THE END AND BEGINNING OF DISSIDENCE

Goblin market.

by James Lawrence

So it looks like abortion is about to get somewhat less convenient in certain parts of the United States. As in, well, a car journey may be required. Maybe a long one. And at today's fuel prices, and all. Of course, if you believe either the left or the right wing of the democratic activist community, this is the first domino in a chain reaction set to roll the clock back two hundred years. All that I can say for it is that it will surely lift the mood of the Far Alt- Dissident Right, which has been through more than enough to earn a respite from the grindstone of negativity. 

As always, this will last right up until the next big disappointment, but there are broader grounds for optimism. Millions of normies have been radicalised over Blumpf, Covid, Brexit, etc. White identity is back in fashion, the Great Replacement is a household name, even white nationalism is losing its brand toxicity. You might say that the Alternative Right ended up achieving its mission in the manner of a Roman javelin – injecting its ideas into the public mind even as it destroyed itself on impact. 

 

I used to think that, if only such a shift in consciousness could be accomplished, it would automatically put an end to the mainstream conservative racket. No more dog-whistling, taking our votes, doing another round of favours for the donor class and then ritually capitulating to the left. With the kulaks in full racial revolt, those responsible for their plight would no longer tolerate controlled opposition, and the right-wing theatre resistance would be forced into leading, following or getting out of the way. 

 

In retrospect, there's really no excuse for such naivety. At least not when you have seen the whole rigmarole play out before. 

 

What we see in conservatism today is a case of Carlson in, Charlie out – the entrance of a new nationalist rhetoric, displacing an older libertarian one, which has become associated with meek political pacifism and agitprop for corporate tax cuts. But pure libertarian ideology, on paper, mounts a more radical challenge to regime authority than white nationalism ever did. The fact that the con party has managed to grift off it for the last fifty years – and crown this achievement by signing off on an unprecedented mass house arrest and bureaucratic-corporate power grab – ought to tell us that the specifics of conservative ideologies are just not that important. They are like intricate, fascinating doodles on the walls of a prison cell, which serve to entertain the prisoners, and (needless to say) dissuade them from trying to escape.

 

Why should white nationalism, like libertarianism before it, not be diluted and co-opted to the point at which the con party can grift off it for the next fifty years? After all, it's not like they aren't already doing it. Whites who vote con have long done so in the hope of slowing down non-white colonisation, and pushing back against state tolerance of anti-white violence. And they have long been permitted to move out of heavily colonised cities and flee to marginal, racially-purer areas – 'white reservations' in all but name – where they can continue to do the productive work that keeps society functioning. 

 

Speaking more openly about all of this would merely be a matter of playing some of the quiet notes loud, and allowing some of the loud notes to fall quiet. The Pied Piper always plies the same trade, but he can always change his tune. And most white nationalists would not have to 'sell out' their beliefs in order to follow him. At the core of their ideology is an obsession with physical survival, which can be expected to motivate the behaviour of a compliant hostage. As long as the cons in office can boil the beloved frog a little more gently, they will keep supporting them and voting for them (and if that condition seems questionable, well, imagine how bad things would be if we hadn't got the cons into office). 

 

Cope, seethe, donate, don't stop voting, and stay away from the blackpill.

 

Philosopher-activist Greg Johnson – who recently treated us to the White Nationalist Case for Abortion and the White Nationalist Case for Imperial Proxy War – approaches his political activism with an almost religious sense of duty to the virtues of Faith and Hope. In some ways, you could say that he has an admirable ethic there, but why couldn't libertarian-conservatives trot in and out in defence of their own failed project? "Arjuna, you have the right to work but not to the fruits of work, so get back to agitating for tax cuts and calling liberals the real racists." (No doubt I say this out of a deficiency in the third theological virtue, that of Love for the White Race.)

Somehow, I can't imagine that this unrequited courtship of the con party will motivate anything like the youthful energy the Alt-Right once had. Indeed, one already senses that the energy is slipping away, that the young blood is going elsewhere. We would be guilty of more naivety if we did not expect the vampire to follow it. 

