I often go around your old posts...I think, and it is just me, that your ideas and your writings are excellent. It is not necessary to write about something new - just for me, again, is more important from your writing to learn what others think about some subjects. Shortly: one of the best for me here on substack, if it means something.
Wish you all well and Merry Christmas...from Croatia
My core idea is that freedom is more than just lack of Big Government. An excessive wealth gap constitutes a power relationship. Fortunately, there are ways to narrow the wealth gap while cutting government. Cutting the deficit would be a good start: https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/debt-is-dumb
Not an entirely original idea. Adam Smith was pushing for smaller government while being on the political left of his day. And he pointed out that quantity of land and capital ("stock" was the term he used) vs. labor determined wage rates. I'm just trying to revive the idea without attaching it to conspiracy theories. (Even when true, conspiracy theories can be a distraction. The bad guys often win by default.)
Perhaps my most original idea is that we can make common cause with environmentalists. Deep environmentalism is as reactionary a sentiment as it gets. "Buy local" is Trumpy trade policy taken to the next level. See https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-11-exploit-the-environmentalists for a start. Look for the Green RINOs on my archive page for lots more.
My grounding mechanism has been to network with members of other political factions. I've attended meetings across the political spectrum, from angry hillbillies on the racist right to tofu eating progressives on the far left. I even endured a Rotary Club meeting.
For a time I distributed a libertarian propaganda newspaper to the kinds of coffee shops you might find in Portlandia, and it was well received. When Ron Paul ran for president, many eco-hippie types showed up for the meetup I organized. The overlap in values is not just theoretical.
Thanks for the response, Fabius. I agree with you both on cutting the debt and the importance of sustainable environmentalism. I think many on the political right are so knee-jerk to avoid what has been traditionally perceived as left-wing issues that there is an opportunity to embrace them and gain a lot of support. Getting out of the tired "Republican" vs. "Democrat" dynamics can only be a good thing.
At the risk of stepping outside my experience I would say that actual role of politics in a monolithic society is distraction and the development of narratives that are intentionally inane. We see this in that exceptionally few genuine concerns of the people are ever acknowledged much less addressed.
What this means is that there are plenty of topics that are off limits, plenty of places that cannot be examined, plenty of intellectual discussions that will never reach an airing.
The decisions that are made, the ones that matter are all done in secret and under the table. This is masked by the circus act which is visible government.
To suggest in all of this that government reflects a culture, or substantive thought of the people it rules is simply just wishful thinking.
Similarly, the actual purpose in such a system of religion is provide identity and to enlist support for government policy.
The actual dynamic of culture is mostly a method with which to keep the populous divided and at each others throats. The better to rule them, fleece them, and parasite upon them.
Civilization is congradulated as an advancement according to the contribution of a relatively small number of extraordinary individuals, yet there is little comparison available to other systems besides the civilization complex.
The terror and certainty that without civilization and government people would perish keeps the people striving in abysmal conditions.
There is very little intellection or rationality in government, religion, or society. The basis of decision is quite apparently largely based upon unexamined urges, the exercise of power. Meanwhile any human development, such as with art, is left to founder unless it captures the self serving interest of the privileged.
Considering this, predictions must involve the actual unevolved core of the decision makers, that and those which support and manifest their ruthless primitivism, and for clues we should look more into that stagnant nature, how it is modified and develops expectations, and what the actual scope of its limited comprehension brings.
What we find is that the highest levels of society are moved by forces they neither comprehend or effectively describe. The current monolithic system is not created or built by those who benefit from it. Their actual position owes more to great cycles of time, and the personality of the age we are living in, than any competence or ability.
It is now at the point, where if one finds value in the higher nature of mankind, one must protect, feed and exercise it themselves.
Hi Mike, thanks for the comment. I agree with you that at least our elected leaders seem both dumber and hypocritical, selfish, greedy and aggressive than ever, and that our elites seek to separate the masses into endless squabbling and distracted groups so they are too busy in-fighting to focus on the actual elites. I think it’s an open question how much our central bank owning elites behind the scenes remain in control of the overall process of the technological machine, as you’re right, this system was put into place long before any of this current crop were ever born. How much power and control does a 10th or 15th generation Rothschild exercise, for example? I delved into this open question in this prior post: https://neofeudalism.substack.com/p/appendix-b-a-caveat-the-rise-of-a
I agree with you too, of course, that ultimately we can only focus on our own efforts and what we can control in our limited domains, to nurture the good and the just where we can.
So, in your view, Neo, we've got as our only possible governmental forms either (1) oligarchy/Potemkin democracy or (2) feudalism -- and egalitarianism is bad, verboten, and should be somehow excised from all consideration and implementation as a governmental style. Anthropologically speaking, however, egalitarianism was, in fact, the dominant and longest-lasting (self)governmental approach in the old (million plus years in the past up to the Neolithic -- and in some places, still) hunter-gatherer days well, well before that young upstart Jesus with his egalitarian tendencies. Good luck to anyone trying to (recursively) talk that egalitarian impulse out of all of us: it's definitely bred in the bone.
It is also, you must surely realize, the deep, continuing influence of the basic human egalitarian impulse that got Trump elected both (three?) times. No further egalitarian ratchet effect consolidation as you have predicted will occur post-Trump: the axle of that particular ratchet gear is fixed permanently somewhere down in the earth's mantle and needs no further consolidation.
As to the lack of open discussion about certain red lined topics. Mention of these topics raises immediate social allergic/immune responses in a good portion of the immense Western body politic, and therefore just cannot be usefully talked about very widely at all. But, even at the micro-scale, many stable marriages have just these sort of 'issues' in their history encapsulated with enough old protective scar tissue to preserve effective marriage function. However, in the marriage case, if only one partner is at fault, the other partner can sometimes help bring about rectification of the problem with simple patient forbearance, waiting for 'realization' or self-administered 'consequences' to wake up the other party. The same thing can certainly happen at the macro-scale: see, for example, the COVID19 cultural and biological hangover now being miserably enjoyed by the pro-Vaxxing crowd.
Thanks for the comment, Larry. I agree with you that humanity has an egalitarian impulse, because it is easier and safer to get along with neighbors than to bash their skulls in, and this concept scales with size. It's also useful to gain power by appealing to the lowest stratum of society. As I've written elsewhere, even Julian the Apostate, if he had won in his battle against the Christians, would have had to incorporate Christian almsgiving and other innovations into the Hellenic religions, which he had planned to do before he was assassinated. His plan was an implicit acknowledgment of the power of egalitarianism. What I disagree with is that we've raised this egalitarian impulse to the level of a religion, where investigation and discussion about biological differences between peoples on the level of gender and race, along with other differences such as over religion, is forbidden (see the controversy over The Bell Curve as an example). Any such differences are equated to the various -isms of the world, and western civilization is considered the devil for holding everyone else down. As I wrote, I would like to see a balance between egalitarian and inegalitarian impulses, not a total swap from the former to the latter.
Re: Trump, while he ran on a race-blind platform in 2020 and 2024, his 2015/2016 platform was decidedly inegalitarian and white populist. You wrote, "No further egalitarian ratchet effect consolidation as you have predicted will occur post-Trump: the axle of that particular ratchet gear is fixed permanently somewhere down in the earth's mantle and needs no further consolidation." That's funny and we will see - I'd be interested in a prediction post by you about the future if you decide to do one. There's plenty of more ratcheting they could do, imo: they could lower the voting age, they could legalize pedophelia or beastiality. Who would have thought they would make brutal child sex changes legal fifteen or twenty years ago?
"As to the lack of open discussion about certain red lined topics. Mention of these topics raises immediate social allergic/immune responses in a good portion of the immense Western body politic, and therefore just cannot be usefully talked about very widely at all." I agree with you here - hence the urge to write about it...
Some of the recent 'egalitarian' ratchet effects you name above, Neo, are not really egalitarian in nature-- they are just cases of newly-emergent, wigged-out human idiocy flying (crawling?) under a false narrative flag of egalitarianism. This sort of thing really shouldn't be tried at home by wigged-out idiotic amateurs who can't change a tire and are basically hirelings (or future hirelings) unable to effectively direct even themselves -- but what are you going to do about such a problem when so many are confidently trending that way? Talk to them and thus simply convince them to mend their rotten ways? Right.
