Few institutions have been fought over as much as education, and none have fallen to modern fads to the extent of the classroom. It’s been a total rout, with only a small subset of private schools and homeschool co-ops escaping the massive, hyper-standardized education juggernaut. History textbooks lost what little nuance they once had in favor of a bland, moralizing, Whig version of history. Bare excerpts have replaced long-form reading. New and poorly researched fads in pedagogy are developed and implemented every few years. Radical concepts of childhood development are mandated with no consideration of whether theory and practice mesh.

While academia pursues the latest craze, those of a more conservative bent are calling to return to the tried and true. Made history books patriotic instead of deconstructionist. Reinstate maligned drilling and memorizing dates. Instill classroom discipline. Make standardized tests more objective, run classrooms more like an imagined pinnacle of pedagogy in the 1950’s.

In recent years though, there is a push to go before Dewey’s educational framework inspired by the Prussian method became the standard. They demand a return to classical learning. Dorothy Sayers called these methodologies “The Lost Tools of Learning” in her famous lecture in 1948, more widely read now than when she was alive. The classical philosophy of education rested around three distinct developments in a child’s education: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. The youngest focus on learning the rules of language. Later they move past memorization to analyzing the links between disparate facts and ideas, followed by the final stage where the student has the knowledge base to use logic, analytics, and poetic language to sway his audience. Contrary to rhetoric being frowned upon, the classics emphasize its necessity to transmit understanding by unlocking the audience’s senses and imagination. These deeply conflict with modern educational practices and philosophy.

While classical styles of learning have had resounding success in homeschool communities and are embraced by a small cohort of private universities, its influence has not extended far into secular education. As much as its ideology expresses love for pluralism and diversity of thought, its intrinsic respect for the Western tradition and its pursuit of “The Good, the True, and The Beautiful” is deemed too stodgy and, ironically, propagandistic in modern times. A prime example of this clash between the secular relativism of academia and the spiritual aspirations of classical education was the formation and eventual destruction of The Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) run by John Senior in the University of Kansas during the 1970’s.

John Senior would seem like a strange avatar for renewing classical education. A runaway who lived as a rancher, a dabbler in the occult and symbology similar to poets like W.B. Yeats, he had a restless soul that refused to live inside an intellectual box. Yet time and time again, his curiosity into the new and exotic left him with a deep, unfulfilled spiritual longing. It was only when he spent a long time truly studying the great thinkers of antiquity and the traditions of the Catholic Church that he felt a sense of purpose. After his conversion, to say he was opinionated is an understatement, and he constantly lamented how colleges espoused moral relativism and had nothing but contempt for the state of modern culture.

When Senior and his colleagues had the opportunity to run a “college within a college” focusing on the humanities, they took full advantage. They quickly recruited a couple dozen students that would soon balloon to three-hundred. The fundamental books of Western thought were studied, the entire works read before anyone else’s commentary. That meant no prefaces, no afterwards, no scholarly papers. They read the works and attended a seminar discussion where note-taking was banned. The purpose was to be engaged in the current conversation without worrying about remembering details or being corrupted by an “expert’s” opinion. They were to be awash tangling with the great questions, akin to being thrown in the deep end of the pool. Grading was simple. For the final exam, the students were given a blank notebook and 80 minutes to write an essay. The focus was not analyzing in an impersonal, academic manner, but truly wrestling with the works and implications to their lives. It was akin to being thrown into the deep end of the pool, but the students learned to swim.

The students had a set schedule of classes, allowing them to build rapport instead of seeing unfamiliar faces every semester. Outside of class, the students participated in stargazing sessions, poetry recitations, and extended seminars. The students quickly learned that “barbarism is a bore” and expanded even further, with many discovering ballroom dancing. The professors emphasized the importance of every sense being activated along with the intellect, instilling a love of creation to the whole man. Not only was the intellect formed, but their emotional well-being and connection to the divine as well.

The results were astounding, and the IHP soon became a victim of its own success. The professors were accused of brainwashing the students when many converted to Catholicism, with some even discerning monastic life. The university, while it didn’t bat an eye at students of conservative parents who embraced the sexual revolution, thought the professors were proselytizing, though investigations yielded no evidence. The IHP was soon suppressed by not allowing the classes to be tallied towards graduation, then slowly squeezing it of funding until it was disbanded.

While The Integrated Humanities Program was destroyed, its underlying philosophy did not. The program produced a bishop, a provost, an abbot, and several other notable alumni. The theory and practice of the college created spiritual offspring in the form of Wyoming Catholic College, a small liberal arts school with a great books emphasis, an extensive outdoors program, and strictly controlled internet policy.

Many educational traditionalists have latched onto IHP’s example, seeing it as a template to follow in getting education back on track. Most important in this mode of thought is the insistence to tangle with what has been deemed The Great Books. While many individual works are open to debate, the core works of Plato and Aristotle, the medieval scholastics, and the enlightenment thinkers are given space, letting the student digest the formation of new ideas and mindsets to see the world. In order for the student to grasp the great questions, he has to be acquainted with the giants who came before him. They are tough works, and to even comprehend them at a basic level is far beyond the capability of many students. It’s a way to really challenge a student with hard material, and a way for him to understand the roots fo Western Civilization.

However, for all the grandstanding and conservative’s antipathy towards modern secular education, they have a mercenary mindset, a focus on immediate practicality just as vapid as the progressives they despise. While they often spout platitudes about respecting the great historical thinkers and having values greater than material comfort, in reality they see education as largely a practical affair. Even the Great Books are used in this manner, and far too many espouse reading them for the challenging prose and familiar value system rather than wrestling with difficult questions. Worse, it’s often used as a “safe” form of learning that protects the reader from the problems of modernity. Instead of seeing them as a gateway to understanding the human condition, it is a blanket to hide under while pretending to be educated, a cocoon to wrap oneself in to avoid battling the current cynical age.

The last two decades of conservative media have blasted that youth should go into STEM or enter the trades to find a well-paying job and become a useful member of society. Discrediting the humanities as being progressive and hopeless, it’s been widely mocked and denigrated as, at best, a waste of time. In the last decades, significant cultural ground has been ceded. Far too many conservatives surrendered the humanities in the hopes that they will work to get “real jobs” and out-earn the gender studies majors. Now, conservatives have neither the money nor the culture. While many inroads have been made in recent years in supporting the arts in education, it’s based far too much on a different form of striverism, almost as corrosive to the young mind as the worst modern pedagogy.

What’s lost in educational discourse is the faulty core premise of modernity. Both progressives and conservatives pontificate on how they want to teach the child how to think, as varied as their techniques are. What’s lost is that before you can teach a child to think, you must teach him how to wonder. A child who is incapable of awe will be just as robotic whether he reads preachy and progressive modern works or Aquinas. How is a child going to relate to the Ingall family from “Little House on the Prairie” if they’ve never smelt a horse stable? How is a child supposed to understand the trials of David Balfour of “Kidnapped” fame if he never explores on his own?

Last winter a snowplow ran through a local parking lot, leaving the spaces bare of snow but forming massive mounds of snow in its wake. My son, along with his visiting cousin, was immediately attracted to the sprawling white mound, grabbing their gloves and sleds and sprinting out the door. This instinctual drive in young boys goes beyond reason, beyond the mechanics that define modern-day life. That rush of life was the biting wind whipping around their faces and the snow creeping under their gloves to bare skin. When they saw the boulder at the top, practically begging to be freed, they spent the next hour grabbing shovels and digging underneath, straining their muscles against the obstinate mass. They tested their young bodies to the limit, battling against an immovable foe for dominance. Once they were locked-in, nothing could cull their determination. After ceaseless effort, the boulder broke free, and they watched in satisfaction as the boulder tumbled into the concrete below.

In striver culture bent on optimization, such behaviors are seen, at most, as a reprieve from their real education. From books and studying. Maybe such activity is a treat after getting their math homework done. Some would say how the children were actually using the scientific principles of physics with levers, force, and kinetic energy, just like every toy now how to show its practical educational value. The focus is how the particular can be abstracted, how personal experience can be formalized into a general framework. This systemization is assumed in our technocratic society. Very little value is put on the experience itself, the interplay of the individual with his environment, the instincts and deep understanding formed that can’t be abstracted away. These exhausting, coddling, and stodgy schoolmarms infest both sides. In removing autonomy and real adventure in favor of simulacra and dry classrooms with mundane lessons, we’ve destroyed wonder.

While even farm-boys in the 19th century could grasp the ancient conception of honor in The Iliad, recent generations have found such works imposing and confusing. Even at the college level, many boys have never been in a real physical altercation to understand battle with another foe. Our strict social codes make personal honor an anachronism. Worse is trying to mold such ancient concepts into modern moral categories, trying to box in Achilles as “toxic masculinity” or making a weak commentary on the horrors of war instead of understanding the minds who lived in a wildly different culture. The constant attempts to flatten the difficult thinkers into a more palatable category shows the paucity of minds and the scourge of hyper-moralism while also espousing relativism.

It also diluted the alien-ness of the culture in favor of a crude deconstruction instead of taking the virtues of the ancient world at face value. Hyper-moralizing and focus on modern works make it difficult to understand those who didn’t play by modern rules.

It’s ironic that as the American population has classroom time than ever, they are less educated with every passing generation. They are awash in symbols and abstractions while having a paucity of experience. They know what cold is in the abstract but never experience the pain of near-frozen hands thawing under the sink. They know the concept of a forest but have never spent idle hours wandering through its organic logic. While complaints of this sort are often blamed on the ubiquity of electronics, the issue has much deeper roots.

Several generations ago, people like John Senior had the foresight to realize the up-and-coming generations never really lived. While redirection to better pedagogy and clear standards is an improvement, it still lies victim to the technical optimization mindset that permeates modern thought. It relies on quantifiable tests, tests that are by their nature designed to be optimized for. While there is commendable effort to replace the faltering SAT and ACT with alternatives such as the Classical Learning Test (CLT), you’re replacing one set of optimization parameters for another. While it might optimize for a slightly better world model and skillset, it still obfuscates the core meaning of education, to raise a man’s soul.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with reading The Great Books. Everyone should read them. What’s flawed is construing them as an endpoint in themselves to digest instead of a tool to be wielded by competent hands. The students at the IHP did not expand their world simply by reading, but through the passionate and formidable personalities of the professors directing them. It was an encounter with another human being who gently led the neophyte into different ways of being. Even if the class was an introductory Latin class, the professors put their hearts and souls into it. Just like a master musician gently going over how to read notes to a child, the professor introduces those naive students into the great conversations of history.

John Senior was such an inspiring man that his former students often visited him, even as his heart issues made teaching at the University impossible. He was an opinionated and often cantankerous man, but every student could sense the life and will emanating from him. The quaint-looking philosopher was a force of nature, a wellspring of wisdom one could only experience in person.

If, by some miracle, the current useless and haphazard pedagogy of the academy was overturned and classical learning was reinvigorated, many of the same problems will be present. They will probably write better and learn more in less time. They will likely have less contempt for their ancestors, but the boredom will remain. Reading a textbook does not immediately instill pride in one’s culture and wonder. Words on a page will not, in themselves, instill culture. You need another human being to interact with. You need to intentionally grapple with the world’s current manifestation together. You need a guide to understand the glory of the stars above, the joyous subtleties of the dance floor, and the otherworldly smell of the cathedral. None of these visceral experiences will increase test scores, nor will it directly improve your career prospects. It’s not “useful” in the direct sense, but they instill the character and virtue that makes one’s culture worth fighting for,

As educational academies have gone from useless to actually damaging, many aspiring educators have been turned off, leading to an overwhelmingly uniform teacher base. Even if one wanted to read the Great Books, the amount of elders with this knowledge a child has access to is dwindling to nothing. The child’s parents aren’t familiar, and internet classes don’t have the same powerful intimacy as face-to-face learning. There are few John Seniors to learn under today. Luckily, alternative institutions are sprouting forth, whether from classical private schools or homeschool co-ops. My children are learning from recent graduates regarding the great thinkers of every age and earn peanuts for their efforts. They do it anyway because it’s important, a vocation. The current institutions are willing to lionize their teachers and artists, and the social prestige makes the low pay more palatable. Traditionalists need to do the same.

