Reactionary Expat responded to my article on white nationalism the other day, and if you have an hour or so, it’s worth your time to listen to it if you have an interest in the topic.

The confusion that’s happened in our corner of the web has a lot to do with confusion between means and ends.

Obviously, I’d like to promote eudaemonia for the Anglosphere. White nationalists also say that they want their 14 words, which isn’t really that far from eudaemonia (human flourishing).

The rhetorical and political means that they choose to pursue that goal are wrong-headed at best, and utterly doomed at the worst. Attempting to form new political parties (trying to apply a miracle patch to democracy) or turning whiteness into a victim-identity (using the means of the left towards different ends than they were intended) are both addled.

Saying that “if they’re pale and have a heartbeat, I love ’em” is not fundamentally all that far from the universalist position that states that all people are of equal value. It also runs into the shoals of the fact that said pale people are almost universally opposed to racial thinking with the same lockstep conformity that they all affirmed before World War II. A consistent pan-European nationalism that purported to represent the will of the people would be forced to oppose the same thing that it purported to support — citizenship for whites only.

One of the reasons why the previous belief melted into John Lennonism was because it encouraged the disruption of the old hierarchical ways of thinking in which people were very much unequal, regardless of their race.

Thinking about history as a way to hunt for scapegoats and Scooby Doo villains is also counter-productive. For every actor, there’s an object.

What it is good at, as a movement, is generating a certain feeling among people — much like most ideologies, it creates a sense of commonality among strangers where there is none. It’s painful to be alone in the world. It’s consoling to believe that there are people out there, whom if you just repeat the right words to, they’ll have your back. If you repeat the same lines together, read the same books, you too can convince yourself that there’s some sort of bond there, that there’s direction, and that you’re headed towards a certain destination together.

Unfortunately, all ideological constructs are unstable, because they’re built on mountains of language alone. This is one of the reasons why so many ideologues change their feathers so often and are so eager to believe in new doctrines after their old ones have failed them (speaking from experience).

In order to recreate civilization, more than clever combinations of words are needed. And that’s hard for modern people to understand, because we’ve been marinated in ideology forever and know nothing outside of it in the same way that past peoples were marinated in religion to such an extent that irreligion was unthinkable.

For thousands of years, Europeans have killed each other with gusto, for alternately noble, greedy, and stupid reasons. They’ve traded with each other, enslaved each other, migrated and invaded this way and that way. Rarely unified, a prolonged period of peace across the entire continent has never been normal.

Part of the unsuccessful propaganda of World War I was that it was a war to end all wars. World War II might not have been a war to end all wars, but it did end wars between major powers on the continent. The external enemy of the USSR helped to push a unification of Western Europe into a bloc of third-way type countries unified by NATO.

Since the collapse of the external enemy of the USSR, the American foreign policy establishment has tried a variety of boogeymen: namely Islam and Putin. Neither of them are especially fulfilling enemies, particularly because the same multicultural doctrine that makes the global cuddle pile of world peace also makes it impossible to effectively oppose Islam.

It’s also difficult for Europe to unify to oppose Russia because of basic economic issues: since Europeans like warm homes during the winter, and because liquid natural gas from America isn’t particularly economical to import, it’s challenging to encourage a mostly disarmed Europe to march off to an apocalyptic war with Russia. The only people dumb enough to go for it were in Ukraine — and apart from an exciting short TV show about an exploded airplane, no one cared enough to volunteer to get exploded in the lands to the east.

Because the external enemies are either unappealing or impossible to fight, the states and ruling elites of the Western world turn to enemies that they can actually fight effectively: internal wreckers of the grand plan. At the same time as these rulers unite with each other to crush recalcitrant wreckers, plenty of the people in the wrecker class are eager to surrender in advance, or otherwise to eagerly advertise that they’re wreckers who deserve to be purged (a wonderful side benefit of permitting free speech).

What we’re approaching are the limits to peace. Peace means compromise and the promotion of odious regimes for far longer than they might be able to survive otherwise. Excessive cooperation rather than the grasping for advantage has made it so that the entire Western bloc has lashed itself together, so that when one of them falls, they all fall. When one of them makes a spectacular error, they all suffer (best demonstrated by Germany’s mass importation of Middle Eastern indigents within an open border zone).

Expanding the international zone of friendship is often portrayed as an overarching capitalistic goal, but what it’s always meant in practice is political compromise on a fundamental level — everyone has to adapt their systems to the lowest common denominator citizen, and everyone must enjoy the same rights of citizenship per global standards of human rights.

This means that there’s less competition in the realm of law and culture — and that homogenization is what has defined the emergence of America on the world stage. It’s not just that America has changed her subjects — America has been far more profoundly changed, in itself, so much so that the cowboy stereotype is no longer salient, unless that cowboy loves tacos and burritos.

Quibbling about the terms that the grand cuddle pile ought to be run on is fundamentally a waste of time. The cuddle pile is itself the existential threat — it makes the entire bloc of countries extraordinarily vulnerable, the longer that it goes on. It generates a profound fragility that will only return to the past levels of resilience with a return to regular internal conflict.

The best way to describe international relations within the West at this time is this:

Participants are often in a state of cuddle intoxication at this point, and feeling a sense of connection with the group that they never would have anticipated at the beginning of the event.

 

We should say the same about global leaders — they’re in a ‘profound state of cuddle intoxication,’ and anyone who might not want to pile on is an unthinkable alien.