This post looks at the appeal of Islam through French author Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission.” Houellebecq is a master storyteller and operates on multiple levels: even as he lays out a scenario for an Islamic conquest of France - both how it might happen politically as well as the appeal of Islam to higher-status Western men - he intends it as a warning for the West to wake up and reject it before it’s too late.
“[Houellebecq] is not merely a satirist but - more unusually - a sincere satirist, genuinely saddened by the absurdities of history and the madnesses of mankind. He doesn’t “delight in depicting our follies,” as reviewers like to say; he’s made miserable by them.” - Adam Gopnik in his review of Submission
Sometimes when you read someone new you are able to draw an almost instantaneous impression of the writer: you love him or you hate him.
For example, I wanted to read a biography on Andrew Jackson. He was an interesting and complicated man, known as a populist who managed to smash the Second Bank of the United States after a very difficult Bank War, while at the same time he ethnically cleansed the Native Americans from their traditional lands via the Indian Removal Act. There were a number of detailed biographies on Jackson on Amazon, all with the same 4.5 stars and sounding roughly the same. Stumped, I eventually bought Robert Remini’s The Life of Andrew Jackson because his positions seemed moderate and he was a well-reputed scholar. When I started it I couldn’t get through more than five pages, though - the prose was exaggerated, flowery, way too descriptive, and written in a smug literary style. I quickly gave up. I’ll find another Andrew Jackson book down the road to read. Costin Alamariu’s Bronze Age Mindset was another book I couldn’t get through; Costin, just tell me what you believe using clear prose and avoid the Straussian esotericism/Nietzschian stylistic framework secretly justifying your desire to rule the world with your Männerbund of aesthetic homosexual bodybuilders, please.
On the flip side, I finally got around to reading Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015). I knew from the first paragraph: this guy gets it. He has a personality and a clear writing style and he knows what he’s doing, and he’s going to be entertaining as hell. And he was. The book was a breeze to read, it had interesting opinions and perspectives and was smart and funny and just cool. I'm going to have to read the rest of his oeuvre.1
Now, I didn’t really want to read Submission. I dragged my feet on buying it and took awhile to read it. I had known Houellebecq was an author with a large following and that this novel had received a lot of controversy, because it detailed the main character’s conversion to Islam in France due to social and financial pressure. The book was meant as a warning about where the country was heading if trends didn’t change. But really, do I really need to hear this message again? I’ve already discussed in depth how Islamic birth and immigration rates in the West are swamping natives, how Africa’s alarmingly high birthdate (still over 6.0) will result in future swarming of Africans even more into Europe, and because demographics is destiny, in only a few generations all of Europe will be Islamic unless something dramatic changes. I saw this up close and personal during my trip to Italy. The topic is depressing because our globohomo overlords ordered the Kalergi plan implemented and there’s nothing anyone is doing about it other than some limp whining online, where even that is increasingly being criminalized in Europe.
So this isn’t a message I need reinforced; I’m already on board. Why did I read it anyway? Inertia, boredom. Show me enchantment, show me what this world has to offer. Show me the literary work of the most famous living French novelist. Show me a novel compared to The Camp of the Saints (1973). Show me the mind of a man who somehow avoids cancellation despite publicly stating that the Great Replacement theory is real, per Politico: “Yet through all the uproar, over his anti-Islam comments or his praise of sex tourism, the author has never faced a major outcry from France’s literary establishment, or anything resembling a ‘cancellation.’” Perhaps depressing realism isn’t a threat to the system the way idealistic active resistance is.
According to Le Monde in 2022 (quoting at length),
Houellebecq is adamant throughout the discussion: France is lost, its decline is inescapable, and the fault lies with a modernity "which generates its own destruction." The "Great Replacement", he says, "is not a theory, it is a fact." There is no conspiracy orchestrated by the elite [NLF: this is wrong], he says, but there is a "transfer" of people from Africa, where the birth rate is high. This supposed overflow spills into Europe because "no one controls anything on immigration". "What we can already see is that people are arming themselves," continues the author….According to Houellebecq, there has been no national reaction because France continues to "tow behind the United States" and is content with importing the "woke" movement [NLF: France lost it’s sovereignty after the Second World War if not long before. It does not set it’s own policies]….