The only way to destroy meaningless careerism, studying for the test, and the incessant rat race of credentialism is to refuse to play. The only way to re-invoke the sense of grandeur over the world is to let go of it. Not every Great Book needs to be read, but the ones traversed need to be read well. It’s more important to let one’s senses be awed by grand architecture than to deconstruct and analyze it. Once the awe comes, such scientific details can be attacked with rigor. A cynical mind is a poor learner. Teachers have to let go of immediate practicality for the higher cause of forming the full man. Those doing “worthless” pursuits in the arts should be given leeway to create their works, even if they never are financially successful. In our age, our most important tasks as educators are re-instilling what has been lost by modernity: Enchantment.

The world is filled to the brim with educators flashing their master’s degrees and doctorates, and yet are barren of those who can instill awe and joy in a child’s heart. Our sanitized world is safer than ever, but only capable of forming passive and risk-averse adults that never adventured from their mother’s skirt. The wisdom of the ages, from antiquity to the modern marvels of science, is there for anyone to study, but the relentless striverism has sucked awe from our vocabulary. The future will not be won with simply a better curriculum. A different form or being, a different form of teacher that has the will as well as the agency to stray outside the platitudes of modern textbooks, from the technocracy of modern pedagogy.

We must remember the IHP’s Motto before all else: “Let them be born in Wonder”

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I could easily go to a store or search on Amazon and find mass produced wooden crafts in my office. Of course this wouldn’t be the same, as the entire joy of having them is that a loved one bared his soul in making it, that human hands crafted it, that a human mind smiled in satisfaction when it was done. He’s been gone for over a decade, but that craft in the office helps me remember him in a way nothing else can. The sculpture became more than a block of wood, but an extension of my grandfather.

Similarly, when one enters a social space, whether online or in person, you want to have an encounter with someone else, an other. By its very nature there are going to be rough edges, little tics that tell more than the words being said, means of communicating that are less than optimal. Every person has a cadence, a stream-of-consciousness that shines through, giving a glimpse into their interior life. Even if he’s role-playing or wearing a mask, some of that humanity seeps through.

When one encounters writing, it’s the same phenomenon. While the written word lacks the physical context and is more refined, it maintains that connection, an interiority shown to the world. Especially in cases of commentary, how one expresses such thoughts is often more important than the information given. In short, the person’s writing becomes an extension of himself, just like any artist who paints or knits or builds. The labor of love makes the text more than just words on the screen. It’s an expression of one’s core being. The Logos, Pathos, and Ethos critical to any writing has to shine, forged from an actual mind who feels these sensations.

While there is a need for dry, impersonal texts that remove this inner realm in law and other formalized realms, those who wish to truly learn and understand a viewpoint have to feel that connection with another human mind. This need for bonding is why AI will never replace human teachers, and why it’s so dangerous for people to think of AI, something that doesn't wonder, dream, touch, or feel pain as a human-like entity.

When you find out someone plagiarized writings or had their work ghostwritten, there’s a sense of betrayal to those who want that connection. Even in a parasocial environment like the Internet, there’s still the assumption of a human being on the other side with the understanding that even if they are hiding as an anon, they are a real person who is making a real effort at connection and understanding. When that work is offloaded, the connection is broken. The inner nuance of their thought is not displayed on the screen, even if their opinions are. With the acceleration of AI writing, now anyone can offload writing to exterior staff, and with it eliminate the inefficiencies of putting thoughts on paper, warts and all.

For a long time, you had to rely on a “sixth sense” to sense AI writing. The tools for detection were easily mitigated and were notorious for lack of consistency. The accusation of AI slop is a serious accusation, and people were loath to toss it out without good evidence. Luckily detectors are getting better, are harder to dodge, and give fewer false positives. While there is still error, it can reinforce the “AI smell” sixth sense. Look at a few articles with the same 100% AI Conclusion, and you are almost certainly dealing with a slop merchant.

To test Pangram, I ran the experiment on my own articles and posts I knew were before A.I, and therefore safe. It ran flawlessly. In my entire SS career, I used AI input in precisely one. In that case, I wrote the entire article and then used AI to go through the draft and change the narrative voice. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess which article I’m referring to. Even after significant modifications because the A.I.s output modifications were now that great, Pangram picked it up. Mixed at 50% A.I… well played. Even though it was largely a jokey article, it gave me a bad taste in my mouth and I vowed to never to do it again.

Picking up slop has become easier too, as they now have a plugin feature to quickly ascertain the level of AI., meaning you don’t have to manually input a snippet of text. When I installed it, I expected a few here or there with most in small accounts with no paid subscribers. Needless to say that hopelessly naive thought was brutally dashed, and my frustration and curiosity led to a little experiment.

I took the 20 Top Rising substances on the site as a whole and found a random article to test with Pangram. Note these are Substacks where people are paying to read, and many have thousands of subscribers. The results are below:

Note: There are some obvious slop ones here, but there is the possibility of false positives, especially mixed. YMMV.

Top 20 Rising:

1. 100% slop.

2. Gad World - Not English, did not check

3. : 100% human

4. Dan Djik - Not English, did not check

5. - 100% slop

6. Pod Street Walk - Podcasts

7. - Human

8. -100% human (this seems to be a business portal)

9. - 100% slop

10. - Mixed (Maura said it is 100% human in the comments, and I believe her, though looking at other articles, it’s all over the map where most posters are very consistent)

11. - Human

12. - Mixed

13. - French. Did not check

14. - 100% human

15. - Mixed

16. - Mixed

17. - All Paid Articles

18. - 100% slop

19. - Not even text, just stock charts

20. - 100% human

A lot of these are investment and get-rich-quick articles that feed on gullibility. It makes me realize what a silo I am in when I never heard of any of these before checking the rising feed, and I consider that a blessing. To be frank, most of the investing and business portion of SS is slop, and this should not surprise anyone. There may be a false positive, but the direction is clear.

For the next experiment, I took a category one would hope would not use AI, cultural commentary. Looking at some of the top Substacks for cuture, this seemed a little better. Of the non-podcast Substacks in English, five were human, one was mixed, and one was slop. Not great, but not catastrophic.

Culture:

1. - Italian, did not check.

2. - 100% human

3. - 100% slop

4. - Human (All paid posts with few substantial blurbs)

5. - 100% Human

6. - Podcast

7. - 100% human

8. - French. Did not check

9. - Mixed

10. - 100% Human

I took another example of a category that one would hope was not mostly slop, Education. It was a disaster, with the top five being one human, three slop, and one mixed.

Education:

- Mixed

- 100% Human (Ironic, given this is on how to use AI)

- 100% Slop

- 100% slop

- 100% slop

In short, Substack is bursting at the seams with AI.

These are interesting metrics, but what really mattered to me is what people in my actual feed are doing, the ones I have conversations with and supposedly align in the same cultural and political sphere. I ran with a “benefit of the doubt” view whenever I saw something that smelled not quite right, and unfortunately every “smell” proved correct. There is a ton of AI slop in my feed. We are not talking 10 percent AI or a little bit of assistance, which I can tolerate, but the entire article being written by Claude with basically no human input. If I wanted to talk to Claude, I would talk to Claude. It feels like a betrayal, like a body snatcher taking the place of a brother in arms. I thought a human being was on the other side, but only got messages in ones and zeroes.

Luckily, none of them were in the “top tier” of this space, with people like , , , , and others being completely free of AI. My biggest disappointment comes with the smaller accounts I wanted to support who ended up being too lazy to write their own stuff, shortchanging both me and themselves. There are also some larger ones in the slop pile. I can handle a little bit of rough editing, and anyone who has read my Substack knows I’m in no position to complain about grammar errors, but when the narrative voice is not even your own, it makes the reader feel sick inside.

I decided not to put these particular people on blast, even though they fucking deserve it. If you are a slop AI poster reading this, you know who you are, and I want to make clear you broke my trust and the trust of your colleagues. And for what? A few likes? A little attention? A few paid subscribers? Why did you sell yourself out for so little?

I know it will just get worse. Anyone on X knows that AI slop is getting out of control, with not even paid subscriptions capable of stemming the tide. It’s almost pointless to read comments now, and Substack will soon be in the same boat. The Human to AI ratio of writing on here will continue to get worse, and more stringent gatekeeping will be necessary to keep the LLMs out.

With every new bit of effort required to keep your feed clean, a few more people will decide it’s not worth it and leave. Not only is it a time sink, but every time one is caught reading an LLM, he is passively inputting machine modes of writing and thinking, and corroding his own writing and thoughts in the process. LLM writing is a body snatcher, and its target is your mind, accessed through unwitting agents you were foolish enough to trust.

I now look with trepidation as Pangram makes its analysis, wondering if I am reading a human mind or a digital one. I wonder who will betray me next. I wonder if the entire sphere will devolve into algorithmic garbage and drive away the good writers forever. When I started on this site a couple years ago, I had a small follower count but a treasure trove of great thinkers I looked forward to reading. I now feel surrounded by human-like body snatchers eating away at my time and my soul. I just wanted to have a meeting of the minds. I just wanted to have a conversation.

Thank you for reading Social Matter

The United States’ Federal Deficit is ballooning with no signs of stopping. The last surpluses were during a few years during the Clinton presidency, otherwise the government has acted like embarrassing spendthrifts for generations. We now operate on a two trillion yearly debt, with total debt-to-GDP a whopping 124%. This is not a party issue, as it hasn’t mattered what party is in the White House. Outside of some impotent complaining in Congress, the entire Washington D.C. machine is committed to ignoring the problem, and you don’t need a PhD in political science to understand why. When you have to worry about elections every couple years, kicking painful reforms down the road is what any rational actor will do.

Expanding entitlements is good for acquiring dependent loyalty in urban vote banks, and lowering taxes is catnip for the average worker. There’s a reason government has only grown for decades, and now over thirty percent of citizens pay no taxes at all. Yet even in this era of irresponsibility, some congressmen have the gall to demand seniors don’t pay property taxes, that childcare should be free for all, and rent controls should be set indefinitely. No one is interested in diffusing the fiscal cliff approaching.

We could make long-winded policy papers how this little change to the tax code will solve the problem, or maybe a different monetary policy and benefits reform. We could, for instance:

• Tighten up the welfare state that takes up around 15% percent of government spending.

• Reform our bloated health care system to lower health care expenses that cost 25% of the federal budget.

• Restructure our deficit to help alleviate the 13% of the budget we pay to interest like a credit card junkie.

• Close bases, lower mission creep, and streamline processes to ramp down the 15% of federal income we spend on defense programs.

Of course congressmen don’t even do this, choosing to grandstand on discretionary spending that does basically nothing in reducing the debt, arguing they are fiscally responsible by refusing that 100 million in pork expenditure as we are increasing our national deficit by orders of magnitude more. It’s like the world’s fattest man congratulating himself after refusing the after-dinner mint.

To solve the crisis, there are three basic paths to solvency:

• Inflate the deficit into oblivion

• Lower expenditures

• Raise revenue

At the current trajectory, the first option is the most likely choice if nothing drastically changes, and will lead to the worst outcome. The second option is impossible, as any lowering of entitlements will lead to accusations of killing babies, single mothers, grandmas, or all three simultaneously. The only other option is raising revenue.

