Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Cultural ‘Room To Destroy’

Blacks, unlike most other ethnic groups in the United States, enjoy some cultural privileges that other groups can’t claim access to.

The most significant one is effective immunity from the demands of political correctness in most of their cultural products. The most famous Black comedians, for example, use the word “nigger” as an anchor for their routines. For a White or even Jewish comedian to use that word is grounds for the destruction of your career, as happened to Michael Richards (AKA Kramer from Seinfeld) in 2006.

The privileges are a bit more profound in terms of creative liberties allowed to rappers and sports figures. Since the integration of professional and college sports in the mid-20th century, expectations of good behavior by athletes has been downgraded. Ideas of sportsmanship have gone to the wayside, for the most part, replaced by a sort of Black machismo. You hear sports fans of all races embracing Black patois when talking about sports — from the announcers to the fans.

The decision by American elites to roll back mass conscription — and the adoption of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas, so much so that Freud is essentially the font of modern pseudo-religious thought, no matter how many times that he’s discredited — has made it so that most masculine personality archetypes have been defined by academic and medical authorities as pathological.

Part of this definition has been justification for the creation of endless new cultural artifacts which are ‘progressive’ to replace the cultural record with new cultural products that reflect the ideas of equality more perfectly. Most of these cultural products are highly perishable, tending to fall out of fashion within months, to be replaced by another expensive production soon afterwards.

The idea of a man as tough, morally resolute, with the capacity to lead, protect, and create order — came to be seen as the font, also, of ‘authoritarianism.’ And the critics weren’t entirely wrong about that. What they were wrong about was in portraying authority — particularly paternal authority — as something evil.

Blacks, as a sort of compensation for their low position in integrated, post-Civil Rights society, get some special room in the culture that they probably wouldn’t be accorded otherwise. Although the critical establishment tends to marginalize Black film-makers, they do tend to elevate a small number of stars here and there. Music has been rather the opposite — as rock became niche, most of the biggest pop stars are either Black or Black-inspired.

What this results in is a White-centered culture which is effete and weak, because depictions of that might smack of the ‘authoritarian personality’ tend to receive severe criticism. When a few slip in through the cracks of censorship, they’ll be subjected to withering criticism later on. This same standard isn’t applied to Black culture, in part because it’s seen as a corrective to the past ‘crimes’ of White male authorities.

It’s not really possible for American conservatives to criticize this effectively, because they tend to accept the Freudian and post-Freudian critiques of Christian family life and paternal authority. When they criticize dysfunctional Black culture and cultural products, they tend to do it from the same frame as the people who critique them. They notice an inconsistency and see an opportunity to score irrelevant rhetorical points in a debate where the score doesn’t matter. Conservatives may also criticize the Black ‘fatherlessness’ epidemic, while simultaneously decrying the idea of paternal authority more generally.

Just about across the spectrum, even and perhaps especially on the alt-right, there’s a discomfort in straying from the Freudian-therapeutic frame — because outside that frame lies the buried lands of religion and philosophy.

What this has lead to is a coarsening of the general culture down to the ghetto standard, while feminine crackers hector one another for deviations from the anti-authoritarian ideal. The culture elevates the idea of the thug — even showering some of them with billions of dollars in illogical corporate mergers — while denigrating the more traditional alternatives, praising the soft, supplicating, nonviolent man-thing who’s more comfortable with spreadsheets than authority.

Due to its particular circumstances, the US needs both conflicting cultural concepts. It needs spreadsheet-man and hipster-man to go to college and hopefully to produce tax revenue. It needs thug-man to fill the prisons and to justify the vast administrations of the welfare state. And also, occasionally, to keep the weak men in line — which they are happy to have happen to them, because they’re so easily intimidated into compliance, being terrified of all kinds of violence.

Civilization demands actions of both creation and destruction, often within the same people. After World War II, Westerners progressively became terrified of both of these elemental forces, and hoped to tame them, to take the edge off of them, under the myth that apocalypse would result if this spiritual advance couldn’t happen.

