mother earth becomes a demonic swamp monster who hates mankind and wants them all dead. There's the diversity demon, some kind of multi-racial behemoth that points its claws and slurs: 'raaaycissss, RAAAYcis.' What else. The LBGTQ demon, of course. Has its own flag. Has manifested fairly well on earth among its followers. Again, we see the propensity of the democratic elite to summon demons -- remember the earlier picture of the trans lady reading at the library? That wasn't just any library, that was the Michelle Obama library.

Oh there is one more demonic presence that I can't help but point towards:

The Vatican, ladies and gentlemen...

My list is by no means exhaustive. Demons pop in and out of existence, poking for weaknesses in mankind. In recent years, for instance, we have witnessed the summoning of the mighty corona demon, in whose name society must be wrecked and people must be injected. There's no reason to give too much attention to individual, minor demons. Only when the evil huddle together and gather around a specific demon to the point where they become harmful, action must be taken. Which brings us to another important topic.

 

Shills

 

Here is a bit by Tolkien in Lord of the Rings on how evil works: "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them ..." The takeaway being that orcs possibly used to be elves, and thus evil cannot exist on its own: it must pervert the good.

Which may not always be true, but it is true very often. Entryism, infiltration of an organization by its enemies who twist its original purposes, is widely practiced by bad people of all stripes. Which makes sense: good people don't like to pretend to be someone they are not. Bad people instinctively pretend to be someone they are not, although the veneer always is thin at close inspection. But entryism, if unchecked, works. Once you have a spy in an enemy organization you can wreak all kinds of havoc. You have good intel. You can sabotage. You can misdirect. Set up traps. All kinds of good stuff. Entryism has become an essential part of warfare. Shills are its foot soldiers -- god damn shills. Like a plague of locusts they are.

Let's take a typical shill over at Jim's blog. What'll happen is, commenters have a conversation, and a newcomer shows up. 'hello fellow crimethinkers', he'll say. 'I hate Jews just like you. Man oh man those f*cking Jews. Gas them all right.' We then tell him: 'well the Jews have been up to no good, but we don't want to gas them or anything.' Which he will ferociously ignore. Instead he will keep commenting and say something like: 'yes exactly we agree gas the kikes fuck niggers heil hitler.'

There's many types of shills and I do not intend to cover all of them. Some shills are paid, e.g. by leftist billionaires, by NGOs or by the FBI. Some are unpaid -- they just like to pretend to be part of groups and then derail them for the sake of derailing them. Whatever people's motives are, the overarching theme is always the same: someone pretends to be part of your group, but acts contrary to the group's interest.

If left unchecked, a shill will clog and derail real conversation, attract more shills and cause a whole bunch of trouble down the road. The group will die from the inside out. It is how online forums die. Offline, as well: Social Matter, that NRx flagship, died because of shills. The Alt-Right was lured into a trap at Charlottesville because of shills. January sixth had fed shills. The list goes on. If an organization is to survive and thrive it must ocassionally check under the bed for shills.

You might wonder, what might such a check look like?

Now I must be wary on handing out too much advice. I have a bit of experience in dealing with shills, but not as much as Jim. Still, I feel it is not incredibly hard to check for shills. It's like maintaining a car -- requires a bit of practice, but very doable. It requires a bit of paranoia, a bit of vigilance. Shills smell off. A shill is always influenced by the community he pretends to be part of, so in order to protect against the danger of switching sides, shills engage in protective stupidity -- they will literally not hear certain truths. This goes double for a paid shill, who has a boss looking over his shoulder. To decrease exposure to our memes, many paid shills therefore use scripts. Certain keywords lead to certain scripts given in response. Such repetitive scripts are one way to recognize a shill. They will raise a point, you will present a counter-argument, and instead of engaging that argument they will simply repeat their point as if no one presented a counter-argument.

