Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Mass Androgyny and World War T

World War T, a term coined by Steve Sailer, actually has little to do with real transsexuals, who are a minuscule minority by any count. The amount of attention paid to this new frontier in equality is wildly disproportionate to the actual incidence of transsexualism in the general population.

What the interest is more likely to be is about transsexualism as a metaphor for mass androgyny, which is part of the egalitarian, democratic experiment. The androgyny relative to historic standards is what is aberrant and significant.

The people who are most androgynous overall, namely white, urban, educated liberals, also put forth the greatest effort to show moral concern over transsexual acceptance, and are more likely to support state subsidies for genital mutilation and hormone treatment to allow a person to effect a more masculine or feminine appearance than biology would allow.

Brainier liberals will use terms like ‘gender dysphoria’ to describe an emotional experience that presents as people claiming to feel as if they have spirits with an alternative gender to the one that nature assigned to them.

In reality, we impose gender dysphoria through instruments like the school system which feminizes boys and masculinizes girls. Civil rights laws addressing gender differences attempt to ‘correct’ for the natural sexual dimorphism in the human species.

Democracy’s ideal has become to mold men with the spirits of women, and women with the spirits of men. According to the values inculcated by the education system, a good biological girl has the enterprising, adventuring spirit of a man. A good biological boy has the meek, gentle nature typical to girls. We encourage both genders to play against what biology pushes them towards, using operant conditioning and social disapproval to rectify any deviations from our attempts to realize the blank slate, to train billions of little Émiles.

World War T resonates because the power structure expects us to all be trannies now, at least on the inside. For the ideal of equality to be realized, men must be encouraged to be effeminate, and women must be encouraged to be masculine. In popular culture, the parody of this is the flamboyant homosexual and the butch lesbian in the lumberjack-plaid shirt. But part of the broader goal of the thrust towards equality is to encourage indifference regarding the social construct of sexual orientation. Rather than calling certain acts sinful, we instead manufacture alternative ‘identities’ around sinning with pride, around favorite sins, while simultaneously condemning most of the classical virtues.

Popular art reinforces the real dysphoria, the common kind that no surgery can correct for, by casting women as competent hard-boiled killers and men as sensitive, bumbling cowards. The ideals that even radical liberals rarely are able to fulfill in the real world show up in their fiction, repetitively.

The obsession about the rights of the transgendered has more to do with soothing people uncomfortable with what they have done to themselves, feeling miserable and unhealthy, having abandoned their natural roles in human society. The ‘brave’ transgender who undergoes surgery is a stand-in for the internal world of an ordinary person who has abandoned their traditional gender role. They dramatize with their flesh the internal struggle of the educated liberal, of the tension that they feel in ignoring what their own body tells them is right.

Whereas the physical transsexual receives praise for responding to emotion with surgery and drugs, the spiritual transsexual receives praise for suppressing their feelings and following the trumpet-calls to corporate ambition, achievement, and certification in place of children, home, and church. While the spiritual transsexual might present as outwardly ‘cisgendered,’ on the inside, and in terms of their behavior, they are firmly trans — no surgery needed.

Rigid gender roles remain both a social construct and a good idea. If the principle advocated by trans-rights-activists that the inner feelings of a person regarding their gender ought to be respected, than that goes even more for people trained by mass education to form a character that runs contrary to their inner feeling of what is right, based on the gender that nature assigned to them, which is unchangeable.

It is cruel to attempt to push girls to forsake femininity and womanhood and to push boys to forsake masculinity and manhood. That’s what’s going on at the scale of billions worldwide, and that’s one of the things that causes so much unhappiness and misunderstanding.

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The Democratic Careerist

In democracy, people are supposed to be roughly equal in ability and talent. People are not supposed to notice inborn differences between people that make for wildly different sets of capabilities and interests across the population. The thought is that, generally, emotional engagement or hard work at something can trump all other factors.

Despite this, even in the most democratic of settings, the compulsory school, we all know of students who never seemed to need to spend time studying to win excellent marks on tests. Part of this is due to the general lowering in educational standards, but it’s also partly because some people are intrinsically more intelligent than others. Some people need to put in hours of work to try to solve a problem and fail, whereas a more intelligent person might be able to solve it in seconds of thought.

Although the democrat praises hard work, the results of hard work over time tend to make them feel uncomfortable. Learning, high levels of skill, and wisdom are all concepts that make a democratic people uncomfortable. There is a general idea that, gaining too much knowledge about any area that might be outside their narrow job description is a suspicious activity.

Even among ‘knowledge workers,’ at least if they’re not technical, it’s common to find people who may only read a single book a year, if that, and otherwise spend the spare time watching television, listening to the radio, and scanning social media feeds. To depart from the culture of mainstream media consumers is to become socially awkward, and to be socially awkward is to be at a professional disadvantage in such an environment, which prefers conformity to virtuosity.

 

Rather than defining a person by their family name or where they come from, at contemporary parties, democratic people identify themselves by what they ‘do.’ In some cases, they may have ostentatious titles that rival those of the old nobility in length and incomprehensibility.

Democratic people tend to focus on building credentials which advance their ‘careers,’ accumulated in a text document, along with recommendations from their former bosses. They may or may not have real skills, but what matters is the long record of conformity that they have behind them. They appear reliable, even if it’s difficult to tell whether or not they are actually effective as individuals. Because of this, the most competitive careerists look to get some brand name companies on their record, which acts as a sort of magic dust that makes them stand out, at least as long as that name remains relevant.