"Michel Houellebecq converses throughout the interview without us knowing if he is serious or if he is once again being provocative," said Jean-Yves Pranchère, a professor of political theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and expert in reactionary philosophy. "He presents himself as a thinker who is aware of the decadence of his time and of his own decadence, but who believes in the purgative power of violence, without actually adopting it. He leaves it to others, like the French who are arming themselves, and the Americans….
"Michel Houellebecq advocates a form of right-wing national-populism: The 'people' would only comprise nationals, excluding immigrants and foreigners, who would not benefit from social rights or health care, and would be deported," said Gisèle Sapiro, a sociologist and author of Peut-On Dissocier l'œuvre de l'Auteur? ("Can we dissociate the work of the author?", 2020). "There is a culturalist view of the world, close to Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilizations,' which locks populations into a fixed religious identity in order to euphemize the racist presupposition. This echoes the 'defense of civilization' that united the conservative right and the far right in the interwar period."
These alarming remarks are mixed in the Front Populaire interview with statements made in a sneering tone. Houellebecq expresses his "reservations" about the abolition of the death penalty. President Charles de Gaulle should have been "shot" for abandoning the harkis, the Muslim Algerians who fought for the French army in the war of independence. He treats Russia with clemency, unlike Europe and the United States: In Ukraine, Vladimir Putin "had eyes bigger than his stomach," says the writer. If surrogacy is authorized, Houellebecq threatens to "drag those male or female bitches who use it through the mud."
Finally, he engages in philosophical and literary concerns, filled with nostalgia for the Catholicism from before the Second Vatican Council. He revels in spreading reactionary sentiments. There is no doubt that this interview will satisfy the parts of society most tempted by the far right. It also fuels the eternal debate on whether or not to make a distinction between art and the artist.
And according to a recent interview with the Financial Times,
I meet Michel Houellebecq at Maison Péret, a busy brasserie serving regional French cuisine in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. He’s bang on time for lunch — which is to say he arrives at 6pm. “I can’t have a meal without drinking wine,” he had explained in a brief email exchange before our encounter. “After that, it’s all over, I can’t stop drinking, so I try to delay the fateful hour.” Impressed by his attempt at moderation, I am happy to agree…
I mention a 2019 essay in which he called Donald Trump a good president and wonder if he will be cheering him on in this US election too. “Yes,” he says. “Trump won’t start wars,” he adds, topping up our glasses.
What if he stops supporting Ukraine? “That’s good,” Houellebecq says. But Ukrainians want to liberate their territory, I say. “What do I care? At the start of the war, I was surprised because I thought Ukraine was Russian,” he says. “It’s better for nature to take its course,” he adds in the spirit of might is right. “People who have humanitarian ideas are a catastrophe. It doesn’t work and motivations are doubtful.”…
Ernaux has said she can’t stand his depiction of women. As a woman, I must admit, it’s tricky to meet Houellebecq. He’s famous for describing us as sex objects with a sell-by date of pretty much 25. I tell him that I find this problematic — and depressing. He nearly jumps up from his chair, looking genuinely upset. “I think it’s dishonest,” he says. “All women, and really all, try to be as desirable as possible. And then when they start losing at the game, they contest the system that they were the first to uphold.”
“Look, I didn’t create the world,” says the 68-year-old, now married to Qianyum Lysis Li, whom he met when she was writing a thesis about his work at the Sorbonne. His wife cooks, he says, an admired female characteristic in his novels, but only dishes that he doesn’t eat. “Some vegetarian things,” he sighs. He sticks to ready-made microwave meals, like many of his characters.
This is great stuff. It’s a little strange that all it took was reading one paragraph of Houellebecq’s book to know he’s a personality with a well considered view of how this world works. And the paragraph was not political; it was rather the simplicity and clarity of the ideas expressed that was the giveaway; shitlibs obfuscate, they revel in needless complexity and unnecessary verbiage. Here’s the first paragraph of the novel:
Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him, never once was I tempted to drop him or take up anther subject; then, one afternoon in June 2007, after waiting and putting it off as long as I could, even slightly longer than was allowed, I defended my dissertation, “Joris-Karl Huysmans: Out of the Tunnel,” before the jury of the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. The next morning (or maybe that evening, I don’t remember: I spent the night of my defense alone and very drunk) I realized that part of my life, probably the best part, was behind me.