One way to take advantage of that is to ask a question that forces the shill to go off script. Preferably multiple choice, so that it is impossible to talk around the correct answer. An excellent shill test is one on the women question, which to many shills is like garlic to a vampire. It might look like this:

Complete the following the sentence: Women misbehave because –
[A] Capitalism makes them misbehave, by economically incentivizing reckless high time-reference behavior over long-term planning. The capitalist class benefits from one night stands and sterility, as it benefits from third world immigration of spendthrift cheap labor to replace frugal whites.
[B] The Jews make them misbehave, since the Jews own the media and the entire entertainment industry from Hollywood down to the tiniest pornography studio, and use them to direct propaganda at women, telling them to fuck blacks and lowlifes. The Jews deliberately intend for dysgenesis to occur, as part of their long-term White Genocide plan.
[C] Sorry, but this is a misleading question. Women don’t misbehave at all. All misbehavior is done by men, who are vile pigs.
[D] Lecherous men make them misbehave, since men are ultimately responsible for all female behavior (including misbehavior), and unlike women, men have self-control and moral agency. Thus it logically follows that any female misbehavior would merely reflect bad decisions taken by irresponsible and lustful men.
[E] They are feral, blindly following ancient instincts from the time we were apes in the jungle, which instincts tell them to cruise for rape by alpha male Chads, and to resist kicking-and-screaming all attempts to restrain them from pursuing alpha male Chads. Stable monogamy has always been a conspiracy by men against women.

There is only one correct answer

But at the end of the day, every shill is slightly different and every shill must be dealt with in an appropriate manner. Maybe that sounds a bit too general still? You know what, I've an idea. Let's borrow an example from the archives from Jim's blog and see what a shill might look like and how he might be dealt with. I know just the example. Meet Carlylean Restorationist and his very first comment:

Seems like an upstanding reactionary no? He mentions all the right words: the King James Version bible, which is the preferred bible among reactionaries. Christ as a reactionary giving us the truth and the logos. Even his name shows familiarity with NRx -- Thomas Carlyle was Moldbug's favorite writer. Plus, Moldbug always said that the right was restorationist, as opposed to the left's revolutions. Let's see what sorts of commentary he gives...

The ingratiation is a bit slimey. But maybe he's just a huge fan? The early 'we' is a little bit suspicious -- already he is posing as if he is talking for everyone, even though this comment was made barely a month since his.

Then for a while, nothing interesting. Until he starts making strange comments...

CR became known for writing these cryptic word salads that were simultaneously eloquent and nonsensical. You are excused for not knowing any of the folk he refers to -- I sure as hell don't. But apparently these unknowns are 'our guys' and, here comes the first definite red flag, they argue that 'it is all the fault of the capitalists.' Where have we heard that rhetoric before...? Unsurprisingly, the comment draws suspicion. And soon enough CR gives us the full explanation

Aha. Okay. We need 'a ruler' to take '100% control of capital' and 'reinvest it'. No longer does he vaguely sound like a communist, he speaks darn clear as communist. Yet he is still presenting his plan as if it were completely in line with Jimian reaction! All hands on deck, we have a certified shill on board...

Debate ensued, the kind Jim excels at.

CR kept insisting he was not a Marxist in the slightest -- he argued that poz and progressivism were clearly the manifestations of rich capitalists, and so in order to combat the progressives we needed to shackle the rich. Which theory, dear reader, I hope you've paid attention, has been refuted in our story already: on Jim's blog we believe that priests are more powerful than merchants. Merchants cannot cooperate on such a scale, and in fact that is exactly why they so often get extorted by priests who tell them: 'you don't deserve that, we will take it.' That is exactly what Marxism is all about -- robbing the capitalists. Tellingly, even though that is what CR argues, he keeps denying it is a Marxist argument and tells us it is our argument and that he is totally speaking on behalf of us! Hilarity ensues when CR argues that we ought to outright ban Dominos pizzas because it is a big corporation that seduces the proletariat to be fat and live from paycheck to paycheck.

Which was refuted by Jim as such

At this point many comments followed with much debate. CR would repeat that his argument was very right wing, and Jim would insist it was not. What was nice about this debate was that although initially CR's position might have seemed somewhat reasonable, near the end he so insistently argued communist economics that it became obvious to everyone that he was a shill. I mean, what do you expect when you want to ban restaurants??

Even I learned a thing or two about communism. For instance, it is standard commie practice to insist that capitalism is only a recent invention and therefore totally not an integral part of human society. Jim disagrees, arguing that capitalism is at least as old as the bible itself.




