A predictable exposé for non-predictive politics part I
Or how I learned to stop waiting for Caesar and just tried to make friends
When I look around res nostra, I feel depressed. There shouldn’t be specters, but elves - not plaguing, nor haunting — but rejoicing across the whole Northern hemisphere, dancing and enjoying themselves in natural superiority. Where are these elves? Why are they not dancing? Why are we not dancing?
Let’s play a game!
My first serious, really conceptualized thought came to me when I was nine or ten or eleven years old, whatever it was. I became obsessed with the idea that that morality had to be real - “objective”, as I said in my precocity. Before this I mainly played video-games, watched movies and experienced nature. I remember having an intuitive understanding that morality was fake, and this troubled me - I think? At least I like to think it did in retrospect, because I made a big deal out of it, like just saying “good and evil are mad up” at family parties, while feeling like a deep emo. The reaction among my relatives was mixed.
Like everyone who volunteers to present themselves as beyond good and evil, and does so not with a laugh, but with a mixture of earnestness, melancholy, seeking of approval — or perhaps desire for correction — it all betrays something else besides just rebellion, doesn’t it? Strengthening this suspicion: I was not a particularly provocative or unruly child, rather the opposite, and so I don’t think I did it to get a rise out of my parents or friends (but perhaps teachers?). Nietzsche tried to be happy, but he often wasn’t; I tried to present as unhappy, but I don’t think I really was. Is this what being stuck in the upper bound of the “midwit”-part of the IQ-curve, right next to the hooded guy looks like in practice? An intuitive, non-conscious striving towards emulating the intuitive behaviour of what is presumed to be genius? A more flattering assumption is that I am a somewhat misformed warrior, who has tried to become a priest. Perhaps that is it, and that is all I was doing.
I am not sure I will like the answer if I delve into any of this further - so I won’t. I will simply say that what we can learn from my childhood — I don’t know exactly how, but it feels intuitively right, and also feels good to write — is that politics is mostly a practical matter, and that anyone who pretends otherwise is gay. Therefore, you are gay if you oppose what I am about to say in this Substack on the grounds of me not being bright or well read enough to try. It is a real possibility that I am not, yet you are just going to have to make do with me, because my future frens (I hope) have yet to try touching upon this particular problem as much as I’d like to flatter myself having thought about it!
What then, is “this particular problem”? Nassim Nicholas Bhabar, before he became arabized beyond all recognition, popularizes the term of optionality: optionality as our bearded greekling uses it is about decision-making under uncertainty: you have “optionality” if you have an option to do something, accrue some sort of benefit, avoid some sort of harm or whatever, regardless of outcome. Your plans are not dependent upon a specific set of circumstances occuring for them to come to fruition. Taleb is, familiar to those who’ve read him, a strong proponent of the principle of non-prediction.
Okay, so why aren’t we?
Yes, Taleb may at times be evocative of a kebabtechnician with delusions of grandeur, but his framework is useful. The right sometimes has political problems, because the right is often autistic, earnest and beholden to nature. These things can be strengths — they ought to be strengths — but they are all too often weaknesses, in the environment in which we today operate.
Politics is the art of the possible — nature is, to some extent, an iteration of the thus far possible, and in the short term it is certainly possible to work against it, ignore it, bypass it. In my nightmares I have seen genetically modified 3 m tall ghoulish trans-sexual 145 IQ mulattos, being born to artificial wombs with replicated semen, surrounded by unhappy men and women of our people all around, and calculating ectomorph chest-less men seeming to rule over it all, neither happy nor sad…
Are such Uruk-hai and this hell-world possible? For all that is good in the world, I hope not — and no, I don’t believe it is; and I also don’t believe that the only counter to this future hell-world being a cold, sterile, AI-God of some kind. No, the enemy is not so powerful… a brave French general would destroy everything that exists before that, I am sure, for crimes against nature.
So what am I saying? Take a look at various satire or serious ideas going around at the moment which are discussing, in highly theoretical, satirical and non-serious terms, regime-change. You have Moldbug’s ideas in “Gray Mirror”. I respect the man as a kind of eminence grise influencing my own thinking, but does he give us options? When reading GM I’m sometimes left with the feeling that there is nothing one can do but wait for Caesar, and perhaps there isn’t! Perhaps all we can do is try to really prepare the launch-process of the next regime so thoroughly that we don’t get Apollo 1. Yes, it only has to work once, but if it only works once, what happens in the meantime…?
This is the big weakness, isn’t it? Even if Moldbug is entirely right in his analysis, as he well might be, is, is it the right frame?
We also have this proposal by the British paper J’accuse, closer to my heart in some ways. I don’t like writing this, because I like the plan. I want to be onboard with the plan. But I have questions. For ex:
Isn’t there a tension between understanding law as mainly manipulation of ever-leftward procedural outcomes on the one hand, and making law a central part of one’s play for taking power on the other?
