Théophile Gautier didn’t actually say “Art for art’s sake,” but even if he did, it was only about 100 years ago. The notion that a true ahr-teeeeeste would never sully his hands with shekels comes from the fin de siècle, when a bunch of nancy boys sponging off their parents decided their works could only be properly appreciated by other useless mooches. William Shakespeare — a true artist, the finest writer in the history of the English language — would’ve laughed right in these guys’ mincing little faces, because as Larry Correia says, the writer’s prime directive is GET PAID. Shakespeare worked for a living, which means he wasn’t above a fart joke. Whatever got the job done. Ditto Mozart — The Magic Flute was the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure of its day — and all the rest. The “artist” who trumpets his intention to produce “art” is a poseur, always and everywhere.
Severian, “The Entertainer”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-08.
January 28, 2021
QotD: Art for art’s sake
January 26, 2021
QotD: “A world organized around institutional mass slavery”
New hypothesis: It’s a category error, all right, but not because they didn’t think in terms of labor costs. It’s because they couldn’t think in terms of labor costs.
A world organized around institutional mass slavery is, in a very real sense, a timeless world. Herodotus (I think) actually says somewhere that nothing worth mentioning happened before him, and you can see echoes of this attitude even as late as the Antebellum South. You see their attitude described as “conservative,” but since that’s egghead shorthand for “evil” you can ignore it. They weren’t consciously backward-looking; rather, they were deeply rooted to their place and station. To the outsider, it looked like they were trying to hold time back, but to the insider, time — clock time, industrial time, the time of the Protestant work ethic — barely existed at all.
So with the Classical World. The Romans, for instance, are endlessly frustrating to their admirers (of which I am an ardent one). Their only economic fix, for instance, was debasing the currency, i.e. a primitive form of inflation. You guys could figure out how to hew an artificial harbor out of some desert rocks — a trick we’d have a hard time pulling off today — but you couldn’t figure out fiat currency? Or a better political system than the tetrarchy? Or that the forts-and-legions paradigm just isn’t cutting it? Or … etc.
Stuff like that is why Spengler said classical, Apollonian culture was fundamentally different from, and incompatible with, our Faustian culture. According to Spengler, the master metaphor for the Apollonian is the human body, which is beautiful but changeless (emphasis mine, not Spengler’s). You can improve your body somewhat, but only within certain tight limits, and the body’s fundamental form is always the same (we could time warp Julius Caesar into the Current Year and still recognize him as a fellow homo sap., no matter how different his mind might be).
The Faustian, though — that would be us — organizes his worldview around space, infinite space. Practically speaking, this results in our attitude of innovation-for-innovation’s sake. We send a man to the moon because we can, but such an idea would never occur to the Romans, for the same reason they didn’t apply all their awesome engineering knowledge to the problems of governance. Hacking a harbor out of the desert is a tremendous feat, but it’s a local feat — a one-shot deal, a very specific response to a very specific local problem, with no broader applications.
This, I suggest, is because the timeless world of institutional mass slavery naturally selects for the kind of man who is at home in the world of institutional mass slavery. It’s a world of very low future time orientation, because “time” hardly exists at all. Forget machinery for a sec; the Roman world was full of enormous problems that had teeny-tiny, head-slappingly obvious fixes. Julius Caesar, for instance, was considered some kind of prodigy because he could sight-read books. Which really was a noteworthy feat, because Romans didn’t even put spaces between their words, much less use any sort of punctuation marks. And they were radical innovators compared to the Ancient Egyptians, since at least Roman writing all ran left-to-right; hieroglyphics can be read in any direction, including vertically, and I’m pretty sure there are examples of them changing text orientations in the middle of the same inscription. It’s not hard to imagine some legion commander actually losing a battle because he had to stop and sound out an important communique from a subordinate …
… and yet the Romans, for all their technical skill, never even figured that tiny change out. See also: The Chinese doing fuck-all with movable type, vs. (Faustian) Europeans using it to conquer the world. China, too, was a timeless society. As Derb says somewhere, Classical Chinese isn’t even really writing; it’s more of an aide-memoire — designed to remind readers of stuff they already know, not to communicate new information.