 

Imagine a future (maybe not too far away) in which white racial revolt has had the edge worn off it, and comes across as dull to most people on the Right as 'muh freedom' does today. Everyone is sick and tired of hearing the White Nationalist Case for the Current Thing, and the predictable failure of the con party to actually stop colonisation has turned racial purification into a fantasy. How, in this scenario, might conservatism try to reincarnate itself in a healthier ideological body? And how, through conservatism, might the democratic regime continue to feed off the energy of its servilised people, while managing down our expectations and containing all angles of opposition within itself? 

Can we even predict this sort of thing in advance? Is it possible to skip a few moves ahead in the game? Maybe not – but when I imagine such a future, I can call to mind at least one good candidate for the job of parasite host. And a slogan, too, which goes like this: 'only a monarch can control the elites.'

This is neocameralism – for the sake of name recognition, let's just say neoreaction – straight from the mind of its leading light, Curtis Yarvin. The basic idea is that the government is just a large corporation, and should be run like any other specimen of its type. This means concentrating the power of the state in the hands of a CEO (a.k.a. monarch, a.k.a. dictator), who in turn reports to a board of shareholders (i.e. an oligarchy that holds ultimate sovereignty but not direct power). Both of these power-centres would have a vested interest in cracking down on bureaucracy (i.e. the current ruling class), and putting an end to its self-interested sponsorship of revolutionary violence (#resistance, social 'justice', 'racial reckoning', etc. etc.)

Yarvin gives a fuller account of neoreaction in a recent post on his Substack. But if we want to get to the bottom of the idea, and glimpse the full web of logic behind it, there's really no substitute for reading the earliest posts on his old blog: let's say this one, this one and this one. 

 

Here we see the analogy of state and corporation stretched out to breaking point. The sole end of governance should be profit, the self-interest of absentee shareholders will hold bureaucracy in check, and – worst of all – the powerless subjects of the state are its 'customers' who receive the 'customer service' of governance. Every man a customer! It doesn't sound much of an ego-trip, but when everyone's expectations have been kicked down another flight of stairs, this might be the last viable way to invert the political hierarchy and patch up the holes in the populist delusion.

Conservatism allows democracy to take control of any
opponent that defeats it in the battle for mass support.

Of course, it's not usually good form to dredge up blog posts from fifteen years ago, and some of these ideas may have been renounced by Yarvin. But I am interested not so much in Yarvin (whom I've reviewed more charitably here) than in the worst uses to which his ideas might be put by the forces of conservatism and democracy. Yarvin's blog was worth reading because he made a sincere attempt to think his way out of the present era, and read his way into a different one. Democracy will have no use for any of this – all it wants is to mold its own substance into yet another ideological idol, which can be granted a shabby little shrine on the outskirts of its temple, so as to perpetuate that temple's monopoly on everyone's soul.

Of course, the real problem with the analogy of state to corporation is that it is arse-backwards. That is to say, a state is not so much a big corporation as a corporation is a little state, which has been stripped down to a purely economic set of incentives by the power of the actual state. Promote the corporate model to the role of the actual state, and this no longer holds true: you cannot expect sovereign oligarchs to be motivated more by profit than by power when they can print as much money as they like, and so bang goes their incentive to streamline the government and submit to the CEO. (The situation is compounded by the fact that the shareholders, under formalism, are likely to be the very folks who ran the old regime as a democratic co-operative.)  

In a worst-case scenario, neoreaction could degenerate into a larp, an exercise in changing the names of things while keeping the underlying realities unchanged. This, admittedly, would require the butchery of Yarvin's original programme, which demands a coup d'etat followed by the immediate purging and bulldozing of most state institutions. But as we all know, conservatism is well-practiced in the art of playing the wicked genie, who always grants your wishes and never gives you what you want.