What the democrat rarely seeks is excellence. Excellence is sometimes spoken of in hushed tones, because excellent men are not supposed to exist. The ancient Greeks sought areté, excellence, whereas the careerists seeks to merge their identity with a trust-worthy collective, which, although it may be excellent in its own way, will rarely phrase itself in terms of the excellence of a single man. There are, of course, sacred exceptions, that responsible people treat with an inverted awe, freely praising a particular that they would condemn in general.

Pre-democratic Europe preferred the artisan, whose excellence spanned generations — and still does in certain pockets. People joke about the ‘artisanal’ buzzword as if it’s a joke, but when artisanal products displace industrial ones, it has implications for public morality and philosophy as well. The industrial producer creates democratic products for a democratic people. As democracy fades into the past, slowly, so do its artifacts, and its characteristics of ordinary life.

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Instruments of the Terror

It’s under-appreciated how state terror envelops society as both a bottom-up organic process as well as being a top-down, state-induced state of chaos. You can especially get this sense by reading Solzhenitsyn.

If you impose terror too quickly, you run the risk of having people escape with their resources, and can possibly interrupt economic activity that you could otherwise collect rents on. Revolutionary governments tend to be money-starved governments, and the ones that survive for longer tend to be better at maintaining a sense of normalcy within the productive class for as long as possible.

Everything is simplified during a real war from which no one can escape, so we won’t consider that instance in this case.

The most basic human instrument of terror is the thug. The thug rarely works, unless it’s as a pimp, a smuggler, or a general-purpose wiseguy. Turned into a political instrument, the thug has an explicit party membership. He may collect a stipend and hold a title, which he can augment with his sidelines and his position of legal authority. Part of what makes the thug useful is that he is disposable if he causes problems.

Thugs can have official status given or retracted as it suits the needs of the party in a particular region. To the extent that the thugs are not officially part of the party, they can be used as pressure to push productive people into joining the party for protection from the chaos that always surrounds the thug’s activities.

A second critical character to the care and feeding of the terror is the informant. Informants are often women or children, but they can be men as well. Informants are usually motivated by either envy or spite, but they may also turn in their friends for counter-revolutionary activity because they are themselves under pressure. Professional informants may also be used, but people can train themselves to spot them, whereas everyone has neighbors, and in cities, it’s not possible to restrict who those neighbors are.

Why do they do what they do? Because thought criminals are legitimately dangerous to the people around them. They instinctively perceive them as threatening, because tolerating their presence is dangerous. And most people have the courage of a mouse.

Finally, there’s the commissar, who will often start as a pure believer in the revolution. The commissar provides the verve, the faith, that the other instruments of terror lack. A thug will torture someone for pleasure, but a commissar will do it because he believes that it’s just.

The thug is useful at all stages of the terror. In the beginning, he is the most deniable tool. Crime can be portrayed as almost a force of nature. If the judge is sympathetic, he may only put lenient sentences on the thug for his actions, if he receives any sentence at all.

As the terror escalates, the thug gains opportunities to wrap himself in the righteous cause. The more that he is able to wrap himself in the colors of the revolution, the more he is able to indulge his sadism and greed with impunity.

Whereas the party may start out condemning the thug’s crimes as crimes, as the revolution accelerates, his crimes shift from regrettable, to understandable, to necessary actions.

A commissar may start out as a thug — even many of the bright names in the Soviet leadership were bank robbers — but he often possesses intelligence, charisma, and an unstoppable work ethic. In ordinary times, a commissar would go from being a bright, passionate student into becoming a dull if scrupulous clerk. Political repression can help him preserve his romantic sense of himself for much longer than would be possible otherwise. The badge to him means everything. When he kills someone, even a woman, he rarely feels regret or pity, even for a moment. The notion of guilt is foreign to his temperament.

While a priest might doubt himself, a commissar does not, at least until the revolution burns out.

Informants are typically ordinary people, who in more moral times would simply be an annoying co-worker or a nosy aunt. The revolution gives them a sense of new-found purpose. Whereas in better times, their vigilance might be put to use reporting a dangerous looking vagrant lurking near a park, during the revolution, they perk up their ears for politically incorrect jokes and other indications of reactionary tendencies.

The universal moral corrosion common to totalitarian regimes is what dissidents and historians usually remark on. It becomes almost as if everyone who stays within the totalitarian society is incapable of being good. There may be occasional good acts performed by bad people under totalitarianism, but part of what makes it so sinister is that the idea of goodness dies within the common people as well as the elites, except for perhaps within some of the surviving elderly people.

Denied the outward performance of goodness, the inner light tends to die as well. That is what makes it so intolerable.

In America, we are still at a relatively early time in the development of the terror, in part because it’s mostly only been possible to move slowly. When a thug performs a crime, the commoners see a criminal. But the revolutionaries and the temporary elites who know that they must appease them see a soldier, or a martyr. The two groups can see the same images, know the same facts, and yet hold a different narrative about the meaning of those images and facts within their minds.

Once the terror begins, it must intensify through a ratcheting process, as elites rely more heavily on the revolution to retain access to resources and control, and the revolution needs to accelerate to avoid decaying into nothing. When the current elites cease to be useful, the revolution eats them, and takes their place in the shell where government was previously.

As the revolution fails to produce the perfection of the idea of the revolution, it must intensify every trend, must make greater use of its instruments, and destroy not just all good things, but attack the idea of goodness itself in the common mind. Thugs being quite literal, they do this by battering the brains of good people until blood and organs stain the walls and ruin the carpets. Hammers, knives, spikes, household objects, guns, machetes, gasoline — complicated tools are not necessary for this sort of mass moral restructuring.

Goodness being redefined as evil, the commissars seek out everyone who is good, to torture them until they stop being good, or cease being. With competing sources of Goodness gone, the revolution looks taller by comparison relative to the crowd of nihilists that it leaves behind.

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