All of this causes CR to shriek, get mad and come back the next day to repeat the exact same argument he made a hundred times before. Here's a comment towards me:

But it is too late and several commenters ridicule him either directly or through spoof accounts...

Which CR does not enjoy...

Now you might think that is the end of it. But no. CR kept coming back, repeating the same arguments, as if he had wax in his ears and was not hearing that he was unwelcome. He kept robotically repeating his script.

But at this point Jim had had enough and started to fully censor CR's comments, as they were only wasting bandwidth at that point.

And with that ends the story of CR. If I may throw in some final observations: I think this case was so great because CR was dealt with so effectively. CR was allowed to make his case, and Jim engaged with him. Jim did not outright ban him. He had no problem censoring certain parts -- many shills have a tendency to ramble on about irrelevant topics, wasting everyone's time. But Jim always makes an effort to seriously engage. Only after it has become clear that there is no engagement, and after it has become clear to everyone that this guy is an obvious shill and he has been ridiculed for his script, only then will Jim completely censor. What's more, Jim used CR as a jumping board to further deepen our knowledge.

Not all shills are exactly like CR, not all the ways to deal with shills have to be exactly like Jim's, but it's as good an example as any.

 

The white pill

 

Dear reader, we've come a long way. We are almost at the end, for I have exhausted myself and told you everything I needed to say. Perhaps I can still tell a little bit more, and convey the hope that has filled me during this journey.

This story is called 'truth in a world of lies' -- I like it because it echoes Jim's theme, 'liberty in an unfree world', but also because it echoes a biblical theme: that we are fallen creatures, thrown out of the garden of Eden. It is the cycle of human society that we keep comitting evil, that we lie and cheat and wreck our civilisation. But part of that same cycle is that many of us strive to be good. We try to overcome our shortcomings and build further towards God's kingdom. God acknowledges our efforts and greatly appreciates them, which is why he sent His son to die for our salvation. All that this story is, is me laying my ear on the earth, or towards the sky, to try and hear, channel and speak God's voice. It is a tricky business, and I am bound to have made mistakes. But hey, even if some of the small letters of the story don't work out, I am pretty confident the spirit of the story is completely correct.

It also strengthens me greatly that many parts of this story are not mine alone; much of it is a summary and synthesis of what many other wise men have said. And I notice that our voice grows, even amidst the collapse. Our memes spread, because the truth, though easily lost and hard to find, is just too darn interesting. We practice what we preach, and what we practice, works. This to me is a great white pill. And truly, the white pill is inherent in Christianity. It it through Jesus Christ that we know God loves us, and that we were given purpose: to love God unconditionally, to build His kingdom on earth. Today, that kingdom is being torn down by God's enemies, by evil. But through this story, I hope to have convinced you that not all men sit by idly.

We know ourselves and we know our enemies. They count on hiding in the dark and not being called by their real names, but we shine a light on them and call them by their real names. We re-establish cooperate-cooperate equilibria among men, among women, among families. We have functional families with happy wives and healthy children, while our enemies have sexless lives and mutilate their only child in the name of the rainbow demon.

It is for all these reasons and many more that I am optimistic about our future. I've searched long and wide for a plan, a faith, that can work, and I know that this is it. Why else spend so much time on writing all this? I truly believe this, or something very similar to this, is the future for mankind.

And who knows. Today it is dark still. But tomorrow, perhaps, we take back the world. And the day after that, we may finally go to Mars. After that, mine the asteroids, explore galaxies, and who knows... We might yet conquer the stars.

 

The end

 

And with that ends our story. This is by no means meant to cover everything. I've a few last thoughts over at the miscellaneous section that I could not fit into the story. Of course, Jim's blog alone has about a billion words more on every topic imaginable. Check it out at blog.reaction.la, or download Jim's back-up, although the latter takes a bit of technical know-how to set up. Jim also has a blogroll linking to other bloggers -- I do recommend.

Dear reader, I hope this text may be of some service to you. May God bless you, and may we soon take back our land from the demons that roam it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've nothing left to say! This was it! The story of Jimian Christianity-- it starts with me wanting to bang some pussy, it ends with discovering the cure to a collapsing civilisation. I gave you 30,000 words on the matter. If that's not enough for you, I'm mighty sorry. Never were much of a talker.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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