Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Out With a Whimper

People on the alt-right to expect that the progressive state will be willing to put up a huge fight for its own survival. Granted, most Western states face profound challenges. There are a lot of highly motivated, well-paid, and intelligent people who are mostly dedicated to keeping the show going. There are many more of those on defense than they are on offense, which doesn’t bode all that well for the people on the offense.

I would suggest that, instead, many of those people who are well-paid and intelligent aren’t really all that motivated or dedicated to keeping the show going, when the show pays out less and less, and expects more and more bizarre behavior and prolific expressions of belief from the people dedicated to upholding it.

The focus should more be on demoralizing the higher order, ordinary, mercantile defenders of Progress, rather than the highly motivated, underpaid, but religiously devout progressives. The focus tends to be on people like the Social Justice Warriors, most of whom make little money, contribute little materially to the state, and are themselves repulsive to the enormous numbers of normal people who are otherwise loyal to the established order of things.

Leftism has succeeded so much in recent decades because it has become ‘normal’ for the professional classes, even when it’s against the long-term interests of those people — indeed, true progressives loath the bourgeoisie, and never miss an opportunity to tell the world how they feel about them. This is the much-groused-about ‘neoliberalism’ — the radical left would refrain from killing the bourgeoisie, so long as the bourgeoisie agreed to exterminate itself slowly through moral dissolution. The end is the same, but the pace is different.

Focusing on normal, high-achieving people — and telling them that it’s actually entirely OK to believe everything that their great-grandparents believed, to aspire to similar life patterns relative to their great-grandparents — might not have that radical flair which so excites dissidents, but it’s a lot more damaging to the progressive cause than it is to just holler at the fringe radicals who keep the leftward edge expanding.

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About the Griping in the Manosphere

The manosphere (referring to the loosely-affiliated ecosystem of small web publishers writing for men and running discussion forums) as a market phenomenon exists owing to censorship in the professional press, where anyone who deviates from the leftist party line winds up ostracized and unable to be published steadily, apart from a few exceptions here and there.

Christopher Hitchens, for example, was able to publish articles about why women aren’t funny in magazines like Vanity Fair, but probably only because he had spent decades contributing to magazines like The Nation and acting as the standard-bearer for atheism. The original piece is apparently no longer even hosted on the Vanity Fair website, although there are countless rebuttals to it.

If even a long-time Trot like Hitchens can’t get away with the mildest criticism of female equality, no one really can. However, reality keeps on being real, even if the way that our cultural organs try to depict reality is blatantly at odds with the thing itself. The manosphere grows in the absence created by censorship and the interference in the creation and maintenance of all-male organizations.

It’s, in effect, occupying a grey market niche, and reaping profits from it.

Part of what the men do with this grey market is to air grievances that get no hearing from other sources. The state has decided, as a comprehensive campaign, to level society across gender lines. To achieve this, it needs to hobble men, saddle them with legal risks, defame them constantly, and create a New Egalitarian Man at least in concept in order to achieve its political goals. Many, many more men aspire to be the New Egalitarian Man than the older version, because professional propaganda tends to be of higher grade than the gray market stuff.

It also needs to suppress and belittle the grievances that come up with respect to this raft of policies to make them appear to be more popular and successful than they really are.

Because egalitarianism is a revolt against nature — it works against natural impulses rather than channeling them — it’s very resource-intensive to maintain.

Grievances against the sovereign that come to be aired — but go unresolved — tends to frustrate people, especially because the democratic psychology expects those grievances to be heard by the sovereign, and then acted upon by that sovereign. When grievances are aired but ignored, to the democratic mind, it seems like the universe isn’t operating as it’s supposed to. It’s ‘supposed’ to go whine -> complain -> protest -> wise legislator passes reform.

In particular, some hope that family law will be reformed.

This will never, ever, ever happen, because egalitarianism has a certain historical momentum (‘leftward drift’) that must accelerate or it must implode. A perceived halfway reversal would threaten the entire sensibility of modern democratic civilization, so even a prudent reform isn’t possible.