First I’ll discuss a little of Houellebecq’s background, then go over some of the parts of the novel that stood out to me, segueing into a brief discussion of Islam. As a warning, spoilers will be discussed.
Houellebecq’s background
Houellebecq was born in either 1956 or 1958. He’s not sure exactly which because his birth mother gave him up to his communist grandmother to be raised, but she may have adjusted his birth year earlier so he could attend school first. He grew up in an irreligious household, yet henow attends Mass on a weekly basis. The rituals, the incense, the chants, the music, the atmosphere and the crowd make Houellebecq feel religious as long as he’s in service, but once he walks out of the Church he feels like an atheist again.
He was a good student (although he did not attend university), not bullied despite being an outsider, and focused on women and rock and roll as he grew up. He read poetry in cafes which attracted significant female attention. One of the songs he recommended in an interview was the rock-and-roll song Child in Time by Deep Purple, which I listened to and thought was excellent (it picks up around 4 minutes in):
He read widely and intently starting young, believing the world of literature was more interesting than the world of real life (Ernst Junger felt the same way). He worked as a computer repairman until his novels became successful enough that he could live off their income. His first novel was Whatever (1995) and his follow-up The Elementary Particles (1998) sold hundreds of thousands of copies and propelled him to fame. His novels contain references to real figures (especially literary figures; he loves Baudelaire who I thought was mediocre) and fake ones, blending realistic and less realistic events - when reading Submission I had to look up numerous times whether a person or publication cited was real or not. I enjoyed this sense of imbalance; it kept me on my toes. In a surprise and delight I saw he was interested in Schopenhauer and wrote a book about the effect the man had on him (who I have covered elsewhere). Houellebecq's books have been quite controversial, dealing with religion, pornography, prostitution, and other aspects of the modern world, even though he retains his high position in literary society. His novel Annihilation, which was just released in English this month, will be his last novel.
Critics claim that his protagonist is the same character in every novel, a man focused on the pleasures of the flesh and who is atomized and socially alienated regardless of the level of success he achieves. Houellebecq denies that primary characters in his novels are autobiographical. Like his protagonists, though, Houellebecq chased after women and was married three times, having one child, and his current Asian wife happened to be a fan of his work and she is 34 years younger than he is. This reflects a trend for many white men on the right choosing Asian wives.
Politically Houellebecq's is against the European project as a whole. He believes democracy is impossible when a political entity covers too many disparate groups of people. He’s made statements about these publicly, even though he also admits to self-censoring (rarely) in his novels. As he told the New York Times:
I hope [the European Union] will fail. It’s a nightmare. It’s the disappearance of any possibility of democracy. It’s something that I don’t want, that many French people never wanted. It’s bringing together countries that don’t have common interests. European culture existed until the 18th century and the 19th. Now it doesn’t exist anymore. European countries have a national culture and there’s Anglo-Saxon culture. National culture is holding up well, more or less, in France, not at all in Italy and in Spain. [NLF: How is it holding up when the French Muslim birth-rates are so much higher than the natives? Strange comment.]...I’m against representative democracy. It’s a bad system…Europe is worse than anything because there isn’t even the parody of representative democracy. It’s a pure oligarchy…I don’t think that [the European Union is] a nice idea. From the start, I was against it. It’s very important for me. It’s my only political engagement. We didn’t realize it. It was slow, progressive. The French weren’t at all interested in it.
Strangely, Submission was published on January 7, 2015, the date of the Charlie Hebdo magazine shooting. A cartoon of Houellebecq appeared on the cover page of the magazine with the caption "The Predictions of Wizard Houellebecq.” A close friend of his was killed in the attack.
His subsequent novel Sérotonine (2019) was sympathetic both to the Yellow Vest movement as well as to French farmers, who have and continue to be destroyed by globohomo; they barely make ends meet, if that. Having grown up low class, Houellebecq empathizes with the French masses, even though he acknowledges that, as a member of the wealthy class, his interests are to an extent different than theirs.