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Stock Market Pretenses

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about a possible turnaround in the stock market. Investors are, by and large, losing confidence in the absurdity of the worldwide zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) which central banks have coordinated to impose on most developed economies.

While there are some intellectual excuses for ZIRP, the more practical one is that it allows governments to maintain their popularity for a little while longer by silently expropriating savers in favor of connected cronies. Further, ZIRP boosting financial markets ensures that pension funds for government workers don’t go immediately bust or have cash flow issues. The government would start to have immediate legitimacy problems if any of this occurred — similar to what we’ve seen for the government of Greece, but with many more states, people, and territory involved.

Banking interests have to be tiring of ZIRP because, while it may confer a few benefits, it puts a lot of pressure on the entire commercial banking system because of low rates on loans across the board. It also diminishes demand for savings, which will tend to be absorbed by other asset classes — particularly risky ones that represent opportunities.

It’s becoming more challenging for touts to justify the continued bull market in financial assets, but it’s necessary to try to pump it up as much as possible for the short-term interests of the state. This is part of the general problem of democracy — with a maximally expanded franchise, you have to continually buy people off with bribes and make-work jobs. This comes at the expense of the most productive elements of society, who become gradually corrupted and then impoverished as the policy goes on.

Those productive elements, by and large, have adopted a sort of self-sacrificing ethos that would have seemed extreme to some of the most go-go 1980s yuppies. This ethos says that highly productive people should sacrifice their private lives almost entirely for their corporations — a sort of campaign for self-obliteration, an inverted parody of Marxist agitation, but for the managerial classes.

Since 2007, many states — especially the US — have tried to float a propaganda campaign that spectacular economic progress was right around the corner, despite fiscal issues and ‘experimental’ (i.e. desperate/crazy) monetary policy. The thought was that, despite tax shortfalls and other issues, monetary and fiscal stimulus would have an enormous ‘multiplier effect’ which would return ‘economic growth,’ whatever that term can be taken to mean.

New eras in finance, particularly with unorthodox policy, all tend to end the same way — with collapses in the paper asset markets as financial dis-coordination disrupts real production and pauperizes speculators.

The question this raises s whether or not there was ever really a serious choice involved in all these matters. The answer is ‘probably not.’

The institutional inertia of more than a century of precedent, combined with a culture eager to deny reality, made it so that dissent against the policy was like hollering into a hurricane. It was never going to work, but everyone had to pretend that it’d work, if only to conserve the remaining momentum in the society. These are the consequences of decisions made in past decades, many of those by people who have been dead a long time.

A thousand thousand excuses must be invented and promulgated to avoid much of any criticism of the root causes — instead, various immaterial phenomena must be blamed — anything but the willfully deceptive decisions made by those administrators with temporary authority. In some ways that makes sense, because individuals are rarely responsible for anything — instead, there are institutions, and empowered administrators, but none have clear, absolute responsibility for anything.

This has been part of the issue preventing a better resolution of 2007 — while many elements of the government and the banks may have wanted to be responsible — even some prominent academics have attempted to solve the most pressing problems — it was never possible for all the institutions that needed to do so to coordinate to propose something that could have restored more credibility to the state and its banks. After the failed compromises, various parts of different institutions sort of went their own separate ways, some plans were drafted that were never enacted, and the press covered up the embarrassment with glossy pap.

After that, all the responsible people declared that the problems were over, and that anyone who thought otherwise was a ‘chicken little’ type. At the end of it perhaps some can comfort themselves with the observation that, even if people had wanted to do the right thing, it wouldn’t have been possible to put it into practice.

Or perhaps more accurately: no one with much authority really liked the United States of America enough to want to keep it together. A lack of authentic belief in the thing itself allowed enough people to shrug their shoulders and permit it to begin to fade away.

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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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