More as to the reason(s) some topics cannot be raised: I'd say that at 'any one time' nearly half of humanity is busy confusedly flitting from one high anxiety to the next and therefore cannot be trusted to not go full tantrum at that 'any one time'. Measured forbearance of the strong is therefore always strategically warranted, but especially these days, just to help keep things from flying apart in a bunch of simultaneous tantrum storms (like those seen time after time in the last several decades, and the last few years especially). We all live in one big neighborhood with buzzing hornet's nests constructed everywhere.
I believe there is already a permanent moderating tension between egalitarian and non-egalitarian impulses, it's just that the over-egalitarian impulse has increasingly had its way more often for a while due to the (relatively) easy living conditions of the last 200 years or so -- and especially over the last 60-70 years. Metaphorically speaking, the permissive economic conditions leading to a high incidence of single head of household families, for example, also leads to numerous kinds of other disturbing imbalances. The non-egalitarian impulse has its own ratchet, however; i.e., the accelerating return of economic hardship. Its strength is, by nature, stronger than its opposite and can easily strip more decorative, less important egalitarian gears.
What I meant by the egalitarian ratchet axis being cemented into the earth's mantle is that the ratchet itself is not going anywhere, and cannot be made more or less permanent (or 'consolidated'). I evidently misunderstood what you meant to convey by your use of the phrase, consolidation of the egalitarian ratchet.
Yes, your comment brings to mind (1) the Calhoun mouse experiments where utopian conditions eventually led to unnatural mouse behavioral changes and atomization before the entire colony collapsed, and (2) an image of an ant colony that comes across a giant pile of sugar, eats it and the colony grows, then it collapses when the sugar runs out. For humanity we've been in a similar utopian mouse experiment/ant colony with sugar pile, more or less, related to consumption of world resources since the industrial revolution and supercharged by oil consumption. But now with the deteriorating economic conditions - related to too much debt and the decline of EROEI that you recently wrote about - means that the future is going to be a lot harder for people, and that it's going to last for a very long time - decades? centuries? forever? It will be interesting to see how that manifests culturally and politically and the effect it has on this push for ever-increasing egalitarianism. One of the conditions where core values of a society may end, as I noted, was from internal societal collapse...
NLF: You expressed contempt for Malthus's overpopulation arguments in one of the Youtube videos. Do you delve into why you don't like those arguments anywhere? (I previously took the pro-neomalthusian position).
GP: It is the standard oligarchic intimation whereby poverty and exploitation are blamed on "Nature." In our human version of the slave-making queens' "chemical communication" (the gasses they emit when attacking a nest to sow chaos among the defensive lines), the suggestions are indeed very few: they're all about labor and procreation. And Malthus, who plagiarized the main idea from a Venetian economist, Ortes, focused precisely on these variables. Not by chance that he was also a paid consultant of the East India company, the great corporate techno-structural mother.
NLF: It does make sense that Malthusian arguments are used by the elites in order to affect consumption by the masses for their own ends. My question though is more basic: do you think there are limits to worldwide consumption based on the availability of natural resources? When I look at the rates (or rather, the reported rates) of natural resource consumption, rates of species die-offs and loss of biodiversity, etc, it doesn't look very long-term sustainable. It makes intuitive sense to me that on a planet of limited natural resources and parabolically expanding human population based essentially on oil that there are some inbuilt natural limits and we will hit them sooner or later, unless one believes in the infinite adaptability of human ingenuity. For example, it is estimated that no more than 3.7 billion people could be fed without just one synthetic nitrogen fertilizer input (derived from natural gas) boosting agricultural output. I particularly enjoyed this post.
GP: Yes, I understand those concerns and yes, I agree that in the name of green conservation, the fascists will want to turn the screws entirely on us.
In that sense, these guys at the top and their screenwriters are extremely uninhibited with changing narratives and "ism" when it suits them, machos one day anti-macho the next, Malthusians at heart and fair weather anti-Malthusians rolled into into one: I suppose the message the Earth is sending us is that she is indeed bountiful but there is an ideal stable limit we should strive for planet-wise in terms of family units and standard of consumption. Now it is all helter-skelter, and the parasites, who are fully responsible for the immense waste, pollution, and screaming disparities juggle the argument form both ends as they see fit.
Obviously they were not stupid. They numbered less than 10,000 in all of Europe, as far as I can tell from wikipedia, although that seems incredible.
Probably they thought that they were at the carrying capacity of their world.
I don't mean to imply that humans will or should breed beyond the carrying capacity of their world, I think they wouldn't breed wildly if they were more secure, but the point is that the carrying capacity is not something externally defined and fixed because it depends on innovations unknown.
Goodreads.com is Amazon owned, and you can trust Jeff Bezos because he drives a pickup truck and wears a cowboy hat and a t shirt and there are pictures to verify that, although his wife looks kind of skanky.
Thanks, didn't know that. Its tempting to keep using it and blame JB if called on it, but I'll stop using it. That's assuming Wickapedia is right though.
My core ideas are all centered around Scholastic Theology and Philosophy, because everything that I have observed and read has shown me that the abandonment of it was categorically false. I can find readings from Edward Feser, to Podcasts from Thomas Aquinas College to name two of many, to further meditate upon these core beliefs easily online. I can also read the great core works. I try to take time out of my day to do so, away from the electronic noise of a computer or device. I make especially sure that my children and family see me do so multiple times a week, and spend time with them doing so quietly reading.
My unique ideas involve filtering new information through the viewpoints of such, and my writing reflects that. As you, I have a short form substack as well as a long form one - though it looks as if you've abandoned the long form. The long form one is not all that long, but mostly written as a series on particular subjects, with a culminating long form to gather up the thoughts and delve deeper into each particular topic as I've meditated upon them during the course of the writing as well. All of these in the series are dedicated towards building Polities and Societies as our world, the empire of the USSA, crumbles around us.
The short form one offs are insights into how the world works with these viewpoints that I hold. How I parse information as real and unreal, the roles that people play, their relationships with each other, the systems they operate within.
I parse information somewhat trying to just follow trends and see where things are going. I'm not an autistic date cruncher or reader. I'm just well decently well educated in history, well read in philosophy, theology, and Catholicism. I'm good at seeing trends and guessing where things will go, but not the best. Most importantly, though, I have a good intuition for seeing the nature of things and the world, so that's the subject I stick to in my writing, and it is what most intrigues me.
Thanks for sharing, Uncouth. It's interesting that you've also gravitated toward a short form/long from model, which is rare. Re: my long form Substack, it was basically a book published in parts and clocked in at 137,000 words which I shared for free with others in the hopes of disseminating it's ideas farther. It's finished and I do go back every now and then to edit it for readability and clarity, but I don't intend to publish more there otherwise.
I did so because I wanted to keep something where I could write very focused types of articles, in a very stylistic manner. They're all structured the same. Same layout, about the same length, same over arching topic - building a Polity out of a community. One centered upon a religious place of worship, turning friends and family into not just people you see, but actual -real- human relationships. If you click the 'start here' tab, you can go through how I see that forming. The current series of articles, slavery, will relate the topics of freedom and slavery as the pertain to the medieval understanding, how it operates within the regular city (what I call a Metropolis in relationship to Rome, Constantinople, etc), and a Polity of people bound by blood and kin ties. We'll see where it goes, it'll be fun, and most can be easily read on a work break or while eating lunch at work.
Anyways.
After I hit my stride, and really started wanting to branch out though... I wanted to just write. And I didn't want to make it so that readers had to flood their emails or reading with both if they didn't want to. So, they could chose both, or one or the other. It let me not worry about the audiences, and just keep doing what I wanted to do, in the way I wanted to do it.
You are touching topics I never thought could be worth reading it like astrology, yet it makes sense. Leading me to realize I do know very little about whats going on. I bought months ago the audio book Dominion from Tom Holland and still did not finish it. As I said I am still at the beginning of my learning/knowledge/education curve.
-> thats the problem: where to start but not getting lost in this universe where I barely know our solar system not mentioning the milky way and beyond.
Maybe a map and Stargate would help. I wish I could hop from one topic to another without getting lost. But I try connecting the dots and understand the bigger picture.
I subscribe to many writes on substack. Truthfully, I get more articles than I can read in a day. I have developed a triage. Some I will delete if the title doesn’t catch my attention. I know which ones these usually are. Periodically they surprise me, so I always check. The second group I consistently will read the first and last few paragraphs. If something blows my hair back, I’ll take time to read the whole thing. But again, I usually know who these writers are.
However, there are some, perhaps five, maybe, where I will save their article and wait u til I am completely undistracted, so I can read every last word and fully absorb all the details they present. You are one such writer.