Your post-Roman European, by contrast, lived in a world where high future time orientation was an absolute must. You don’t need hypotheses like the famous “lead in the drinking water pipes” to explain the seemingly bizarre things the Romans did, or didn’t do; all you need is time orientation, a fundamental attitude of “this is a variation on an old problem” vs. “this is an entirely new situation that requires a new response.” Life in the post-Roman world was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short — every man for himself; think through the consequences of your actions very carefully before you do them, or die horribly. Those who failed to do so died. Bake that into the genetic cake for a few generations, and you get Renaissance Man, who’d see a million possible applications for the aeolipile.
Severian, “Bio-Marxism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-24.
November 29, 2020
QotD: The succession problem of totalitarian leadership
There were two main reasons for the decline, both structural. The first, of course, is Communism itself. A totally ideologized society is a society totally committed to make-believe. You could fill a good-sized book listing the catastrophes make-believe caused the USSR. Just to take the most obvious: Hitler did everything but send the Goodyear Blimp over Moscow, towing a banner announcing his invasion plans. But since everyone who accurately reported the goings-on in Poland ended up in the Gulag, the Wehrmacht walked right on in.
The second has to do with the nature of totalitarian leadership. Obviously sharing power is out of the question, so every Boss who finally claws his way to the top ruthlessly purges everyone who could conceivably challenge him. The purged are replaced by yes-men and toadies, who immediately enact mini-purges of their own inside their new departments. It doesn’t take more than a few rounds of this for smarter functionaries to learn to dig themselves in very, very deep, disguising themselves in a kind of protective stupidity. A few more rounds, and “protective stupidity” drops the modifier, as anyone with anything on the ball has decamped for the safer — and, not coincidentally, very soon much more profitable — havens of technical management.
It doesn’t take long before your “leadership” is nothing but ideology-addled dimbulbs. Sound familiar?
Severian, “How Dumb Are Liberals?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-07-31.
November 4, 2020
QotD: The dangers of breaking the “fourth wall”
Note that the rules can be broken from either side, the spectacle’s or the audience’s. Movies these days are most often guilty of the former, while rasslin’ bankrupted itself doing the latter. The last Star Wars movie I saw, for instance, was the first one with Girl Luke. It broke its own in-universe rules by having Girl Luke do everything Luke did, minus the training and effort and self doubt. She was just instantly awesome at everything, because grrrl power, and now that franchise is in the process of bankrupting (oh God, let it be so, and soon!) the entire Disney empire. Rasslin’ first tried to fool the “smart marks,” then went the nudge-nudge wink-wink route — both fatal to the suspension of disbelief for the majority of fans, who were still operating under the old contract.
Under the old contract, “wrestling fan,” like “Star Wars fan” or “Schwarzenegger movie fan” or what have you was a temporary identity. You went to the spectacle to put your real self aside for a few hours. You buy the ticket, and cease being Joe Schmoe the mechanic or the plumber or the customer service rep or the shmuck who still lives at home because he just can’t catch a break. Instead you’re transported to a galaxy far, far away, where bodybuilders are time-traveling robots and men in spandex come back from the dead to body slam their rivals.
For that kind of person, breaking the fourth wall, as the lit-crit types call it, is a slap in the face. Ha ha, fuck you, you loser! You don’t get to enjoy a few hours in a galaxy far, far away from your normal life, because we’ll be constantly reminding you that all of this is fake fake fake fake fake! You can watch the body slams and light saber fights, but every time you’re just starting to get into it and forgetting yourself, we’re gonna pop back up with an in-your-face aside! You’re a loser, and the very fact that you’re here watching this proves you’re a waste of oxygen! Take that!
