The Atlantic Report: The Renegade Nurse

I wonder what progressives would say if Kaci Hickox, the quarantine-defying nurse, told the press that she refused to be isolated because:  1) It violated her civil liberties and 2) There were too many Mexicans among her medical staff.

If the progressive reaction to ebola confuses you, it's helpful to think of the differences between where conservatives and liberals believe our threats lie. Conservatives are cautious about external threats while progressives keep their focus on their internal rivalries.

Most zombie movies eventually rely on one trope:  The individual who is less concerned with the ravenous horde outside than sticking it to his compatriots. (One of the reasons Night of the Living Dead is lasting is that it complexifies this trope by making the dissenter's plan the right one.) Even though this character is always depicted as a villain, progressives seem to think he's the hero.

Russell Berman has the report here.

At the heart of [Hickox's] protest is a belief that authorities in the two states were confining her out of fear–both political and irrational–rather than medicine. She has no fever and feels fine, and as public health officials have stressed repeatedly in recent weeks, Ebola can't be transmitted unless a person is symptomatic.

So far, the media has restrained themselves. They haven't come out and said that they support her, but they're willing to keep a spotlight on her.

It appears they're being wise, but I doubt it. The progressive foot soldiers that have been raiding the comments sections all have a similar refrain:  Science has proved that we're safe.

Has it? There's a lot of speculation but surely the powers that be don't have an interest in making it look safer than it is.

Anyway, ebola is a good example of what I call the Nuclear Energy problem. Nuclear fission, as far as I can tell, is our best source of energy. It's even safe--except for one thing:  when it isn't safe it's really, really bad.

You are faced with a big prize wheel. You have a 45% chance of winning $10 a day for the rest of your life and a .5% chance of having your home burn down to nothing with all your family inside. Do you play?

That's what ebola is. What's the latest death rate? 70%? I've heard 90% in the past. It's a horrible way to go, as well. As for how easy it is to catch, well, the information has been so politicized who knows who to trust? Not to mention the fact that diseases can mutate without warning. The wisest decision is control what we can because the alternative is horrifying.

Hickox's defiance toward the quarantines and the progressive support for her are exceptionally short-sighted. Sure, she's within her rights, but what happens if she turns out to have it and transmits it to someone? Those rights will be gone for everyone else because she will have proved their danger. Conspiracy theorists would argue that this is all part of the plan--"prove" how civil liberties endanger the public in order to strip them.

It reminds me of a slogan I use as a manager:  "If everyone acts reasonably, we won't have a lot of stupid rules." While New Jersey's tent in a parking lot was a really dumb move, if Hickox had compromise between the public's concerns and her feeling of imprisonment, a happy medium could have been reached. By insisting that only her happiness was important, she's added more fuel to the prog-con battle.

The Atlantic Report: Why Millennials &%#@! Love Science

I keep talking about Walker Percy's concept of the autonomous self because I keep seeing examples of it in modern culture. Alexandra Ossola's examination of Millenials' love of science is yet another good example.

This is how most Millennials feel about science—curious and awestruck. And they can’t get enough of it. They’re reading about science at their jobs and in their free time, in peer-reviewed journals or on Wikipedia. But what makes Millennials’ interests different from the scientific interests of every previous generation?

Well, for one, other generations didn't get cohort-stroking pieces in The Atlantic. But another is that science is the only avenue of truth allowed in the West.

Even a light presence on the Web will prove that Millenials' championing of science is shallow. Sagan and Tyson hero-worship and "Cool beans!" snapshots. And I don't get the impression that they understand the difference between science and technology--they know the difference when they talk about their iPhones, but not when there's a breakthrough in carbon fiber manufacturing or something.

Most importantly, there's a real lack of understanding of the disconnection between reality as the universe outside ourselves and science as our knowledge of that universe and the method of determining that knowledge. It may make atheists roll their eyes when I say this, but the rah-rah science fans make science a faith. (Here is another term I thought I made up before I encountered it on the alt-right:  scientism.)

When historians--and God help them--dig into the piles of chatter the modern era has produces, they'll have to take a Straussian perspective; everything that the mainstream media discusses is not what they're really discussing. This "love for science" is really the cult of the scientist. To really love science, I think, is to love the rigor of it--the strict rules of what is considered proof, the reluctance to promote definite conclusions, the process of eliminating possibilities rather than proving theories. The modern perspective is that the white-coated sage emerges from his laboratory and pronounces, "I bring you Truth!"

I wonder what will be the event that will shatter the Millenials' faith. As I said above, the spiritual perspective is that science is an abstract description of a reality that is separate from that description--a description that strives for accuracy but a description nonetheless. But the broader right wing also sees that science has become politicized.

Millennials have a greater need for things that transcend old boundaries and ideologies. Science has become a universal language, a form of information that is available almost instantly and can be shared among people who have nothing else in common.
...
"Obviously one issue that Millennials will put their talents toward solving is climate change," [Neil] Howe said.

Sadly, the end of Millenials' love of science probably won't be because of any single event. It will be because the excitement will slowly leak out of it. It's nice to be 22 years old and thrilled about the advances in space exploration or nanotechnology--or that Tarantino is coming out with a new movie or your favorite comic writer is taking over your favorite comic character or they've discovered a lost Salinger novel or Hulk Hogan is returning to the WWE. But time will tell you that these things rarely work out the way you think they will and you're left back in your home, wondering how to handle a Wednesday afternoon.

Traditionalist-ism

One of the elements that attracted me to the non-establishment right was that their common terminology consisted of words that I thought I had made up.

Back in the old days, when my reading consisted of The Atlantic, Harpers, with pre-lunacy Slate and Salon, I thought to myself, "These people aren't talking about improving race relations or improving the lives of minorities. They're just...anti-racists."

Likewise, the term traditionalism. I first glommed onto that word when considering Sarah Palin. I liked having a married mom in national politics but her particular personality irked me. I thought, "Yes, she's traditional without being a traditionalist."

However, Henry Dampier's piece, "Is Neoreaction Traditionalist?," makes a plain case that I think of the word differently than others do.

I think my usage is more accurate but what can I do against the mob? Traditionalism seems to mean adherence to the Western/American/Christian (take your pick) traditions of the past. That's just being traditional, isn't it?

That leaves a blank space when I talk about a belief in the efficacy of tradition as a process--the push and pull of a million separate individual interactions that result in the best outcome for the most people.

Believing in tradition is believing that, most of the time, people can work out solutions among themselves, if they are left to do so. Tradition triangulates between human desires, natural obstacles and the worst outcomes. It may be mysterious and slow, but it works like water carving out the Grand Canyon.

The Kind of People Who Want to Know What Kind of People They Are

I recently read Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos and have since been looking at the world through the lens he introduced.

Percy's argument is that the fundamental human problem is that we are subjects trying to be our own objects. That is, we are frustrated by our attempts to define ourselves--as a species and as individuals--the way we define everything else.

The problems that arise from this are endless but most relevant in modern America is everyone's need to define what kind of person they are.

A few weeks ago, New York made the connection between Jonah Peretti, the critical theorist, and Jonah Peretti, the founder of Buzzfeed. Critical Theory has a rundown here.

It seems that Peretti wrote an article for the journal Negations that predicted the future web sensation, albeit in anti-capitalist terms. "Late-stage capitalism" produces consumer "schizophrenia," is the basic idea. The takeaway is that what companies and consumers end up exchanging are identities.