 

The supposed aloofness of neoreactionaries from mainstream politics would not protect them from being co-opted. In a series of later posts on his old blog (this one, this one and this one), Yarvin outlined what he saw as the optimal neoreactionary strategy. Initially, we would renounce all political participation and concentrate on building the Antiversity, an independent source of truthful information. The Antiversity would then direct the actions of the Plinth, a mass electoral party aimed solely at abolishing democracy and carrying out the transfer of power.

To this day, Yarvin has never got around to laying out a blueprint for the Antiversity, but his early posts on the subject (here, here, here and here) haven't aged well. What we can gather is that the Antiversity would be a sort of dissident Wikipedia, in which all perspectives inside and outside the political spectrum could battle it out in quest of the truth. Not only would this depend on a relatively free internet that no longer exists, but it would also be partially infiltrated from the get-go, and vulnerable to further convergence by the usual combination of bribery and bullying. Given that no progress seems to have been made on the Antiversity beyond the existing neoreactionary blogosphere (whereas Yarvin is now peddling his manifesto everywhere from Unherd to Infowars), I think we can safely do what everyone was always going to do anyway and skip ahead to the Plinth.

In some ways, the Eurosceptic movement in Britain represents a trial run for the Plinth. At first sight, Brexit appeared to give us what Yarvin would call a 'boolean' choice: either Britain is in the EU or out of it. Much like the abolition of democracy, it entailed doing away with a set of elections and an upper layer of government (the EU political class and bureaucracy), and devolving power upon a lower layer of government (the British nation-state). The catch is that the intended recipient of this power did not actually want it. This, I suspect, is also true of the corporate managers to which Yarvin proposes to devolve USG's power (although admittedly they would stand to gain a lot more power).

 

In any case, the Pyrrhic victory of Brexit is instructive. Once the proposition gained enough popular support, the con party promptly half-inched it from the main Eurosceptic party, and won elections off the back of it while doing its best to half-arse the implementation as well. Many of us who might otherwise have disengaged from politics went traipsing back to the ballot box for Brexit – after which, as if to really rub the dog's nose in its own vomit, Con Party Prime Minister Blorris meekly followed the EU into lockdowns and coronatardery. As of the present day, the Eurosceptic political machine has fallen apart, and the British ruling class will spend the next decade or so scapegoating Brexit for the economic consequences of its own mass-hypochondria. 

But let's ease up on the reality blackpilling for a moment and imagine a best-case scenario. Let's say, quite plausibly in my opinion, that democracy proves too intolerant and conservatism too moribund to accommodate the new radical right. Let's imagine that the state cracks down, and that censored neoreactionary documents circulate in banned PDFs among discontented elites, who then turn up at unsurveilled fascist speakeasies to recite them to crowds of grumbling horny-handed kulaks.

 

Let's say the new movement goes on growing until it manages to daunt USG into granting it a vote on abolition, in which the fortifiers of democracy neglect to cheat hard enough and the neoreactionaries unexpectedly win. Let's say the old regime chooses not to fight, the Great Reboot takes place, and all state power is transferred to the shareholder-CEO axis. Just for the hell of it, let's also say that the political fighting in the aftermath extends to ethnic purges, and ends up fulfilling the white-nat programme too (let's say, the reduction of the non-white population to less than 10% of the total).

 

Would this change anything? Obviously, yes. At a fundamental level, and in an ideal way? The answer can only be yes and no. It seems obvious that the modern total state has certain permanent characteristics that will limit the effects of any change to its constitution. 

If every utopia that we dream up and project onto this state seems fragile, unreal and doomed to failure, that could just be because we need to bucko up and think positive. But it could also be because the modern total state is dystopian by its very nature. It represents a vast engine of universal servitude, which has long been disguised by a fantastic increase in wealth (now falling prey to Joseph Tainter's law of diminishing returns), and seems destined to transform every part of society into some combination of prison, boarding-school and human wildlife park.