In other words, loser is the fixed identity on which Postmodern entertainment is parasitic. This is just aces for the dorks-with-big-microphones who write the Tweets, since nudge-nudge wink-winking each other about what losers those other fans are is what keeps them, the Postmodern ironists, from feeling like losers themselves. But see above, with wrestling. Or Star Wars, or now sportsball, or pretty much anything else. The Postmodern ironists don’t buy tickets. They don’t go to the show in person, because they know that bringing their Postmodern ironic act into the theater would likely end with them getting their asses kicked.
Severian, “Rasslin'”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-07-26.
September 23, 2020
QotD: Don’t blame the Boomers for the “Summer of Love” … most of ’em were too young to participate
Now, I’m all for bashing the goddamn Boomers, but let’s be fair (since it matters for historical analysis). There’s a common misconception about the Baby Boom. Here, see if you can spot it:
Did you see it? Look closer, and you’ll see that while 1947(-ish) appears to be the peak year in terms of total births, the vast majority of what we call “Boomers” were born after 1950. Let’s do some simple math. The very oldest Boomers were born in 1946. The Summer of Love was 1967. Even if we assume the Summer of Love came out of nowhere — which is impossible, of course, any movement that large had antecedents going back years, probably decades, but let’s assume — that means that any “Boomers” participating were, at most, barely 22 years old. They were just barely 24 when Woodstock came around. Granted that the youngest are the dumbest, and thus can have outsize influence, they still can’t have been largely, let alone solely, responsible for the idiocy of the hippies.
That’s all on the older crowd, the so-called “Silent Generation” — the ones who were old enough to be aware of World War II, but unable to participate directly.
It’s easy to verify. The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the New Left, was penned by coddled college kids in 1962 — meaning, by kids born, at latest, in about 1942 (its principal author, Tom Hayden, was born in 1939). Here are the Chicago Seven and their dates of birth: Abbie Hoffman (1936), Jerry Rubin (1938), David Dellinger (1915!), Hayden, Rennie Davis (1941),John Froines (1939), and Lee Weiner (1939).
Hoffman, especially, bears scrutiny. Though he’s best remembered as a Yippie — that is, the founder of an ostentatiously youth-oriented movement — he was 31 at its founding. Don’t trust anyone over thirty, right?
1936 to 1946 is only a decade, but it’s crucial. A kid born in 1936 would have vivid memories of World War II and its immediate aftermath — fathers, uncles, and older brothers (and, in more than a few cases, aunts and older sisters) coming home from the service. A kid born in 1946 would have a completely different experience — ask any combat veteran about the first year or two back in the world, versus being home for a decade. Those guys — the kids who saw firsthand the angry young strangers they were supposed to call “Dad” — were the ones who did the real damage in The Sixties(TM), just as it was the almost-but-not-quite frontsoldaten who did the real damage in the Third Reich.
With me? Now hang on to your hats, because here’s where it gets pretty meta: It was the “Silent Generation,” not the Boomers, who did the real damage in The Sixties(TM). That is, the guys who juuuust missed the giant social upheaval that was World War II. The Boomers have done all the damage since The Sixties(TM).
That — The Sixties(TM), which is why I’m using that obnoxious (TM) — is the great social upheaval they juuuust missed. [These people] aren’t old fossils from the flower power years, though many of those fossils are still alive and kicking (including four of the Chicago Seven: Hayden, Davis, Froines, and Weiner). Has anyone heard from Billy Ayers lately? How about Noam Chomsky (born 1928)? I’m sure they have plenty to say … but nobody cares.
It’s not retreads from The Sixties(TM) out there doing this stuff. It’s the people who wish they’d been around for the Summer of Love that are doing it. It’s the people who just know they would’ve ended the Vietnam War, if only they hadn’t been in junior high at the time. This is their Woodstock, not least because they only heard about the original when they arrived for freshman orientation in 1976.
Severian, “Talkin’ ’bout My Generation!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-06-11.