Think Apple vs. Windows vs. Linux. Or Starbucks vs. indie coffee shops. Or, dating back generations, Ford vs. Chevy. One's consumer choices define what kind of person one is.

The reverse can also be true. If one is the type of person who cares about social justice, of course one is going to buy Fair Trade certified products. If one doesn't, then obviously one isn't really that type of person. The consumption and the identity are indivisible.

I've discussed before how this is working politically. The populace is divided into smaller and smaller segments, each of which is positioned against a perceived majority. If one is the type of person who is kind and considerate, of course one is going to support teaching children safe ways to have gay sex. The identity and the moral choices are indivisible.

Buzzfeed really has mastered this element of modernity. Every five-minute quiz is based around viewing oneself as a fixable object in the cosmos. Who am I? Well, if I were a member of One Direction, I'd be Harry. I'd be happiest living in a Tuscan cottage. I'm definitely an 80s kid and my spirit plushy is a Pound Puppy.

But Buzzfeed's attitude is basically harmless, except in its perfection of shallow distraction. If Percy's description of the human condition is accurate, then Buzzfeed is like trying to stave off hunger with an endless supply of potato chips. Buzzfeed gives the reader a tiny definition, then a thousand more in the hopes that it will satisfy the desire for one complete definition.

The happy truth is that most Americans aren't "smart" enough to be ruined by Percy's existential misery. Irritated, manipulated and lost, maybe, but not ruined.

Take, on the other hand, NYT's article on Jill Soloway, creator of Amazon's transgender drama, Transparent:

In college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she tried her hand at playing the ideal college student — “makeup, hair, cute clothes” and “dating horrible, gross dudes.” She even tried to pledge a sorority, but a poorly timed dermatologic event pre-empted this. One day she was taking a walk on the shore of Lake Mendota in Madison with some of the friends she’d made, still very much preoccupied with cuteness, when she saw a bunch of people — “like hippies, feminists, demonstrators, political kids, people who fought” — wading in the water, just having a good and un-self-conscious time. These, she realized, these were her people.

Emphasis is, of course, mine, but it should be obvious that Soloway is acting precisely as Percy describes--she's trying to find a definition for herself first and be herself last. Finding that perfect definition, she will find freedom, or at least the absence of self-consciousness.

[A side note:  Percy's arguments help make sense of Esther Vilar's definition of love in The Polygamous Sex. She explicitly states that love "defines" an individual "completely." If the definition is incomplete, then it is not truly love. Percy would probably agree to her terms but point out that the only complete definition can come from God, who loves us more completely and more truly than any individual human ever can. This would cause Vilar to vomit.]

Lest the reader think that Soloway was simply having a typical college-age "finding oneself" moment, consider this recent event:

Soloway was greeted heartily by workers around the back lot as she made her way to the set of “Transparent.” She had mixed feelings about all the chumminess: Yes, it’s only hello, but sometimes you just want to get to work. She said “hi” back, of course, because what are you going to do, but even a small exchange like that can lead Soloway to rant on gender roles. “I don’t have the privilege to just stand there and go, ‘Hi,’ ” Soloway said, mimicking the men.“ ‘Look at that walking by. I’m trying to have sex with that.’ ”

 Here's another:

Soloway has managed with “Transparent,” which is part cutting-edge TV show and part gender-studies utopian experiment, to keep alive the questions that have preoccupied her for years: If we are living in a post-gender-binary world, what is all this talk about feminine and masculine styles? How can you be a good feminist and also love watching beauty pageants and “The Bachelor” and the “Real Housewives” franchise (which Soloway does very much)? If gender isn’t important — if it’s just a construct — why is it so important?

And this:

 “I have the same problem with alcohol that I do with femininity,” she says. “With alcohol I can’t figure out how much to drink before I feel drunk. With femininity, the moment I put it on and see that I look like Daisy Fuentes, I’m a real estate agent and I have my own bus bench.”

Can there be any doubt that this woman is broken? Percy would describe her as having a "reentry" problem--she spends so much time transcending the real world with her intellectual theories and artistic translations that she can't handle saying hello to a group of blue collar men. She's so wrapped up in the objective identities she's defined for herself that she can't enjoy the Miss America pageant without hours of self-reflection. She can't do anything that comes natural to her without comparing it to the definition she has for herself.

It's people like Soloway that give me hope. Their path is a dead end and their misery is proof. Keep trying to make it work and the absurdity will only become clearer.

The Nature of the Bureaucratic Beast

A great article on Zero Hedge around five months ago:  "Why Is Our Government (And Deep State) So Incompetent?" by Charles Hugh-Smith. I'll be pursuing Hugh-Smith's work, I think, because he operates from the same principle as I do:  "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity."

1. That which is cheap and abundant will be squandered until it is no longer cheap or abundant.

More or less the Tragedy of the Commons--but I like this better. It's true and trying to explain why it's true is a waste of time. We've reached a point in history where we can say, "This is what almost always happens. Let's stop thinking we can prevent it and start thinking how we can manage it."

2. The prime directive of any bureaucracy is to eliminate all accountability. The raison d'etre of bureaucracy, the very reason for its existence, is not to manage complex affairs but to dissipate accountability into a formless cloud so that no member of the bureaucracy will ever face any consequences for his/her actions.

 This is what I was getting at in my discussion of monarchy. The most contemporary example of this is the ongoing investigation of the IRS's Lois Lerner. It's extraordinarily difficult to pin anything on her because of the dissipatory nature of bureaucracies. When Tea Party groups are harassed, when evidence goes missing, everyone in the department just shrugs--"I don't know how that happened."

However, it's a major shift in our bureaucratic development that Lerner hasn't fallen on her sword to shelter the President's administration. Consider the chain of resignations after Watergate; each resignee announcing that he was responsible, not his superiors. Lerner is an administrative lifer and she's decided she's not going anywhere, no matter what her department did.

This is why it's important to consider a bureaucracy as an entity of its own, with particular traits like any creature has, a colony of ants or, more appropriately, kudzu. It's always going to grow and there is no single spot from which the growth originates.

3. Bureaucracies are intrinsically prone to group-think

What I'm  most interested in, regarding group-think, is the power of the disruptive member. The need for harmony within the group is obvious--no one wants to make unnecessary enemies--so the member who is the most willing to cause division can effect the most change.

This principle--group-think and its weakness for internal loudmouths--explains the increasing PC irrelevancy of our mass culture. Looking for maximum agreement, group members offer concessions to their most disgruntled members.

5. One systems-level consequence of tightly connected, interactive complex systems is that they generate routine failures known as "normal accidents," catastrophes that result from seemingly small miscalculations and miscues that cascade into systemic crises. When accountability has been lost, there are no feedback loops left to correct these "normal accidents," so the damage piles up within the organization until it collapses in a supernova model of accumulated incompetence.

In my experience, this is concentrating on fixing problems and not preventing them.

This I see in my day job at a small business, my first dealing with business-to-business matters. After about three months on the job, I said, "If everybody here and out there did their job correctly, half of the country would be out of work."

At least in private enterprise the money wasted on fixing mistakes has a cap--once operating expenses exceed revenues, something has to be done. It has to be worse in government bureaucracies.

