Pessimist Dissident Substackers: Part 2

Zooming in on cultural/metaphysical pessimists.

This post explores the divide between philosophically optimistic and pessimistic voices within the dissident space and discusses the personal and strategic implications of networking, audience size, and ideological alignment. It reflects on how optimists dominate reach due to hopeful messaging, while pessimists - often introverts with darker worldviews - pursue connection more for spiritual and intellectual growth. A map of writers across these spectrums is provided, offering insight into a fragmented but evolving ideological landscape.

This is a post about the benefits and drawbacks of networking.

Inspiration for this post, although brewing in the back of my mind already, came from two places:

1. Librarian of Celaeno’s April post The Dissident Right and Its Discontents where he discusses how diverse what he calls the “dissident right” is¹, united only in it’s shared opposition to the establishment (where “dissident right” is a label I’m souring on and contemplating a replacement², although such labels are meant as a directional guidepost and not as a rigid system to be worshipped³). Librarian castigates the “JQ crew”, “doomerism”, "conspiracism”, the “elite human capital crowd”, and “Groypers”⁴ as he aligns with an optimistic Christian nationalist vision, highlighting dozens of posters who he interacts with, respects and appreciates; and

2. Peter James’s post about how his unwillingness to network played a big role in his failure as a comedian, where others less funny and talented than he networked to bigger opportunities, after which they were able to develop their talents in a way he was not and eventually surpass his skill level.

Librarian’s post highlights to me how astute my prior breakdown of the dissident right was, which divided such writers into a quadrant: (1) whether the individual is philosophically optimistic or pessimistic⁵ and (2) whether they post on a political, cultural, or metaphysical level. Librarian’s friends are all philosophical optimists who mostly post on cultural levels, and he distances himself from philosophical pessimists and simple political posters. These optimist cultural warrior writers include:

I got my start as a commenter on John Carter’s stack. We’ve disagreed at times, but I can say confidently that his work is excellent. Dave Greene, κρῠπτός, and Johann Kurtz are phenomenal writers and good men, as are Isaac Simpson, Jonathan Epps and Alan Schmidt. Adrian Vermeule and Charles Haywood are brilliant and committed patrons of many of us here and in the real world. Dimes, Fortissax, Mark Bisone, Tree of Woe, Kenaz Filan, LucTalks, Ahnaf Ibn Qais, William M Briggs, Billionaire Psycho, el gato malo - all quality. Lee and the whole crew at IM-1776 are great, and of course I’ve already mentioned Raw Egg Nationalist. Christopher F. Rufo and Christopher Brunet-each does great work despite their differences. Yakubian Ape and The Brothers Krynn deserve ten times their subscriber numbers. Yuri Bezmenov was once denounced by Alexander Vindman; what better mark of quality do you need? Constantin von Hoffmeister and Office Hours with Lomez do the hard work of promoting rightist authors in analogue form, a project very much in need, and are brilliant in their own right. Likewise, few have done as much as Dudley Newright to promote interesting rightist thought on Substack and X. Not that they need my endorsement, but Sigma Game, The Z Man, Don Surber, Morgoth, eugyppius and James Howard Kunstler are all big names worth a follow, and while I don’t always agree, Curtis Yarvin is a must-read. And of course, there’s the ladies- Peachy Keenan, Mary Harrington, and the ever-gracious Nina Power. All of these are great, among so many others.

Alternatively, I almost exclusively interact with philosophical pessimist cultural/metaphysical writers, although there’s a bit of overlap with the above with more borderline edge case writers (The Brothers Krynn, Tree of Woe, L.P. Koch, The Z Man (RIP), and Dudley Newright occasionally flirts with the darker side). It’s interesting how the gulf between optimists/pessimists and metaphysical/cultural/ political writers has increased over time: in mid-2023, when I started posting, the gulf seemed far smaller than it is now, and the interaction overlap was much greater. As a philosophical pessimist alternating between cultural and metaphysical interests, I basically don’t interact with philosophical optimist dissidents at all anymore (and I don’t mean to highlight Librarian alone, merely to use his post to the broader issues involved; I’ve had only respectful interactions with him).⁶