My core idea is that tax = slavery, if we are forced under the threat of violence to pay taxes on "our property" or give up part of earnings that we have labored for then we are not free. It's an illusion that we own anything and that our time is our own. With deficit spending/borrowing and an unlimited money machine controlled by the gov't, I think the only reason for taxes is to keep us plebs in check.
I agree with you for the most part — I’m not opposed to some sort of taxation in theory, but we get very little value out of the taxes we pay and the IRS operates as a mafia shakedown operation for the Rothschild central bank owners. Nasty stuff.
A lot of my core ideas align with yours but bring a little nuance simply from the perspective of raw energy dynamics see my latest post... its not 137000 words but could easily blow out.
Your "long 137.000 word piece" influenced my thinking greatly and is still one of the best, if not the best, articles I have read here in the past two years.
Regarding original ideas: Isn't an original idea always a combination and build on already "known" ideas? I don't think we can ever invent something genuinely new as every "new idea" is built on old concepts mixed in a new way.
The problem is that only a few readers want to read about new combinations of ideas.
You will never become a "successful" writer doing that - maybe in old age (like Henry Miller) or postmortem, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. (I remember reading about how Nietzsche had to strongly convince his publisher to print 1000 books, of which only 500 were sold during his lifetime.)
Genuinely great books and minds are, by definition, ahead of their peers and the Zeitgeist. I don't even think these contributions are of a single mind. Great riders can tune into the collective unconscious and are "compelled" to express it, sometimes not fully understanding it.
Most people find it hard to read and look outside their "Overton Windows." New ideas create chaos in people's minds, and most people don't welcome "chaos" as much as "order".
Jordan Peterson (I am no big fan) did a fascinating essay on "order and chaos" and rightly pointed out, as I interpreted it, that too much order kills and destroys all creativity, joy, love, and progress (fascism). Chaos, in turn, is exceptionally creative and fluid, living and thinking from moment to moment.
I am extremely messy - my garage and workshop are chaos (sometimes even too much for myself), but if no one moves things without my knowledge, I find the right tool in that chaos 95% of the time. When I was young, as a tool to defend against criticism of my chaos, I embraced a German proverb, "Nur Idioten brauchen Ordnung, das Genie findet sich in Chaos zurecht." (Only idiots need order; the genius is at home in chaos.)
How did I end up here? I had no plan, intention, or idea to write what I just did. This post is an example of how the play of the Logos constantly creates new ideas. There is no free will involved.
If we would collectively understand and give up the idea of "free will" the world would be a much, much better place, of that I am convinced. Nothing reinforces the ego more than the false idea of having a "free will". Nothing humbles the ego more than the proverb: "If you want to make the Gods laugh, tell them about your plans."
People in the West forget that whole cultures do without the concept of "free will", like the Hinduistic culture. Not surprisingly, they are much poorer in will-driven wealth but richer in family values, community, humbleness, health and spirituality.
I think the whole idea of "free will" is a capitalistic psyop to "fuel the American dream" and make a bit part of the population work their arses off in the rat race, sacrificing their families, relationships, health and spirituality to "make it", enriching the elites in the process, while all they get out of it if they are lucky, is to be a bit better off than their parents. (And even that seems to decline for most people while the elites get insanely rich.
Anyway, there are so many ideas, so much to write, so little time. Thank you for work and Happy Christmas.
Thanks BNGN, I enjoy reading your work, and Merry Christmas to you as well. I used to be more of an order guy myself and am not personally very messy, but time has humbled me. So much of life is outside of one's control, so to live in the moment and just do what one can do is the approach I've tried to embrace...subsuming one's will and integrating one's intuition and unconscious - Jung's individuation process - takes a leap of faith and a letting go of control that I think is very uncommon in the West these days, but one that is critical to stay sane, at least for me...
Re: fate vs. free will otherwise, I'm ambivalent... Astrologically it seems that much of our personalities and how they develop are predestined, and the idea of free will is irreconcilable with the idea of an omnipotent God (b/c the omnipotent God would know what you would do before you do it, so how could your decisions really be free? And if there is no free will then how could there be Heaven or Hell?), but the idea of living in a clock universe where everything is predetermined is also unsettling and depressing to me. Whether or not there is actually free will, I'd like to think there is, and that the karma we accumulate in this life, both for good and for bad, somehow equalizes in the afterlife.
Core ideas? Humans, like nature, are fundamentally anarchic, but that has never really been cultivated by any culture I am familiar with, not least by most people who call themselves anarchists.
We reincarnate. The Great Work of the Self us the point of this existence. Humanity is spiritually evolving, but it is still rather early in that process. Existence is a great deal more manifold than any existing culture believes. Magic and the occult in the Western tradition is a great deal more close to an understanding of reality than any of the existing religions or materialism.
Decentralization is necessary to the making of people, society and nature healthier. The next great step for humanity will be reconciling our relationship with the earth.
It's always a pleasure to read your essays, so thank you and merry Christmas to you and those you care about.
I felt really sheepish about your comment about reading previously published material from writers, which I've only occasionally done. Just today I read an essay of Nyons you liked from three years ago and feel much better for it.
In terms of predictions, my shot at the moon is a nato expeditionary force in the levant. I found myself reining in support for DJT by late summer in terms of revolutionizing the status quo. For instance, while peace is possible in Ukraine, Russia is asking for a comprehensive security architecture agreement, which isn't even in the vocab of anyone (with few exceptions). And my starting point is DJT represents rotten entrepreneurship and abuse of the tax structures. Yes he's a billionaire and got good instincts, but he doesn't embody virtues of a legendary leader and his dependency on networks (and not his own cognitive analytical framework) to bring him good qualitative info is a huge problem (for ex. the excuses made of DJT 16-20 rely on this excuse quite a bit, and normies have created a trope on this to excuse inconvenient outcomes).
Regarding the financial issues, the thing is, do fish know what is water? It's all good and well to discuss the relationships between different factions and central banks, but the rot goes much deeper (I had read somewhere that approx 40% of global money laundering activities occurs in GB territories linked to the crown, which no one talks about, except for briefly a decade ago in a WikiLeaks/ICJ "panama papers" scandal). My point is there are many more cogs in the machine and we ourselves are part of the same thing that's problematic, simply by existing in "the west". The tax issue I mentioned helps reveal hidden relationships which can trace themselves back for centuries beyond the Christian/Jewish framework. Our entire modern financialized capitalist system is interwoven with inequity and secrecy. None of this is at risk of unraveling without bringing down the edifice of babel. With this in mind, short sighted and flawed as it may be, the egalitarian ratchet effect of doubling down you discuss could be interpreted as a sort of soma to misdirect attention from what's really important, without realizing the monster it creates is unmanageable.
Borrowing from uncle Clif, I think 2025 is going to bring something new.
Basically, this conversation we're having, substack and xitter, etc, all this is the real internet revolution. The .com bubble was like the first printing press, whereas now we're in the "every town has its own newspaper/journal" territory. The visible effects are the flailing control narratives and the left/right online mobs, cancel culture, etc.
When Karl Marx published the communist manifesto, it was after the industrial revolution had begun, but before it became the technological revolution. I expect we'll see a new manifesto against the digital universe emerge uniting most dissenters and we'll know about it because it'll spread like wildfire. Remember that in the 19th century, besides communists, anarchists reached their zenith, and I'm guessing there were many more smaller ideological factions (fascism draws from eugenists etc).
Sorry for being verbose. But I mentioned uncle Clif because I think he's off only on timing. In Europe right now we're witnessing the rebirth of spontaneous anti-establishment public demonstrations. Over the course of the 20th century, the manifestation of dissent has become regulated in the West (ex you have to apply for a permit to protest). I think this will crumble in 2025 and Clif's prediction of a riot between long-time citizens and recent arrivals will unfold with ever greater zeal as time progresses.
And lastly, there's always the deagle state of the world in 2025 to consider. If a dirty firecracker or similar goes off in Russia related to Ukraine, we're not so far away from a nuclear MAD scenario.
Thanks for the comment, Stefano. I agree with you that Trump will be a disappointment.
I'm open to the idea of the secret nobility bloodlines going back long before the central banking issues, linked back to Rome or even previously, but my issue with it is there's no ways of verifying it. Understanding the structure of the modern banking system is something one can at least peripherally verify, such that it was Rothschilds and Rockefeller agents at the Jekyll island meeting setting up the Federal reserve, and information on understanding the formation of the Bank of England centuries prior. How does one go about verifying the nobility bloodline thesis?