Maybe a miracle will happen and the AI revolution increases productivity so much that GPD rises 10+% every year for the next decade, creating a new golden age of abundance as everyone has a self-driving electric car to drive to work, only needing to push a button daily like The Jetsons and thereby entering a post-scarcity world. If this doesn’t pan out, we will have to get more creative. Given the catastrophic financial hole we are in, the type Dave Ramsey would make his especially angry face over, dramatic actions will have to be taken to avert crisis. Methods way off the beaten path will have to be taken seriously.

There are a few ways to spur federal revenue growth:

• Higher Taxes

• Capital infusion into the economy, i.e. a stimulus package

• Raising education levels to create a more productive workforce

• Removing regulatory bottlenecks, i.e. deregulation

Higher taxes is political suicide, so that’s off the table. Government stimulus does not gain back in revenue what it put in, as can be seen from the stimulus packages put in during the 2008 financial crisis as well as Covid, both of which caused massive inflation and immiserated the growing underclass of America. Education reached its peak decades ago and college grads now find themselves with massive amounts of debt and a useless credential, We are left with the most feasible option, deregulation, and we’re going to have to put that bad boy on steroids.

One trade-off of modernity is sacrificing efficiency for safety. To a certain extent, this was not a bad thing. Deaths have plummeted and we have a reasonable expectation of quality control in our food, water, shelter, and health care. This helps decrease friction in commerce and increases social trust, allowing scaling to happen through standardization. There comes a point of diminishing returns, a point where the innovative are suffocated by onerous protocols that help no one but only increases cost and removes innovation. An incredible amount of invisible costs in our economy is in avoiding litigation, and the can-do American spirit of risk-taking has been sidelined.

The usual progenitors of innovation and risk, young men, are increasingly constricted, unwanted, and hapless to improve their plight. They are stuck between a stifling corporate job or low-paying trades, both of which subject him to humiliating social games. Their pay is poor, so mating options are off the table. There’s no adventure in the sanitized, risk-averse society. Many ventures that could improve their plight is off the table, illegal, even if they decide the risks worth it. If you want to really boost the economy, not by 3% a year, but 10% or more, we’re going to have to take the safety rails off and let them cook.

Renewing the National Economy Through Innovation Exceptions

It’s well known the cost of compliance across labor laws, worker safety, and countless specific industry practices is onerous, often so intensive only massive corporations can swallow the loss, leaving more nimble entrepreneurs dead in the water before they even start. It’s also well-known a large portion of regulations are kayfabe, designed to give the illusion of safety while actually doing nothing but enriching a corporate lawyer and keeping a useless regulator off your back.

Congress has abdicated responsibility to write regulations, giving them to a body of un-elected bureaucrats with a wide mandate to justify their jobs. The effects aren’t just in the most visible parts, like OSHA requirements or bank and food regulations, but all the rules that exist in a fuzzy territory, especially with regard to civil rights law. Real Estate agents have to talk in code about good school districts, HR departments wield enormous power due to the looming specter of federal regulators and racial hucksters. Food regulators have created oligopolies due to overhead that doesn’t make food any safer. Full deregulation is not on the table, but that doesn’t mean enforcement has to be universal.

We’re not saying anyone can pay the government break the law1 but to modify legislation to allow a little more wiggle room for those who either want to take more personal risk or bypass certain rules contrary to their desired way of life. For a monetary bribe fee, of course. Maybe for a little higher taxation, you could participate in what we will call black markets Innovation Exceptions. Maybe you want to live in a neighborhood of only a single religious group. Say you’re a farmer who wants to process cattle on the premises, or a nurse who wants to make nighttime house calls. Say you have a new invention but can’t afford to follow the federal government’s safety regulations or your bros want to make a software company employing a specific type of gamer exclusively. All of these can get the “Innovation Exception” treatment.

It goes without saying it can’t be the Wild West. The commons still exist and need a modicum of predictability. You can’t build a nuclear power plant in your back yard. You can’t drive a vehicle that’s unsafe for other drivers. You can’t allow vigilante behaviors with a financial get-out-of-jail card. Given how much doesn’t fit into these categories, and how many laws are only in place to ensure certain fashionable social ideals as opposed to general flourishing, there is near limitless potential. The ability to employ or be employed in a field with far less stringent compliance metrics is largely a victimless crime exception. Laws designed for personal safety can be removed for those willing to accept the increased risk.

Of course, customers will also have to get buy-in. All such Innovation Zones and their products will be explicitly stated, and those who want to opt out of these innovation zones can live life as normal. The question becomes “Are you willing to get 20% more pay for a more dangerous job?”, “Are you willing to go to an unlicensed therapist for half the cost?”, “Are you willing be pay 10% more in taxes to live in a neighborhood that explicitly keeps unwanted people out?”. It might be as simple as “Will you pay twenty dollars to avoid the ridiculous child car seat requirement?”

This isn’t new or as anarchic as it seems, but is simply an extension of similar ideas. Charter schools are designed to create innovation in teaching outside of the educational bureaucracy. Innovation zones in large cities give generous subsidies to areas the foster growth in the wider community while looking the other way regarding zoning laws and cumbersome processes. This is just universalizing the general concept so everyone can take part instead of a select few.

Such an initiative will not only require loosening regulations, but also updating banking policy. Currently, banks prefer standardized, easily consolidated packages like mortgages, and this becomes the standard approach. As Emir Phillips in American Affairs wrote:

Three channels matter. First, prudential rules and examiner culture: Capital and liquidity frameworks often treat well-underwritten mort­gages as low-risk and highly “eligible.” That can be defensible at the micro level. But it becomes macro-distorting if the system collectively treats housing leverage as safer than financing productive cash flow. Examiner culture matters too: a bank officer can justify a mortgage with standardized documentation and a familiar collateral story; a loan officer underwriting a new production line has to defend judgment, and judgment is penalized when cycles turn.

In short, loans will have to prioritize productive uses over asset inflation. The banks will serve as fuel for the new economic machine being forged.

The brilliance of this scheme is it serves as a catalyst for market growth while directly increasing tax revenues to the federal government. Even better, it gives incentive to take regulations off the books once the innovation exceptions show how unnecessary they really are. It shifts economic focus to actual production and new technologies at a smaller scale, thereby removing bottlenecks that removes small players from the field. It also shrinks occupations that are antithetical to growth and serve largely as credentialed gatekeepers, forcing them into more productive lines of work.

Renewing the World Economy, or The Soldier of Fortune Model

Unfortunately, massive economic growth likely won’t be enough without a robust world economy. We truly are a global marketplace now, and a high tide lifts all boats. The world economy stands at around 123 trillion. In other words, the US deficit is a quarter of the annual world GDP. In order to save the US economy, we gotta pump those numbers up.

As corrupt as the United States seems, we’re still the most stable nation on the planet. No one is starving, no one is expected to give bribes to officials, no one is going to jail on trumped up charges.

Where the corruption exists, it’s streamlined and manageable. The world is full of resource rich countries stymied by rampant corruption and poor infrastructure. The worst of these countries all exist on one continent: Africa.

As the World Bank says:

With about 30% of the world’s mineral reserves, Africa is poised to meet the growing demand for critical minerals, as the global shift to clean energy could require an additional 3 billion tons of minerals and metals by 2050. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) already produces roughly two-thirds of the world’s mined cobalt; South Africa holds the world’s largest reserves of platinum and manganese; Zambia and the DRC are major copper producers—each central to electrification and renewables.

Increasing fiscal revenues from natural resource extraction is an important step to ensure countries get their fair share and to boost much-needed public investment in their economies. However, as we saw during the previous commodity price boom from 2004 to 2014, over-dependence on natural resources can also pose dangers. Africa has experienced an increase in the number of resource-rich countries following that boom, with recent discoveries converting more countries into major resource exporters (see Figure 1). Currently, a majority of the region—26 out of 48 countries—demonstrates substantial dependence on resource-derived income, subjecting them to both the advantages of increased fiscal inflows and to the risks associated with price fluctuations, governance challenges, and economic mismanagement.

Governance challenges and economic mismanagement is putting it lightly. The post-WWII governance model treats individual states as a sort of platonic form that can’t be altered. It also played a role in dismantling the old colonial powers. While this seems like an effective way to keep peace, stability, and equality, it has in reality kept kleptocrats in power artificially through American influence, allowing exploitation and deterioration of their nation’s breadbasket. How bad is Africa’s corruption? Some estimates put the costs it as high as 580 billion. This is just with their current level of development and doesn’t even scratch how such mass corruption has stymied development. The continent of Africa is begging for good governance, patiently waiting for a hero to answer the call.

The old post World War II model is breaking down, and new ideas need to make their way in. We could initiate colonialism economic sustainability initiatives where a brave band of mercenaries explorers arrive to secure underutilized or exploited resources and form their own governance model. It might just be staking a claim to countless unused resources. It might be forming a small country within a country and bringing in industry. It might go as far as overthrowing the tin-pot dictator and becoming the new benevolent ruler. As important as stability is, many of these countries have no clear governance, the law being there solely to extract and graft from the general population. In this new age, it’s best to wipe away any pretenses of international order and find out what works.

Since antiquity, there has been a surefire way of dealing with an excess population of ambitious males who want to make something of themselves, war exploring the world. Luckily for America, there is an entire underclass of young men with no prospects along with counter-elites with no access to the levers of power. There are countless angry Global War on Terror veterans itching for an adventure they can actually profit from instead of dealing with IEDs in Fallujah. There are young, ambitious men who want danger and a chance at spoils who never enlisted because they no longer trust Uncle Sam. Give them the prospect of wealth and power a great humanitarian effort and watch their tune change. We already have private armies consultants who know how to bring such ambitions to reality.

While some might counter such initiatives will only create another nation of kleptocrats, we already have evidence to the contrary.

We even have a documentary of what happens when responsible governance decides to leave.

Just like failed companies deserve to fail, failing countries should be put under new management. Of course the United States, as the current world hegemon, could let the regime change happen and maybe even invest in extracting the countless resources to enrich both the conquerors entrepreneurs and the general population. As the borders stabilize again, a diaspora of Americans itching for a new life could be imported in to build the new civilization. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants. Through it all, Uncle Sam would get his cut, and the new warlords leaders will be happy to pay the tribute.

Reinvigorating the Cosmic Economy

So far we have a good deal for the risk-taking businessmen and military folk, but what about the nerds? For that we will have to go to the final frontier. While there are vast untapped resources on planet Earth, there are even more in outer space, and the cost to extract them isn’t as bad as one might think. There are several asteroids close to earth that contain precious materials, especially platinum-type minerals. Companies are popping up that hope to use current breakthroughs in technology to begin missions to create a sustainable space ecosystem.

Founded by entrepreneur Teun van den Dries (CEO) and space strategist Daynan Crull (Mission Architect), Karman+ aims to make asteroid mining more accessible and cost-effective. As the space industry expands, it requires a reliable supply of materials and fuel to sustain satellites, research, and manufacturing. Instead of launching these resources from Earth at great expense, Karman+ seeks to harvest them from asteroids.

Karman+ was established in 2022 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado. The company’s goal is to realise viable asteroid mining by developing autonomous spacecraft and using off-the-shelf technology to reduce mission costs from $1 billion to under $10 million. The company plans to launch its first test mission and customer missions in 2027.

The Trump administrations is well aware of the economic potential of space, and has aggressively asserted its right to mine such resources for its own benefit, and protect its gains if need be.

“Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law. Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons,” the order, signed by President Donald Trump, states. “Accordingly, it shall be the policy of the United States to encourage international support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law.”

It’s honestly shocking how relatively inexpensive some revolutionary technologies are. A technology just begging to be green-lighted, the space elevator, comes in with a price tag of a measly 100 billion, only about a tenth of our military budget, creating the possibility of bringing people or materials to space with ease. The elevator would lower costs of entering orbit by an order of magnitude, and those cost savings will create secondary ripple effects that will transform space exploration. Even amateurs could get their equipment up in space, and what was once an impenetrable expense now becomes a race of which enterprising individual will become the next Elon Musk. As costs to enter and leave space plummet, we will move past space tourism for billionaires and build real things in zero gravity. Maybe it will be space based solar panels. Maybe they’ll need men manned for those asteroid trips. A new frontier of adventure awaits a century after all of them being closed off on Earth.