 

We can apply Aristotelian political categories to the total state, but we must remember that they are limited to the new upper class (10-15% of total population?) directly involved in ruling, administering and instructing it. So if the total state is an oligarchy, this means that the new upper class is ruled by one cohesive group or institution (e.g. the Communist Party in China, or the plutocrats/Jews/satanist cabal in the minds of many Western dissidents). To say that it is a monarchy means that it is directed by a single individual. And to say that it is a democracy simply means that the entirety of the new upper class – the bureaucrats, the political elites, the activists and lobbyists, the high managerial elites, and the members of the academy-media complex – enjoys the freedom to direct the total state by free collective deliberation and tribal mob behaviour.

As for everyone else under the rule of the total state, they are best described as subjects – a category that can be further divided into serviles and dependents, or workers and wards, i.e. those from whom more is taken and those to whom more is given by the state. The fact that popular sovereignty is also vested in the subjects should not confuse us on this point, because this sovereignty is ceremonial and has always been divorced from the direct exercise of power. A modern election is a sort of consensus-building ceremony, in which rival factions in the new upper class oppose two or more armies of 'sovereign' peasants to each other. They might just as conceivably carry out this ritual with rival herds of Hindu sacred cows, and yet those cows would have no more chance of ruling the total state than the mass of its subject people.

There is no getting around the basic negativity of
our situation under the total state – but what of it?
Past generations had to suffer much, and so must
ours, without giving up.

As Mosca teaches us, direct power in any regime tends to be held by an oligarchy, composed of all those whose business is to operate the most important levers of government. No monarchy can do without the loyalty and (ultimately) consensual support of this oligarchy, because it can always hope to reduce a single individual to impotence by disdaining to carry out his orders. As long as a Great Reboot would leave the modern state standing in some sort of bureaucratised form – and what is a corporate manager but a bureaucrat by another name? – we can expect its core oligarchy to be composed of bureaucrats and synonymous with the top 1% of the new upper class.

 

Giving a monarch more powers might enable him to control individuals in this elite, but he would not be able to antagonise the oligarchy as a whole without jeopardising his rule. Not only would it decide how and whether his orders were carried out, it would also be able to control his supply of information. Here's how Martin van Creveld describes the irrelevance of monarchy to bureaucracy in The Rise and Decline of the State:

"Though its pace varied, the growth in the number and power of the bureaucracy [from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries] took place regardless of the state's lineage, i.e., whether it was absolute, constitutional, or parliamentarian; had been set up by armed coercion, as was mostly the case in France, Austria, and Prussia, or with the aid of capital as in the Netherlands and, in a different way, England; and ultimately even whether it was national or multinational, centralized or federal, monarchical or republican. If lazy rulers such as England's Henry VIII and France's Louis XV found themselves trapped and sidetracked by their own bureaucracies so, though for the opposite reasons, did industrious ones such as Spain's Philip II and Prussia's Frederick the Great. If hereditary rulers enjoying lifetime power failed to master the machinery they themselves had created, so, though again for the opposite reasons, did elected ones with their much shorter terms of office. As Hegel recognized, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the point had been reached where the bureaucracy itself became the state, elevating itself high above civil society and turning itself into the latter's master." (pp.142-3, all italics mine)

To change this situation on a permanent basis, we would need not only a new monarch but also a new and distinct oligarchy – perhaps a military Praetorian Guard, perhaps a rival scholarly elite with no existing attachments, perhaps even a sewing circle of ultra-loyal court eunuchs. With the help of such an oligarchy, the monarchy could break up much of the administrative state by force and parcel out its powers among a larger number of its subjects, who would then become its allies in a hammer-and-anvil strategy against the remnants of the bureacracy. The problem is that the administrative types in the new upper class will not swallow this collective suicide pill – so bang goes Yarvin's plan for a clean and consensual transfer of power, and we are back to the larp of overthrowing the total state by force.