I agree with you that the internet may ultimately prove as revolutionary as the printing press was; Protestantism would not have been created without it and it supercharged the secularization trends. We will see if this development is ultimately good or bad...
Let's hope nothing untoward happens between now and the inauguration.
You're right and I agree that there is a difference between being able to verify through documentary evidence vs leaning in/on deduction and theorizing.
Robert Sepher had a few interesting vids on YT recently linking Goths/Vikings to the levant and the origins of Aryans before this word was defaced. He's a self professed anthropologist by trade.
Having grown up around diverse environs, the thing is, there are many realities we're not privy to and will never be. The absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Unless you already know of it etc, I'm minded to double down and suggest reading up on the Panama papers offshore tax havens story by the International consortium of journalists because it's something worth knowing as a "what else is there".
'certain red lines of discussion that are simply off-limits'
This is completely true. Substack/xitter nu right nexus tends strongly towards mischlingheit/philosemitism (codeword: 'vitalism'; philosemitism is also present among many 'Trad' Christians, nominal enemies of 'vitalists'). I have commented elsewhere on this subject. I could copy and paste, but I won't.
'what are your core ideas and your unique ideas, if any?'
Thinking about this question I realise I find the two hard to separate, which probably means I'm not as original as I thought I was. Some ideas I guess are unique in context but pretty standard in a general sense. Let me try to lay them out.
Core 1: The Hajnal Line Matters: I re-hash HBD verities from 10-15 years ago (eg HBD chick, Peter Frost, KMac, Duchesne) while trying not to lean too heavily on stuff about IQ, which (1) I think underexplains social phenomena and (2) I distrust because--as Jewish, mischling and philosemitic nerds have colonised the HBD 'right'--it has for pretty obvious reasons become over-emphasised.
Core 2: the rise of the Western middle class, and the 'liberal' order it eventually engendered, more or less simultaneously brought about and went some way towards solving the 'large society problem'; liberalism uniquely allowed for the creation of high-trust mass societies in the West, *on pre-existing fertile psychosocial ground* dating back to at least the High Middle Ages.
(partially) Original 1: Baseline social trust is at least as important as IQ in explaining societal success; Western liberalism, as an expression of deep-seated high-trust NW Euro individualism, is not necessarily the ‘civilisational AIDS’ that the cookie-cutter right claims it to be and would be very hard for Westerners to shake; put in pseudo-Heideggerian terms, it’s *our way of being* (the fish-in-water simile would be a less pretentious way to put it).
(partially) Original 2: We Are Not The Same: the RW should be able to see under the skin better than the left; European whites have roughly the same skin tone but are profoundly different underneath; intra-European sociobiological/sociohistorical differences are highly consequential and can't easily be effaced.
(partially) Original 3: urbanisation and liberalism are recent, rough and uncomfortable grafts onto the historically personalistic/nepotistic/kleptocratic Romanian sociopolitical ethos; Romanians are a spiritually rural people, and Romania never produced a dominant native urban middle class -> one of the lowest-trust societies anywhere in the world. 'Free market democracy' is no solution to low social trust in Romania and in fact only makes things worse.
(partially) Original 4: Mass immigration is a *sufficient but not necessary condition* of a trashy low-trust anti-culture. Psychologically rural people divested of accustomed sources of leadership, and brought into in close contact with ascendant non-white 'national minorities' (eg Gypsies), are very liable to absorption and reproduction of both the transnational anti-culture AND the minority’s genes; rural people are low-trust people ('peasants always hate each other'); reflexive fetishisation of Eastern European mores by North American TRADs/conservatives is misguided.
(partially) Original 5: The 'Based East' is largely a chimera enjoyed by insular North American TRADs/conservatives, who in spite of their illusions (1) are inescapably wedded to 'liberal priors' and (2) see everything as 'whites' vs the rest--which is true, in a sense, but it’s not the whole story.
(partially) Original 6: Communism/Marxism/Socialism is not (fully or even mainly) to blame for Romanian social dysfunction; fewer than 20 years of EU membership has proved at least as damaging as 50 years of Communism.
None of these ideas is of wide interest, leads to 'whitepilling' or has/is going to win me many frens; I fully accept all this and value those who read my highly specialised hate-screeds.
'What is your filtering process for how you take in new information?'
It's hard to say. I would have to think about it a while longer, but I suppose it's a matter of 'feel' as much as anything else.
I typed out a long response but it somehow didn't get posted -- let's see... I agree with you that high community trust matters just as much if not more so than having high average IQs - this is why everyone wants to live in white Western countries and almost no one wants to more to East Asia, despite East Asia's higher average IQs (in some ways, anyway). The right's fetishization of IQ as basically the sole determinant of a strong functional society is wrong. The Machine running the post-industrial West basically takes unquantifiable things like community trust, breaks them down into it's constituent parts, and then quantifies them for financial exploitation - which then drains the community trust and leaves nothing but a destroyed husk behind. We are in a very late stage of this process in the West now... Re: Romania, it seems like you know a lot about the country and I'm interested to learn more - I mostly know about the country because of it's oil (critical for Nazi Germany), the great Romanian/French philosopher Emil Cioran (who I will cover in future posts), the Iron Guard, and of course the gypsies...
'the great Romanian/French philosopher Emil Cioran (who I will cover in future posts), the Iron Guard'
These are underrrated figures; I look forward to reading your account of Cioran's thought.
'The Machine running the post-industrial West basically takes unquantifiable things like community trust, breaks them down into it's constituent parts, and then quantifies them for financial exploitation - which then drains the community trust and leaves nothing but a destroyed husk behind.'
I disagree on the "liberalism uniquely allowed for the creation of high-trust society."
I think good governance and a perception of a functional just judicial/legal system is the underpinning of all complex societies. A cursory glance at Asia (ex India and China pre-19th c. and the Thai monarchy) reveals trust in institutions is not a uniquely Western phenomena and has more to do with our perception of justice and the avoidance of tyrants (not all Kings were psychopaths). High/low trust is downstream of a justice system and overrated (for me); economic development is more about the ability for strangers to expect contracts will be honored because consequences are not dependent on whether you have good contacts with the nobility (for ex. This is why economic growth is poor if crime/mafia etc is high).
Not sure what you mean by your "(partial) original 1 & 2", but unfortunately racism exists pretty much everywhere (it's downstream of your orig.2 "differences can't be effaced"), either overtly or under wraps. It exists in Africa, Asia, the ME and S. America too, not just on the old continent or North America. If anything, the USA is incredibly unracist and I think this is a good thing. As a multicultural European who has lived for decades around the world, I can say it can be incredibly frustrating to see bourgeois Europeans virtue signal their liberal values, as long as the savage migrants are housed in a different post code.
Unfortunately many RW are not intellectually minded, and shouting slogans is always easier than reading a book (like being lazy), which makes it really easy for them to be manipulated, pointed in a direction and told to charge mindlessly. The education system in Europe is incredibly pretentious, and in all probability was designed to be this way to stop people from developing analytical and critical thinking skills and becoming independent humans.
I appreciate your thoughtful, non cookie-cutter remarks.
'unfortunately racism exists pretty much everywhere'
Eh it's just nature speaking. The question is, what is to be done about it?
'trust in institutions'
I didn't rilly mean this kind of trust; I was referring to trust between man and man, of which an obvious manifestation is, as you mention, the honouring of contracts.
I often go around your old posts...I think, and it is just me, that your ideas and your writings are excellent. It is not necessary to write about something new - just for me, again, is more important from your writing to learn what others think about some subjects. Shortly: one of the best for me here on substack, if it means something.
Wish you all well and Merry Christmas...from Croatia
Thanks Alex, I appreciate it. Merry Christmas to you as well.
My core idea is that freedom is more than just lack of Big Government. An excessive wealth gap constitutes a power relationship. Fortunately, there are ways to narrow the wealth gap while cutting government. Cutting the deficit would be a good start: https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/debt-is-dumb
Not an entirely original idea. Adam Smith was pushing for smaller government while being on the political left of his day. And he pointed out that quantity of land and capital ("stock" was the term he used) vs. labor determined wage rates. I'm just trying to revive the idea without attaching it to conspiracy theories. (Even when true, conspiracy theories can be a distraction. The bad guys often win by default.)