Sure, this will create up-front costs. But unlike previous stimulus packages that were used to bail out local governments or create make-work programs, there is a real return on investment, a symbolic return to national greatness, a grand effort to conquer explore the stars.

The Return of American Grit

The deficit is a symptom of America losing its sense of identity. As the West receded and the public commons became overrun with moral hectoring and fear, we lost the core tenets of what made us great. Today we don’t see the same wild-eyed optimism, the toughness, nor the supreme self-confidence that tamed the countryside. We thought money could alleviate our sense of guilt for our past successes. Too long we have listened to the browbeating of the unproductive busybodies who live in fear of their own shadows. It’s time to reacquire our moral courage.

It’s time to be more aggressive and live out our national ethos. Let’s re-engage with high-risk high-reward businesses. Let’s remove our aversion to instability and guilt over colonialism to embrace excellence abroad. Let’s put people in space just for the hell of it. The national deficit crisis will not be solved by clever policy papers, but a spiritual transformation, a return to the frontier grit that made us a superpower to begin with. Our manifest destiny never stopped, it just needs to be reawakened.

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"And suppose I am man," answered the other. "And suppose that I give the answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back at you, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing up straight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you for the fools' paradise you have made. Suppose I praise you, with a literal pain of ecstasy, for the jest that has brought me so terrible a joy. If we have taken the child's games, and given them the seriousness of a Crusade, if we have drenched your grotesque Dutch garden with the blood of martyrs, we have turned a nursery into a temple. I ask you, in the name of Heaven, who wins?"

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Like many young boys in the 1990’s, my family had a Book-It tradition. Pizza Hut was the next town over, and every month the family would drive out there so we could redeem the reward slip for our personal Pan Pizza. Given our middle class background, this dine-in chain was as fancy as it got. The exterior’s two-tiered pavilion style roof was instantly recognizable driving by. It had a quiet, slightly dark interior with its unique chandeliers over the table and red booths with wooden trim. For a kid who didn’t know better, it felt pretty fancy. We got out drinks in semi-opaque scarlet cups where Pepsi seemed to have an elevated taste. Their unique tactile feel and thickness left an impact to this day. The jukebox sat on the corner, awaiting your quarters to play the greatest hits of times past. Next to it was an old Pac-Man where my siblings had the esteemed tradition of competing for the high score.

Yet time passed by, and Pizza Hut lost market share due to the transition to delivery and an influx of competitors. The Pizza Hut my family frequented is no more and the building now sells farm supplies. One sees the classic gabled red roof everywhere, but repurposed to Churches, general stores, and even Domino’s Pizza. While Pizza Hut’s meteoric success was astonishing, spearheaded by lots of gimmicky pizzas and its unique style, they couldn’t keep the momentum going. The pizza was overpriced compared to competitor’s offerings and quality control issues seeped in. It wasn’t more than ten years from when they were at the top than their dominance ended, and mass store closures brought the era to an end.

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Yet millions look back at the restaurant chain in its heyday. They still feel the ridges of those red plastic cups, picture that cute high-school waitress serving them, the little grandeur of those happy times with loved ones. They remember the cheery atmosphere devoid of screens, feel the glossy menu in their hands. In all honesty, the pizza was never that great, but the ambiance gave it a sense of place in a world where everywhere else is an infinitely interchangeable no-space, an airport society. Whether it was celebrating a birthday in second grade or hanging out with your high-school buddies during a night in the town, you could count on that distinct space that oozed comradery and fun.

There are such good memories that an eccentric millionaire has made it his mission to resurrect the old franchise, taking it upon himself to recreate the old-school feel many millennials and gen-xers yearn for in our convenience-focused age.

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Even in this age of flattening, there are several layers of hierarchy in a functioning state. Across the ocean, the multi-nation European Union has powers vested to its domain. Individual countries are beholden to those mandates and create mandates of their own. The local provinces enforce the State’s mandates, and creates ordinances to their community. The individual is subject to all these laws, but also has personal rights regarding self-autonomy. While the family in times past was understood as a distinct social unit, modernity has largely eliminated that role, preferring to treat each person as an individual instead of a kin group member.

Of course, human beings are not born completely independent adults, and the time and care involved in raising children is arduous. While the parent has an interest in seeing his family line continued, the State also has an interest in the child’s development, as one day he will be an adult and a member of larger society. The State wants to ensure the child has the education to be a productive member, has similar values to others, and an understanding of the social order and his role in it.

As technology proliferates, wealth increases, and governments become more sprawling and complex, the State’s intrusion into domestic life has dramatically increased. Compulsory schooling is, at civilizational levels, a very new thing. Child welfare agencies are only possible because of the vast resources at the state’s disposal. This increased complexity, in conjunction with the dissolution of organic bonds, has made the state, for all its vast resources, far more brittle. Educational requirements are understood not so much for creating productive citizens, but ensuring the children are indoctrinated into the modern and impersonal cultural apparatus.

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While The United States has actually increased parental authority in recent years with push-back on mandatory educational, health, and disciplinary laws, much of Europe has followed a different path. Family life is continually becoming more constrained, with both hard and soft power making it difficult to avoid the State imposing its value system on the children. The modern idea of children’s rights supersedes the assumption the parent knows what’s best for his own child.

While the steelman argument for government intervention is that it’s designed only to ensure the child is healthy and gets a reasonable education, the truth is it’s to ensure that the child submits to the secular ethics of the state. One such example is the case of parents who refused to have their child participate in mandatory sexual education classes that they felt were deeply immoral. The priests of the European High Court, after ritually slaughtering a goat and observing its entrails, unsurprisingly came down on the side of the government.

The Court had previously found that the German system of compulsory elementary school attendance, while home education was generally excluded, aimed at ensuring the integration of children into society with a view to avoiding the emergence of parallel societies. Those considerations were in line with the Court’s case-law on the importance of pluralism for democracy.

You might be confused how these states importing masses from the most culturally differentiated societies on the planet helps them ensure a cohesive society, or how how enforcing a strict, singular educational system encourages pluralism. Yet they will say this with a straight face while arguing Germany’s homeschooling ban does not break the European Convention of Human Rights. Western Society likes to pontificate on objective moral frameworks to work under, that the concept of Human Rights has some meaning outside the societal context where it is employed. Anyone who makes even a cursory analysis will realize the modern conception of universal rights is very recent and based on cultural assumptions that don’t transfer to other places. More and more of the time, the idea of Human Rights is simply a catch-all for any new social upheaval those in power want to enforce. As Alastair Macintyre famously quipped:

From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.

Whether we are talking about human rights, minority rights, children’s rights, or any other subset, the same problem remains. It lies in the realm of sentiment more than any cohesive abstract theory. It doesn’t follow that all rights are meaningless, however. Every society has an idea of rights procured to its citizens, many of them legally enforced. With those rights are implied obligations, though those aren’t talked about much anymore. While the European courts want to look at human rights as an objective universal, they are simply stating that the citizens of the wider European Union don’t have the right to separate children from state-mandated education for religious reasons. The parent’s right to raise their child in a certain tradition is aggressively curtailed. A person’s rights are entirely a construct of the community they live in, not a metaphysical entity.

The tension between the family unit and general society has always been there, and the delineation of where the parent’s authority ends and the State’s authority starts has never been static. It has run the gambit from the parent' having totalitarian authority over the household to the parent being little more than a resource provider as the child is raised by the state. Both have their philosophical assumptions, and both extremes come to conclusions abhorrent to modern ears.

All Rights, No Obligations

The anarchist Murray Rothbard likely has the most hardline attitude regarding obligatory parental involvement mandated by society. None. In his controversial essay, Children and Rights, he stated:

Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights. The parent therefore may not murder or mutilate his child, and the law properly outlaws a parent from doing so. But the parent should have the legal right not to feed the child, i.e., to allow it to die. The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive.

Rothbard argued that until the child had agency to leave the house (through growing up or running away), the parents had total dominion over the life of the child. Rothbard isn’t concerned about the extremes of such statements, such as this necessarily entailing the ability to sell one’s own children. He embraces it and considers it a moral good.

Now if a parent may own his child (within the framework of non-aggression and runaway freedom), then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else. He may give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract. In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children.

To those wondering, no, Murray Rothbard did not have children.

While this sounds monstrous to modern ears, in ancient times it wasn’t uncommon. Often the patriarch had control over matters of life and death, and full mastery over those in his household. In harsher, less socially intertwined times, the business of a man’s household was solely his business.

This is quite liberating for the parent, as he has total control over the domestic household. They can decide whether one’s child is worthy of their time and support at any point and remove it at will. The parent’s autonomy is absolute and unquestioned, and the child only has a say through showing self-agency by removing himself from the household.

While an extreme example, society has to grapple with the application of a parent’s will on a child. At what point is a punishment extreme and abusive? Many countries ban corporal punishment entirely. Many go as far as to say banning their children from social media is abusive. There’s the question of whether a parent can let a child run feral and give him zero education or whether the State can intervene. At what point are we dealing with parental abuse? At what point are we dealing with parental neglect?

No Rights, All Obligations

When became an ex-pat in Sweden, he knew there would be a culture clash. He never thought it would culminate in his entire family fleeing the country as the Swedish equivalent to Child Protective Services came to take away his children. Their family ran amuck of the aggressively egalitarian and conformist nature of Sweden, and his child’s innocent faux pas were seen as a menace to their quiet society. They also have a far different notion of parent’s relations to children, as Nordic countries are extremely restrictive of parenting outside of very rigid norms.

This was the context for the publication of Bergström’s Divorcing With Children. Addressing the new “parental teams”, Bergström advises parents to give up the idea that they have a basic “right” to care for or control their children. Rather, parenthood is about obligations.

This mindset is due to their individualistic attitude, where natural hierarchies such as Church, family, or other organizations are seen as oppressive constructs that inhibit people from living as they see fit. The parent is not the authority over the child, but the caretaker at the mercy of the State’s whims. The Swedish ideal of freedom is an individual free from constraint, which paradoxically conflicts with the American conception of freedom that includes these natural bonds. As the American expats realized:

In the Swedish mind, the ideal is to isolate individual people from each other via the government.

Swedes and Americans---as cultures--- value freedom. But how they conceptualize it and engineer freedom are quite different.

In the Swedish mentality, no person should be able to exercise dominion or control over another person. This extends even to the parent-child relationship. It especially applies to married or romantic relationships.

The means by which Sweden has engineered their version of freedom is to have the government deeply involved in an individual’s life from cradle to the grave. Sort of an omnipresent genderless parent to which a person can always turn. And this frees them from burdening and being burdened by family and friends.

In the American mindset, the enemy of individual freedom is the State, while the family, community, religious congregation, and others are the means to enforce virtuous behavior and cooperation. In other models, freedom is imposed by the opposite, diluting common familial, religious, and local bonds through State action. The State sees itself as the active caretaker of its citizens freedoms that ensure no citizen is conscripted into unwanted bonds, no matter what they are. The child is more the ward of the State than the parents, as the parents in this framework has no right to impose its worldview or code of ethics. Of course, this fanatical level of egalitarianism requires a powerful state to mandate, and there’s still the contradiction of the state mandating its own views of individualism on the general population.

Because of this conception of rights, the State has final say regarding every aspect of raising and rearing children. The parents have no rights in this moral framework, and are more unpaid caretakers of the next generation than anything organic. This is not going away, as Sweden is doubling down on such policies as children in unmarried families skyrocket and the two-house model of childrearing continues unabated. The question remains, though, whether anyone will be willing to have kids in such an environment.