6. The moral-hazard-riddled leadership of bureaucracies will choose whatever short-term politically expedient fix reduces the immediate political pain (also known as "kicking the can down the road") rather than risk shaking up the organization by imposing accountability and clearing out the deadwood.

Something I've been saying in private for years, but have never had occasion to say here:

Democracy is the theory that an infinite number of short-term solutions equals a long-term solution.

Logical Castles in the Sky

Earlier this week, I listened to a back-catalog interview with Phil Hendrie on Rick Overton's podcast. Somewhere in the second part, Overton starts spilling gobbledy-gook. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, he said, men did the killing. As Rick imagined it, killing another creature would be traumatizing--the hunters would naturally sympathize with the death throes of their dinner. To prevent them from being too distraught to feed their clan, men developed capacity for compartmentalization. This, of course, explains why men are able to commit heinous acts and then go on about their business.

Several years ago, I had a customer at my bar educate me, "You know, man is made to crave sugar and fat," because of energy needs out in the wild. He gestured down his overweight, slack body. "You see where these cravings get you."

Likewise, the article I discuss here had a detour tracing the origins of jealousy back to "caveman" times.

Theories based in evolutionary psychology--as least as practiced by the chattering class--are simply science fan-fiction. They take whatever trait they'd like to endorse and trace it back to an imaginary situation in which that trait would be an advantage. Thus, we are hard-wired to have that trait. Thus, we must accept that trait unconditionally.

Overton himself is a great example of this attitude writ large. He's a funny person and his discussions of comedy, improv and performance are always interesting. There's no doubting his expertise and passion for these subjects but he insists on inserting his smart-guy-liberal opinions into everything.

One subject he returns to is his theory that education has been intentionally dumbed-down by the powers-that-be to prevent another uprising of intelligent youth as they had experienced in the 60s. Because clearly those in charge are descendants of Barry Goldwater, only more nefarious. And because clearly our educational system is tightly controlled by a handful of people and not a sloppy mess of bureaucrats, loan officers and those-who-can'ts.

We see this again and again among smart-guy-liberals. They may be decent thinkers but they never, ever examine their first principles. Was the youth activity of the 60s really the result of a bunch of kids using the full capacity of their minds? Did they really, as Overton insists, "stop the war?"

When one starts making arguments from incorrect premises, one might as well start discussing the rules of order for the Hogwart's teachers' union. It has just as much relation to reality.

Assorted Thoughts on Monarchy (and a Goodbye to NRx)

A few weeks ago, I was considering coming to some kind of final reckoning with the ideas of neoreaction. The movement seemed to have stalled and spun its wheels with navel-gazing and back-slapping. And all without having come up with a definable perspective at its center.

I planned on digging through the fundamental texts listed in the Neoreactionary Canon and trying to figure out what exactly were the premises on which everyone was operating.

Then Trannygate happened and I became disgusted with the whole mess of them. It suddenly became clear--these guys think they invented reactionary thought and are too self-aggrandizing to understand that "inventing reaction" is a contradiction in terms.

The ideas they discuss--hierarchy, HBD, the dangers of mob rule--disappeared from the Western conversation only sixty or seventy years ago. For the most part, neoreactionaries don't say, "These old ideas are more true than modern assumptions." They say, "I have true and radical ideas. Me--I have them."

More social posturing, in other words, and that means it's doomed to obscurity, but not before a short-lived sweep through the alternative right because it assembles a lot of loose opinions under a cool-sounding name.

Consider pre-power Italian Fascism. Mussolini and his cohorts wrote millions of words describing how great and revolutionary Fascism was and how different it was from every other political theory. What it failed to describe was what exactly Fascism was.

The Reaction will put you in the driver's seat. The Reaction will be no rerun, brother. The Reaction will be live.

Neoreaction is the same way, all marketing puffery surrounding a few old ideas with no central perspective. So, I'm no longer interested, though I plan on checking in a year from now to see its state.

However, I realized that I'd never written out my thoughts on monarchy, which the mainstream media has erroneously attached to neoreaction but was once a lively topic of discussion. With no more ado, the advantages and lessons of having a final authority:

Monarchy has a human reach  Perhaps the triumph of democracy is really the triumph of bureaucracy, with the idea that good governance is too complex for one man to sit at the head of it.

In absolute monarchy, the government does what the monarch feels is important. If a bureau has outlived its usefulness, the monarch can single-handedly dissolve it. Consider how a strong monarch could have handled the civil rights movement, had he been persuaded that blacks were unduly disadvantaged. He may have instituted the exact same affirmative action programs that were placed but at some point he would have discontinued them as having done as much as they can.

In our current system, programs are easy to start and almost impossible to end. A final authority examines the efficacy of the programs and adjusts accordingly. The quality of the programs, of course, rests on the quality of the one ultimately responsible.

Most importantly, the fact that the monarch cannot control everything means that he’s more likely to control what’s important. Even though final authority rests in a single person, monarchy is naturally decentralized. He’s just one man, after all.

A bureaucracy without an ultimate authority, however, believes that everything can be controlled and never hesitates to try.

Monarchy is the ultimate arbiter of the law  Progressivism has a bad trait of wanting the tail to wag the dog. The existence of exceptions means that the whole of the law has to change. Gay marriage and transgender rights are the current hot buttons, but the best example is euthanasia.

Everyone can conceive of a situation in which it appears that snuffing out the life of another is an act of mercy and not of violence. Our laws are generally geared toward allowing someone to die--removing medical assistance--but progressive thought says that this is oppressive--the law should allow for situations in which it’s advisable to actively kill someone.

By providing a final authority from which the law springs--as opposed to our conception that the law itself is the authority--, monarchy provides an escape valve for especially difficult cases. The man who is charged with murder for putting a pillow over the face of his father who was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s can have his punishment reduced or rescinded by order of the monarch. The monarch has the power to say “This is a special case,” without establishing a precedent for euthanasia. The law applies to most situations but cannot apply to all--monarchy solves this through the final authority of a single person.

Monarchy comes with a set of inherited obligations  Perhaps the reason why dictatorships usually devolve into tyranny is because the dictators themselves were not morally prepared for true leadership.

Aristocrats and monarchs were raised in the culture of noblesse oblige--their blessings of rank required them to care for those lower in status. A future king was raised to respect his role and to understand the needs of his kingdom.

It’s always a gamble to rely on the moral compass of a leader (but hasn’t America consistently done this?), but the truth is that cruel leaders like Ivan the Terrible and prolifigates like Louis XIV were rare. The majority of bad rulers were mediocre and a surprising number were paralyzed by the enormity of their responsibilities, rather than abusing their stations.

The training of life-long leaders is the primary reason why a return to monarchy isn’t feasible today. The descendants of royalty have been separated from real power for so long that they will rule no better than your average ambitious colonel.

Monarchy provides a framework  One of the most eye-opening writers I discovered in my early days of conservatism was Justus Moser. In this conservative collection, he has a piece from the 1770s named “No Promotion According to Merit.”

I was amazed that something so fundamental had a period of debate. But Moser had some good points. His central argument was that a stable arrangement allows actors to work around the framework to accomplish their goals. A shifting arrangement--one that is always changing in order to “improve” it--is like building a house during an earthquake.