 

Within that state, there seems to be very little will to self-discipline, to getting any sort of grip upon the cancerous growth and self-indulgence of the new upper class. Another corollary of Mosca's reasoning is that the core oligarchy should be able to outmanoeuvre any larger group in political struggle, simply by virtue of its being more tightly organised and closer to the centre of power. In some total states – e.g. modern-day Communist China – this theory seems to hold true, as the top 1% or so keeps the rest of the new upper class on the leash. It does not hold true in the Global American Empire – which, in spite of various theories purporting to identify secret oligarchies with total power, works to all intents and purposes as a democracy of the new upper class. 

On the one hand, we could say with neoreactionaries that the Chinese oligarchy has made its power more secure. But on the other hand, we can surmise that this was motivated by insecurity: the need to set up the state in a strong defensive position against a more powerful empire. If the Chinese new upper class were to grant itself a free hand to indulge in revolutionary madness, it would risk losing the support of its subject people and introducing a thousand foreign tentacles into its bureaucracy, academia and corporate elite. To wield this black magic in the shadow of a stronger practitioner would be too dangerous, so the state relies on crude propaganda and hard power, and puts up with the consequent resentment. Much the same can be said for the later Soviet Union, which turned away from revolution under the strain of defensive war.

 

Alas, no such insecurity troubles the new upper class of the Global American Empire – squatting as it does on a near-impregnable continent-island, and dealing with parochial geopolitical rivals (Russia and China), which can do little more than keep the Empire's power at arm's length and wait for democracy to corrode it to death. Trying to avert this outcome would require a lot of foresight and a lot of energy to act on it, and the foreign beneficiaries of 'Western chaos' – including free access of Chinese students to American universities, cheap purchase of political influence, etc. – have no incentive to do the job themselves by sponsoring anti-democrats.

 

So why should the latent core oligarchy – I'm assuming the inner bureaucracy, top academics and prog party elites – go to the trouble of making its power more secure? Guarding access to power will always be a hard, unpleasant and occasionally dangerous business, because every ambitious sociopath wants a piece of it. As long as there is no pressing need to 'get a grip' on the state, why not take a liberal attitude – allowing the trough at the top to widen and lengthen, so that anyone who's anyone can take a place there, and eat up the productivity of the subjects while shitting out rules and regulations on our heads? In the event that the nobles' democracy needs its fat pulled out of the fire, it can always pretend to yield before the loyal opposition of conservative politicians, who will take all the hard decisions and accept most of the blame and resentment before gracefully retiring to the subs' bench.

You may not like it, but this is what peak secure power looks like. Or at least, we are getting there – as Yarvin notes, the state will one day be able to make war by means of crypto-locked robot armies, which will never mount a coup d'etat or refuse to fire on the people. Somehow I doubt that the obsolescence of strong men will be good for the cause of sane governance. Just imagine the hubris of the new upper class when it can finally dispense with the conservative military and police, and vest the perennial role of the warrior class in a bunch of technocrats commanding literal hordes of animated dead!

Maybe I'm overstating my case. Maybe when every flu season comes with a call for universal house arrest, and the GAE and Russia have nuked each other over Ukrainian 'sovereignty', we will see some sort of belated crackdown on the anarchy at the top. But this is essentially a toss-up between democracy and republicanism within the new upper class, and dissidents outside the state cannot decide its outcome. So let's focus on something that we can hope to influence by our efforts – the incentive of the modern total state to delude its subject people.

The lies of the academy-media, and its various fantasies about race, sex, etc., are only the outworks of the mass delusion that casts its shadow over the West. The groundwork of the structure consists of a religious cult of the state's power and an invitation to identify with that power – in other words, a false god and a false self, a sort of Brahman and Atman of power. Once again, I'm inclined to think that mass delusion is optimal for the total state, and that failure to generate a deep and expansive dreamworld comes from a deficiency in the power to tell people what to think.

But couldn't the state, in theory, just dispense with mass delusion? Didn't the subjects of premodern states – no matter how deeply deceived on some matters – manage to get along just fine without faith in an inverted social hierarchy, ruled by the lower and served by the higher? 