You Get the Society You Tolerate

While it’s easy to point and sputter at the excesses of both sides and it’s easy to contemplate the happy medium that is ideal for a functioning society, it doesn’t accomplish much. When dealing with the levels of rights and obligations, it runs the gamut of total autonomy to slavery, with justifications for both. Most people would blanch at the thought that their neighbor has the right to kill his six-year-old son if he became a nuisance, or could put their newborn daughter in the elements to freeze to death. They would justifiably be appalled if a child was beaten by a drunken father or allowed to run feral in tattered clothes around town. It is not only a travesty on a child, but the wider community, as such bad behavior begets more of the same, the same way as when one couple divorces it spreads like wildfire. There has to be a line that can’t be crossed, and social norms that can be enforced. On the other side, taking a child away because the family does not believe in new secular fads, does light corporal punishment, or has specific political beliefs the bureaucrats don’t like is also a travesty and terrorizes even those who are more “normal”.

As an American, my traditions give large latitude to the family. I’ve seen kids whose dad relied on the belt far too often, kids who came to school in tattered clothes, and a good share of nut-jobs mothers. Even with these tragic circumstances, barring one I knew involving sexual abuse, the kid was better off with the parent. Without even getting into the details of the horrific foster care system, a sub-par parent is better than a stranger. Still, the parent’s will can’t be absolute, and a parent’s rights must be curtailed by certain obligations due to bringing a helpless human being into the world.

I will argue that giving this wide latitude is likely best for stability, as models like Sweden, regardless of your views of it morally, is very unstable long-term. It relies on a very top-heavy bureaucracy and secretive channels to operate. While it leaves many parents in terror now, once the welfare state cannot support itself, the existing social structure will come tumbling down. Also, an all encompassing State looking over every parent’s shoulder is a fertility death trap for a nation with already far below replacement reproduction.

You can argue about the ethics of parent’s right, children’s right, and the rights of the State to your heart’s content, but such moral arguments doesn’t tell what the status-quo will be, but power. For parents who tolerate an intrusive state, they will get more of it. For those who look the other way at a kid getting beaten, they will get more of that too. Cohesive communities in the last century have been effective at self-policing, which has been a blessing and a curse. There’s the neighbor who sounds the alarm when he thinks a kid is being starved, and there’s the ninny who freaks out because a nine-year-old is biking around town alone. The overprotective shrew has helped murder classic Americana, but the concerned citizen reasonably looking out for others keeps everyone honest.

As zero-tolerance policies in education, psychology, and other fields have terrorized many innocent parents and an influx of childless adults want a hand in how other people’s children are being raised, the ratchet is always moving towards more control, more suspicion, more obligations without associated rights. As demographics change, and there are more childless voters, this will only accelerate. The voting booth won’t give a reprieve, but only parents who refuse to comply and are willing to fight to maintain their sphere of control. It means keeping self-policing norms without ceding power to neurotic busybodies and fighting an encroaching bureaucracy to allow your child to flourish.

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One pivotal movement in American history that is often glossed over is Women’s Suffrage. While the causes of slavery abolition and the 1960’s civil rights revolution is well, known, little ink is given regarding prominent figures of universal suffrage. The best known proponent of women’s suffrage, Susan B. Anthony, failed to achieve her goal, dying decades before women’s suffrage was established. It would seem there should be a mythology of the movement on par with other great upheavals, but little attention is given. It’s given as a moral inevitability.

The reason is not sexism, but rather that the story is embarrassing and makes for bad propaganda. The suffragettes were hardly a sympathetic bunch. Not only were they loud and abrasive, but they also weren’t above terrorism to get their demands met. Worse yet, most women had little interest in suffrage. Even as late as 1913 put up for a vote in Massachusetts, it was met with strong resistance or apathy by the majority of women, leading the suffragettes to actually resist letting women vote on the question, as they knew only a pitiable minority had a strong opinion behind the bluster. There is also the embarrassing fact that the voting rights women had, such as in school boards election, were notorious for incredibly low turnout.

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The narrative on the left regarding the anti-suffragette women often revolves around oppressive social conditioning they couldn’t untangle themselves from, or simply not understanding their potential outside a boring domestic life. On the right, they understand the anti-suffragettes as being more interested in hearth and home than politics and power games. Both are inaccurate. Women understood their collective power, wielded it very effectively, and had ways of getting their interests met outside the realm of party politics. Women’s groups were some of the most effective actors for social change in this time, and it was often the most active and powerful women that resisted suffrage.

They understood suffrage was a double-edged sword, and while they would gain power in the abstract, the organizations they developed and the social role they played would be transformed in a way that would serve as a long-term hindrance in getting their interests met.

I came across a fascinating collection of essays called Anti-Suffrage Essays by Massachusetts Women that laid bare the misconceptions by both sides. These women understood power, but that power took a different form. They weren’t ignorant leftovers from a previous misogynistic era, nor were they humble housewives uninterested in a public voice. To understand this dynamic, one has to understand their rights and responsibilities that, while different from men’s, allowed them to leverage influence in different but arguably more effective ways. One must also understand that universal suffrage had aftereffects on their social standing that, while they could now vote, made it harder to advocate for their interests.

Woman as Non-Partisan

A dispatch from Topeka, Kansas, describing the recent campaign in that state says that three years ago the Kansas Federation of Women’s Clubs lined up solidly for suffrage, and won it—and that they have not been lined up solidly for anything since! Instead of throwing their influence as a unit for good legislation, as women’s clubs are wont to do in male suffrage states, these women are divided into Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, and Socialists, and the friction among them is greater than ever before.

---

They do as the men of Portland did a short time ago, when a number of citizens became convinced that the moral conditions in Portland were not what they should be. And what did they do? Did they vote about it? Did they form party organizations? No; they resorted as nearly as they could, to what is known as ‘women’s methods,’ and formed a non-partisan citizen’s committee, just as detached as possible from politics. And why did they resort to women’s methods? Simply because they had all had the vote since coming of age, and they all knew how useless it is as a means of accomplishing reform work.

Margaret Robinson

The ideal of democratic institutions is a public expression of grievances and policy preferences. It assumes all interested parties will eventually agree on a happy medium that, while not ideal, is at least tenable. Modern mass-politics does not work like this due to the complexity of listening to every policy proposal from every person. Political parties are formed that, if you want any voice at all, you must at least partially conform to. As can be seen, internecine squabbling becomes rampant as loyalty to one's side and maintaining power takes precedence over good policy.

It’s not a coincidence that the most effective modern organizations have avoided naked partisanship, even if their advocacy is definitely coded to a certain party. While the NRA gets a lot of flack, they have been more successful in protecting their interests than those who tie their flag to a political party. Another example, the homeschool lobby, has punched dramatically above its weight by being a single issue, nonpartisan entity.

Before they received the vote, women's advocacy groups were well staffed and very effective. Freed from the constraints of partisan loyalties, they could designate themselves as above politics, the reasonable people that could find a solution amenable for everyone without taking a visible side.

For representatives of a cohort with no voting rights, they were incredibly effective. While they were not voters, they were wives, daughters, respectable society women, and philanthropists men running the legislatures admired and, sometimes, greatly feared. Upper class women had incredible organizational abilities and with it the ability to create good and bad publicity. Snubbing the wife of a prominent individual was as bad as a personal insult. Dismissing the grievances of a society of mothers made for bad optics. Standing outside politics gave leverage, and also the ability to organize without being beholden to a party.

Woman as Moral Force

One of them is that a few women, representing perhaps ten per cent of the sex, have under present conditions too much influence. These women, the World says, “have maintained at times a reign of terror over legislative bodies, in consequence of which half the country is now bedeviled by some form or other of harem government, and legislators are forever making ridiculous concessions to women agitators.” These “women agitators” are, of course, the club women, social workers, and others interested in social welfare. In order to make it unnecessary for legislators to make “ridiculous concessions” to this type of woman, the World advocates—what? Giving the vote to all women!

Margaret Robinson

I never saw so many women working for social betterment as I have seen in the American cities I have visited. In England women have turned their attention to politics and have accomplished nothing like so much in civic reform.

Mrs. Pethick Lawrence

The ability of women to appear truly non-partisan also meant they were seen as above the petty ambitions of politicians. One didn’t have to worry about someone pushing an angle for personal political vainglory, giving the impression of a class truly concerned with the public good without outside ambitions.

While there are plenty of examples of writers in this era lambasting the moral busybodies of society, far more talked about their innate virtue in a way that would make even the biggest boomer simp blanch. While the mantra of modernity is “well-behaved women rarely make history”, the reality is their enforcement of norms and ability to work within such norms gave moral weight to their sex, and with it moral deference.

Woman as Educator

Every man is born of woman and almost every man is cared for by a woman throughout his earliest years. The Jesuits, in their wisdom, founded on much experience, have said: “Give me a child until he is seven and after that you may do what you like with him!” It is these early years that count most in a man’s future. What have the mothers done in these years?

Women, through their training of their sons and daughters, hold the future of the world in their keeping. This training cannot be given by the enactment of laws; we cannot legislate the control of human passion. The law-maker bears no relation to the character builder.

Mrs. William Putnam

The chances are that woman suffrage would tend to make the school more truly the servant of the party in power than of the general good.

…..

Would her judgments be cooler because she is in the thick of the fight, and her statements more convincing because she is in direct conflict with the fathers and mothers of half her class? It is of the utmost importance that the child shall look upon the teacher as impartial. He may consider her in some respects his natural enemy, but he must none the less regard her as one of the immutable things of the universe. For this reason public commotions over school affairs, however well intentioned, injure the institutions they design to benefit. Anything which tends to increase the possibility of opposition between the teacher and the child's family, and makes the child's attitude partisan is a menace. Suffrage in this field as in so many others, offers no compensation for the increased friction and unrest.

Elizabeth Jackson

Men are not raised exclusively by other men. On the contrary, much of the rearing was done by women. They grew up with mothers who nurtured them, young teachers who advocated for the virtues in which to live their lives, and understood their responsibility to protect and provide later in life. The soft power of the schoolhouse allowed women to instilled these mindsets, and have men act on them long after leaving the classroom.

This moral training was largely instilled by women, buoyed by their status as unsullied by politics and personal ambitions. Since women did not exist in the partisan sphere, they could instill values on the young without political infighting. As they were not active partisan participants, there was a level of trust one’s child was not being indoctrinated into particular political causes but instilled with the virtues to be a good citizen. Feminists aren’t wrong when they say men need to be taught to control their sexual impulses and to help those weaker when they are younger, but such advocacy will fall on deaf ears if part of a power struggle between the sexes.

As Elizabeth Jackson stated, once the women who fill the halls of schools become political partisans, being able to say you are simply instilling values is simply untrue, as the schoolhouse from a young age on becomes a battleground of partisan politics. Instead of being able to be see as above such power games, every one of their lessons become suspect. She asks the pertinent question, does this help women’s causes? Instead of being relatively unencumbered in educating children, they are now foot-soldiers of other powers. Instead of the demeanor of serving general society, often to women’s benefit, they will be forced to take sides. Trust erodes, parents question the teachers, and young boys their own mother’s loyalties.

Woman as the Protected Sex

Thus far we have made a few crude experiments in double suffrage, but nowhere has equal suffrage been tried. Equal suffrage implies a fair field with favor to none—a field where woman, stripped of legal and civil advantages, must take her place as man’s rival in the struggle for existence; for, in the long run, woman cannot have equal rights and retain special privileges. If the average woman is to be a voter, she must accept jury service and aid in the protection of life and property. When the mob threatens, she must not shield herself behind her equal in government. She must relinquish her rights and exemptions under the law and in civil life, if she is to take her place as a responsible elector and compete with man as the provider and governor of the race. Such equality would be a brutal and retrogressive view of woman’s rights. It is impossible, and here we have the unanswerable answer to woman suffrage theories.