Likewise, in one of his books, Theodore Dalrymple marveled at the quality of life somewhere in Italy, which he ascribed to the complete ineffectiveness of the government. Because the people could not rely on the state to regulate their economy properly, they developed a black market for quality goods whose prices were not inflated by taxes and other regulatory costs.

I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as those two, but one should know that monarchy provided a stable arrangement. The character of the reign was dictated by the character of the monarch, whose time on the throne may well last decades. Whether the most capable leader in history, a so-so ruler or a total incompetent, the subjects had time to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of their monarch. If the king was good, they prospered. If he was bad, they worked around him.

Monarchy is not driven by change  Modern democracy is built on the cry, “We can do it better!” Rare is the politician who runs on the platform that nothing needs to be done.

A monarch is more likely to accept that a system is generally working and leave it unchanged. Progressive thought is always looking for the exceptions and overhauling the system to correct them. When the overhaul creates further exceptions, more overhauling follows. It’s a cycle that produces instability and can never be judged for its effectiveness because it’s always about to be improved.

The days of powerful monarchs probably will not be seen again for a long time. The kings and queens of the past came from warriors who won their position through battle and cunning. Their descendants held their thrones by outsmarting and outfighting their rivals while earning the love of their subjects. The genes may still be there (though probably not) but the historical environment has been destroyed. There is no one to take their place.

Even though we can’t return to those days, we can see the failures of our current system by comparison. Absolute monarchy may be extinct but it is not obsolete.

Transactional Love

Bryce LaLiberte is probably the best example of neoreaction's tendency toward enthusiasm over rigor but he makes a good point over at Social Matter:

While in the past one generally had a guarantee that their romantic partner would live and die with them, the breaking up of relationships is now the norm. The effect of this is neither inconsequential nor non-negligible, yet we rarely analyze it as a social ill, practically discounting heartbreak as not a real problem deserving of a solution. Yet the costs of heartbreak are tangible and for a majority of people heartbreak plays a role in the onset of mental disorders, a decreased pleasure from love and romance, and an eternal fear of ever becoming attached and letting someone else have power over your emotional state. As such, we withdraw from each other, pursuing sexual relations as though the emotional element might be sanitized. Recovery from heartbreak changes a person, and while they might come out better for it in certain material ways, there will always linger that unease at being asked to trust someone.

By the time one reaches thirty, most everyone that's single is emotionally damaged. Some have been heartbroken and avoid making emotional attachments the way one learns to avoid touching a hot stove. Others become emotionally callous.

Manosphere writers have lately made a point of highlighting articles in which female writers announce that they're "ready for a nice guy." This is especially sad. Red pill writers point out that the women's sexual market value has expired and that a woman whose body is well-known to a surfeit of men is less than attractive.

But there's also the condition known as being an "alpha widow." Though the woman has settled down--and settled--for the proverbial beta provider, she still dreams of the lotharios of the past. Whether the yearning is sexual or emotional, that circuit has been burned out; it will never fire for the man with whom she condescended to spend her life.

Men do a little better with experience. If the man at the end of his peak decides to settle down, he has a more objective measurement of what will make him happy than a woman's, her preference is for being emotionally overwhelmed. While a man decides that he wants a woman who is, say, attractive, cheerful and loyal, a woman wants to be swept away by her partner. She may find a man that meets her checklist--good job, good with kids--but she'll always be tempted by the possibility of rapture.

Either way, the relationship can shade into becoming transactional, the way thrown ball is drawn towards the ground. Both the over-experienced man and woman become self-centered--the relationship is a method for obtaining what they emotionally desire. The old definitions of marriage and family, of being a part of a whole, of union, are harder to achieve.

That's not to say that the majority of marriages pre-Sexual Revolution were two becoming one, but the culture pointed us in that direction. The message was, if you are unsatisfied, turn toward your relationships. The answer isn't out among the mass of strangers but within yourself and how you relate to those closest to you.

Our current understanding tells us that we are all self-contained objects, extracting our needs from the environment around us, billiard balls bouncing against one another. Two people enter a relationship because it is mutually beneficial; they part when the good feelings dry up.

Each sex is suspicious of the other, and the assumption that the relationship will end, while simultaneously continuing it as though it might end in a lifelong marriage, alienates the self from his most primal urges to belong to another, to have another to protect and call his own.

I touched on that balancing act the other day. The definition of what a sexual relationship is has been thrown away so everyone chases exactly what they want at the moment, just as the alpha widows above say, "I am now officially pursuing a long-term relationship." That one's desires may change from day to day isn't considered.

The old dynamic was that the husband and wife were at the core of the family. Families were at the core of the community. The communities were at the core of the state. Society had a million tiny anchors, as small as the house you grew up in. Now, that house is just the rack from which the balls roll out to bounce against one another.

Meeting Buddha on the Road: The Red Pill Shades Purple

The saddest element of our information age is how quickly coalitions can form only to crash and burn immediately. Take the Red Pill.

I moved back to my hometown almost five years ago after living in a city for more than a decade. I’ve settled down, starting a family in a town with just over 10,000 residents. I’m no longer mixing with the libertines and social strivers. The red pill movement has been more an object of study than a new gospel for me.

I found it exciting. Finally, everyday men were discussing truths the previous generation had to find out for themselves. Some never have.

I’m of the previous generation. The sexual revolution was finally the new paradigm. The Moral Majority had been the last populist pushback against the new sexual morality, with a weak echo in the GOP’s “family values” platform in the early 90s. License had triumphed.

For the sake of argument, let’s agree that traditional morality at least restrained the most damaging aspects of unrestricted sexuality. I’m not here to parade the classic arguments of teen pregnancies and STDs. What I’m most interested in are the personal interaction aspects.

What traditional morality restrained was the male’s roving eye and the female’s fickle heart. All romantic roads were to lead to monogamous marriage. If an individual didn’t wish to face legal, social and familial disapproval, he or she would have to learn to manage their extra-marital desires. In the best scenario, they would learn to love one another more deeply and maturely.

The sexual revolution legitimized--but did not create, libertines will remind us--romantic relationships other than the marriage path. One-night stands, serial monogamy, short-term polygamy, casual hook-ups, friends-with-benefits are all available and applauded.

As proud as we all are about our sophisticated expressions of lust, some problems arose. For one, no one ever seems to know exactly what kind of relationship into which they’ve entered. Worse, if one party pushes for clarification, the magic disappears. “What are we doing here?,” is such a fun-killing question that it’s become a cliche. Worst is the unspoken suspicion that one’s partner has a different idea of the relationship than you do.

The red pill deals specifically with another problem:  that the nature of women, once traditionally concealed under flattering constraints, has been more recently rationalized as a natural good in and of itself. The old pedestal of innate female nobility is still there, only women now believe that wherever they step, the pedestal is beneath them. They are told that whatever feelings they have are correct, without need for adjustment. We forget that the pedestal was also a boundary of what was acceptable.

Red pill theory tells us that what we’ve been told about women's natural goodness is untrue, that we’ve been believing the lies women tell themselves. 

My opinion is that the most important truth of the red pill is in that neologism, hypergamy. Women want the best possible man they can get.

One aspect of this I haven’t seen discussed--and what I think is behind the techniques red pillers advocate--is how this plays out internally. How does a woman know that she has found her best possible mate?

When she feels like she just barely qualifies. 