July 10, 2020
QotD: Marcus Aurelius for the incel demographic
You just can’t beat it. But […] Our Thing has lots of potential Trigglypuffs. They’re called “incels,” I’m informed, but whatever the nomenclature, there are a lot of young single dudes out there who while away their pointless hours with video games and porn. Those are our potential storm troopers (it’s a metaphor, FBI goons). Why haven’t we weaponized them? (again: metaphor).
It’s probably as simple as giving them a role model. It goes without saying that your “incel” (or whatever) was raised by women. Even if there was a biological male living in the house during his childhood, it’s a thousand to one he was just that: a cohabiting male. Certainly not a father. And even if by some miracle he was, the poor guy can only do so much. You’ve got to let your sons out of the house sometime … where they’ll immediately be snapped up by the sour, shrieking cat ladies that control our educational system, our media, our professions, our culture. Both the son and his father have to be very, very hard-headed, and not a little lucky, to escape a poz infection …
… and that’s the best-case scenario. For the worst, look around — you’ll find incel and his soy-enfeebled twerp of a “male” parent cowering under the bed, scrubbing their hands and faces with Lysol, while Mommy scolds and caterwauls on Facebook.
There are role models out there, y’all. Stoicism in general, and Marcus Aurelius in particular, have seen a real upswing in popularity, especially on “Game” sites. This doesn’t represent a return to a Classical education; it’s that Marcus seems to be — Marcus is — a worthwhile role model for a fatherless boy. Strip out the “credits” at the start of book one and a few of the denser, more philosophical passages, and you could subtitle Meditations “how to drop your nuts on the carpet and act like a fucking man for once.” Loosely translated, of course.
Severian, “Be a Centurion!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-07.
June 2, 2020
“Calling a modern ‘artist’ a poseur is like calling water wet — what could possibly be the point?”
Severian on modern “art” and its practitioners:
Picasso’s “Guernica” in mural form in the town of Guernica.
Photo by Papamanila via Wikimedia Commons.
Leszek Kolakowski, in his essay collection Is God Happy?, wrote several fascinating essays on Communism vs. other forms of Socialism, such as Fascism and generic Leftism. He notes that while Communism proper attracted lots of serious intellectuals and artists, who produced some works of real merit, generic “Leftism” had few, and Fascism almost none.
He also notes the degeneration of art on the Left. I don’t want / am not qualified to get deep into the weeds of art history, but let me use an example (mine, not Kolakowski’s): Pablo Picasso vs … oh, pick an artist, they’re all Lefties … let’s say Andy Warhol. Noting that “important” can be diametrically opposed to things like “good,” “aesthetically pleasing,” etc., we can all agree that both were important artists. Whatever else their differences, the most obvious one was:
Sincerity.
Picasso was a lifelong member of the Communist Party. He was also a sincere artist (which, again, can be miles away from “good;” I personally can’t stand Picasso’s art). Guernica is wildly overrated, and its sentiment jejune — we all agree that bombing civilians is bad, mmkay? — but at least it’s sincere. Warhol, on the other hand, never took a sincere breath in his life. Making your work superficial on purpose doesn’t absolve you from the sin of superficiality. Warhol (and Roy Lichtenstein, and the rest of the “Pop Art” crowd) gave wannabes permission to substitute “being ironic” for “having something to say,” and there’s your modern art in a nutshell. Calling a modern “artist” a poseur is like calling water wet — what could possibly be the point?
Which brings us back to Kolakowski. He notes that there are apostates aplenty from Communism, and they all seem compelled to write big long books full of critical self-examination. Cheering for the murder of millions would do that, one supposes… except that, as Kolakowski says, you can’t find one single ex-Leftist doing it. Hell, is there such a thing as an ex-Leftist, as opposed to an ex-Communist? Kolakowski couldn’t find one (as of 1995, I think), and I can’t think of one either. Every former radical I’m aware of was just that — a radical, a card-carrying Communist or at least a virulent fellow-traveler, e.g. David Horowitz. We probably all have heard of someone waking up one day (say, after 9/11) realizing that the Democratic Party they’d been knee-jerk voting for all their lives was out to lunch, but do you know of any True Believers seeing the light?