A. J. George

Massachusetts gives to her women the best protection of any state in the Union. In January, 1915, New York ranked first, but since our legislative enactments of 1915, Massachusetts is again in the lead. We have, in the first place, the Maternity Act. Then we have the law prohibiting women in industry from working more than fifty-four hours per week. We have the absolute prohibition of night-work for our women in textile, mercantile, and manufacturing establishments. We are one of the five states in the Union to have such a law. All the five states are male suffrage states. Not a single woman suffrage state prohibits the night employment of its women; and yet among the laws safeguarding the health of women workers, the prohibition of night work is of the most fundamental importance.

Catherine Robinson

Because of women's status as non-partisan moral educators of the next generation, there was a healthy paternalism in the culture. It was acceptable, and even morally required to ensure women weren't mistreated, often given special consideration in legislation. State labor laws, especially for night work, protected women better than suffrage states that veered towards equality while ignoring the clearly different lived realities of both sexes. Also, contrary to common sentiment, marriage law was heavily skewed towards women even in the 1920's.

When the Titanic sank and the declaration of “Women and children first” came through without a second thought, men were not acting just on instinct, but social conditioning instilled upon them since they were babies. In their youngest years, the rules of proper behavior were bestowed on men, including the treatment of women. The social contract was that women would receive protection and deference in some matters in return for safeguarding and protection.

It was considered unmanly, a violation of this social contract, to not come to a woman’s aid when in danger. It was shameful to not assist a woman in a physically arduous task. This is not the natural state of man but built from culture build over several generations that instilled values necessary for society to flourish. He was trained by women that a man did not speak ill of a lady, a man did not take advantage of a lady, and a man went out of his way to assist a lady.

Equilibrium Over Equality

More talk and less thought is expended on the subject of sex today than on almost anything else.

Mrs. William Lowell Putnam

If only Mrs. Putnam could witness the modern day.

Probably the fundamental disconnect between the suffragettes and the anti-suffragettes was where the basic building block of society lied. The suffragettes saw it as the individual, and saw women as a distinct class with political grievances that needed to be fulfilled. The anti-suffragettes did not see women as a class, but a sex, and considered the family society’s fundamental building block. Because of the nature of the family unit, there needed to be incentives for everyone to have their needs met and fulfill their responsibilities within this unit to raise the next generation. Once the family is dissolved in favor of the individual, the natural cooperation turns into squabbling over dominion. Instead of the sexes asserting their power in different but complementary domains, they all fight in the same sphere.

It goes without saying a lot of the fears of the anti-suffragettes were fulfilled. Men and women have become politically antagonistic; marriage has become a brittle and non-sensical institution as trust has broken down and there is little groundwork for cooperation. The reality of easy divorce has entered the calculations of husbands and wives with all-too-predictable results. Women believe they have to earn an income, even if not necessary, for divorce insurance. Men fear long hours in the office to build a nest egg, fearing it will be used against them in a custody battle.

The moral panic over the mikes of Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, or another boogeyman of the week has festered due to this out-of-control partisanship. Schoolteachers lost their leverage as non-partisan entities generations ago, and the gap keeps increasing. Young boys rightfully see these women as hacks trying to indoctrinate them into mindsets that benefit a particular political project rather than common civic mindedness. With this, chivalric impulses have gone to the wayside as men and women have become partisan adversaries. Argue you should risk your life to save a woman you don’t know and be prepared to get mocked mercilessly. White knight online and get called a simp.

As the internet is inundate with slurs such as Karen, Becky and others, it’s apparent the kind deference that previous generations exhibited has gone to the wayside, and many see no reason to follow the old social mores in modern times. As women entered the workforce in larger numbers, the they demand marriageable men make more. In the quest for equality, these are obviously contradictions and need to go. As much as conservatives lament the breakdown in these norms, it’s part of the renegotiation regarding roles between the sexes. One can’t demand equality in every sphere while maintaining special privileges. One doesn’t show deference to a political rival.

Still, even with all the upheavals, women do have the vote now. They are the majority of college graduates, and they get preferential treatment in the workplace. Doesn’t that mean they have more leverage to live their lives as they see fit? On paper, all the standard indicators state they are more powerful than ever.

The truth is likely more nuanced. It bears to mention that the rise of women’s philanthropy groups and other social organizations was partially a reaction to the rise of industrialization, and family businesses and estates to manage became a thing of the past. They were deprived of many traditional means of status, and women’s suffrage and their rise in the workforce was a reaction to that change.

While women have gained power in certain spheres, one might ask how much power is really here. Is a woman working as a high-powered executive more powerful than a lady a hundred years ago who could successfully petition governments for social reform? Is a teacher now more morally influential than educators in years past? The truth is, women still have a boss, and arguably one far more demanding than the overbearing husband of feminist mythology. Social atomization has fostered the creation of a propaganda apparatus that has strange new social demands and taboos, and there is no individual one can speak with to redress grievances.

Technology has sullied traditional means of personal interactions and relations that made power dynamics possible. You don’t pay your local doctor, but an impersonal medical leviathan. You don’t have a relationship and mutual back-scratching in working with a local business, but deal with a global conglomerate. The ability to assert power and influence has dwindled as impersonal technology has flattened human interaction.

The amount of power wielded is also not a static entity, or even a universal value. Trying to make the power dynamic between men and women equal is a fools’ errand. Biology is real, and men and women operate in different worlds, have different motivations, and relate to power differently. What’s needed isn’t equality, but equilibrium, the ability for both sexes to move in the social sphere and get their interests met. It’s only in such an equilibrium, when both sides can let their guard down and cooperate, that family formation can stabilize.

When there is not equilibrium, parties start to “sit out”. As family formation is becoming more and more difficult, and the sexes unwilling to play the current rules of the game, it’s clear this phenomenon of “sitting out” is going to get more pronounced, whether by mindless entertainment or empty and unrooted “live, laugh, love" ideology. While some state this is due to men not stepping up, the truth is as women wield more male coded power, the more resentful they are with men as a whole. As the anti-suffragettes feared, many women see themselves as a class, not a sex, and men are following suit. And his has made both men and women more miserable as the lack of cooperation has ended up failing to get both side’s needs met.

Of course, demanding equality between the sexes is akin to wishing unicorns into existence, and the ugly head of biology and innate psychology will win over in the end. One can argue about equal work conditions, equal pay, equal housework, equal childcare, and equal emotional labor until the heat death of the universe and get nowhere. Social norms that only serve the 5 percent of male-brained women and female-brained men will create abject misery for the rest of the population.

In some cultures the men work, but the women handle the finances. In some arrangements it’s vice versa. Some couples have harsh barriers between responsibilities, some are more fluid. The fanatical impulse for equality has inhibited the sexes from ascertaining what they really want, and what they’re willing to sacrifice to get it. The oppressed/oppressor dynamic makes it impossible to engage in good faith. Technology has reshaped the landscape, and the new equilibrium will not be a fanatical equality or the “trad” 1950’s.

Legal requirements of equality under the law has stymied the only indicator that matters, revealed preference. It has disallowed legal and cultural norms that might not give everything they want, but makes the tradeoffs worth it for most of the population. “Are things equal?” is a nonsensical question. “Are the tradeoffs acceptable?” is a framing that allows conversation and rapport.

Of course, the 19th amendment isn’t going to get repealed. Even if it could, it would not guarantee equilibrium is reached. That being said, as feminine means of non-partisanship, non-combativeness, and indirect means of persuasion as avenues of power has been forgotten, there is a vacuum in modernity that is begging to be filled. While it would be suicidal to abandon partisan politics, there is an opening for anyone, man or woman, who can be “above it all” and not worried about getting personally ahead, simply a concerned citizen who wants things to be better. There’s a place for a moral force that can disarm and influence a partisan neighbor. Paradoxically, it will likely need to be men who employ this more feminine approach, at least in the short term. Of course, a difference will be men won’t be able to play the victim. No one cares. They can, however, look like strong, reasonable, confident actors in a declining society. The adults in the room who just want both sexes to flourish. They can gently offer an alternative to both men and women.

A subculture that can replace combativeness with cooperation will allow easier mating off. Replacing power struggles with flexible and complementary norms that eschew rigid scorekeeping can build lasting trust, even if their relative “equality” can’t be spreadsheeted optimally. Of course, many will refuse any tradeoff, oftentimes by parties believing themselves to be on the side of angels. It’s not relevant whether everyone is convinced, but to find a critical mass of outsiders who find the arrangement a healthy equilibrium to get their wants met and buy in. This will not be won through arguing online, but living a new reality.

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And that is called asking for Dane-geld,

And the people who ask it explain

That you’ve only to pay ‘em the Dane-geld

And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

Rudyard Kipling

When dealing with an enemy, one has a few options. There can be a temporary peace, total conquest, or extortion. When one side has an overwhelming advantage, peace makes little sense, but total conquest may not be optimal either. The military campaign may be too expensive, the risk might be too great, or there could be a destruction of capital in terms of skills and resources that would make a victory pyrrhic at best. In these cases the stronger power can simply extort the weaker power into giving exchanging tribute for peace, thereby strengthening themselves while losing nothing of value. It makes more sense to bleed them than destroy them, and the victims are often more willing to pay off their oppressors than risk annihilation.

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After a military defeat in 991, King Æthelred the Unready1 offered the Vikings under King Sweyn Forkbeard a tribute of about 10000 pounds of silver to cease hostilities. This tribute, the Danegeld, brought vast riches to the Vikings, but they weren’t above raising the rate. In 994, the Vikings came back demanding more tribute, and King Æthelred was forced to pay another 16,000 pounds of silver. Thus began a vicious cycle where the riches extorted were then used to make the enemy stronger, and therefore able to demand ever more payment in the future. Soon, the kingdom operated not so much for the general welfare of its subjects, but to transfer wealth to an external, hostile force. The extortion racket continued for decades until Sweyn Forkbeard's son, Canute, became King of England.2

Similar types of extortion are done at every scale, from an individual threatening to ruin a colleague by releasing damning information to mafias demanding “protection money” from neighborhood businesses to governments redistributing wealth through taxation from their productive constituents to ideologically aligned patrons. As power is gained with little to no loss, such appeasement only serves to invite more demands until the tribute becomes so onerous that the victims have nothing to lose.

While such extortion could be seen as all uses of force to secure resources, this is a gross oversimplification, though one embraced by radical individualists such as libertarians. The most infuriating part is how close they are to getting it, but falling just short. While mantras like “taxation is theft” and the “non-aggression principle” are woefully inadequate to handle the harsh realities of the real world, they understand fundamentals that are glossed over in modern civics, namely the primacy of violence.

Their main flaw is their philosophical dichotomy between individualism and mass, cohesive action. The ideal libertarian is a man on the prairie, a sovereign citizen with full control of his resources and wielding a rifle to protect them. While romantic, it’s clear why such a mindset doesn’t scale. Outside of Randian fantasies, armies can easily dispatch rugged but disorganized opponents with ease. It is why the Libertarian Party is, and always will be, a joke.

However, if one tries to scale the libertarian mindset to a unified collective, the libertarianism of the Hans-Hermann Hoppe variety, it becomes more tenable.

There is a government of sorts, and whether you consider the entity public or private is immaterial; the outcome is the same. It is emphasized that the government exists for the flourishing of its constituents. The police are there to protect the law-abiding. Fees are used to maintain roads. Building codes are enforced for the safety of the neighborhood. While there are some restrictions on freedom for society to function, the denizens know it benefits the group as a whole, even with some wasteful spending.