When a man engages in what’s called “beta” behavior, he is communicating that she qualifies for his affection and does so without any effort. When one practices “bad boy” behavior, he is telling her that her hold on his attention is tenuous; she’s just barely good enough for him. If she’s just barely good enough for him, he must be pretty special. Her emotions are parallel to that of a student struggling to keep up in a prestigious school or a neophyte among a team of high-powered salesmen. The slightest bit of approval produces a glow that no number of “You’re beautiful to me,” comments could.

It goes without saying that this is simply a trick and the source of the “Chicks only dig assholes,” lament. The shiftless but handsome man is triggering the cues that tell women, “This is a good one,” without actually being a good one. But women view the world through their feelings first and their reason second. When their heart is telling them one thing and their mind another, they naturally follow the former.

I’m starting to believe that the red pill community, for all the condensed wisdom it has assembled, is ultimately worse than the even more autistic PUA community. While the PUA discussions looked like the manual for a space shuttle, their compendium of techniques, plays and other discrete abstractions were separate from their personas. That is to say, the red pill aims its acolytes at personal transformation, to attain the internal state of the “alpha male.”

No one has done a better job of outlining the problems with red pill theory than The Rawness in his Reader Mail series. His argument is that re-forming oneself to red pill standards is to become a compensatory narcissist. 

To paraphrase it with my own commentary, the female half of the sexual market is now populated with women whose tendencies toward solipsism and hypergamy have been unshackled. In order to compete with other men and present themselves as the best of the options, recovering betas (Rawness points out that “beta” behavior is actually co-dependent behavior) assume the impervious facade of the bad boy. 

The Rawness doesn’t consider this a healthy reaction. The switch from being co-dependent (“You are more important than me”) to being faux-narcissist (“I am more important than you.”) is just the other side of the same coin. I consider it being an expert on the rules of a children’s playground.

This weekend, I had the opportunity to visit a nearby city with an energetic nightlife. Hundreds of people were out on the streets walking from bar to bar. I got the chance to see the living results of red pill thinking.

I was with my girlfriend with whom we have an infant (I am aware that I am in violation of my faith, so no need to point it out) and her sister. We had just come from a family get-together celebrating her engagement to her long-time boyfriend.

My first experience came when we left the quiet jazz bar filled with adults and entered a multi-story nightclub. I left the women to visit the bathroom. I came back to find two separate gentlemen triangulated around them. They didn’t face the dancefloor and the DJ like everyone else. They were at the accepted forty-five degree angle and looking at the ladies alternately directly and from the corner of their eyes.

I already have my own counter-technique in place. I motioned over my girlfriend and directed her to kiss me on the cheek. I counted to myself, “Five...Four...Three…,”and both gentlemen broke their stances. To my surprise, one walked over to the other and began talking into his ear; they were a twosome.

The second instance was at another bar. It was mostly empty--our end of the night spot. There were no women around the bar, though I assumed that there were a few in the booths farther in the back of the restaurant. We took a bar-side table.

Once again, I stepped away. When I returned, some dude was talking up my girlfriend and two more were approaching her sister. I put myself into the conversation with my girlfriend. She was being coldly resistant, which did not slow him down, but, seeing how I was being friendly (pretending he wasn’t doing what he was), he moved over to talk to me.

My goal was to get him to move on, so I told him who he was talking to. “That’s my girlfriend and that’s her sister, who is engaged.” “So you’re saying you have a claim here?,” he responded.

“You’re in the wrong place,” I told him. “Look around. There’s no women here. If you’re looking for action, go across the street.” I pointed to the club and the crowd of people in front of it.

I wish I had asked him, “Did you take the red pill or something?,” but my attention focused to the sister. The two guys weren’t taking her hints and she had to be pointedly rude, three or four times, to get them to leave.

(I haven’t even mentioned the peacocking guy with the rose-print wife beater, six-inch beard and perfectly-coiffed hair. Or the dozens of men who entered the various places alone and maneuvered for position. Or the scores who scanned the rooms with a look of desperation masked as aloofness.)

What’s wrong with you guys?

Being an impervious egomaniac is not the key to happiness. Making cold-calls to get booty-calls has zero dignity. 

One of the supposed crimes of the Catholic Church is that it prevented the common man from reading the Bible for himself. It was kept in Latin, read aloud in service without the people understanding the words, and then interpreted for them.

But look what happened when it was translated into the vulgate. One person after another decided that they alone understood the meaning of the text and Christianity split into a thousand different sects. Some have been more valuable to the Faith than others; some have ended like the Branch Davidians in Waco.

Likewise, the red pill has been the distillation of principles from the PUA/Seduction community. Perhaps things were better before because the average red-piller can’t seem to handle the truths behind effective techniques.

For example, here’s something that’s been lost from that acronym-heavy bygone era:  IOI--indicators of interest.

The men that vultured my companions hadn’t received any IOIs. Yet, they approached, confident that their “alpha game” was tight enough to bend the will of their prey. Once they were rejected, they soldiered on until they were insulted, clinging to their vision of an unperturbed bad boy.

Red pill men, do you realize that you are creating a romantic arms race? Please realize that women are not always out in public to get it on. In fact, I’d say that the majority of them aren’t. Your unwelcome approaches and your inability to hear the word “No,” can only result in stronger defenses. It’s only a matter of time before women respond with a punch in the face--you are exhausting the effectiveness of rudeness.

Why aren’t you able to spot the ones who are looking for action? First of all, they are not sitting in a quiet bar talking to their friends. They will be looking around all the time. They will be dressed provocatively, in one way or another. They will be out on the dancefloor. They’ll be squeezing themselves between men at the bar.

How many fractures and exposed frauds have populated the manosphere? How many pixelated alphas found in the comments and forums are actually alpha in real life? Why hasn’t the oft-discussed formation of red pill rules for long-term relationships ever come together?

Because, at the ground level, the manosphere is full of children who grab a piece of wisdom that appeals to them and miss everything else.

The saddest part is that the biggest bloggers associated with the red pill aren’t even telling you to behave this way. What they do best is explain how to avoid blowing the whole interaction because you can’t keep your feelings in check. They talk about abundance mentality and being secure enough that the shit-tests don’t cause you to melt into a puddle of emotions. They don’t talk about being a robot with an erection whose only mission is to spit game and ignore all other input.

Maybe even a year ago, one could make the claim that the red pill was about rediscovering masculinity in an age that denied its unalterable existence. Now it’s reduced to hollow braggadocio and arguments whether it’s about self-improvement or getting ass. Have you ever seen anyone ask, “I’d like to know how to work on my own car. Where do I start?” Why would you ask these morons?

They don’t discuss much that’s typically male. Where they once could have been men exchanging advice about how to be a man--an ancient practice abandoned by most of our Baby Boomer fathers--they instead shame one another for not going to the gym enough and not getting a STEM degree.

Men and women are fundamentally different. The message of our time is that they are not, but the information-elite won’t let us take women down from the pedestal. And, when you are trying to transform yourself into a cocky, unruffled player, you are putting them on a pedestal. 

My generation was told that women wanted, to paraphrase, beta behavior. All the romantic comedy stuff that would get the average guy arrested as a stalker. The resultant man was whiny and needy but at least he was himself (the most unimproved version of himself). Today’s post-red-pill man lives only inside his own mind, creating a world of supreme ego and measuring it with his dick. It’s as pathetic as what came before.