 

Maybe they did, but premoderns did not live under the infrastructure of modernity – mass media and schooling, ubiquitous surveillance and policing, instant information turnover, etc. etc. Central power – again, out of weakness, not strength – was obliged to leave the vast majority of its subjects to their own local domains most of the time. Thanks to modern technology and infrastructure (are we noticing a pattern here?), it can now suck up most pockets of autonomous power, and subject all of society to something resembling the atmosphere of a tyrant's court. 

 

It would be tedious to go into all the effects of this – the atrophy of the cardinal virtues, the devaluing of the sex, class, nation, etc. of servilised people, the privileging of modern-day eunuchs, mamluks and state-owned women, and the constant use of lies as a test of loyalty. But one obvious one is that the loss of local power can most easily be compensated by delusions of vicarious participation in central power.

Political masturbation often means identifying with the state
  as it vilifies a Girardian scapegoat. 'Plausible attainability' is
important to such fantasy: non-upper-class white men make
ideal scapegoats because they are not obvious charity cases,
yet do not possess the power to fight back with much effect.

As Yarvin points out, these delusions are basically analogous to those indulged by someone wanking to porn. But is there a 'push' as well as a 'pull' behind the vast modern addiction to political porn? It seems natural to apply Yarvin's analogy of power and sex in the opposite direction, and say that the total state has done to the normal spheres of power in society what a boundlessly lecherous tyrant might have done to the women in society. That is to say, coralled every last one of them into a harem, and reduced every normal man to an incel. 

 

Expecting all those political incels to live as strict ascetics is just not reasonable, and yet only weakness could compel the tyrant to let most of his captives go back into society to marry them. So he does the obvious thing – sets up a live porn feed from the harem (i.e. voting, activism, political discourse), rents out some of his captives to his favourite subjects (empowerment, social 'justice', crime tolerance, etc.), and reluctantly grants others a platonic courtship with the most desperate and persistent among the rest (Reaganism, Thatcherism, Trumpism, Brexit, all right-wing reform movements that string us along and end up getting nowhere). 

 

Political inceldom is not easy, and the temptation to cope is strong. But as individuals, if we want to avoid being utterly degraded by our situation, we must try to do the unreasonable thing and deny ourselves all vestiges of delusion. And collectively, if we ever want to force our tyrant into the desired position of weakness, we must persuade a critical mass of masturbators to accept the same discipline – something that can only involve ruthlessly puncturing their fantasies, courting their hatred, suspicion, and abuse, and not giving up on them unless they are clearly beyond hope.

And that brings me to the point that I am trying to make here. I'm not so much against the ideas for a political solution (most of which are about right at some level) as the idolatry of political solutions, which can only feed into the idolatry of the total state that monopolises political power. I object to the notion that every dissident movement must begin with a 'redpill' or 'awakening', and follow it only as far as is useful, before moving on as quickly as possible to some new programme for political reform. This soon becomes the centre of the movement, and is invested with a fair bit of Faith, Hope and Love, at which point democracy can use it as a means of renegotiating its dreamworld (though not its underlying constitution) and lulling the dissidents back to sleep.

As far as I'm concerned, the rejection of delusion and attainment of clarity is non-negotiable, and more valuable than any political manifesto. It can never be completely harmonised with power (given that this is inseparable from the ability to lie with impunity), and the best that we can hope for politically is that power gravitates more closely to the truth. Regardless of whether it does or it doesn't, the task of dissidents (literally, 'apart-sitters') is to stake out the closest possible position in advance. 

 

In other words, the 'awakening' or 'redpill' – as long as it is a true one – is not just a beginning but also an end in itself.

It is also something that takes constant attention and effort. Even if you do manage to unravel the whole dreamworld – including the parts that you would dearly like to be true – you cannot just 'wake up' once and for all and expect to stay awake through the night. And given that sanity can never be reduced to intelligence or knowledge, you cannot hope to sustain it by reading this book or following that guru, learning that fact or believing this theory. 