The ideal never lasts long, though. Bad actors will always find a way to worm into the organization. Maybe they’ll infiltrate the roads commission and build a little fiefdom. If you want your pothole repaired, get ready to make nice with them. In the beginning the demand might be minor, maybe a special favor or tickets to an exclusive event. As these interactions become normalized, other agencies are forced to pay their own tribute. Their funding spirals upward as less work gets done. The money forms a patronage class that can agitate other agencies and infiltrate those as well. Soon the entire bureaucracy becomes rotten. Roads aren’t being built, and the entire organization seems to exist to appease the worthless parasites. The bad actors that originally entered to exploit resources now have a little kingdom of their own to defend, built off pirating those trying to earn an honest living. The police now exist to extract wealth from the productive while doing nothing for public safety. The entire government apparatus becomes an extortionist racket as the productive members are milked as tax-cattle to fund their enemies.

High-trust, civic-minded citizens are most likely to fall prey by not acknowledging the ground shifting under them. They are most susceptible to the myths of good citizenry long after such a worldview is hopelessly counter-productive. The slow ratchet of higher taxes and lackluster services is viewed as a fact of life. Often, it takes more than a generation to pivot, as the young see with fresh eyes the collapse their elders refuse to confront.

This doesn’t mean all taxation and means of force are the same. While libertarians see all forcible extraction of wealth as equivalent, in the realm of power relations, this couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s very different for a government to tax for defense of one’s homeland, to build an economic safety net to ensure anyone in hard times doesn’t starve to death, and to form a minimum amount of health care for the poor. While one can argue about scale, efficiency, and levels of graft, these are at least tangible uses of government that doesn’t exist to simply serve someone with external loyalities.

Cronyism in local, state, and federal governments has always existed. In the years from the New Deal to the Great Society to the present, such cronyism has reached a fever pitch with new, legal avenues of graft open to anyone of the right political persuasion. Every year money flowed from the pocketbooks of productive citizens to radical progressives and foreign influencers, who then used that money to jockey for more power. Danegeld was offered by local governments, corporations, and cultural institutions to make the rabble-rousers depart for a time. The average taxpayer saw costs in every level of society rise, not just in taxes but compliance costs for increasingly nebulous regulations, all the while being frozen out of high-power positions and watching them be given to cronies instead. Agencies went from being a positive contributor to a wasteful but necessary component to an active enemy of those paying into the system.

For the longest time, this clear extortion was viewed as run-of-the-mill waste, the predictable outcome of government spending. While conservatives saw fat to be cut, progressives saw income used to form and maintain a vast patronage network. The sums of money got larger, the graft more blatant, and the terrorizing of normal citizens more pronounced. When Elon Musk came in with the well-intentioned but poorly executed DOGE initiative, the average person was awe-struck by the corruption. Money, likely in the hundreds of billions, went to a mass network of progressive NGOs that survived by government largesse. These orgs seemed to exist solely to be rabble-rousers. Intricate networks of NGO employees, loyal foot soldiers, and paramilitary wings of Antifa made people wonder if all the revolutions and turmoil of The Summer of Floyd, The Covid Hysteria, and the Rodney King Riots were indirectly funded through the federal government. It’s likely DOGE didn’t find half of the graft, as the Military-Industrial Complex, the Israel Lobby, and other sacred cows of the establishment right likely have the same level of corruption.

When police in several cities do little to nothing to deter crime, but will come down like the wrath of God to those who took matters into their own hands, people question the civic pieties they learned in school. When hucksters like Jesse Jackson gleefully extorted businesses for decades in clear cases of racketeering, they wondered why the legal hammer only went one direction. When America bombs Iran to sate the bloodlust of a foreign country, they wonder where loyalties lie. When non-profits like the SPLC are caught funding the very radicalism they pretend to be fighting, they wonder if these organizations thrive on chaos. They start to wonder if much of their taxes are being used by enemy forces to continue to crush their resolve. They wonder if the Vikings have taken over in all but name.

The first step in fighting paying the Danegeld is realizing you are paying the Danegeld, and for all of Trump’s foibles so far, he has laid bare the venomous contempt this patronage network has for the traditional American way of life. Billions of dollars were spent for the express purpose of alienating heritage Americans and importing their replacements. It isn’t relegated to Washington D.C. either. Religious congregations are realizing their higher ups hate their guts and will require churches to pony up funding for their own destruction. Hollywood now openly sneers at a large portion of their customers. Professional sports leagues are embarrassed by their own fans. It’s hard to pinpoint any organization that doesn’t have hostility towards their own conservative constituents.

This didn’t happen overnight, but through demanding little Danegelds that steadily increased. In the beginning, it could have been as simple as a small diversity statement or maybe a message against anti-Semitism to appease a small but loud minority. This small but loud minority had several distinct advantages. They were brash with their wants, unflinching in their moral superiority, and could handle social discomfort with ease. Outside the aggressive rhetoric of “Don’t Tread on Me” and talk of taking up arms, the natural libertarianism of the right is very susceptible to these pressures. The mindset of just wanting to be left alone makes these little compromises to “keep the peace” seem reasonable, a little pinch of incense to the gods, a little bit of Danegeld to keep things running smooth. The current disaster is something that has built up over generations.

The core belief of wanting to be left alone is untenable. No one can be totally left alone, and someone is paying the Danegeld. Conservatives in times past would loathe to put pressure on their progressive neighbors to donate to a pet cause, or hassle Human Resources to give a statement on a patriotic holiday. The progressive coalition has no such scruples, and that’s why they won. They had no issue with strong-arming either through social unrest or legal means to make everyone pay tribute to a moral crusade.

And why shouldn’t they? Why should a business be about just making money and not being a vehicle for social betterment? Why shouldn’t taxpayer money be sent to patrons of your own ideology? Even a culture warrior has to eat. While it’s true that throwing money haphazardly creates graft, it’s a failure of moral fortitude to be unable to say that everyone should have to contribute to social betterment. That guy might not be the best programmer, but he is competent and believes what you do and therefore should be hired. It doesn’t matter if your neighbor is pro-abortion, he should donate to the pregnancy resource center. It doesn’t matter if that DINK couple never wants kids, they can subsidize those who do. It’s called being a good person.

If universities can’t be objective, a financial penalty might straighten them right up. If Human Resources is discriminating against whites, make it as financially painful as refusing to hire a minority. Maybe they can grease the skids a little by hiring one of your friends or donating to one of your pet causes. The only way to keep bad actors out of a system is to have mechanisms to bleed them dry by both legal and extra-legal means. And the only way to defeat an out-of-control patronage network is to bleed it dry and make one of your own.

Of course, some might complain this will only create corruption in the other direction, and they have a point. Bad actors on either side can grind productivity to a halt and create enemies, but this doesn’t mean building patronage through one’s opponents resources is verboten. In fact, it is necessary. For the right, regaining a cultural foothold again after the other side has been subsidized by public funds for generations will require picking winners.

In a world of heavy partisanship, being able to extract wealth from your enemy isn’t a moral failing, but an effective strategy to keep your enemies down and your friends elevated. Maybe sometime in the future a better equilibrium will hold, partisanship will evaporate, and a new high-trust, civic mindset will form. Maybe, but for now, someone is paying the Danegeld, so you might as well be the Viking.

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Back in college, I was friends with what seemed to be the ideal couple. She was small and kindly but with a mild neurotic streak that her muscular boyfriend easily countered with a smile and teasingly tossing her over his shoulder. Unfortunately, they broke up, and I assumed it was typical young lovebird drama. The reality turned out to be far darker.

The man’s mother was a hyper-pious Catholic who despised the girl, going as far as telling him that “the devil brought you two together”. The man, while outwardly happy and secure, was weak in keeping his mother’s outbursts in check. Needless to say, she had no intention of spending the rest of her life with an unhinged mother-in-law and broke off the relationship. The fact that the woman ranting and raving about demons was a devouring mother was not lost on me.

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Whether or not one is in a religious community, everyone has a story. Maybe it was the erratic street-corner preacher shouting at bystanders to repent and escape the devil’s grasp, or the self-righteous churchgoer who is all too willing to relegate everything he dislikes as “a tool of the devil”. There is the “satanic panic” regarding role-playing games, day-care centers (some of which was true), and rock-and-roll. Such hysterics over time led the general population to roll their eyes and scoff when old scratch was mentioned.

Yet there is still that doubt lying in even our secular times, that modern psychiatry more explains away than explains problems of living, that there is a manifestation of malice and cruelty wafting through society, a certain spirit that emanates time and time again that scientific manuals can’t quantify. One can speak to his heart’s content about chemical imbalances, DSM-V classifications, and standards of care, but such cold, clinical words can’t penetrate the language of the spirit.

We have been a materialist culture for several generations, and the march of science continues to relegate religious thinking to empty individual pieties. Psychiatry explained mental illness, psychology healed without using the language of a priest. After the social and religious revolutions of the 1960’s, even the Catholic Church seemed to cede most of its territory to psychology. Demonic possession was relegated to mental illness that could be helped with a mix of medication and talk therapy. The exorcist, likely the most unscientific of all professions, became a dying breed, with only 12 in the United States in the 1980’s. It was a near certainty they would cease to exist within the next couple of decades. Yet underneath the seeming victory of secular thought, a spiritual emptiness took hold, along with the realization that material philosophy did nothing to explain the strangeness of existence. Now there are now 150 exorcists in the United States, and they can’t keep up with demand.

Father Chad Ripperger, an exorcist and minor celebrity in the trad-Catholic sphere, recently went on the Tucker Carlson Podcast. There he discussed his experiences as an exorcist, how demons operated, and the foibles us mere mortals do to invite their presence. What’s interesting about his appearance is his indifference to whether anyone believed him. While his worldview was completely foreign to the average man, and he had no intention to debate the logic of an exorcist in the modern day, taking the need as a given. Because of his attitude, a fully secular man will probably see a kook discussing shapeshifting and dialoguing with diabolical beings. Some more religious will be fascinated by his stories and explanations, glad that such spiritual matter can be discussed openly. Other religious will wonder why an exorcist makes podcast rounds like a celebrity and question whether discussing demons to the general public is a good idea. Both religious sides have a point.

wrote on the spiritual pitfalls of contemplating the demonic, arguing such actions will cause nothing but misery. It is akin to forbidden knowledge, divination that can only spiritually damage one listening.

I had no warning that I was going to be instructed by the tongues of liars and thieves. I had not given consent. It was a violation. Keep the hell away from me! This was not profanity when I said it, but a literal command to the most popular exorcist in the world from the middle of my kitchen. Since then, I have seen Father’s content pop up seemingly everywhere, and it is often and increasingly objectionable as he offhandedly recalls the words of demonic encounters and places the burden of such knowledge upon the little ones of Jesus’ flock.

The Disobedience of Fr. Ripperger

Others argue that such knowledge is necessary to survive without falling to naivete.

The fact is this - although Scripture tells us to be ‘like little children’ this does not mean we are to be enfeebled as little children. Especially in the modern age, with devilish lawlessness running riot, we have our tools and weapons, the Sacraments, Guardian Angels, the Rosary, and, crucially, His Holy Spirit to equip us for spiritual battle because there are not enough Father Ripperger’s to go around and this is something he clearly recognizes which is why he teaches us and educates us in these things. This is part of why I respect him.

In Defense of Father Ripperger

When one talks of the heat of evaporation in different compounds, this is detached, outside of oneself. Contemplating the demonic is another matter, and rests on actively contemplating a malignant, wholly inhuman force. As seen by how it drives some to hysterics, taking the form of demons while railing against them, it’s a valid point that some people aren’t equipped for such contemplation. It doesn’t affect only the individual either, as irresponsible talk of the demonic brings all religious practice into question. Maybe accessing knowledge of the demonic is questioned for a reason, for the same reason books were once banned.

Of course, all this talk of forbidden knowledge, possession, and spiritual infiltration is a far cry from the triumphalism of Western materialist ideology. While all the words are in English, the connotations of the words described might as well belong to two different civilizations. Skeptics will question whether the speaker truly believes his own words.