If only Roosh, Heartiste and the rest had written in Latin.

The Philosopher's Stone Part Two: The Dimensions of a Cloud

As discussed in Part One, Esther Vilar has the markings by which we recognize feminists. Her “misogyny” can be more easily explained as envy of more romantically successful, less intelligent women. Her theory looks like a plan to turn the world upside down in the service of a single Argentinian-German writer.

And what she wants appears so minuscule compared to what she damns as the problem. While “Slut Power!” feminists want society to change so they can gain access to many men, Vilar wants a revolution so she can have a monogamous, jealous and faithful relationship with just one man.

Though I believe her arguments are weak, though I believe the whole of her vitriol is not in defense of men but in service to herself, I still recommend The Manipulated Man to nearly every man under forty.

The reason is this:  nearly every man would benefit from its perspective. TMM paints the relationship between a man and a woman as the cold exploitation of a pathetic fool. We should all spend a little time asking the question, “Am I a pathetic fool?” Especially so when it comes to women--nowhere does the male tendency towards idealization do as much personal damage.

A few might agree but I’m getting the impression that more would be puzzled at my recommendation. “Why would you tell someone to read a book based on flawed thinking?”

E-PRIME, abolishing all forms of the verb "to be," has its roots in the field of general semantics, as presented by Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity. Korzybski pointed out the pitfalls associated with, and produced by, two usages of "to be": identity and predication. His student D. David Bourland, Jr., observed that even linguistically sensitive people do not seem able to avoid identity and predication uses of "to be" if they continue to use the verb at all. Bourland pioneered in demonstrating that one can indeed write and speak without using any form of "to be," calling this subset of the English language "E-Prime."

When Robert Anton Wilson first introduced me to E-Prime, I didn’t see its value. Everyone knows that language is a metaphor, right? I didn’t see a need to remind people that to say, “The apple is red,” is to say, “The apple absorbs the full spectrum of light and reflects only that wavelength that we agree to call ‘red.’”

But Wilson was right and I was wrong. We do need to be reminded that “the map is not the territory,” and often.

I recommend Vilar’s theory not because it is the capital-T Truth but because it is an enlightening perspective. Vilar, on the other hand, is quite sure that she has found the Philosopher’s Stone that makes all of the male/female problem comprehensible.

The philosopher's stone is a legendary substance, allegedly capable of turning inexpensive metals into gold. It was sometimes believed to be an elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and possibly for achieving immortality. For a long time, it was the most sought-after goal in Western alchemy. In the view of spiritual alchemy, making the philosopher's stone would bring enlightenment upon the maker and conclude the Great Work.

My statement is this:  There is no Philosopher’s Stone, in any arena of human knowledge. 

E-Priming that statement, we should assume that there is no Philosopher’s Stone and that every theory that comes along should be thought of as a description and not a definition.

We see the folly of believing that we have created a definition--that we’ve pinned reality to a display board--in Vilar’s The Polygamous Sex.

Two of her assertions reveal that she hasn’t discovered the Philosopher’s Stone. The first is her analysis of biological imperatives. The second is her definition of love.

Vilar told us in TPS that humans have three drives:  to preserve one’s own life, to reproduce and to raise the offspring until they are independent.

The whole of her theory, from the first book to the last, rests on her assertion that the last two drives are entirely distinct from one another. But are they really?

Speaking biologically, one doesn’t rear offspring unless one has had sex. The mentor-protege relationship, as Vilar characterizes parenthood, is inextricably connected to sex.

I’m sure that Vilar has thousands of words available explaining why this connection is illusory, but that connection explains the development of the traditional monogamous family. It explains it more simply, too, than asserting that the family is only a female trick upon men.

Since Vilar is telling us--in so many words--that she has the Philosopher’s Stone of romantic relationships, just arguing the distinction makes her whole argument false. Truth is the absence of the false; she tells us that she has the truth.

If she had stopped writing at The Manipulated Man, that work may have become more than what it is now, which is a footnote to a footnote. If she had said, “Look at your love life from this perspective,” its value would be more obvious.

Instead, she tells the married man that he is being deceived by the one he loves, that he is a slave and, worst, that he is committing “pseudo-incest” each time he enjoys the marital bed. Not only that, she says she can prove it, as she pulls out a list of definitions.

But we have thousands of years of personal and theoretical descriptions of marriage. Our civilization (at least until the last few decades) has concluded that a monogamous marriage between a man and a woman is a net positive for everyone.

In response, Vilar waves her Philosopher’s Stone and cries that she has seen the Truth.

Vilar tells us that the reason that men commit infidelities is because their primary relationships are incestuous. Deep in their hearts, men are disgusted by this and turn to other women, seeking the pure sexual love Vilar describes.

That’s certainly one way to look at it. Our current accepted wisdom is that men are biologically driven to spread their seed far and wide because that is the best evolutionary reproductive strategy. Infidelity is natural and monogamy is unnatural.

Anonymous Conservative tweaks this theory. The urge to have sex with as many women as possible stems from an r-selected reproductive strategy. With abundant resources, the organism’s best path is to create many offspring and invest little energy raising them. The alternative is K-selection, in which organisms mate with fewer partners and devote more energy to raising offspring. This brings us back to the concept that the sex instinct and the nurturing instinct are linked.

At the very least, we can return to our original quibble with Vilar and say that, while raising offspring is completely linked to sex, the reverse is only occasionally true. The loose correlation of sex to children allows room for interpretation, but the two drives are definitely linked. Vilar looks at it and decides that they aren’t linked at all.

If our concern is to pinpoint Truth, we cannot accept Vilar's argument. Her distinction between the sexual and the nurturing drive is false. Since the rest of her argument hinges on this distinction, we must pronounce that it isn't True.

One antidote to Philosopher’s Stone thinking is the phrase, “For the sake of argument.” We accept that Vilar has severed the sex instinct with the nurturing instinct not because it is true. We accept it to see what doing so can tell us.

Vilar, however, believes that she’s found Truth, so she aims for a definition of love based on her assumptions. Love--sexual or romantic love--has been perverted into pseudo-incest by stupid and lazy women. What, then, is love when it is uncorrupted?

To explain, she relies on her ex-husband’s ontological theories. Note that she feels no need to prove his theory. We are to accept it as valid.

What I’ve gleaned is that it begins with a basic thought experiment.

Imagine a black box.

You may have imagined the box resting on a surface. If not, you may be assuming the box surrounded by air. If not air, then surrounded by nothing.

The one thing you can’t picture is the black box as its own “system,” as Vilar phrases it. If the universe stops where the box stops, it’s not a box. A box has sides; if there is no “outside the box,” there is no “inside the box.” The edges are where the box stops being and starts not-being.

The conclusion is that objects are defined by other objects. A box is not air. A box is not nothing. A box is not the surface it rests on.

Okay. We don’t know how useful that line of thinking is, but we’ll accept it. Vilar then says that the individual is no different, that a person is defined by other people.

Putting it mildly, this skips over a lot of philosophy. Vilar says, in effect, that that entity that we have called the psyche, the soul, the self, or consciousness--that entity which we have discussed for millennia--is simply an object like a black box. We can know the self only by defining it through others.

Here, even the most indulgent of readers has to take pause. Q:  If a person lives alone in a forest, does he exist? A:  Why would you think he doesn’t?