What happens to Europe if it doesn’t work, and the US derp-state strikes back right Hyperborea is reconstituted?
If we accept that the current form of modernity destroys all that is discrete, natural, whole and embedded (warrior-farmer) in favour of that which is quantity, reductive, scalable (priest-merchant), is it not better for at least some Europeans to just let our states burn? To undertake a deep abandonment of such ideas really, and become nomadic techno-feudal Christo-Nietzschean Judaeoform familial warband männerbünde instead? It could be argued that anything else is even counterproductive…
More importantly, even with respect to this great plan, which I otherwise like, we get back to square one. What are you going to do about any of this? Are you the American Caesar? Are you a European politician, or aspiring politician, in any kind of position to facilitate regime change in some European country in the next 20 years? If you are not… is it good for you, or for us as a movement, that everyone autistically calibrates a specific plan of attack? Can you see the future? Why do we even need a plan, in the singular? It is not clear that it can work, and while it is true we only need to win once — we can only die once…
The right has a problem with continuity and increasing power incrementally through politics: probably because so much of right-wing politics is, once again, about subordinating oneself to nature, which also works incrementally. If you think nature ought to be respected to some degree, as I do, well, that arguably limits your political playing field, doesn’t it? Life in the aggregate and nature as a whole may be stronger than any accumulated degree of leftist madness, but does that help us right now?
You can’t use incremental means to bring about a result that you only conceptualize as process, or as the indefinite result of a process, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t make sense, it just becomes a recursive loop — you can however use incremental means to bring about an imagined absolute negative result, the destruction of European civilization for example (which is fixed, as a negative ideal)— what the Left is about, and always has been about.
Driving home the analogy: the right politically operates as the dative case in classical Greek, the left the accusative (or genitive?); the right is a guy with a very big hose or the building company, the left is a stream of dumb inanimate but very effective H2O-particles coming from the bursting dam; the right is a sword, the left is a word — politically, speaking.
This has not been a problem for the majority of human history, except for the fact that industrialization and the modern world has made incrementalism, quantity, scaling and reductionism and so on the ruling logics — we seem to be in a kind of Reign of Quantity, as per Guénon.1 So yes indeed, a man with a fixed point can move the world, but where are those points? As long as these points dissappear into the woods, all right-wing political methodology appears to be structurally at a short-term disadvantage to left-wing political methodology, perhaps.
BAP seems to have alluded to something similar to this multiple times, in lifting the importance of new forms of military technology, for example shield which could creat something like the space-feudalism of Dune and anti-ballistic materials.
So, to summarize: I am not doing the kind of work essential to victory here, because that kind of work cannot be done here for us, by definition. If it could be, I would be a leftist — and I’m not. Do you understand? There isn’t a plan. There has never been a plan, and there never will be. Why? Because it is not possible to plan politics so specifically in the kind of world that we want to live in. Can you plan human life? Perhaps you can — but would you like to? Perhaps the account spreading good memes is much more important, in the long run, than any of this theorizing.
What I will try to do here is to experiment with plans and scenarios, in the plural. Not one plan or scenario, operating under one specific set of circumstances and presumptions about the world, but many — operating with different or even often contradictory logics, presumptions and ideas about the world. Notice how the left doesn’t have anything approaching a correct ontology — and notice how the left has often won, politically. Effectiveness is ultimately more important, politically, than truthfulness. Therefore, I will operate from one premise, and one premise alone: I must write so that we become stronger.
I must presume the worst when it is useful (it sometimes is), presume idiocy, falsehood or paranoia when it is entertaining and generative — and presume truth when it is inconvenient for the enemy to do so. I must try my best to make the whole span of possible interpretations of what I’m saying here, all the meaning and misinterpretations and all the secondary effects including the doxxing (in the unlikely scenario that what I do here becomes big) serve the same goal: INCREASING POWER.
This may be impossible to do in this format, and the reason the left can do this so well through employing words is probably because they are evil, destructive and non-generative… well… politics is the art of the possible. If what I’m trying to do works, it’ll work — if not, no harm done! Worst case, I will become a wordcel that unwittingly amuse wiser amphibians on Twitter that have left logocentrism behind, and perhaps some people will write or paint or do nasty things about me, ridiculing me. Indeed, perhaps the best thing I can do, all things considered, is to stop writing. We shall see, but I think I sense opportunity for new angles of attack here.
If memes truly are the right’s best way to counter leftist symbol-manipulation incrementalism, perhaps I will also try my best to just start posting pictures instead, or finding some other way of communication? The only way for me to find out what works is to try… and experimenting is really the point of this little excercise.
We’ll see how it goes, currently my head hurts, so I think I might just take to dancing instead.
That and making friends! Because making friends is always good — it always does something, and that something is always good!
I think, I only skimmed the book, my French is subpar… at the moment of writing!