Perhaps my most original idea is that we can make common cause with environmentalists. Deep environmentalism is as reactionary a sentiment as it gets. "Buy local" is Trumpy trade policy taken to the next level. See https://rulesforreactionaries.substack.com/p/rule-11-exploit-the-environmentalists for a start. Look for the Green RINOs on my archive page for lots more.
My grounding mechanism has been to network with members of other political factions. I've attended meetings across the political spectrum, from angry hillbillies on the racist right to tofu eating progressives on the far left. I even endured a Rotary Club meeting.
For a time I distributed a libertarian propaganda newspaper to the kinds of coffee shops you might find in Portlandia, and it was well received. When Ron Paul ran for president, many eco-hippie types showed up for the meetup I organized. The overlap in values is not just theoretical.
Thanks for the response, Fabius. I agree with you both on cutting the debt and the importance of sustainable environmentalism. I think many on the political right are so knee-jerk to avoid what has been traditionally perceived as left-wing issues that there is an opportunity to embrace them and gain a lot of support. Getting out of the tired "Republican" vs. "Democrat" dynamics can only be a good thing.
At the risk of stepping outside my experience I would say that actual role of politics in a monolithic society is distraction and the development of narratives that are intentionally inane. We see this in that exceptionally few genuine concerns of the people are ever acknowledged much less addressed.
What this means is that there are plenty of topics that are off limits, plenty of places that cannot be examined, plenty of intellectual discussions that will never reach an airing.
The decisions that are made, the ones that matter are all done in secret and under the table. This is masked by the circus act which is visible government.
To suggest in all of this that government reflects a culture, or substantive thought of the people it rules is simply just wishful thinking.
Similarly, the actual purpose in such a system of religion is provide identity and to enlist support for government policy.
The actual dynamic of culture is mostly a method with which to keep the populous divided and at each others throats. The better to rule them, fleece them, and parasite upon them.
Civilization is congradulated as an advancement according to the contribution of a relatively small number of extraordinary individuals, yet there is little comparison available to other systems besides the civilization complex.
The terror and certainty that without civilization and government people would perish keeps the people striving in abysmal conditions.
There is very little intellection or rationality in government, religion, or society. The basis of decision is quite apparently largely based upon unexamined urges, the exercise of power. Meanwhile any human development, such as with art, is left to founder unless it captures the self serving interest of the privileged.
Considering this, predictions must involve the actual unevolved core of the decision makers, that and those which support and manifest their ruthless primitivism, and for clues we should look more into that stagnant nature, how it is modified and develops expectations, and what the actual scope of its limited comprehension brings.
What we find is that the highest levels of society are moved by forces they neither comprehend or effectively describe. The current monolithic system is not created or built by those who benefit from it. Their actual position owes more to great cycles of time, and the personality of the age we are living in, than any competence or ability.
It is now at the point, where if one finds value in the higher nature of mankind, one must protect, feed and exercise it themselves.
Hi Mike, thanks for the comment. I agree with you that at least our elected leaders seem both dumber and hypocritical, selfish, greedy and aggressive than ever, and that our elites seek to separate the masses into endless squabbling and distracted groups so they are too busy in-fighting to focus on the actual elites. I think it’s an open question how much our central bank owning elites behind the scenes remain in control of the overall process of the technological machine, as you’re right, this system was put into place long before any of this current crop were ever born. How much power and control does a 10th or 15th generation Rothschild exercise, for example? I delved into this open question in this prior post: https://neofeudalism.substack.com/p/appendix-b-a-caveat-the-rise-of-a
I agree with you too, of course, that ultimately we can only focus on our own efforts and what we can control in our limited domains, to nurture the good and the just where we can.
So, in your view, Neo, we've got as our only possible governmental forms either (1) oligarchy/Potemkin democracy or (2) feudalism -- and egalitarianism is bad, verboten, and should be somehow excised from all consideration and implementation as a governmental style. Anthropologically speaking, however, egalitarianism was, in fact, the dominant and longest-lasting (self)governmental approach in the old (million plus years in the past up to the Neolithic -- and in some places, still) hunter-gatherer days well, well before that young upstart Jesus with his egalitarian tendencies. Good luck to anyone trying to (recursively) talk that egalitarian impulse out of all of us: it's definitely bred in the bone.
It is also, you must surely realize, the deep, continuing influence of the basic human egalitarian impulse that got Trump elected both (three?) times. No further egalitarian ratchet effect consolidation as you have predicted will occur post-Trump: the axle of that particular ratchet gear is fixed permanently somewhere down in the earth's mantle and needs no further consolidation.
As to the lack of open discussion about certain red lined topics. Mention of these topics raises immediate social allergic/immune responses in a good portion of the immense Western body politic, and therefore just cannot be usefully talked about very widely at all. But, even at the micro-scale, many stable marriages have just these sort of 'issues' in their history encapsulated with enough old protective scar tissue to preserve effective marriage function. However, in the marriage case, if only one partner is at fault, the other partner can sometimes help bring about rectification of the problem with simple patient forbearance, waiting for 'realization' or self-administered 'consequences' to wake up the other party. The same thing can certainly happen at the macro-scale: see, for example, the COVID19 cultural and biological hangover now being miserably enjoyed by the pro-Vaxxing crowd.
Thanks for the comment, Larry. I agree with you that humanity has an egalitarian impulse, because it is easier and safer to get along with neighbors than to bash their skulls in, and this concept scales with size. It's also useful to gain power by appealing to the lowest stratum of society. As I've written elsewhere, even Julian the Apostate, if he had won in his battle against the Christians, would have had to incorporate Christian almsgiving and other innovations into the Hellenic religions, which he had planned to do before he was assassinated. His plan was an implicit acknowledgment of the power of egalitarianism. What I disagree with is that we've raised this egalitarian impulse to the level of a religion, where investigation and discussion about biological differences between peoples on the level of gender and race, along with other differences such as over religion, is forbidden (see the controversy over The Bell Curve as an example). Any such differences are equated to the various -isms of the world, and western civilization is considered the devil for holding everyone else down. As I wrote, I would like to see a balance between egalitarian and inegalitarian impulses, not a total swap from the former to the latter.
Re: Trump, while he ran on a race-blind platform in 2020 and 2024, his 2015/2016 platform was decidedly inegalitarian and white populist. You wrote, "No further egalitarian ratchet effect consolidation as you have predicted will occur post-Trump: the axle of that particular ratchet gear is fixed permanently somewhere down in the earth's mantle and needs no further consolidation." That's funny and we will see - I'd be interested in a prediction post by you about the future if you decide to do one. There's plenty of more ratcheting they could do, imo: they could lower the voting age, they could legalize pedophelia or beastiality. Who would have thought they would make brutal child sex changes legal fifteen or twenty years ago?
"As to the lack of open discussion about certain red lined topics. Mention of these topics raises immediate social allergic/immune responses in a good portion of the immense Western body politic, and therefore just cannot be usefully talked about very widely at all." I agree with you here - hence the urge to write about it...
Some of the recent 'egalitarian' ratchet effects you name above, Neo, are not really egalitarian in nature-- they are just cases of newly-emergent, wigged-out human idiocy flying (crawling?) under a false narrative flag of egalitarianism. This sort of thing really shouldn't be tried at home by wigged-out idiotic amateurs who can't change a tire and are basically hirelings (or future hirelings) unable to effectively direct even themselves -- but what are you going to do about such a problem when so many are confidently trending that way? Talk to them and thus simply convince them to mend their rotten ways? Right.
More as to the reason(s) some topics cannot be raised: I'd say that at 'any one time' nearly half of humanity is busy confusedly flitting from one high anxiety to the next and therefore cannot be trusted to not go full tantrum at that 'any one time'. Measured forbearance of the strong is therefore always strategically warranted, but especially these days, just to help keep things from flying apart in a bunch of simultaneous tantrum storms (like those seen time after time in the last several decades, and the last few years especially). We all live in one big neighborhood with buzzing hornet's nests constructed everywhere.
I believe there is already a permanent moderating tension between egalitarian and non-egalitarian impulses, it's just that the over-egalitarian impulse has increasingly had its way more often for a while due to the (relatively) easy living conditions of the last 200 years or so -- and especially over the last 60-70 years. Metaphorically speaking, the permissive economic conditions leading to a high incidence of single head of household families, for example, also leads to numerous kinds of other disturbing imbalances. The non-egalitarian impulse has its own ratchet, however; i.e., the accelerating return of economic hardship. Its strength is, by nature, stronger than its opposite and can easily strip more decorative, less important egalitarian gears.