The arguments against this idea are more complex than a simple, “I think, therefore I am,” but it does not matter. Vilar simply asserts that we somehow don’t exist until we are defined by others.

What I mean to say is that it’s a little hard to swallow.

Her next leap is to assert that the best definition of the self comes from having only a single definition. Her argument is that multiple definitions create the possibility of contradiction.

This is a remarkable statement. She has been playing the ruthless logician throughout the book, but yet she places the highest value on a perspective that does not eliminate inaccuracy, but eliminates the evidence of inaccuracy. She will not allow a second definition because it may not agree with the first definition. This is like covering one’s ears to avoid hearing what someone is saying.

The PDF that Crowley linked contains commentary by an unspecified “KJ” at this point. This KJ has very little respect for Vilar’s arguments--at least in this portion of the book, because he doesn’t show up elsewhere. He pokes enough holes that I won’t waste any more words on it.

Vilar’s whole definition of love is a tangle of questionable assumptions and bizarre logic. It’s all in service of proving that love--sexual, romantic love--is monogamous, jealous and faithful. (Note--by “monogamous,” Vilar is saying that an individual has one partner over a lifetime, not that he sleeps with only one person at a time. Otherwise, it’s redundant to include “faithful.”)

Armed with the Philosopher’s Stone of reason, she believes that she has established that any relationship that doesn’t have these qualities is not love.

On the other hand, the Western tradition has concluded that monogamy is the best way to unite a man and a woman, because faithfulness manages the natural feeling of jealousy that sex partners have for one another.

In other words, that…mess above was created to prove what we’ve already believed for centuries. Yet, Vilar tells us that marriage, the monogamous institution that manages jealousy by demanding faithfulness, is a ruse to trap men.

[In fairness, some clarification:  Vilar is telling us that once we experience real love, we will automatically be monogamous because we are emotionally compelled. She is sex-positive and anti-virginity, so I assume that she believes that sexual restrictions get in the way of finding that love. That is, we won’t know that it’s love until we have sex, so take off your pants and go mix it up.

It’s actually a more restrictive concept than traditional marriage. Tradition tells us that we will be tempted to stray but we must resist. Vilar tells us the temptation is proof that the union is not real love and must be abandoned.]

How does this prove the folly of the Philosopher’s Stone? We don’t need Vilar to drag us through a brier patch of argument to get to her conclusions; we can just take the path that was created by the millions of husbands and wives before us. It’s no unique insight to conclude what most others have concluded.

When Vilar discusses our biological drives in respect to the power dynamics of romance, she is giving us the height, length and width of a cloud. But the cloud is not a rectangular box; it rises here and it stretches there. Her measurements may be true but they tell us very little that’s useful.

However, her description of a man enslaved by a woman who cares nothing for his interests, humors him enough to get what she wants, and allows him to work himself into an early grave for her benefit--that’s a useful description. She’s taken a snapshot of the cloud and drawn lines to show the dimensions. We can see more than just her assertions and we can see how her ideas fit into the whole.

Philosopher’s Stone proponents wish us to abandon everything we’ve understood and accept only their interpretation. They demand this because they believe that their stone has explained everything there is to explain.

Is it possible that someone will crack the code of romance and we will gain a complete understanding of it? Anything’s possible, I guess, but it is better to assume that the code will never be broken completely. Once a true Philosopher’s Stone comes along, we’ll deal with it then.

We should resist believing in a Philosopher’s Stone because that is the first step in believing that it has been found. In the field of relationships, we have seen one Philosopher’s Stone after another in the past couple of decades:  The Rules; Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus; He’s Just Not That Into You; Act Like a Woman,Think Like a Man. Each of these set a fire in the self-help world and each one died out because they weren’t the Final Answer.

Malcolm Gladwell has made a career out of uncovering Philosopher’s Stones. The most famous TED talks are almost always about a Philosopher’s Stone. Marxism, Objectivism, progressivism--they all say, “One formula to rule them all!”

To explain romance by way of biological imperatives, or to diagnose the poor as victims of either the wealthy or of vice--any argument like this is reductive.

Reduction is necessary. Without it, we couldn’t say, “The apple is red.” We’d have to show the apple and figure out a way to indicate the color itself. But we have to remember that, like sex is to childbirth, our reductions should be attached to reality but reality is not attached to our reductions.

The lack of a Philosopher’s Stone does not mean that we can’t know anything. What it means is that we have to accumulate descriptions.

Vilar gave us one picture of romantic relationships. Plato gave us another. So did Shakespeare. So did Love Story. So did your parents.

Vilar tells us that a single definition is best. I say that each new description brings us closer to accuracy, if even if by being completely wrong.

The Enlightenment put to rest the search the alchemical Philosopher’s Stone, only to replace it with the search for a rational new one. Our age is one that believes that all is knowable, that what is unknown now will be known soon, and that everything can be reduced to a formula.

In E-Prime:  Attempting a complete understanding produces very little value. In English:  Seeking a Philosopher's Stone is to view the world precisely as it is not.

Prudence is Our Greatest Virtue

Adam Gurri at The Umlaut tells us Prudence is a Virtue:

If you assume a notion of justice, or an extremely other-directed moral philosophy, in which the entire purpose of our lives is to provide for other people, prudence is still a crucial virtue. If you cannot provide for yourself, you cannot hope to provide for others. Au contraire; the selfless and imprudent saint becomes nothing more than a sinking ship, who is more likely to pull those he wishes to help to the bottom of the ocean with him, rather than improving their lot. If you cannot provide for yourself, how can you hope to provide for others?

In my foot-dragging path back to Catholicism, contemplating prudence was a major step. To hear progressive Christians and holier-than-thou leftists tell it, there is no martyrdom too stupid to avoid. Better to open one's borders to foreign cultures and endanger one's neighbors than to be intolerant. Better to allow all manner of sexual deviance at one's doorstep than to be judgmental. It's no virtue to allow one's children to be slaughtered because one is a pacifist. A pacifist is not what the children need.

As Gurri points out, prudence is the balance by which all moral judgments must be measured.

When thinking about human society, my starting point is the isolated village of the pre-modern age. The population and resources are small. Travel to the nearest city takes days. The monarch's army is nowhere close.

Assume you are the patriarch of that village and a stranger has come into town and murdered a resident. He is captured and brought to you for justice. He swears that, given a chance, he will kill again, and will do so as long as he is able.

What is the appropriate action? There is no prison in the village--the crimes committed there don't require major penalties. It's impossible to confine the man for the rest of his life--the necessary resources aren't there nor is there a way to keep him permanently locked away. The prudent action is to execute him.

But isn't taking a life a sin? Yes, but the patriarch has an obligation to his village, who look to him for protection and guidance. Is it better to let the man loose to wreak violence on them? Say he is escorted out of the village--is it moral to sentence a stranger to certain death?

No. The patriarch's obligations to the dependent and the innocent outweigh his obligations to the murderer as a fellow human. So he orders an execution and prays for forgiveness.

The progressive evolution described by Moldbug as an outgrowth of Quakerism and Unitarianism is really just Christianity stripped of prudence. There is no hierarchy of virtues or vices--every moral failing or achievement can be thrown into an enemy's face, like when Alec Baldwin discovered that his years of championing liberal poverty and environmental policies meant nothing because he was thought homophobic.