May 29, 2020
QotD: Historical ways to deal with your “rage heads”
Set the Wayback Machine to the turn of the 20th century. Lenin’s great insight is that “the masses” will never achieve the proper revolutionary consciousness without a dedicated cadre of hardcore, professional revolutionaries to lead the way. Lenin recognized the prevalence of incipient rage heads in his society — how could he not? — but realized that, absent some guiding hand, they’d flounder around incoherently. At best (from the “furthering the Revolution” point of view), they’d do what his, Lenin’s, idiot brother did: Try to knock off the tsar, and get himself hung for it. Thus, the Bolsheviks.
The problem, though, is that rage heads by definition suffer from poor impulse control. The tiny subset of them that are pure sociopaths (like Lenin), and thus have the icy-veined self-control to hold their fire, have to maintain the very tightest discipline over the Party, or all hell breaks loose. See, for example, the massive street battles in Weimar Germany between the KPD (German Commies) and the SD. Hitler, like Lenin, had to get his rage heads on a tight leash, so he channeled the disciplined sociopaths from the SD into the SS, cooled out the coolable in the SD by buying them off, and shanked the incorrigible remainder. See also the almost-exactly-contemporary Moscow Show Trials.
Note please that this is your best-case scenario for a purely ideological revolution. From Robespierre to Kim Il Sung, the first step in consolidating the Revolution is killing off a large fraction of the original revolutionaries.
The worst-case scenario (again, from the “furthering the Revolution” standpoint) is what the American wannabe-bolshies did / are currently doing. Knowing that you can’t shank or show-trial the dreadlocked poetry majors that make up your goon squad, you try to channel them into academia, the Media, the “arts.” Which fails egregiously, because whatever tenuous contact with reality they once had gets completely severed by those institutions’ social bubbles. They never were very good at holding fire, and now they can’t, literally can’t, see any reason to — life is great here on campus, so why can’t it be that way everywhere?
Severian, “Living in End Times”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-28.
May 11, 2020
QotD: Certainty is liberation
In short, absolutely nothing I did, or didn’t do, that final semester meant anything at all. I was as responsibility-free as an “adult” human can ever hope to get.
This had some interesting consequences. I got laid a lot more, for one thing — sorry about the crudity, but it’s a great illustration of the principle. The principle being: “When you truly don’t care, you project this invincible vibe that attracts people.” My friends were all shocked — not just about the getting laid part, but the fact that my whole personality seemed to change. I am not, as you might imagine, the most outgoing, happy-go-lucky guy, but that semester I was.
I mean, why not? I’d hit on varsity cheerleaders and sorority goddesses. I turned in wildly counter-intuitive assignments, just to see what would happen. I signed up for Intro to Conversational Chinese. Totally bombed it, but seriously, why not? I’ve always wanted to know if I have a knack for languages (turns out I don’t), and that was the hardest one in the course catalog. So long as I stayed alive and out of jail, I could do whatever the hell I wanted … so I did.
The lesson I drew from this: Certainty is liberation. It’s bliss. I still had anxieties, of course — e.g. how was I going to do in my new life, all the way across the continent? — but in my current context, I had no worries at all. I was King of the Dorm, because, quite simply, I could afford to be. I had three hots and a cot, endless free time, and a give-a-damn meter stuck on zero.
If I were quicker on the uptake, I’d have identified that instant as my turn to the Shitlord side of the Force. What in god’s name am I doing, hitting on the homecoming queen? Doesn’t matter. She could blow me off so viciously that dudes three blocks over would wince and cover themselves,* and I couldn’t care less. Why not shoot for the moon? If I win, I’m a dorm legend; if I fail, I’m still a dorm legend for having the balls to try it. In two months, I’ll be a thousand miles away and nobody will care about either of us.