 

Just as the food of today degrades into the excrement of tomorrow, the redpills of today degrade into the bluepills of tomorrow. Presumably this is why we see Yarvin hawking neoreaction as a miracle cure for the coof, and throwing in his passivist strategy as a cope to sweeten the deal. Needless to say, most others in the dissident movement have fallen much further and harder off one or other side of the wagon, assuming that they ever got aboard it to begin with.

 

It's time to stop underestimating the difficulty of psychological detachment from the power of a total state. In the absence of help from outside, the battle can only be a defensive one, conducted on the most important and favourable ground. Our first order of business as dissidents is not to 'win', 'pursue our interests', 'get a better deal', 'make ourselves heard', or even 'survive' – it is to guard our souls against the cult of the false god, and to liberate as many other souls as possible. (For the connotations of soul we can substitute those of heart, mind, psyche, etc. – we are not talking about a 'new religion' but the negation of a false one, not trying to climb up to heaven but to swim up to ground level.)

As long as this is being done, secondary motives can be arranged around it, but those who sell out the core for some peripheral 'strategy' will end up with nothing. The truth is the best strategy, for delusion is the lubricant that sloshes around the total state and keeps it from wearing and tearing, and all compromise with democratic nonsense only gives rise to more delusion. Moreover, a truer picture of reality is the strongest uniting force for the dissident movement – far stronger than any real or imagined 'common interests'. Unless power is on hand to hold things together, movements based on common interests will fracture along every social and demographic line imaginable – but no-one male or female, rich or poor, native or foreign wants to be a dupe.

That's not to say that we can ever banish the temptation to go back to sleep. The project of guarding one's soul runs the risk of a retreat into stagnancy – the solipsism of the 'gullible paranoid' type, who squats on a blog or comment account and trusts nothing but the belchings of his long-decayed original redpill. Conversely, the project of converting the deluded comes with the risk of dissolution – the compromise mentality of the 'flexible conservative' type, who throws himself into the Great Larp and thinks that he can move its narrative in some desired direction. 

 

The ideal dissident movement would run between the individual and the mob, linking both and losing neither. Like Yarvin's Antiversity, it would be built on the maxim that the truth is the best strategy. But it would recognise the dangers of corralling the best dissident outlets into a single institution, and expecting it to relieve us of any need to think for ourselves by always being right about everything.

 

One way of keeping things decentralised, while exercising some sort of quality control, would be to concentrate on developing a set of navigation techniques for the soul in a sea of delusion. These would be simple, practical extensions of the virtue of prudence – nothing like the rationalist project to indoctrinate everyone into learned autism – and would be field-tested by everyone who trawls the democratic Cathedral and the dissident Bazaar, trying to glean truths out of a huge slurry of lies. Taken together, they would amount to something like an art of self-defence against mass delusion – and while such an art can always be watered down, it can never be entirely co-opted, because at the end of the day it either works or it doesn't.

 

One useful technique might be to approach the media as a court of law approaches a claim against a defendant. That is to say, always presume that it is lying until you have reviewed evidence from both sides, and then decide whether to concede or uphold this initial judgement. This avoids the dissolution of the conservative – who accepts every lie on good faith, and only troubles to review the evidence after the defendant has been hanged – and the stagnancy of the conspiratard dissident, who will conjure any amount of bullshit to avoid conceding a point or confessing his ignorance.

Whether the 'pill' is red or blue, black or white, depends
partly on the mind that takes it. No-one is entirely free of
delusion, and no path to political sanity is foolproof.