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On Audience Size

Philosophically optimist dissidents possess far larger of an audience than pessimist dissidents - I would guess somewhere between 25x and 100x larger, although it’s hard to quantify. This is for good reason; people naturally want to believe that the world can be made into a better place politically, economically, religiously, either through their own efforts or by relying on favored politicians to save them (hence the Q phenomenon). People require hope to live, and this is a dark, cruel world; getting a little jolt of hopium - Trump will save us! Tariffs, expulsions of illegals, stock market increases, putting the woke and trannies away, Christ is King, brothers! - helps many people through their day. Even Andrew Anglin, the king of race-focused Daily Stormer, pivoted to a religious-based outlook (I presume) because the audience size was so much bigger and he would otherwise starve. As I wrote in a Note:

One of the curious things about this reality is the difficulty of understanding and judging scope. For example, maybe there’s a hundred like-minded English language dissident writers out there [NLF: “like-minded” being philosophical pessimist dissidents], if I’m being generous and taking into account my very limited vantage point of the writers out there. From what I see it’s actually much smaller than a hundred. Political commentators are almost universally grifters surfing the wave of the Current Thing.

Yet there are billions of English speakers out there. Shouldn’t this scene - shouldn’t any of these ultra niche scenes? - be far bigger than they are? After all, the Current Thing seems to be a defining feature of this age, everyone talks about it and thinks about it and is animated by it. Yet that’s where it ends for almost everyone, pigs forcefed at the trough of shill marionetted influencers and media.

It’s also easy to get jealous of writers who tap into larger latent readership pools even if their takes are poor and their predication capacities are very bad. After all, even though one may write ultimately for oneself - I think of the story that Ernst Junger told about Picasso⁷ -one cannot live on “soul work” alone: see Kafka’s A Hungry Artist, where, according to critic Maud Ellmann, we survive by the gaze of others and "it is impossible to live by hunger unless we can be seen or represent doing so". I’ve had the silly idea to create an alternate account Pessoan heteronym, spazz out on low IQ optimistic durr-hurr cultural level takes, and watch how readership skyrockets. However, that would not be psychologically healthy; it’s not possible to adopt a persona like this and not be negatively psychically affected by it.

Regardless, because the religion of the modern era is the Current Thing - to get excited by new political developments, focusing on the details and debating it with others, acting it out with passion one way or the other, not just for those forever online but normies too - it’s much easier to follow the Current Thing plotlines if one has hope and optimism for the future. “If we just try harder, focus more, debate more, engage more, things will change for the better, brothers! Positive change is just around the corner!” For those interested in power acquisition, too, one has to be an optimist almost by definition - believing that the world is irreparably fallen and will not get better due to human nature and the predatory base incentives of this reality is not a helpful belief structure toward networking, tribe formation, or war. It’s defeatist and depressing, and that sucks, right? Under the optimist approach, the internal contradictions (Jungian unconscious) that haunt every person is externalized into a utopian ideology which allows that person to hide from himself, at least until the ideology fails.⁸

Networking for philosophically pessimistic dissidents, though, is a different ballgame: sour on the ability to improve this fallen world and with a much smaller potential audience size, with almost all being introverts, networking is much less about power or money acquisition than about spiritual growth - to think in new ways, to learn previously unconsidered topics, perhaps there’s an element of emotional camaraderie as well, as no one wants to feel totally isolated. I have no idea what Peter James’ politics are, maybe he’s an NPC or shitlib, but his approach to comedy is in line with general pessimism and introversion. He wrote:

The long answer [for why I failed at comedy] is that I neglected the most important part of finding success in any business or creative scene: relationship building. “It’s all about who you know” is a well-worn cliche, but I’ve learned the hard way that cliches are cliche for a reason. They get repeated so often because they’re uniquely true and useful. The problem is that we mistake their repetition for a lack of vitality and insight and choose to ignore them, often at our own peril.

When I moved to New York in 2012, I was temperamentally averse to networking, both in real life and online. The whole thing just seemed so gross and transactional to me. I saw comics glad-handing each other at shows and complimenting/tagging each other’s jokes on Facebook and Twitter, and I was immediately put off. There used to be a very mean-spirited (but incredibly accurate) Tumblr account called Comedians Complimenting Comedians that perfectly sums up the sort of thing I’m talking about. And no, I was not behind it….

