Annotation

A post from the Z-man, with annotations.

A cause that has any hope of surviving past the novelty phase will demand from its followers a sacrifice to show commitment. Criminal organizations are the simplest and easiest examples of this phenomenon. A street gang will require all of the members to get a tattoo, for example, to show their commitment. More mature criminal organizations will require new members to commit crimes in front of other members to prove their willingness to sacrifice for the gang.

In more sophisticated movements, the adherents will perform rituals or make symbolic sacrifices to show their commitment to the cause. It has not been unusual for cultural movements to adopt a style of dress. The macaroni style, for example, was an extreme expression of commitment to a cultural and social class. In this age, the sexual subcultures often embrace clothing styles like the “lesbian kit” to set themselves apart and show commitment to the subculture.

Whether it is getting the gang symbols tattooed on your face, wearing an unofficial uniform or committing yourself to a way of life, every cause requires something from the members as a payment. This sacrifice is not only a signal to the other members, showing their shared commitment to the cause, it is also a form of advertising to potential members of the cause. More important, it adds a sense of value to membership in the cause. The members feel committed.

The people displaying their pronouns in their e-mail signature and social media profile are signaling their commitment by sacrificing some portion of their dignity. There is a noticeable discomfort in these people then they say “I go by they/them” because they know what they are doing is foolish. It is as ridiculous as wearing a flowerpot on their head, but that is the point of the ritual. They are making a fool of themselves in public as a way to show their commitment to this cause.

The same thing is at play when white people take to the stage and begin hectoring their fellow white people about racism. It is patently absurd for a white person to stand up and condemn their ancestors for being white or for the crime of having created a culture that is now called white supremacy. Some of what drives this is mental illness, for sure, and some is the “my fellow white people” act. Much of it, however, is the need for the adherent to show their faith by committing an act of lunacy.

For example, look at this post from a gym teacher about the racists power structures at the local swimming hole. His profile makes clear that he is a fully enculturated bug man, but as a white male, he is at the bottom of the woke subculture. His post about how the man is conspiring to keep black people from swimming is a sacrifice of whatever dignity he retains as a man. The point is not to change minds, but to show others in the subculture that he is fully committed to the cause.

A key part of the cult ritual is the irrationality of it. The systemic racism claims are just modern magic. There is no rational or empirical argument behind these claims, but that is what makes them appealing. You just have to accept them on faith. That is the sole appeal of the trans business. One has to strip themselves of all sense of self in order to claim that humans are assigned sex at birth. The ridiculousness of the claim does not allow for even a shred of dignity.

This is why we are being flooded with a wave of public testimonies about how the trans community is ignored in some way. In this post, we learn that the guitar makers have ignored transgenders and women. The fact that the sex of the performer has no bearing on the instrument or that there is no such thing as transgender is central to the sense of sacrifice the writer feels when posting this. In another age, he would have been writing about elves and sprites with the same conviction.

Part of this self-degrading ritual within the identity subculture is the attention these humiliation rituals gain the adherent. It is why we have gone from publicly tolerating homosexuals to take your child to a drag show events. Each step has been more bizarre and degrading than the next. Post-Marx culturalism has been a weird race to the sea that has finally led to mothers offering up their children to predators. The believers seek the ultimate sacrifice they can make to the cause.

How much the shot callers on what we now call the Left understand the forces they are manipulating is hard to know. It is not particularly clear that the trend setters in this cult understand the intellectual history behind their movement. They have simply embraced the primary modes of thought and let nature take its course. Robin DiAngelo could simply be a fame seeking huckster who landed on the right cause at the right time to make money from a movement desperate for a purpose.

Despite this cult’s efforts to tart up their thing with jargon from the sciences, what drives it is a need to vanish into a cause. The appeal to the adherent is the need to sluff off the identity of the adherent and take on the identity of the group. Self-loathing has always been at the heart of mass movements. Christianity explicitly embraced this reality with the concept of sin. To be a Christian is to not only accept the teachings of the particular sect, but to accept and embrace your sinfulness.