If we take his birthdate as the 1956 date as the astrology website Astrotheme does, his chart is here. His Sun sign and degree (which forms a person’s core personality), Pisces 6 degree, is as follows (Janduz version). It seems accurate:
Hedonistic, pleasant, and hospitable character. One is a bon viveur endowed with an insatiable appetite for spiritual and intellectual food, as well as for the pleasures of the table. Success and fame can be achieved in all occupations related to seafood catering or cannery, or fishing. Painting and literature, especially when related to the water element, are also favoured, as for instance a painting featuring sea or lake landscapes, the publishing of a cook book or a culinary column, etc. Indeed, this degree is under the influence of two constellations, Eridan and Horlogium. The former underlines the importance of the sea, and the latter indicates great intellectual abilities.
Below are two interviews in French with English subtitles if you want to get a sense of the man. These were the only two available on Youtube; the rest were all in French with no subtitles.
I was impressed, even though he uses a lot of “ums” and delays as he thinks through his answers. You can see the gears in his brain turn as he considers each question. Furthermore, he appears to be a highly individuated person, unlike the masses of standardized people in the West. There used to be more creative types like him even in America in prior decades, but they have all disappeared in an era of capeshit, autotune, and self-brand maximization. Watching such a person is a breath of fresh air.
I was having a bit of a hard time figuring out Houellebecq’s clique.2 I would describe him as a high or ascended nerd/loser hybrid. Listening to him speak and watching him move, he holds your attention, and his gaze is inward; his focus is on his internal process, which is a requirement - especially for losers - to ascend within one’s clique.
Submission
The brief overview of the story is as follows: Francois is a middle-aged lecturer at the Sorbonne and an expert on the decadent author J.K. Huysmans. He has sex with his students, trading them in every year (which reads strangely now after the 2017 Me Too hysteria, although France has always been more open sexually than the hypocritically prudish Americans). He has feelings for a Jewish woman named Myriam who he’s had an on-off relationship with for a long time. But mostly, he is bored and depressed, listless. He tries to reconnect with his religious roots but fails. He also tries to reconnect with ex-girlfriends, but they’re even more blown out than he is:
As for the present, it was clear that Aurelie had never managed to form a long-term relationship, that casual sex filled her with growing disgust, that her personal life was headed for complete and utter disaster. There were various signs that she’d tried to settle down, at least once, and had never recovered from her failure. The sourness and bitterness with which she talked about her male colleagues (in the end we’d been reduced to discussing her professional life…made it painfully clear that she had been through the wringer. Even so, I was surprised when, just as she was about to get out of the taxi, she invited me up “for a nightcap.” She’s really hit rock bottom, I thought. From the moment the elevator doors shut, I knew nothing was going to happen….she could no longer - she could never again - be considered an object of desire….
My meal with Sandra followed a similar pattern….She was sad, very sad, and I knew her sorrow would overwhelm her in the end; like Aurelie, she was nothing but a bird in an oil slick….In one or two years she would give up any last matrimonial ambitions, her imperfectly extinguished sensuality would lead her to seek out the company of young men, she would become what we used to call a cougar, and no doubt she’d go on this way for several years, ten at the most, before the sagging of her flesh became prohibitive and condemned her to a lasting solitude.
Even though he is describing single, childless Western women as blown out mentally and spiritually, the married women are barely any better:
I thought about Annelise’s [the wife of his friend] life - and the life of every Western woman. In the morning she probably blow-dried her hair, then she thought about what to wear, as befitted her professional status, whether “stylish” or “sexy,” most likely “stylish” in her face. Either way, it was a complex calculation, and it must have taken her awhile to get ready before dropping the kids off at day care, then she spent the day e-mailing, on the phone, in various meetings, and once she got home, around nine, exhausted ([her husband] was the one who picked the kids up, who made them dinner - he had the hours of a civil servant), she’d collapse, get into a sweatshirt and yoga pants, and that’s how she’d greet her lord and master, and some part of him must have known - had to have known - that he was fucked, and some part of her must have known that she was fucked, and that things wouldn’t get better over the years. The children would get bigger, the demands at work would increase, as if automatically, not to mention the sagging of the flesh.
Compare this to the novel’s Muslims, where women go outside in burqa or niqab, not showing open flesh to strangers, not wearing makeup to look pretty for them or flirting with strange men, and therefore they express their sexuality at home where it is otherwise bottled up. They don’t work, they get married young - a rich man could have up to four wives - and they were devoted and submissive, aiming to please.