*She didn’t. She didn’t go out with me, of course, but she was very nice and gracious, as most truly pretty girls are. Another valuable lesson learned.
Severian, “The Emotion is the Tell”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-24.
May 5, 2020
QotD: Social media encourages autistic behaviour
The genetic fallacy, you’ll recall, is the inability to separate the idea from the speaker. Or, if you’re under age 40, it’s simply “communication,” as our public discourse nowadays proceeds in very little other than genetic fallacies. Try it for yourself. We all know what kind of reaction you’ll get in respectable circles if you say “You know, Donald Trump has a point about …”, but you can do it on “our side” of the fence, too. Watch: Obama was right about Race to the Top. No, really: Compared to W’s No Child Left Behind bullshit, pretty much anything short of letting kids be raised by wolves would’ve been better (and hey, even being raised by wolves worked out ok for Romulus and Remus). Even with the qualifier attached, almost everyone on “our side” instinctively bristles — we’ve been so conditioned by the words “Obama” and “race,” especially in close proximity, that we can’t help ourselves. Even I do it.
It’s especially bad for the younger generations who, as I keep arguing, have been effectively autismized (it’s a word) by social media. Twitter, especially, is so constructed that “replies” can come in hours, days, months, years later. Blogs too for that matter — one of the reasons we close the comments here after a few weeks is to prevent drive-by commenters clogging things up trying to re-litigate something from years ago. Modern “communication” must take place in discrete, contextless utterances. That being the case, understanding a statement in context is impossible — I repeat, impossible. So Lenin (or Hitler, or Mao, or William F. Buckley, or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man) didn’t have a point about ___; because that requires understanding how his point fit into the larger context of his thought, his times, his culture, his world. None of that shit fits into a tweet, so we’re trained to respond to the name — Lenin (etc.) is either a good guy or a bad guy, full stop, so anything he says about anything must be good or bad, automatically.
I hardly need to elaborate on the effect this has on our public culture. If Our Thing really wants to get serious, the first thing any “organization,” no matter how loose, must do is: Ban social media.
Severian, “Education, the Genetic Fallacy, and the Spectrum”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-27.
May 4, 2020
QotD: The eternal “now” of Progressive stasis
None of that matters to the cultural marxist, though. How could it? As I wrote yesterday, to the fanatic, the past is one long catalog of freely chosen error. Nor is there any meaningful future to a fanatic. That seems wrong, I realize, but consider that time passes through contrast. People will be born and die in the Communist Utopia, but since everyone will always have everything, human activity will be exquisitely pointless …
Ignore what Leftists say. Watch what they do, and it’ll soon be obvious that what they long for above all things is stasis. They want everyone and everything to be one way, and one way only, forever. Homosexuals are the most flamboyant example. Imagine that — having your entire life defined by your sexual attraction. I like blondes, but you know, if the right brunette came along I’d go for her. Heck, I’d even go for a ginger (I know, I know, I’m a monster). But according to the Left, that’s not allowed. I like blondes, and therefore I’m only allowed to like blondes. Oh, and I can only vote for Bernie Sanders, because he’s the attracted-to-blondes candidate, and I must support abortion, and use the word “cisgendered,” and …
Thus, to the Leftist there’s no past, and no future either. There’s only now, and the only thing that matters now is power. How could it be otherwise?
Severian, “The Endless Now”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-23.
April 10, 2020
QotD: Ketman
The problem, though, is that the sour pleasure of ketman is addictive, and like any addiction, you need to keep upping the dose to feel the same effect.
My first few years in grad school, anyone who cared to look could’ve easily spotted me as a secret shitlord. For one thing, I was the only guy in the whole damn town who actually looked happy. For one thing, professing is a 24/7 job — that’s “24 hours a week, 7 months a year,” and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. All that free time is lovely, especially in a college town with 24-hour everything and scads of scantily clad undergraduate eye candy.