The griping can also be seen as an attempt to coordinate during a time when the state (as it ought to in order to protect itself) is working hard to prevent such coordination. Because the state doesn’t want (and shouldn’t want) a competing culture to emerge within its own territory, the people in the alternative men’s media who succeed the most tend to be the ones who encourage men to coordinate to become better parasites on the shuddering carcass of what was good ol’ Western Civ.

They create a bandit culture which praises excellence in banditry. Which would make sense, because we’re in conditions which are conducive to banditry as a strategy.

Parasitism is adaptive, however, until it isn’t. Americans tend to believe that ‘economics is cyclical,’ believing in narratives of ‘stock market recoveries’ which exceed every downturn. But civilizations and economies more often go through profound phase changes which aren’t cyclical at all. The ‘business cycle’ can be more like a one-way ratchet of dysfunction, and the same goes for the other social phenomena.

Without religious consolation, Americans instead have psychological consolation: they believe things like “everything happens for a reason,” “it will all turn out OK,” “I’m OK / You’re OK,” “there’s someone out there for everyone,” “It gets better,” “50 is the new 30,” and a whole lot of other gibberish that acts to ease the pain of existence.

Actually, it’s not going to be OK, most of you aren’t going to make it, it’ll all be terribly unfair, the new 50 is probably worse than the old 50, and you squandered your opportunities in your 20s, and few people even like you, much less love you. Also, you’re going to become old, die, and you’re probably not going to a good place, either, after that’s done with.

Much of the griping in the manosphere is an attempt to gain consolation for individual despair by spreading despair to others as well. The justification sometimes goes that if everyone is demoralized enough together, something positive will happen. The only thing that results in that is that people just come together in their misery — feeling less alone in their individual unhappiness, but doing little to resolve anything.

At some point, Westerners will have to start recognizing that there’s less of a ‘we’ in this than we’re accustomed to thinking. Many Western countries aren’t going to make it. Many regions aren’t going to make it. Many religious groups aren’t going to make it. For small groups of men to solve problems, the problem space has to be shrunk down to a manageable level. Fixing the US isn’t possible; salvaging a portion of it is.

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Federal Terror Against Local Peace

The most elegant way to understand the recent spate of rioting is that part of the Federal government, using its proxies — which it supports through transfer payments in a variety of ways — is using proxies to diminish the authority of local police departments in order to replace them with units directly loyal to the Federal government.

While some may want to portray it as some sort of masterful conspiracy, it’s really more like a crazy, destructive, and transparent plot without a whole lot of mystery behind it or likely upside for all that many people.

In a recent private discussion I mentioned that it wouldn’t be all that shocking if some foreign power or another was bribing officials here and there to fan the flames — that would at least be more rational and understandable. It’d even be respectable.

It’d be something that could be more easily dealt with and deterred, perhaps, than just plain degeneration into incredibly poor quality governance.

In general, whatever your feelings about modern police — and I’ve tended to be critical of the concept — in a conflict between the local police and terror forces being used by the Federal government against small property holders — you should be siding with the people being attacked, because they’re ordinary citizens and small business owners.

Terrorizing these ordinary Americans into bankruptcy and into fleeing their cities is an evil action. The assaults and murders against ordinary people and cops are also evil, with no sane moral justification.

There’s a tendency in the way that American professors teach history that tends to regard ‘people power’ and popular movements as wonderful things — rather than precisely the sorts of movements which have bathed both Europe and Asia in the blood of tens of millions since the 18th century. Popular movements tend to create enormous destruction and chaos. Historians may rationalize after the fact that it was all in the service of something better, but careful analysis usually finds that revolutions are not, by and large, good things.

The riots are mobilizing people to use as terror forces against the civilian population in a variety of American cities. Right-thinking opinion is supposed to praise the terror campaigns against American civilians, in part because those campaigns are quite nakedly being used to usurp authority from local politicians in favor of Washington. There’s not even any ‘false flag’ there — the riots are just being nakedly instigated by the prestige press, certain political types, and various officials in the Federal government.

Taking the rhetoric of loose terror groups at face value — rather than focusing on their actions — is moronic. The pretense that terror by itself is a cleansing force is central to the left. While that pretense may seem safe and even exciting in the classroom, when brought into reality, it brings horror with it.

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