What I meant by the egalitarian ratchet axis being cemented into the earth's mantle is that the ratchet itself is not going anywhere, and cannot be made more or less permanent (or 'consolidated'). I evidently misunderstood what you meant to convey by your use of the phrase, consolidation of the egalitarian ratchet.
Yes, your comment brings to mind (1) the Calhoun mouse experiments where utopian conditions eventually led to unnatural mouse behavioral changes and atomization before the entire colony collapsed, and (2) an image of an ant colony that comes across a giant pile of sugar, eats it and the colony grows, then it collapses when the sugar runs out. For humanity we've been in a similar utopian mouse experiment/ant colony with sugar pile, more or less, related to consumption of world resources since the industrial revolution and supercharged by oil consumption. But now with the deteriorating economic conditions - related to too much debt and the decline of EROEI that you recently wrote about - means that the future is going to be a lot harder for people, and that it's going to last for a very long time - decades? centuries? forever? It will be interesting to see how that manifests culturally and politically and the effect it has on this push for ever-increasing egalitarianism. One of the conditions where core values of a society may end, as I noted, was from internal societal collapse...
oh no
malthus yucky
Refuting Malthus: the Geopolitics of Creativity and Open Systems Explored
https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/refuting-malthus-the-geopolitics
How Darwin's Theory of Evolution created Eugenics and Transhumanism
https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/how-darwins-theory-of-evolution-created
https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/how-darwins-theory-of-evolution-created/comment/13353158
Hi Tommy, you might appreciate my back-and-forth with the wonderful Guido Preparata on the topic of Malthus, as he too believes Malthus is "yucky" as you put it. The written interview is here: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/interview-with-guido-preparata
The specific back-and-forth is as follows:
NLF: You expressed contempt for Malthus's overpopulation arguments in one of the Youtube videos. Do you delve into why you don't like those arguments anywhere? (I previously took the pro-neomalthusian position).
GP: It is the standard oligarchic intimation whereby poverty and exploitation are blamed on "Nature." In our human version of the slave-making queens' "chemical communication" (the gasses they emit when attacking a nest to sow chaos among the defensive lines), the suggestions are indeed very few: they're all about labor and procreation. And Malthus, who plagiarized the main idea from a Venetian economist, Ortes, focused precisely on these variables. Not by chance that he was also a paid consultant of the East India company, the great corporate techno-structural mother.
NLF: It does make sense that Malthusian arguments are used by the elites in order to affect consumption by the masses for their own ends. My question though is more basic: do you think there are limits to worldwide consumption based on the availability of natural resources? When I look at the rates (or rather, the reported rates) of natural resource consumption, rates of species die-offs and loss of biodiversity, etc, it doesn't look very long-term sustainable. It makes intuitive sense to me that on a planet of limited natural resources and parabolically expanding human population based essentially on oil that there are some inbuilt natural limits and we will hit them sooner or later, unless one believes in the infinite adaptability of human ingenuity. For example, it is estimated that no more than 3.7 billion people could be fed without just one synthetic nitrogen fertilizer input (derived from natural gas) boosting agricultural output. I particularly enjoyed this post.
GP: Yes, I understand those concerns and yes, I agree that in the name of green conservation, the fascists will want to turn the screws entirely on us.
In that sense, these guys at the top and their screenwriters are extremely uninhibited with changing narratives and "ism" when it suits them, machos one day anti-macho the next, Malthusians at heart and fair weather anti-Malthusians rolled into into one: I suppose the message the Earth is sending us is that she is indeed bountiful but there is an ideal stable limit we should strive for planet-wise in terms of family units and standard of consumption. Now it is all helter-skelter, and the parasites, who are fully responsible for the immense waste, pollution, and screaming disparities juggle the argument form both ends as they see fit.
Rapa Nui Hooey?
Easter Island resurrected
https://tomg2021.substack.com/p/rapa-nui-hooey
The Aurignacian people who inhabited the Vogelherd Cave 30,000 years ago carved this beautiful horse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MUT-9846.jpg
Obviously they were not stupid. They numbered less than 10,000 in all of Europe, as far as I can tell from wikipedia, although that seems incredible.
Probably they thought that they were at the carrying capacity of their world.
I don't mean to imply that humans will or should breed beyond the carrying capacity of their world, I think they wouldn't breed wildly if they were more secure, but the point is that the carrying capacity is not something externally defined and fixed because it depends on innovations unknown.
“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.” ― Lord Acton
That's a great quote, but apparently it doesn't appear in any of his published writings.
got it from goodreads.com
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/969937.John_Emerich_Edward_Dalberg_Acton
Goodreads.com is Amazon owned, and you can trust Jeff Bezos because he drives a pickup truck and wears a cowboy hat and a t shirt and there are pictures to verify that, although his wife looks kind of skanky.
Funny. See here though: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton#Misattributed
Thanks, didn't know that. Its tempting to keep using it and blame JB if called on it, but I'll stop using it. That's assuming Wickapedia is right though.
My core ideas are all centered around Scholastic Theology and Philosophy, because everything that I have observed and read has shown me that the abandonment of it was categorically false. I can find readings from Edward Feser, to Podcasts from Thomas Aquinas College to name two of many, to further meditate upon these core beliefs easily online. I can also read the great core works. I try to take time out of my day to do so, away from the electronic noise of a computer or device. I make especially sure that my children and family see me do so multiple times a week, and spend time with them doing so quietly reading.
My unique ideas involve filtering new information through the viewpoints of such, and my writing reflects that. As you, I have a short form substack as well as a long form one - though it looks as if you've abandoned the long form. The long form one is not all that long, but mostly written as a series on particular subjects, with a culminating long form to gather up the thoughts and delve deeper into each particular topic as I've meditated upon them during the course of the writing as well. All of these in the series are dedicated towards building Polities and Societies as our world, the empire of the USSA, crumbles around us.
The short form one offs are insights into how the world works with these viewpoints that I hold. How I parse information as real and unreal, the roles that people play, their relationships with each other, the systems they operate within.
I parse information somewhat trying to just follow trends and see where things are going. I'm not an autistic date cruncher or reader. I'm just well decently well educated in history, well read in philosophy, theology, and Catholicism. I'm good at seeing trends and guessing where things will go, but not the best. Most importantly, though, I have a good intuition for seeing the nature of things and the world, so that's the subject I stick to in my writing, and it is what most intrigues me.
Thanks for sharing, Uncouth. It's interesting that you've also gravitated toward a short form/long from model, which is rare. Re: my long form Substack, it was basically a book published in parts and clocked in at 137,000 words which I shared for free with others in the hopes of disseminating it's ideas farther. It's finished and I do go back every now and then to edit it for readability and clarity, but I don't intend to publish more there otherwise.
Of course.
I did so because I wanted to keep something where I could write very focused types of articles, in a very stylistic manner. They're all structured the same. Same layout, about the same length, same over arching topic - building a Polity out of a community. One centered upon a religious place of worship, turning friends and family into not just people you see, but actual -real- human relationships. If you click the 'start here' tab, you can go through how I see that forming. The current series of articles, slavery, will relate the topics of freedom and slavery as the pertain to the medieval understanding, how it operates within the regular city (what I call a Metropolis in relationship to Rome, Constantinople, etc), and a Polity of people bound by blood and kin ties. We'll see where it goes, it'll be fun, and most can be easily read on a work break or while eating lunch at work.
Anyways.
After I hit my stride, and really started wanting to branch out though... I wanted to just write. And I didn't want to make it so that readers had to flood their emails or reading with both if they didn't want to. So, they could chose both, or one or the other. It let me not worry about the audiences, and just keep doing what I wanted to do, in the way I wanted to do it.
You are touching topics I never thought could be worth reading it like astrology, yet it makes sense. Leading me to realize I do know very little about whats going on. I bought months ago the audio book Dominion from Tom Holland and still did not finish it. As I said I am still at the beginning of my learning/knowledge/education curve.
-> thats the problem: where to start but not getting lost in this universe where I barely know our solar system not mentioning the milky way and beyond.
Maybe a map and Stargate would help. I wish I could hop from one topic to another without getting lost. But I try connecting the dots and understand the bigger picture.
I subscribe to many writes on substack. Truthfully, I get more articles than I can read in a day. I have developed a triage. Some I will delete if the title doesn’t catch my attention. I know which ones these usually are. Periodically they surprise me, so I always check. The second group I consistently will read the first and last few paragraphs. If something blows my hair back, I’ll take time to read the whole thing. But again, I usually know who these writers are.