A night and day difference.
Anyway, Francois has sex with some whores and still feels nothing. He wonders if he should kill himself, drowning in the nihilistic, empty West. Meanwhile, there are national elections ongoing and the leftists, the right-wing Nationalist Front, and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood split the vote. The Muslim Brotherhood (correctly) does not care about the normal issues that the other political parties cared about:
“The Muslim Brotherhood is an unusual party, you know. Many of the usual political issues simply don’t matter to them. To start with, the economy is not their main concern. What they care about is birthrate and education. To them it’s simple - whichever segment of the population has the highest birthrate, and does the best job of transmitting it’s values, wins. If you control the children, you control the future. So the one area in which they absolutely insist on having their way is the education of children.”
In the ensuing run-off, the leftists decide to ally with the Muslims - with the Muslims in the lead role - in order to defeat the right. This feels exactly how it would happen, and in subsequent years the National Front has indeed lost in run-off elections to leftist/Islamist alliances (but not to the point the Islamists come to power). The ascendant Islamists then fire the university professors unless they convert to Islam; Saudi Arabia pours huge amounts of money to incentivize professors to convert in return for tripled or better salaries. Francois is fired, but the administration (now Islamic) tries to convince him to convert and come back:
In an article for Oumma, Rediger [the head administrator] raised the question whether Islam had been chosen for world domination. In the end he answered yes. He hardly bothered with Western societies, since to him they seemed so obviously doomed (liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structure such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion [NLF: Yet Islamic birthrates are falling, too, and Muslims are becoming more secular overall; just not nearly at the rate of collapse of Christians]….
In another article, Rediger made a case for highly unequal wealth distribution. Although an authentic Muslim society would have to abolish actual destitution (alms-giving was one of the Five Pillars of Wisdom), it should also maintain a wide gap between the masses, who would live in self-respecting poverty, and a tiny minority of individuals so fantastically rich that they could throw away vast, insane sums, thus assuring the survival of luxury and the arts. This aristocratic position came directly from Nietzsche; deep down, Rediger had remained remarkably faithful to the thinkers of his youth….
[Rediger] called it tragic that [the traditional right-wing nativists]’s irrational hostility to Islam should blind them to the obvious: on every question that really mattered, the nativists and the Muslims were in perfect agreement. When it came to rejecting atheism and humanism, or the necessary submission of women, or the return of patriarchy, they were fighting exactly the same fight. And today this fight, to establish a new organic phase of civilization, could no longer be waged in the name of Christianity….Thanks to the simpering seductions and the lewd enticements of the progressives, the Church had lost its ability to oppose moral decadence, to renounce homosexual marriage, abortion rights, and women in the workplace. The facts were plain: Europe had reached a point of such putrid decomposition that it could no longer save itself, any more than fifth-century Rome could have done….
He, Rediger, was the first to admit the greatness of medieval Christendom, whose artistic achievements would live forever in human memory; but little by little it had given way, it had been forced to compromise with rationalism, it had renounced its temporal powers, and so had sealed its own doom - and why? In the end it was a mystery; God had ordained it so.
Despondent and depressed, barely alive in the secular, materialist, blown-out West, after Myriam flees to Israel Francois ultimately converts to Islam and looks forward to wealth, prestige, and possibly multiple Muslim wives. The end.
Conclusions
Those who achieve higher level of spiritual growth blend opposing ideas in what is called the coincidentia oppositorum. God, being infinite, is the infinite synthesis of opposing ideas; by understanding and combining them, one becomes able to see from a higher plane. This is a lifelong process with no end goal. The nice thing about Houllebecq is that he understands this, either implicitly or explicitly; in Submission he lays out a pretty decent case for Islam, even though in actuality he opposes it’s takeover and wants the novel to be seen as a warning for the French to wake up before it’s too late. He wants to believe in a Catholic God and he attends Church, even though he doesn’t believe. Recognizing and comprising these opposite energies and working to synthesize them is what gives a person depth.