Prudence tells us how to make the best of the world as it is. That's why it's the highest of virtues man can achieve without God's intervention.

Sonic Youth, Infidelity and Powering Through

Righteous Gen-Xers might remember the public weeping when Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth, announced their split a couple of years back. The couple were the king and queen of Alternative Rawk and, I guess, a model for marriage-minded hipsters.

You know what? I've never met anyone--or read anyone--who said that Sonic Youth was their favorite band. Daydream Nation is always in the mix when talking about "best albums" of one stripe or another but their tracks don't often turn up in the legion of Spotify mixes out there. For as respected as they are, they get a lot more lip service than accolades.

Thurston Moore recently poked his head from the rarefied air of genius to make an ass of himself. The AV Club has the rundown.

Moore had an interview in The Fly in which he said that he'd been in a relationship with his current flame for nearly six years, which significantly overlaps with the time he was officially married. Needless to say, the usual suspects lambasted him for dickishness. Moore lashed back, accusing Jezebel, which is normally the most level-headed and understanding of maniacs, with "gender fascism."

Moore is in the same situation that Alec Baldwin recently found himself:  "B-but, I thought we were all cool with each other." Note that mid-80s tone in the "gender fascism" slur. And like the straight white man that he is, he was angry. He probably should have taken the self-flagellating tack that Ani DiFranco (eventually) used; sobbing and admitting that there's so much to learn, so much to repair, God help me.

But Moore is right about one thing:  "[W]hen they grow up, maybe they’ll glean the complexities of real life and love."

Moore's apparent infidelity isn't necessarily understandable and definitely not praiseworthy. Leaving aside his crybaby defense and the stupidity of assuming that no one would do the math, he has a right to take a look at his life and make a bad decision.

But, by God, he should have to walk through the fire if he's so sure he's right. I don't doubt that Kim 'n' Thurston were much like John 'n' Yoko and Bill 'n' Hillary--relationships that became more usefully symbolic than personally meaningful. There's a good chance that the last years of their marriage were public appearances together and separate lives privately, all in support of Sonic Youth, Inc and their image. Their image of authenticity.

None of that means that he shouldn't be subject to ridicule and shaming. That's more or less the entirety of my societal thinking:  You can't be subversive and applauded at the same time. If you're right, you're still right even after you've been thrown to the lions.

How to See Real Magic

This is as much as what Tumblrites call a "signal boost" as it is a commentary. I'm really enjoying Henry Dampier's Quick Reactions blog. He's approaching neoreactionary thought in a similar manner as myself, with an eye towards the moral and the non-rational.

From his post, Magic: More Real Than You Think:

If magic is a way of perceiving the world, then it may be more ‘real’ than the enlightenment-rationalist method of pretending as if the many things that we don’t understand accord to natural laws that we only pretend to be familiar with.

I didn't realize it at the time but Chesterton's Orthodoxy had a profound effect on me. On the first reading, I recognized the feeling of searching the world for a philosophy that made sense to me and then arriving upon the Christianity I was raised with. The rest made sense only on the surface.

The second reading jimmied some cracks in my mind. Chesterton presents the point that faith allows us to see the world as being as magical as it is. It took some time for it to sink in.

I was already down that path. I realized that the best way to approach the world is to picture oneself smaller and smaller within it--that is, that the world was getting increasingly bigger around me.

It started as a response to the artistic-types with whom I had surrounded myself. Most of them came from comfortable backgrounds and the rest had recklessly charged into the world, unconcerned with consequences--they had experiences that I envied. But as I heard them talk, I realized that their experiences were badges that they wore, not events that shaped and changed them.

I can explain it this way:  I imagine myself and the individuals I envied sitting in a Roman piazza, sipping espresso. My eyes would be wide, trying to take everything in, trying to imagine it hundreds of years before, trying to incorporate all the historical figures who'd been there, trying to understand the architecture, the people, the atmosphere and my reaction to it. I'd be a tiny child on an enormous playground. The people I met--who had been able to make these kinds of trips--sat there thinking, basically, "Hey, check me out. It's me, in Rome."

(Lest you think that I'm just guessing at my reaction, I was lucky enough to travel to India for a couple of months at the end of the last century. This is an accurate description of how I felt, with the addition that everything was a mystery to me, having no grounding in Indian history.)

But the entire world is this way, even the path from your door to your car. I wrote a bit in this direction in my piece about polyamory. Traditional marriage is one of those magical phenomena in the world. Even the concept--it's a human discovery rather than a human invention. It seems to exist in our collective psyches without anyone making it up; after all, nearly every culture has some variation on the union.

Our world is filled with these. The novel, for example--was it invented? Or is it an outgrowth of our natures, a knotting of language, imagination, our need for narrative and our ability to manage complexity? Wasn't it inevitable, not the creation of one individual but a diamond that only needed to be unearthed?

When one looks at the world with an understanding that it is more strange and wonderful and complicated than you can know, that it all exists outside of you, when one understands that there are dynamics at play of which one only sees shadows--well, it's a lot happier place to be.

That's why the post-Enlightenment, pseudo-rationalist progressive worldview is repugnant. It's not a matter of maintaining ignorance, like one burning astronomy books because one wants to believe that stars are the candles of angels, but a matter of knowing that our struggle to understand is like emptying the ocean with a teacup. The progressive tells us that the ocean is only an inch deep and a mammoth teacup will be here any day.

Take, again, Diana Adams' relationship philosophy. Her perspective was that humans have some finite number of needs/desires that need to be checked off to become happy or satisfied. Her particular set of needs could not be satisfied in a relationship with one partner, so she expanded.

Adams and her Yale-educated brain were bigger than the human phenomenon of relationships--she could map and diagram all the gears and controls and engineer a relationship(s) that fulfilled her needs.

That's not what relationships are and that's not how the world works. So much is unknowable--and if we do learn something, you can bet that there's another mystery right behind it.

Western Civilization has struggled with male-female relationships its entire existence--Adams and her comrades believe that the problem is that there weren't clear rules. Not only that, they believe that clear rules are possible and that they will cover every eventuality. I say that's madness.

Tradition, not speculative logic, is the method of handling the mysteries of the world. We can map the path through the forest, but only once we've gotten through it.

Make Mistakes Now!

Sunshine Mary had a typically great post, Girls conspiring to turn other girls into sluts: a good reason not to send your daughters away to college.

I don't have anything to add to her piece, but this caught my eye. A quote from her source article:

All of these things are part of being young, make mistakes now so when you’re too old for these mistakes to be acceptable, they’ll be out of your system. It may seem far off, but everything will fall into place someday. Being twenty-something is awesome, and you’re never getting these years back so stop planning your life and start living it.

Long before I started walking the Catholic and Dark Enlightenment paths, I knew this attitude was garbage.

One makes mistakes in one's twenties--that's a fact of life. Those mistakes are made because one enters adulthood with a head full of untested theories about the way the world works. We forgive these mistakes because they are understandable--young people think that they are making good decisions but they are incorrect. In those situations, we pick them up, dust them off and make sure they've learned their lesson.

But by no means are you supposed to make mistakes. You shouldn't make decisions that you know are wrong just because you know that they'll be forgiven.

I have a feeling that when all these young feminists, social justice warriors and evangelical atheists realize that they aren't living in a world made of Nerf, we're going to see a real backlash and, I hope, a return to wisdom.