However, there are some, perhaps five, maybe, where I will save their article and wait u til I am completely undistracted, so I can read every last word and fully absorb all the details they present. You are one such writer.
Cheers! Thanks for what you do.
Thanks Simon, that’s a nice compliment. I enjoy interacting with you and learning from you as well.
BTW... Merry Christmas, you're one of my favorite writers.
Thanks Wheel, Merry Christmas to you as well. I enjoy reading your writing as well (although it’s been awhile since you posted!).
My core idea is that tax = slavery, if we are forced under the threat of violence to pay taxes on "our property" or give up part of earnings that we have labored for then we are not free. It's an illusion that we own anything and that our time is our own. With deficit spending/borrowing and an unlimited money machine controlled by the gov't, I think the only reason for taxes is to keep us plebs in check.
I agree with you for the most part — I’m not opposed to some sort of taxation in theory, but we get very little value out of the taxes we pay and the IRS operates as a mafia shakedown operation for the Rothschild central bank owners. Nasty stuff.
A lot of my core ideas align with yours but bring a little nuance simply from the perspective of raw energy dynamics see my latest post... its not 137000 words but could easily blow out.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thumbnailgreen/p/all-lives-within-an-energy-system?r=nv8me&utm_medium=ios
Your "long 137.000 word piece" influenced my thinking greatly and is still one of the best, if not the best, articles I have read here in the past two years.
Regarding original ideas: Isn't an original idea always a combination and build on already "known" ideas? I don't think we can ever invent something genuinely new as every "new idea" is built on old concepts mixed in a new way.
The problem is that only a few readers want to read about new combinations of ideas.
You will never become a "successful" writer doing that - maybe in old age (like Henry Miller) or postmortem, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. (I remember reading about how Nietzsche had to strongly convince his publisher to print 1000 books, of which only 500 were sold during his lifetime.)
Genuinely great books and minds are, by definition, ahead of their peers and the Zeitgeist. I don't even think these contributions are of a single mind. Great riders can tune into the collective unconscious and are "compelled" to express it, sometimes not fully understanding it.
Most people find it hard to read and look outside their "Overton Windows." New ideas create chaos in people's minds, and most people don't welcome "chaos" as much as "order".
Jordan Peterson (I am no big fan) did a fascinating essay on "order and chaos" and rightly pointed out, as I interpreted it, that too much order kills and destroys all creativity, joy, love, and progress (fascism). Chaos, in turn, is exceptionally creative and fluid, living and thinking from moment to moment.
I am extremely messy - my garage and workshop are chaos (sometimes even too much for myself), but if no one moves things without my knowledge, I find the right tool in that chaos 95% of the time. When I was young, as a tool to defend against criticism of my chaos, I embraced a German proverb, "Nur Idioten brauchen Ordnung, das Genie findet sich in Chaos zurecht." (Only idiots need order; the genius is at home in chaos.)
How did I end up here? I had no plan, intention, or idea to write what I just did. This post is an example of how the play of the Logos constantly creates new ideas. There is no free will involved.
If we would collectively understand and give up the idea of "free will" the world would be a much, much better place, of that I am convinced. Nothing reinforces the ego more than the false idea of having a "free will". Nothing humbles the ego more than the proverb: "If you want to make the Gods laugh, tell them about your plans."
People in the West forget that whole cultures do without the concept of "free will", like the Hinduistic culture. Not surprisingly, they are much poorer in will-driven wealth but richer in family values, community, humbleness, health and spirituality.
I think the whole idea of "free will" is a capitalistic psyop to "fuel the American dream" and make a bit part of the population work their arses off in the rat race, sacrificing their families, relationships, health and spirituality to "make it", enriching the elites in the process, while all they get out of it if they are lucky, is to be a bit better off than their parents. (And even that seems to decline for most people while the elites get insanely rich.
Anyway, there are so many ideas, so much to write, so little time. Thank you for work and Happy Christmas.
Thanks BNGN, I enjoy reading your work, and Merry Christmas to you as well. I used to be more of an order guy myself and am not personally very messy, but time has humbled me. So much of life is outside of one's control, so to live in the moment and just do what one can do is the approach I've tried to embrace...subsuming one's will and integrating one's intuition and unconscious - Jung's individuation process - takes a leap of faith and a letting go of control that I think is very uncommon in the West these days, but one that is critical to stay sane, at least for me...
Re: fate vs. free will otherwise, I'm ambivalent... Astrologically it seems that much of our personalities and how they develop are predestined, and the idea of free will is irreconcilable with the idea of an omnipotent God (b/c the omnipotent God would know what you would do before you do it, so how could your decisions really be free? And if there is no free will then how could there be Heaven or Hell?), but the idea of living in a clock universe where everything is predetermined is also unsettling and depressing to me. Whether or not there is actually free will, I'd like to think there is, and that the karma we accumulate in this life, both for good and for bad, somehow equalizes in the afterlife.
137,000 words is a fairly long book, just sayin'.
Core ideas? Humans, like nature, are fundamentally anarchic, but that has never really been cultivated by any culture I am familiar with, not least by most people who call themselves anarchists.
We reincarnate. The Great Work of the Self us the point of this existence. Humanity is spiritually evolving, but it is still rather early in that process. Existence is a great deal more manifold than any existing culture believes. Magic and the occult in the Western tradition is a great deal more close to an understanding of reality than any of the existing religions or materialism.
Decentralization is necessary to the making of people, society and nature healthier. The next great step for humanity will be reconciling our relationship with the earth.
It's always a pleasure to read your essays, so thank you and merry Christmas to you and those you care about.
I felt really sheepish about your comment about reading previously published material from writers, which I've only occasionally done. Just today I read an essay of Nyons you liked from three years ago and feel much better for it.
In terms of predictions, my shot at the moon is a nato expeditionary force in the levant. I found myself reining in support for DJT by late summer in terms of revolutionizing the status quo. For instance, while peace is possible in Ukraine, Russia is asking for a comprehensive security architecture agreement, which isn't even in the vocab of anyone (with few exceptions). And my starting point is DJT represents rotten entrepreneurship and abuse of the tax structures. Yes he's a billionaire and got good instincts, but he doesn't embody virtues of a legendary leader and his dependency on networks (and not his own cognitive analytical framework) to bring him good qualitative info is a huge problem (for ex. the excuses made of DJT 16-20 rely on this excuse quite a bit, and normies have created a trope on this to excuse inconvenient outcomes).
Regarding the financial issues, the thing is, do fish know what is water? It's all good and well to discuss the relationships between different factions and central banks, but the rot goes much deeper (I had read somewhere that approx 40% of global money laundering activities occurs in GB territories linked to the crown, which no one talks about, except for briefly a decade ago in a WikiLeaks/ICJ "panama papers" scandal). My point is there are many more cogs in the machine and we ourselves are part of the same thing that's problematic, simply by existing in "the west". The tax issue I mentioned helps reveal hidden relationships which can trace themselves back for centuries beyond the Christian/Jewish framework. Our entire modern financialized capitalist system is interwoven with inequity and secrecy. None of this is at risk of unraveling without bringing down the edifice of babel. With this in mind, short sighted and flawed as it may be, the egalitarian ratchet effect of doubling down you discuss could be interpreted as a sort of soma to misdirect attention from what's really important, without realizing the monster it creates is unmanageable.
Borrowing from uncle Clif, I think 2025 is going to bring something new.
Basically, this conversation we're having, substack and xitter, etc, all this is the real internet revolution. The .com bubble was like the first printing press, whereas now we're in the "every town has its own newspaper/journal" territory. The visible effects are the flailing control narratives and the left/right online mobs, cancel culture, etc.
When Karl Marx published the communist manifesto, it was after the industrial revolution had begun, but before it became the technological revolution. I expect we'll see a new manifesto against the digital universe emerge uniting most dissenters and we'll know about it because it'll spread like wildfire. Remember that in the 19th century, besides communists, anarchists reached their zenith, and I'm guessing there were many more smaller ideological factions (fascism draws from eugenists etc).
Sorry for being verbose. But I mentioned uncle Clif because I think he's off only on timing. In Europe right now we're witnessing the rebirth of spontaneous anti-establishment public demonstrations. Over the course of the 20th century, the manifestation of dissent has become regulated in the West (ex you have to apply for a permit to protest). I think this will crumble in 2025 and Clif's prediction of a riot between long-time citizens and recent arrivals will unfold with ever greater zeal as time progresses.