Basically, Islam solves a lot of the problems of the West: it offers patriarchy, it offers a larger family life, it offers stability with women staying at home and tending to children and cooking (as long as one is rich), it is somewhat resistant to shitliberalism. I think of Cat Stevens who converted to Islam from his prior liberal background and ended up with a larger family, shrugging off the decadence of the West after a near-death experience. Here he is with his family, what a respectable result:
However, Islam is not a panacea; everything in this world is a series of trade-offs. The problems with Islam include the following:
It eviscerates the traditional Western middle class, leaving the society with the ultra rich and masses of poor; another form of neo-feudalism. Perhaps this part of the reason why globohomo seems to like it a lot more than Christianity - given they control Islam’s rulers, perhaps they think can use Islam to formally justify their own rule down the road. An Islamic society is a society with very little social mobility.
Lower status men are totally screwed, even worse than in modern Western society. It’s a simple math problem: if a man can have up to four wives in Islam and males and females are each roughly 50% of the population, that means that under this system there are a lot of men who simply cannot get married or have children, period. (Yes, we already experience this with hypergamy in the West causing the incel phenomenon as previously discussed via
’s debut novel here, but at least the relatively greater social mobility gives incels a chance to ascend from their situation.)Women who like to work in business or corporate jobs are screwed. While I think most women would likely find traditional gender roles refreshing, there are some women who would feel frustrated and unfulfilled being at home running the household and raising children.
Due to it’s nature Islam also strangles technological advancements over time, which is both a bad thing (no more exploration of the stars) and a good thing (technological advancements are inherently destabilizing to society).
Furthermore, and this is both a good and a bad thing, Islam is fundamentally much more pessimistic about human nature than Christianity is: Jesus gave men a choice to choose him or not to, optimistic that at least some would; on the contrary, a religion of submission requires one to abide by it’s dictates or else be stoned, imprisoned or murdered - humanity as sheep, behave or be slaughtered. Even though Islam is correct about most of humanity - they need an exoteric Daddy God telling them what to do so they don’t have the weight of responsibility on their shoulders, a topic covered so well in Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor - the small minority of those who choose a higher calling may be worth the rest - who knows? Well, as least they would still have Sufism ala Rene Guenon.
Due to Islam’s ambitions as a world-spanning religion which de-emphasizes non-religious differences, much like Catholicism, those who hope to emphasize enclaves based on ethnicity, race, intelligence, similar cultures etc. will be disappointed.
Regarding this last point, as the arrogant pro-Chinese Spandrell argues, Islam is a imperfect solution to the problems plaguing the West but it is still a potential solution (well, maybe, given our central bank overlords control it as well). Spandrell writes:
You have probably guessed where I'm going. I won't repeat myself. Europe now is in decline and all Europeans of good faith are trying to find a solution. We are being invaded by Islam, and nobody likes it. But the problem we have is not Islam. Is not Islamism. As bad as it is; which is horrible indeed. But ideas come and go. What doesn't come and go is the people. The gene pool. The problem we have is not Islam, it's foreigners. Arabs, South Asians, Africans, etc.. Most happen to be Muslim, many are not. The problem is not their ideas, as bad as they are. The problem is HBD. They're dumb. They're impulsive. They have different genes, going back tens of thousands of years.
Even if we could fix their culture, their family structure, the clannishness; which we can't. It still wouldn't matter. You could convert them all to Lefebvrism tomorrow and they would still destroy European civilization, and physically replace European people, who are busy watching football, binge drinking and wasting their youth studying socialist history.
But you can't say that. One can't object to the immigration of foreigners into Europe and North America on genetic grounds. I can't object to Arabs being dumb; because there's plenty of Europeans who are just as dumb, and they don't appreciate that we discuss population policy in terms of intelligence or other personality traits. Any rational, utilitarian discussion of population policy is a complete dead end because there is no workable Schelling point for proposing eugenics in a democratic society. It benefits no one. For one, we don't know that much about the genetics of behavior. Second, meritocracy is an excellent Schelling point. It's completely fallacious, but it works. The elite can justify their privilege because they have earned it, they have "merit", not just genetic luck. And the dumb can consolate themselves that there's nothing physically wrong with them; it's just tough luck, which could change any day. All human societies, every single one, believe that human behavior and performance depends on proper education. Of course they do.