Another one might be to intermittently detox from all mass media, on the grounds that it is inherently toxic to the soul, and refresh our stock of prudence with home-grown experience before taking to the market-place again. Another might be to challenge any ideology that shows signs of becoming calcified as dogma, to see whether it has the integrity to mount a reasoned self-defence. Another might be to rectify our language by superimposing old words on new ones, not because they are absolutely true but because they can exercise a veto on democratic concepts. This means thinking of the free citizens as a servile class, the emancipated woman as a state-controlled whore, the police service as a military class above the people, the academic and journalist as members of a priesthood, the demos and democracy as being restricted to the ruling class, and so on, not just in occasional flourishes of rhetoric but in all everyday situations. 

 

To paraphrase Seneca, these suggestions are offered in the spirit of a sick man swapping remedies with his fellows at the infirmary. It should go without saying that one man's remedy might be another man's poison, and that imprudent overuse of any remedy will surely turn it into a poison.

Similar principles apply when we move from thought to action. The most constructive dissident actions are apparently practical, but actually psychical – that is to say, pertaining to the heart and mind. It is obvious that we cannot hope to out-supply, out-fight or out-communicate the total state, and a commitment to strict practicality would induce us not to try. But if we can produce some of the needs of life and trade them with others, if we know the rudiments of physical self-defence, and if we can wield myths, stories, poetry, art and other cultural material, then we can say that we are preserving the embryo of a non-servile life and lessening our learned helplessness. 

 

Such actions represent physical outworks built around our inner fortresses, which can be linked up with those of others until whole communities are practicing dissidence together. Some might build them out of different and harder-to-come-by materials – such as the attainment of vast wealth, or the renunciation of all but the most basic needs of life. They might also be built from ketman – thinking dissident thoughts while doing no action out of the ordinary – but it is no easy matter to divorce soul from body, and this might always collapse into a cope. ("Go ahead and burn that incense to the god-emperor, it's not going to kill you.")

Conversely, one of the most degrading forms of action is to reduce ourselves to footpads in some democratic political army, troosting the plan and vooting harder when we realise we've been diddled yet again. I've explained why I think non-voting is the best dissident strategy – mainly on the grounds that it devalues leftist votebanks, and separates the concept of popular sovereignty from that of democracy. But what if the conservative protection racket were a little less useless and fraudulent? And what if we knew there could be no hope of inducing large masses of people not to vote? Would there not still be a case for refusing, on principle, to make a forced choice between two evils and participate in a fraud? Voting is the contract by which we let out our souls to the democratic cult, and nothing it could give us in return would be worth the trade.

We must admit that this would not necessarily be the case in someone sufficiently detached, or in the event that we were voting not for an illusion but for something that would work as promised. One example would be an electee who could actually dismantle the total state; another would be one who was committed to exposing the power structure, and letting everyone know how little power he actually had. Although neither Trump nor the Brexiteers possessed such honesty, they did manage to pull down a few curtains on the charade of popular sovereignty as they blundered about on the stage. There is always a case to be made for this sort of political action, and an ideal dissident movement might still have supported Trump and Brexit in the hope of waking people up – the difference being that it would not have done so at the price of deluding itself. 

But that is the last I am going to say on the 'ideal dissident movement'. We are stuck with the one that we've got, and I would have gone on leaving it well alone this year, were it not for a sense of obligation to write some sort of epitaph for this site. The habit of referring to 'the movement this' and 'the movement that' goes back to the days when Alternative Right was its flagship, and this was carried over when the site shifted into a marginal and critical role. It is a practice that sits ill with the sort of decentralisation that I and others here have always preached. 

In any case, 'the movement' has made it all too clear that it doesn't want a gadfly, and is not willing to reflect on the failures of the past in any way that could discourage it from repeating them in the future. So let those still in it have their activism, their voting, their ideology and strategy and all the rest of the conservative panoply, and let us who warned them against these things have the good grace to shut up and get out of the way. They have chosen their path, so let them go as far and as fast as possible – for perhaps they will finally win this time. Or perhaps they will furnish a cautionary tale for those who will come after them, an encouragement to fight without the help of false hope.

 

Fate, as ever, leads the willing and drags the unwilling. Gæđ a wyrd swa hio scel.

Also published at Affirmative Right