But then something interesting happened. Because a comedian (who might have been less funny than me at the time) built relationships and ingratiated themselves in the scene, they got more opportunities for quality stage time and eventually became funnier than me. Years later, I’d watch that same comic generate rolling waves of laughter with their jokes, and it would be painfully obvious that I had been surpassed.

Because I didn’t have any close relationships with other comedians, I was trying to improve by doing open mics, bar shows, late night comedy club spots, and whatever other scraps of stage time I could hustle up for myself. Every rep on stage is important, but not all reps are created equal. You can’t always get a good read on material doing the spots I was doing, and that negatively impacted my artistic growth. These other comics were performing in front of real audiences on a regular basis, and it was like they hit one of those accelerator ramps in Mario Kart. I, meanwhile, had run off the track and was spinning around in circles.

He goes on to state that he wishes he networked harder against his own inclinations, but I have doubts whether that approach would have worked for him. Perhaps it wasn’t that he wasn’t networking, perhaps he was surrounded by a bunch of optimists who he didn’t like and didn’t want to force himself to.

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The updated list

The following is the graph posted in my original March 2024 article (boy, due to Guenon’s increased solidification of the world this feels like ten years ago):

This chart holds up quite well, I think. While one’s place on the chart is largely based on one’s intrinsic physiognomy and outlook, people’s opinions do change to a limited extent over time based on emotional and spiritual development. I’d move Tree of Woe somewhat further to the right on the chart toward optimism after he called Trump’s 2024 win the start of a new post-Faustian era, Grant Smith I’d move a bit leftwards as he sours on Hegseth and the amazing, wonderful, stupendous Trump 2.0, Good Citizen has moved further left and up, and I think Rurik Skywalker has become slightly more pessimistic as he increasingly understands the depths and stupidities of human nature. Shoutout as well to William Hunter Duncan for maintaining communication with pessimists even as he remains a pretty steadfast optimist. I may have moved a bit further toward pessimism, although I’ve conversely articulated the importance of stoically narrowing the scope of what I focus on to the things that I can directly impact in my life. In other words, even if I am solidly blackpilled about politics and human nature, I believe that I must try to remain optimistic and push for better outcomes in the spheres of life that I control, much like the serenity prayer.

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Writers to highlight

Focusing in just on the upper left quadrant of the chart, here are some additional writers who share a philosophically pessimist outlook (it’s hard to find pessimist politics level writers because one needs a broader perspective in order to cope with life). Some are more pessimist than others, some are much more metaphysically focused and others cultural. In no particular order:

1. Mees Baaijen of Predator Versus the People. His perspective as displayed in posts such as One crime syndicate controls the entire world is pretty close to my own.

2. Laurent Guyénot of Radbod’s Lament. Guyenot is very well researched, a very good writer, and he correctly understands, like Adam Green, that the gentile adoption of the Jewish God via Christianity led to a fundamental metaphysical shift that put Abrahamism at the center of the world, and all that entails…

3. Erik of Erik Builds. Erik has an engineering background and focuses on the science behind various popular narrative scams.

4. Martin Štěpán of The Autistocrat and Natural Law Institute. He’s actually not on Substack much - you can find him on the NLI Youtube channel here, such as this video on core concepts:

   I would just point out that “Natural Law” in the way he uses the term does not refer to the libertarian definition (which is entirely discredited in my opinion), but rather Stepan’s understanding of human nature through pattern recognition.

5. Sasha Latypova of Due Diligence and Art. Great lady, political or cultural level poster focused on the heart attack jab scam, I think she’s fairly moderate or benign in her pessimism but she’s open to ideas and interactions with those much more pessimistic than she is (she recently did an interview with Rurik Skywalker).

6. Michel de Cryptadamus of The Cryptocalypse Chronicles. His Notes on the ongoing cryptocurrency scam reads like a horror novel and are a regular must-read.

7. Sean Lannin has some great Notes as he travels around the world with his life zipping all over the place while maintaining a low cost of living; his posts are here.