I like the Z-man, and think he says a lot of things that need to be said in a very articulate yet almost folksy way that resonates. But this right here is monumentally stupid, and is that stereotypical moving the needle across the vinyl jerk-stop moment. It feels like a monumentally cheap, opportunistic dig thrown in for no good reason, that turns out with even a quick glance to have been a facile and inaccurate one to boot. Christianity doesn't encourage self-loathing, it tells you that you are literal Sons and Daughters of God, the apple of his eye, and destined to become like him if you can purge yourself of all of the natural man tendencies, through the Atonement of Christ and our own striving to repent and be better, that keep you separate from him. There's no higher form of esteem-building, self-affirming doctrine anywhere else in the world than in Christianity. Especially because it does so without narcissistically lying to yourself about how good you are without putting any effort into being so. It doesn't build fragile arrogance, it builds honest self-esteem, because it also focuses you on the things that you need to be doing better, and encourages you to do so. There's nothing that counters self-loathing more than self-improvement.

Not that I didn't know this, but he hangs out in different online communities, if you will, then I do, but my oldest son also commented on this phenomena. The so-called "dissident right" who have eschewed the mainstream "right" because it's obviously insane and stupid, have become bifurcated into two camps; one of which is almost militantly, authoritarian Christian, and one of which is bitterly anti-Christian. I can kind of understand the appeal of both sides, but both are also dead wrong. The former will have no room for the true Church of Jesus Christ, because it will be too militant in trying to force the dogma of man down the throats of everyone and anyone, and won't tolerate any dissent from its dogma. This is nothing like the conflict between Christians and kingmen in the Book of Mormon, because mainstream Christianity in the background of American Heritage isn't correct Christianity; it's Christianity that resembles it in many ways, but was always corrupted. Meanwhile, the anti-Christians I can get, because seeing the damage done by corrupted Christian churches to America and the West overall is not at all difficult, but the corruption of already incorrect Christianity hardly means throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Western Civilization requires three founding legs: 1) Christianity, 2) the Classical Greco-Roman tradition, and 3) the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe and their cultural and Hajnal Line genetic heritage. Take away any of these three legs, and you don't get Western Civilization. You might get something that's relatively nice: the Nephites seem to have had a nice civilization (at times) with only Christianity, for example, of those three (although they had better and more pure Christianity than that on which Western Civilization was built), but it won't be Western Civilization. Frankly, I have no interest in anything that attempts to subvert any of the pillars of Western Civilization, even if they're claiming to try and save Western Civilization. No, that's not how that works. 

And these right wing pagans are have missed the mark so far that you can't even put them on the same map anymore. I honestly have no idea what that's all about other than swallowing yourself up in an identity because of self-loathing. And I kind of understand that, I suppose. But a pre-Christian, pre-Western Civilization benchmark, that lacks legs 1 and 2 of Western Civilization isn't even something that these weirdos would want to belong to, I don't think. They just haven't the wit to understand how formative the other two legs are to the environment in which they live.

In any case, while I like the Z-man and highly recommend reading him on a regular basis, he does have two massive blind spots, and his rejection of and passive-aggressive digs at Christianity is his biggest and most important failing that you need to recognize before starting. Go in with your eyes wide-opened. Even though he's both a good and important read, nobody is perfect, and even with him, caveat emptor.

These modern identity cults are less sophisticated, feeding on a population desperate for immediate gratification and lacking the intellectual capacity for high culture organizational structures like mainstream Christianity. This is why the rituals are so primitive and crude. The barrier for entry is low, so the people flooding into this scene tend to reflect that standard. It is also no surprise that they have arrived at the cusp of child sacrifice. Spilling innocent blood appeals to the savage mind.

Counterintuitively, these spasms of ritualized self-degradation may be a positive sign that the culture is finally ready to free itself. For generations, American culture has been locked into cultural norms so ingrained in the land that the present culture has not been able to evolve to fit the times. The energy of each generation is channeled into civic nationalism, which is throwing seeds among the stones. American culture has been a zombie shuffling along with no real purpose.

Oswald Spengler used the term pseudomorphosis to describe “an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness.” This is most obvious in the obsession with the Founders you see on the Right. All of the energy of youth for building something new is channeled into ideas from men who wore powdered wigs.