And lastly, there's always the deagle state of the world in 2025 to consider. If a dirty firecracker or similar goes off in Russia related to Ukraine, we're not so far away from a nuclear MAD scenario.
Thanks for the comment, Stefano. I agree with you that Trump will be a disappointment.
I'm open to the idea of the secret nobility bloodlines going back long before the central banking issues, linked back to Rome or even previously, but my issue with it is there's no ways of verifying it. Understanding the structure of the modern banking system is something one can at least peripherally verify, such that it was Rothschilds and Rockefeller agents at the Jekyll island meeting setting up the Federal reserve, and information on understanding the formation of the Bank of England centuries prior. How does one go about verifying the nobility bloodline thesis?
I agree with you that the internet may ultimately prove as revolutionary as the printing press was; Protestantism would not have been created without it and it supercharged the secularization trends. We will see if this development is ultimately good or bad...
Let's hope nothing untoward happens between now and the inauguration.
You're right and I agree that there is a difference between being able to verify through documentary evidence vs leaning in/on deduction and theorizing.
Robert Sepher had a few interesting vids on YT recently linking Goths/Vikings to the levant and the origins of Aryans before this word was defaced. He's a self professed anthropologist by trade.
Having grown up around diverse environs, the thing is, there are many realities we're not privy to and will never be. The absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Unless you already know of it etc, I'm minded to double down and suggest reading up on the Panama papers offshore tax havens story by the International consortium of journalists because it's something worth knowing as a "what else is there".
'certain red lines of discussion that are simply off-limits'
This is completely true. Substack/xitter nu right nexus tends strongly towards mischlingheit/philosemitism (codeword: 'vitalism'; philosemitism is also present among many 'Trad' Christians, nominal enemies of 'vitalists'). I have commented elsewhere on this subject. I could copy and paste, but I won't.
'what are your core ideas and your unique ideas, if any?'
Thinking about this question I realise I find the two hard to separate, which probably means I'm not as original as I thought I was. Some ideas I guess are unique in context but pretty standard in a general sense. Let me try to lay them out.
Core 1: The Hajnal Line Matters: I re-hash HBD verities from 10-15 years ago (eg HBD chick, Peter Frost, KMac, Duchesne) while trying not to lean too heavily on stuff about IQ, which (1) I think underexplains social phenomena and (2) I distrust because--as Jewish, mischling and philosemitic nerds have colonised the HBD 'right'--it has for pretty obvious reasons become over-emphasised.
Core 2: the rise of the Western middle class, and the 'liberal' order it eventually engendered, more or less simultaneously brought about and went some way towards solving the 'large society problem'; liberalism uniquely allowed for the creation of high-trust mass societies in the West, *on pre-existing fertile psychosocial ground* dating back to at least the High Middle Ages.
(partially) Original 1: Baseline social trust is at least as important as IQ in explaining societal success; Western liberalism, as an expression of deep-seated high-trust NW Euro individualism, is not necessarily the ‘civilisational AIDS’ that the cookie-cutter right claims it to be and would be very hard for Westerners to shake; put in pseudo-Heideggerian terms, it’s *our way of being* (the fish-in-water simile would be a less pretentious way to put it).
(partially) Original 2: We Are Not The Same: the RW should be able to see under the skin better than the left; European whites have roughly the same skin tone but are profoundly different underneath; intra-European sociobiological/sociohistorical differences are highly consequential and can't easily be effaced.
(partially) Original 3: urbanisation and liberalism are recent, rough and uncomfortable grafts onto the historically personalistic/nepotistic/kleptocratic Romanian sociopolitical ethos; Romanians are a spiritually rural people, and Romania never produced a dominant native urban middle class -> one of the lowest-trust societies anywhere in the world. 'Free market democracy' is no solution to low social trust in Romania and in fact only makes things worse.
(partially) Original 4: Mass immigration is a *sufficient but not necessary condition* of a trashy low-trust anti-culture. Psychologically rural people divested of accustomed sources of leadership, and brought into in close contact with ascendant non-white 'national minorities' (eg Gypsies), are very liable to absorption and reproduction of both the transnational anti-culture AND the minority’s genes; rural people are low-trust people ('peasants always hate each other'); reflexive fetishisation of Eastern European mores by North American TRADs/conservatives is misguided.
(partially) Original 5: The 'Based East' is largely a chimera enjoyed by insular North American TRADs/conservatives, who in spite of their illusions (1) are inescapably wedded to 'liberal priors' and (2) see everything as 'whites' vs the rest--which is true, in a sense, but it’s not the whole story.
(partially) Original 6: Communism/Marxism/Socialism is not (fully or even mainly) to blame for Romanian social dysfunction; fewer than 20 years of EU membership has proved at least as damaging as 50 years of Communism.
None of these ideas is of wide interest, leads to 'whitepilling' or has/is going to win me many frens; I fully accept all this and value those who read my highly specialised hate-screeds.
'What is your filtering process for how you take in new information?'
It's hard to say. I would have to think about it a while longer, but I suppose it's a matter of 'feel' as much as anything else.
I typed out a long response but it somehow didn't get posted -- let's see... I agree with you that high community trust matters just as much if not more so than having high average IQs - this is why everyone wants to live in white Western countries and almost no one wants to more to East Asia, despite East Asia's higher average IQs (in some ways, anyway). The right's fetishization of IQ as basically the sole determinant of a strong functional society is wrong. The Machine running the post-industrial West basically takes unquantifiable things like community trust, breaks them down into it's constituent parts, and then quantifies them for financial exploitation - which then drains the community trust and leaves nothing but a destroyed husk behind. We are in a very late stage of this process in the West now... Re: Romania, it seems like you know a lot about the country and I'm interested to learn more - I mostly know about the country because of it's oil (critical for Nazi Germany), the great Romanian/French philosopher Emil Cioran (who I will cover in future posts), the Iron Guard, and of course the gypsies...
Thanks for response Neo(?)
'the great Romanian/French philosopher Emil Cioran (who I will cover in future posts), the Iron Guard'
These are underrrated figures; I look forward to reading your account of Cioran's thought.
'The Machine running the post-industrial West basically takes unquantifiable things like community trust, breaks them down into it's constituent parts, and then quantifies them for financial exploitation - which then drains the community trust and leaves nothing but a destroyed husk behind.'
Yes
A happy Christmas to you sah!
Very interesting response, Shade, thanks for sharing. I'll respond in more detail to it later.
Wow, and I thought I was off the reservation 🤣🤣🤣
I disagree on the "liberalism uniquely allowed for the creation of high-trust society."
I think good governance and a perception of a functional just judicial/legal system is the underpinning of all complex societies. A cursory glance at Asia (ex India and China pre-19th c. and the Thai monarchy) reveals trust in institutions is not a uniquely Western phenomena and has more to do with our perception of justice and the avoidance of tyrants (not all Kings were psychopaths). High/low trust is downstream of a justice system and overrated (for me); economic development is more about the ability for strangers to expect contracts will be honored because consequences are not dependent on whether you have good contacts with the nobility (for ex. This is why economic growth is poor if crime/mafia etc is high).
Not sure what you mean by your "(partial) original 1 & 2", but unfortunately racism exists pretty much everywhere (it's downstream of your orig.2 "differences can't be effaced"), either overtly or under wraps. It exists in Africa, Asia, the ME and S. America too, not just on the old continent or North America. If anything, the USA is incredibly unracist and I think this is a good thing. As a multicultural European who has lived for decades around the world, I can say it can be incredibly frustrating to see bourgeois Europeans virtue signal their liberal values, as long as the savage migrants are housed in a different post code.
Unfortunately many RW are not intellectually minded, and shouting slogans is always easier than reading a book (like being lazy), which makes it really easy for them to be manipulated, pointed in a direction and told to charge mindlessly. The education system in Europe is incredibly pretentious, and in all probability was designed to be this way to stop people from developing analytical and critical thinking skills and becoming independent humans.
I appreciate your thoughtful, non cookie-cutter remarks.
'unfortunately racism exists pretty much everywhere'
Eh it's just nature speaking. The question is, what is to be done about it?
'trust in institutions'
I didn't rilly mean this kind of trust; I was referring to trust between man and man, of which an obvious manifestation is, as you mention, the honouring of contracts.
"What are your core ideas and your unique ideas, if any?
What is your filtering process for how you take in new information?"
These are great interview questions - will use these. Thanks.