8. Joshua Stylman focuses on the encroaching digital panopticon, and his descriptions are clear, easy to read and incisive; this post was top notch.

9. Blue Vir of Blue Vir’s Writings believes that there is an emerging neofeudal order which will result in much lower quality of living for most people, which is in large part driven by declining energy return on energy investment from oil/gas, and that natural energy is no substitute. He posts on a cultural level.

10. Geopolitics & Empire of the eponymous blog has regular posts and interviews mostly focused on the emerging digital panopticon, but he features a gamut of topics. I’d say he’s more moderate in terms of his pessimism.

11. AMRX Mark II from NO COPE. His views are pretty quickly evolving, he is a decidedly pessimistic writer and he regularly references both Rurik and myself (thank you).

12. INRI_07 from Pacem in Terris. INRI is an interesting character; his takes are decidedly pessimistic, mostly from a cultural perspective, but he also has from what I see establishment Christian beliefs (as opposed to gnostic or Marcionite). I think there is fundamental tension between his underlying perspective and his professed views (or at least my understanding of them), and think they will likely evolve one way or the other down the road.

13. Charles Hugh Smith of the eponymous blog. Smith has a decidedly negative view of the future of the world, while at the same time he encourages doing what one can to maximize one’s agency within it.

14. The Honest Sorcerer also of the eponymous blog. Sorcerer sees increasing energy scarcity as ending the growth of the past couple hundred years and that the future is going to be much darker than what most people expect.

15. James Delingpole conducts a lot of interviews, many of which have substantial overlap with the writers listed herein (and it may perhaps give him some ideas for new interviewees?).

Although not “rightists”, I’ll also offer an honorable mention to Antonio Melonio - a depressed and pessimistic communist wagecucking and writing bitter screeds about it, and Real Left of this Substack, whose interview here shared much of my perspective about how the international banking elite, the owners of the world central banks, rule the world, and they use divide-and-conquer tactics like "wokeism", along with race, gender, sexual orientation differences, so people are too busy fighting amongst themselves to focus on the financial parasitism.

Lastly, although his politics are nuanced and evolving - I think he doesn’t quite know what to make of pessimist dissidents, and his interests are varied - ARX-Han of DECENTRALIZED FICTION deserves a shoutout here, as his debut novel Incel does an excellent job describing with a decent amount of sympathy a young man blown out mentally by modern secular nihilism and doesn’t offer any neat solutions. And while probably too optimistic for this post, Clintavo of Reflections of The Starving Artist points the way toward the synthesis of philosophical pessimism with optimism, at least from what I see: narrow the scope of what one focuses on to what we can accomplish in our own little sphere in life, and listen to our intuition, blended with our natural interests and talents, to achieve what we are meant to in this world. This is, as I wrote in another post, ultimately the opposite of the blackpill or pessimism on a personal level.

I hope you found this continued discussion about optimist versus pessimist dissidents helpful in some way, and I hope it leads you to discover new and interesting writers. If I left any of my online acquaintances off who I regularly read, my apologies, and I’ll try to include you next time. If you think you fit the bill of what’s discussed here, feel free to leave a comment and hopefully others will discover you that way.

Thanks for reading.

1. He states, “‘Dissident right’ proper is a sort of catch-all category for various rightist tendencies and their associated personalities, united by the fact that they are in some sort of ideological opposition to both left-liberalism and mainstream conservative. The dissident right is defined by a stance of opposition, not a single coherent program. After all, one can dissent from something for a range of reasons, and on the dissident right one can find people who are religious and secular, Christian and pagan, libertarian and distributist, militant and quiescent, trads and futurists, Judeophiles and phobes, among many other things. These and a multitude of other gradients of belief coalesce into a range of camps, many of which are hostile to each other.”