And almost on queue, he brings up the second massive blind spot that he has; his contempt for the Founding Fathers and the fact that most on the Right still recognize that they were on the right track about almost everything. Sure, there were cracks in the founding documents that have been exploited to put us in a precarious situation. But mostly, if the intent of the Founding Fathers were following more strictly, we'd fix most of our problems almost immediately even today. The problem is isn't the Constitution or the Founding Fathers, it's the lies that have been told since then that have become so ingrained in our psyche that we have them as base-line assumptions rather than things that can and ought to be challenged. The Founding Fathers, for instance, recognized that universal suffrage would be a disaster, yet even Constitutional originalists now accept the false-hood that universal suffrage is as American as it gets. 

Of course the only people who should have a say in the way a community works, i.e., its government, are going to be members of the community, for instance. This is very obvious, and yet we reject this and rush to give foreigners voting rights long before they establish themselves as actual members of the community who have its best collective interest at heart. The concept of skin in the game is not a new one, and yet we generally reject that as an icon of "racism" or "sexism" on the part of the Founding Fathers. It was nothing of the kind; it was an absolutely necessary precaution to avoid us getting to exactly where we are now. Of course people who's living comes from the government in any way have a conflict of interest and should be recused from voting. And the most difficult to accept, because it requires doing some research into understanding reality that most people have no knowledge of, and it requires undoing tons of emotional brainwashing, of course women have no business worrying about political issues, and their involvement in them has been a disaster from the get-go. One vote, per head of household, for households that do not 1) work for the government, 2) work for privatized government contractors, or 3) get paid by the government via any form of welfare, all three of which should be excluded from being able to vote. And foreigners, even those living among us, are not natural born citizens, and shouldn't have citizenship or voting rights. They are welcome guests (well, assuming that their rationale for being here passes muster and isn't fraudulent in some way) but guests do not tell the host how to run his household.

All of that digression is to show that the Z-man is wrong, again, although for this post, only in an off-hand passive-aggressive dig. There's nothing wrong with the Founding Fathers, what's wrong is those who have built on the Founding Fathers by subtraction, and assuming incorrectly that the Founding Fathers were sufficiently flawed that their vision needs to be reworked in light of progressive lies that even most conservatives believe nowadays.

What left-wing identity politics is signaling is the old culture finally losing its grip on the present, which is why these maladapted mutants can easily organize in public and attack the symbols of the old culture. The subculture is not a replacement for the old culture or a genuine culture in itself. Instead, it is a cancer on the old culture, slowly eating away at its organs. Coinciding with it is the swelling hatred by the young culture ready to break free from the old body.

There is the other part of Spengler’s concept. At some point, after enough pseudomorphs have been created, the next flowering of cultural energy is fueled by a hatred for the old forms. In the present age, it is those asking how useful is that old civic nationalism rooted on the culture of the Founders when it has led to suburban mothers sacrificing their children to groomers? Perhaps it is now time to shed the old forms and think about creating a new model appropriate to this age.

Again; the old culture is losing its grip on the present because the old culture isn't the old culture. It's a caricature, worn by the very people who killed the old culture as a skin-suit. The old culture is literally a wolf in sheep's clothing. But the true old culture, the sheep that was killed for the wolf to wear, was fine.

Then again, as James Madison himself said, the Constitution is wholly inadequate for governing any other than a righteous people. Perhaps there is no going back to it until there's a Great Repentance. Which, according to my reading of prophecies of the Last Days, won't happen. What's more likely is that something will be built on the ashes of the old, but not until most of the old has been swept away in an orgy of fire and bloodshed. We're just too wicked as a people now to handle righteous government. Which, he also says in his conclusion.

Of course, everything comes to an end. The current spasms of degeneracy could simply be the death throws of a dying West. What comes next may not be a new West, but a return to the barbarism that has been the standard for humanity. What gets left behind is a reminder that a people once thrived and reached for the heavens. Like all prior civilizations, this one will end in rubble. What will remain is the high achievements along with the mystery as to why it failed.