But more importantly, there’s the pleasure of ketman. So long as I make a few radical noises, I can get you sheep to believe anything I say. I used to tell people I studied transgendered potato farmers in the Kenyan uplands. I told this obnoxious girl from the Gender Studies department my dissertation was on resistance strategies of Eskimos in the Waffen-SS. I cited Alan Sokal’s hoax paper on the social construction of gravity in every seminar taught by a radical feminist, and no one ever called me on it. Anyone who thinks I’m kidding obviously hasn’t been on campus in the last 20 years or so. It was fucking hilarious …
… for a time. And then it got sad, then nauseating, because I eventually realized I was no different from the fools who swallowed my bullshit. It doesn’t matter if you’re being exquisitely ironic when you tell a room full of freshmen that “gender is a social construction.” They can’t recognize irony anyway, and even if they could, parroting the phrase “gender is a social construction” is still required to pass the class. More importantly, what if they did recognize it? I’m up there thinking I’m a shitlord, speaking truth to power to anyone smart enough to figure it out, but all they see is another fat, middle-aged sellout parroting nonsense. If I were serious about my shitlordery, they think, then I’d quit. But I don’t quit, which must mean my so-called “principles” are worth … what? We’ve already established you’re a whore, madam; now we’re just haggling over the price.
Severian, “The Pleasures of Ketman”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-09.
April 5, 2020
QotD: The fear of “becoming” your job
You could see this worry everywhere in our culture, our art. Watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Judge Reinhold’s character is wrestling with this type of question, and he’s in high school, fer chrissakes. See what I mean about that movie being made on Mars? Remember that; it’ll be on the final.
There’s a certain type of person, though, who just couldn’t grok those worries, because the very notion of social roles was incomprehensible. We didn’t know about the autism spectrum back then, but that’s what that type of person effectively is: A high-functioning autistic. For the autistic, what’s now is forever. Bob’s nametag says “customer service representative.” Therefore, Bob is a customer service representative, and only a customer service representative, now and forever. Bob the family man, Bob the stamp collector, Bob the bar-band strummer … all those fry the autistic’s circuits. It says “customer service representative,” damn it! The train is fine.
Two sides of the same coin. Normal people were worried that they were becoming their jobs. The autistics couldn’t grasp that anyone could be anything else.
The autistics all went into the ivory tower, which gave us identity politics. “Identity politics” only makes sense to the autistic — that is, to people who can’t process change. Normal people have such a hard time with it because we can’t see the logical connection between, say, being gay and being pro-abortion. I mean, if you’re gay it’s a moot point, right? Nor is there any logical connection between being gay and favoring redistributive economics, or worrying about global warming, or whatever. Maybe you do believe in redistributive economics and are worried about global warming, but those are just individual opinions, right? I’m not obliged to vote Republican because I dig blondes. It’s a non sequitur.
Not to the autistic, it isn’t. They’re told that this — pro-abortion, being “green,” the whole Liberal schmear — just is gayness, and they go with it, because that’s the only way the world makes sense to them. Just how “gay” came to mean all that is above my pay grade, but we all know it’s true. More importantly, we all know they believe it, with all their hearts and souls.
That’s the situation in which we find ourselves, my young friends, here in the Current Year. Most of us would like to be team players, but we have no role models. Because the autistics control the culture, we’ve internalized their worries. If I’m a member of the team, we instinctively feel, then somehow I am the team, and only the team, now and forever. It’s a stark choice: Either I give up my individuality completely to advance the team’s goals, or I take my ball and go home.
But it’s a false choice, kameraden, one that could only be beaten into us by very long, very expensive training — i.e. the American “education” system, K-thru-PhD.
Severian, “Advice to Young Dissidents”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-01.