2. This will be covered in a future post, but briefly: I have felt synergies and congruencies with the approach of Guido Preparata, who comes from a leftist and anarchist background, even though I myself have traditionally thought more along the lines of populism, nationalism, and elements of hierarchy, and more recently Jungian individuation and gnosticism. Francis Parker Yockey tried to unite the far left and far right back in the 1950s and failed miserably - which I may do a post about in the future - and I attributed his failure to the fact that the core “leftist” belief is one of egalitarianism, and they will sacrifice any and all of their stated aims and objectives in furtherance of it - which is why the far left vehemently opposed the “alt right” even with overlapping critiques of the system. But the convergence between myself and Preparata suggests a deeper layer, where both he and I:

1. see liberal modernity as a controlled illusion, maintained through managed conflict, finance, propaganda, and moral blackmail,

2. understand fascism and nationalism as honeypots, deliberately fostered and destroyed to prevent genuine autonomy movements from arising;,

3. share a deep suspicion of mainstream history, economics, and media, and

4. see the 20th century as a stage-managed disaster to entrench globalist control.

This is a shared conclusion arrived at from different approach vectors: he sees nationalism and fascism as conjured, manufactured by elites to discredit any challenge to international finance, used as a scapegoat to sacralize liberalism and justify imperial war; while I see nationalism as doomed ontologically - not just because it was used by elites, but because no collective identity structure in the modern era escapes the demiurgic infection. The nation is another idol; no mass movement can save you. This convergence signals a growing undercurrent in dissident thought: not a return to left or right, but a fusion of archetypal, spiritual, and structural analysis. It is post-political because it knows where politics ends and initiation begins; this is why we, despite different aesthetic languages, occupy a similar sacred refusal.

3. All typologies are partial. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being” - and so too with every label, map, or frame. Even Jung, near the end of his life, confessed that he did not know himself. To typologize in a spirit of discernment is not to imprison truth, but to approach it obliquely, as through a veil. But many typologies do the opposite, ossifying, moralizing, or masking. As Alan Watts observed, naming creates conceptual scaffolding but cannot capture essence; the map is not the terrain. Labels like “dissident right” may offer temporary clarity but they must be held lightly - not as rigid containers of truth, but as symbolic gestures that, if used wisely, point beyond themselves toward deeper intuition.

4. He argues: “I’ve written extensively and extremely critically about the JQ crew. I’ve called out doomerism and conspiracism. I regard the ‘elite human capital’ crowd as being some of the worst purveyors of negativity on the internet, who exist primarily to call people stupid for not immediately acknowledging their own brilliance…I’ve gone after the Groypers, whom I suspect are behind something like 90% of what anyone who deplores “the state of the right” means.”

5. Philosophical pessimism is that the base conditions of this world mean that one cannot be satisfied: humans are always either striving for an object or bored, nothing we do lasts, and existence is suffering. Furthermore, it is an endless cornucopia of violence - one must consume other living creatures in order to survive. Schopenhauer responded to this with ascetic withdrawal, while Nietzsche responded to it with will-to-power to try to spite underlying reality. See here if you want more information on this.

6. Aside from the dissident space, it goes without saying that I stopped interacting with shitlibs and NPCs many years ago about anything relating to politics, both because they never change their minds and they feed energetically off pushback like vampires (although I still interact with them on non-politics levels to an extent; if I stopped interacting entirely I would have to be a hermit in the woods).

7. The Details of Time, interviewed in 1985: “In 1942, when I visited Picasso on Rue des Grands-Augustins, he said to me: ‘Look, this painting, which I have just completed, is going to have a certain effect; but this effect would be exactly the same, metaphysically speaking, if I wrapped the painting up in paper and cosigned it to a corner. It would be exactly the same thing as if ten thousand people had admired it.’”

8. Many dissident typologies fail not because they’re false, but because they presume coherence - among actors, movements, or motivations - that rarely exists. The more revealing axis is not ideological, but moral-psychological: the distinction between the naïve power-seeker who believes his system will redeem the world and the cynical manipulator, who cloaks ambition in salvationist language. This motivational asymmetry explains why the same symbolic rhetoric (“tradition,” “order,” “sovereignty”) can serve radically different ends. It also clarifies why so few remain rooted in inner sovereignty: the real conflict is not between systems but between souls unwilling to face their own contradiction. In this light, typology becomes less a map than a veil, and discernment begins not with naming types, but with asking: what does this person truly want, and what wound are they hiding behind the frame?