And so we are left without sellable arguments against the invasion of Europe by fertile foreigners with a set of innate traits which make modern civilization impossible. We are left without arguments against Europe developing the demographic profile of Sudan, which implies the living standards of Sudan. So if we can't use this argument, what can we do? We can adopt a new religion. It doesn't matter which. As long as it ensures the physical reproduction of European peoples. As of now, Islam is a fix, if a bad fix. I hope we find a different one.
I have a reputation as a gloomy pessimist, but there's a different way of looking at this. Think of this post as a way of prodding you into action. We better come up with something damn fast, because there are only two alternatives. White Islam, or the physical disappearance of the European peoples.
So to sum up, Islam is good at solving certain extremely nasty issue plaguing the West (nihilism, attacks on family formation) but if victorious it would still result in neo-feudalism, low status men would be screwed, say goodbye to technological progress and you’ll still be surrounded by low IQ foreigners with extremely different thoughts and attitudes.
Regardless, due to demographic and immigration trends, unless the West wakes up with something new within the next generation or two, Europe will likely belong to Islam even if we don’t like it - even though, ultimately, Islam itself may be undergoing the same secularization and decreased fertility processes plaguing the West.3
Thanks for reading.
As I’ve discussed previously in the second half of this post (under the section “Clique Theory”), modern America has a rigid but unstated and informal caste system, as rigid as the Indian caste system if not more so, based on one’s phenotype. The idea is juvenile - it was created by a group of law students at the height of the 2008 financial crash where they could not secure jobs through OCI (“On Campus Interviews”) and they came up with system to explain why they were unable to secure jobs even though others were able to do so. The actual theory, which is quite long but entertaining, can be found here. The cliques are: Jock, Prep, Nerd, Scumbag, and Loser (Loser is a catch-all term for everyone who is not clearly in one of the other cliques). Women are their own clique as are Jews, Indians, and perhaps other ethnic groups; the clique system is meant to apply to whites, although other groups have sub-cliques within their ethnic cliques. Clique is immutable except one may ascend or descend within one’s own clique between a low, average, high and ascended form. Trying to change one’s lane (i.e. a jock trying to learn to code or a nerd who does sports) will bring ruination. Some people are comprised of two cliques (i.e. a Scumbag/Nerd hybrid) but no one has more than two. Anyone who spends a lot of time internet posting is at minimum half loser clique.
Because this is an American system, clique is less salient in other countries and is less salient the further back in history one goes; this is because clique really solidified and stratified in the post-World War 2 era. Because the U.S. exports its culture, the clique system has to a much lesser extent impacted the countries over which it rules (including Europe).
If the below data is correct (and it may not be, given the source is a compilation of establishment outlets) the trends indicate the Sunni Middle East is undergoing rapid secularization:
I bought his Submission at a flea market a couple of years ago but haven't gotten around to it yet. This piece of yours definitely made me put it higher on my to read-list.
Houellebecq said: "“People who have humanitarian ideas are a catastrophe. It doesn’t work and motivations are doubtful.”…"
It reminds me of H. L. Mencken's "The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
Been waiting for this for a while. You seem to share a lot of my own impressions of the book(https://deusexvita.substack.com/p/review-7-of-2024-submission-by-michel). Would love to hear a little more about why you think Catholicism isn't a potential solution (and why I think Houellebecq agrees). Another large part of the novel is François trying to follow in Huysmans footsteps and trying to be Catholic, but walking away and choosing Islam when it doesn't do it for him. My thought is that the big problem with Catholicism is that it is far too skin suited by the globo homo. The church basically allowed the sex scandal stuff to happen without doing much to stop it, and also doesn't enforce its own views with the same intensity as Islam and even the earlier Church (the Pope used to lead armies to war). On the parish level there's still a lot of virtue: my local priests have helped me a lot with overcoming certain spiritual problems (nihilism, porn use), but it's just not enough. Young people need to be getting married and we need to be rebuilding community, but my priests at least are not so good at helping with this. There's also a sense that the church has lost the fight against secularism almost completely, and now all that remains is fighting a brave rear guard action. I don't know, I say this all as a practicing Catholic, but I just don't see a way forward for the church unless there are massive changes on all levels of the hierarchy. I don't want to see an Islamic world, and I don't believe the intellectual forces of secularism (the gospel of growth) are up to facing our current challenges. I guess the personal solution is just to focus on gnostic spiritual growth as you say in other posts.