March 25, 2020
Bonus QotD: Cognitive dissonance and the very, very woke
We’ve written a lot here on the West’s “crisis of legitimacy.” Well … this is it. Let’s break down some of the big factors in play:
The first, biggest, and in some ways only factor that matters, legitimacy-wise, is cognitive dissonance. We spent a lot of time here back in the days arguing about whether or not it’s a real thing […] I finally took the position that it’s real, but only for stuff that rises to level of actual cognition … which you just don’t see too much of anymore. Indeed, the whole point of Postmodern Leftism, when you come right down to it, is not having to think. Identity politics gives you The One Right Answer for most every situation; it’s just a matter of filling in the Social Justice Mad Lib. Any apparent conflict between One Right Answers is dealt with by ad hominem.
An example will probably help: Trannies vs. Feminists. Feminists, of course, are all in on The One Right Answer that “gender is just a social construction.” But Trannies actually believe this — if you feel you’re really a woman, then you are, your twelve-inch wang be damned. How, then, can impeccably #woke lesbians refuse to have sex with the aforesaid twelve-inch wang, since gender is just a social construction and Thundercock identifies as a lesbian? Easy: ad hominem. Oh, gender’s just a social construction all right … it’s just that any be-penised individual who “constructs” himself as a lesbian is lying for personal gain (#wokeness, as everyone knows, gives one the ability to read minds).
This isn’t a problem for the Left as a whole, much less for our entire society, because of the tiny numbers involved. Despite showing up pretty much everywhere in popular culture, gays are a small fraction of the population. Trannies are a fraction of a fraction, and since militant lesbianism is almost entirely political anyway (lesbian bed death is very real), about the only place this could possibly be a live issue is on the loonier college campuses.
Severian, “The Real Crisis”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-03-17.
March 24, 2020
QotD: “Desacralizing the State”
Speaking of quotable-yet-loony folks, Aristotle defined Man as “the political animal,” and as such had an answer to our question: The State’s purpose, Aristotle said, is to promote virtue.
Let’s leave the contentious topic of “virtue” aside, and step back to the definition of “Man.” Man isn’t a political animal. Man is a purpose-finding animal, an explaining animal. We simply can’t resist the siren song of teleology. We all live under some kind of State; therefore, we assume that “The State” must have a purpose. It’s in our DNA; we can’t do otherwise, but … we might be wrong. Perhaps “self-organization into some kind of government” is just one of Humanity’s givens, like “sexual dimorphism*” or “requires oxygen.” Maybe “government” just IS.
A dangerous thought, that. If it’s true, it desacralizes the State — the worship of which, I think we all agree, has driven all the major political events in the West since at least 1789. Historian Herbert Butterfield called the 20th century’s great mass movements “giant organized forms of self-righteousness,” but he could’ve taken that a step further — “popular” government of any sort invariably becomes a giant organized form of self-righteousness. People being people — that is, teleology-addled monkeys — it can’t be any other way. The State, since it exists, must exist to do something. What better something to do than to promote virtue?
So we’re back to Aristotle. But it looks like Aristotle stole a base. As a rule, people aren’t virtuous. Why else would they need the State to promote virtue? And yet, the State is made up of nothing but people. Aristotle also said that a cause can’t give something to an effect that it, the cause, doesn’t already have. So how, then, can the State — which, like Soylent Green, is made of people — itself make people virtuous?
See what I mean about this teleology stuff? The mind rebels. The State is a human thing. Humans made it, and every human act, we’re hardwired to believe, has a purpose behind it. That hardwiring may lead us into incoherence in under three steps, but so far as I know, I’m the only guy in the history of Political Science ever to suggest that government just … kinda … IS. That it evolved with us, and thus all our airy-fairy noodling about Divine Right and We the People and the Vanguard of the Proletariat and whatnot are just foolish blather about what’s basically still a monkey troop.
[…]
All this would be just philosophy-wank, better suited to a dorm room bull session after a few bong rips, if not for the fact that “desacralizing the State” has to be the #1 project of any viable Dissident movement. The State, as a human production, has only such “goals” as we give it … and, being made up of nothing but humans, is going to be as good at achieving those goals as we humans generally are at achieving any of our goals …
Severian, “The Least-Worst Government?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-21.