While only God knows Father Ripperger’s heart, Let’s take at face-value he is sincere in what he says, that he really experiences what he says. He really believes he talks to demons, he really believes he casts them out, and he really feels he has been under demonic attack. It would be unfair to lump Ripperger in with this crowd. He is calm, detached, and often quite funny in his interviews. His definition of demons and his encounters are complex and esoteric, and whether or not you believe they exist, such beings make rational sense within his theological framework.

Unlike the shrill mother or the rabid street preachers, his thought is deeper and more layered. He’s also willing to discuss other factors at play that give a better explanation and cure to a malady than immediately assuming demonic possession. If one listens to the interview, he doesn’t even dismiss non-supernatural explanations. He knows you don’t need to talk of demons when someone has serious hangups about trust because of being sexually abused as a child. While few adults, thankfully, have what would be considered a full demonic experience, they have enough empathy to understand the struggles that creates.

The ways of the scientific mind through the last few centuries have put emphasis on the objective, to witness something that can be witnessed by any third party in a reproducible setup. Such a mindset has brought about the revolutions of physics, biology, and ecology that we take for granted. Yet it would be wrong to allocate everything to clinical objectivity. A classic thought experiment is whether an infinitely powerful computer existing outside the cosmos can predict with clockmaker’s accuracy the entire lifetime of the universe. In the time of Newtonian physics, this would seem to be a given. In the new age of quantum mechanics and modern experiments that show a strange non-locality, this isn’t as cut and dry.

Objectivity has also been made synonymous with reason, that unless something can be demonstrated to an outsider at will, it belongs to the realm of sentiment. Testing the velocity of a particle is part of the scientific process, while intuitions are not trustworthy without hard data to back them up. When Father Ripperger discusses types of demons like Lilith and Loki, commiserating how their presence torments a man, there is an implicit understanding, an instinct, but nothing that can be relegated to objective analysis. After all, aren’t these matters subject to cultural prejudices and social stigmas? Yes, of course, but does that discount individual experience. Does that nullify his mental model of the world?

Ripperger: So supernatural is those things which are above anything that is created, and that pertains to God. Whereas preternatural comes from the Latin word praeter natura, which means aside from nature. So that would be things that are above what we experience as human beings in this world, but it's not supernatural because it's not God. It's kind of in that in-between state, which is what the demons are. But they're still considered natural in the sense of they have a specific nature that God created them with. They're created beings and that they actually have a natural law. They have all that, they're structured to think in certain patterns in certain ways. So it's kind of a middle tier, but it's preternatural. Supernatural would be something like being able to suspend the laws of nature. So demons can't cause miracles, for example, but they can cause things that to us as human beings are outside our normal experience. And so it looks miraculous, but it's actually not. Something that they can do on their own.

From a purely materialist perspective, this will sound like total balderdash, but is it balderdash to a person who has experienced a dark presence, a malignant voice in their psyche that seems to stem from nowhere? The materialist may talk of chemical imbalances driving these sensations, but that just begs the question of how a chemical reaction can emit a non-material output. One’s own consciousness stands as a refutation, and the idea of consciousness being an emergent property of molecular complexity serves more to obfuscate than edify. That being said, overt superstition obfuscates as well, and Ripperger says some pretty wild stuff in which some pushback is justified.

An individual is still an individual, who has subjective experiences no one else can fully understand. A brain scan might pinpoint general emotions, but the experience remains hidden to everyone but the subject. An exorcism requires this kind of encounter, as there is no process or procedure, no specific rite that can with certainty cast out the demon. It depends on the subjects using these tools. It’s also why exorcisms are as contrary to science as one can be. Instead of objectivity, is it subjective to its core, an encounter of two souls, with maybe a demon lurking inside. It’s why the personal virtue of the exorcist is considered important, why his connection to the divine is necessary for being able to bestow deliverance.

In the realm of humans understanding the world, there’s a place for metaphor, for the fuzzy details that fit in no theoretical framework. A physicist can pontificate on the properties of matter, but such theoretical knowledge will not get him far against a professional tennis player’s instincts built over a decade of hard practice. You can prattle off stats to your heart’s content on how to raise the perfect child but you’ll be useless compared to the hard-boiled father who sacrificed and suffered to raise his own six children. Theories, at their core, are just models, and every model hits the wall of reality. This goes for the minutiae of theology as well as the frontiers of scientific research.

At its core, this is the distinction between the spiritual and material. The material is, by its very nature, lifeless. It can see atoms in powerful microscopes, observe cells reproduce, and tell what wavelength makes the color red. It can’t, however, speak objectivity on experiencing "red”, stubbing one’s foot on that bunch of atoms called a rock, or pinpoint when a mass of cells becomes something more and can experience the world. The sensation doesn’t exist in a certain time or place. No one can point and say this is where the experience of “red” lies. In the spiritual realm, the words to explain what an encounter with the divine entails will seem like straw compared to the encounter itself.

Yet the spiritual and material are intertwined in countless ways. One would have to be mad to be unable to map hunger to lack of physical nourishment or a brain injury to limiting cognitive abilities. There will be those who argue the panic over devils will keep those who need mental health care from getting their needs met, while others will accuse the medical establishment of wanting to numb their patient’s mind instead of handling a real spiritual crisis more in line with the faculties of a priest.

Since the time of Plato with his theory of forms, philosophy has tried to understand the interaction of ideas on the physical plane. Some consider the entire material plane an illusion, maya, while others believe only what can be measured is real. Wittgenstein argued such questions were simply problems of language. Such ideas have been discussed for millennia and will probably be discussed until man takes his last breath.

This isn’t to argue Chad Ripperger is correct. Even many who like him think he’s a mixed bag. Still, he represents the hard extremes and conflicts in such modes of thought that have no conclusive answer, and likely never will. There are those obsessively beholden to hyper-rationalist scientism and those who get a little nutty with superstitions. Both are immensely dangerous.

On Angels

While there is the demonic, one must not forget about the angelic. One of my old classmates became a priest after the usual conflicts between wanting to be married and raise a family and his higher spiritual purpose. When we worked together in the fields during the summer, the farmer looked over to him and said, “that guy’s just different.” And different he was. I still see my work partner throwing hay bales on those humid summer days and getting into antics at school, even after he entered the clergy and has become a local legend with stories of miraculous conversions and healings. While I have witnessed none of them, I have no doubt of his sincerity, nor of the many who swear he healed them. In another example, an extended family member who almost died in a routine c-section miraculously stabilized after her priest administered the Anointing of the Sick.

Can I prove that these are real miracles? Of course not. But believing the subjective experiences of fellow human beings is hardly irrational either, and neither is believing in phenomena outside our technological trappings to observe. As the levers of truth-telling our institutions once wielded rust out, other modes of thought are escaping. Such new interest in the preternatural can be seen as a longing for a re-enchantment.

Yet in our world there is much more talk of the demonic than the angelic, of Lovecraftian horrors than guardian angels. Perhaps it is because we live in a world festering with devilry, perhaps we can no longer see the angelic if we tried, our minds hopelessly mired in cynicism and despair. Yet there are miracles all around us for those willing to see.

As stated:

In this fallen reality we have built, the Lord has not been quick to drive out demonic beings nor ghostly beings nor still odd beings, for it is these oddities and terrors that often remind the world how much we require a deliverer.

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Back in my twenties, I was part of a co-ed young adults’ group. Like most cliques of this nature, people attended them more as an avenue for finding a romantic partner than anything else. One of my buddies was an established software developer taking home a reasonable paycheck but missing all social tact. He inherited a house from his grandparents, still adorned with all their archaic furniture. Dressing like a nerd out of the 1950’s, he was notorious for incessantly asking every single girl for dates. Needless to say, he gave them the ‘ick’. A newcomer came and, as expected, he asked her on a date within a couple weeks. Surprisingly, she said “yes”. They continued dating and after a few months he proposed to her. To the horror of the others, she said “yes” again.

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The women’s clique went to lunch with her and staged what amounted to an intervention, asking what in blazes she was thinking. She was established, reasonably attractive, and still young. In the interrogation, she stated he was stable, would be a good father, and she could count on his loyalty. The romantic infatuation of early love was non-existent, and she spoke in terms of utility more than anything. To some ears this will sound like a grotesque compromise that goes against everything a marriage should be, but anyone who is honest knows there’s a spectrum between exciting romance and practicality, and everyone makes decisions based on what their priorities are.

They’ve been married around thirteen years now with three kids. When I catch up, both seem content. She’s not getting an exciting life, but a reliable husband who is present. He’s likely not getting a love life that knocks him off his feet, but it’s not a dead bedroom either. A lot of people would kill for that arrangement. These sorts of transactional thoughts go to the highest echelons of power, such as when Ivanka Trump was famously asked if she would have married Donald Trump if he wasn’t rich, she replied back that he wouldn’t have married her is she wasn’t beautiful.

Over time you see every sort of family dynamic. Quite often, you see ones that make you wonder how the husband or wife can refrain from running out the door. I have a friend who is a total workhorse while his wife is the opposite. Ornery, obese, and very lazy. He’s also the most maritally satisfied man I know. I also know an opposite case where the husband lulls around on the couch scrolling his phone while his wife handles both the kids and cooking. Again, she is perfectly happy with the relationship. Of course, I also see everywhere else in the middle. Needs are being met, even if they are unconscious or irrational.

These mediums of stability did not occur through long, drawn-out conversations. Equilibrium did not form through an objective framing of the facts of life or their personal abilities. They happen in the unconscious level, primed through hormones, past experience, instinctual wants, forward-thinking goals, and plain old practicality. As much as people want their spouse to change, they have a large number of immutable aspects you just learn to deal with and come to an understanding that complaining isn’t going to change anything, and sulking about one’s situation is a waste of emotion.

Little of what is deemed objective criteria for marital health pertain to every couple. Some couples talk all the time, some barely ever. Some go out constantly, some are homebodies. Some have an active sex life; some barely ever get under the sheets together. If you read through relationship advice online, especially social media, talking about some of the above situations will likely create responses with “toxic” or “emotional abuse”. The internet is full of advice on how to turn your marriage from “okay” into “electric”. While there’s nothing wrong with improving one’s relationship, quite often the disappointment with realizing that your ideal “electric” marriage is never going to happen turns an “okay” marriage into an insufferable one. They run into hard limits and take it personally.

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History is a strange field of study, as it can take on a life of its own long after the events have transpired. Heresies abound. Know then that it is the year 10391. I, Moneo Atreides, under the direction of our gracious God Emperor Leto II, was tasked as court historian to document and analyze all existing artifacts regarding the war against the machines, called the Butlerian Jihad, and its aftermath. While the full report will only be available to the high-priests, Leto II, in his divine wisdom, bestowed upon the general population this general summary that will help to divine the road that has led to his glorious “Golden Path”.

Various historians have given different timelines to the dawn of the “thinking machines”. Some attribute it to the “machine revolution” of mass factories and the growth of technological techniques in human operations in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some attribute the beginning of the era to the early 21st century, just before the Mad Emperor1 dropped atomics and instigated the World Upheaval. I subscribe to the former, as it is now well-understood that one does not necessarily need machines to have a machine-mind. People succumbed to machine slavery long before the first robot appeared.

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In the 19th century, the machine revolution had a strong hand in dismantling many traditional practices as instant communication, easy transportation, and a mass propaganda apparatus homogenized countless cultures under a monolithic umbrella. Scaled production and sprawling factories induced labor from farmers and other earthly professions in the hinterlands. With time, material gain increased, but was earned at great cost even then, as the same techniques that produced chairs and textiles at scale were used to create bombs and soldiers that led to two great 20th-century wars. Yet those who refused technique found themselves subjugated by nations who fully utilized them. This short-term advantage in embracing a corrosive and deadening ideology led to disastrous effects later, but those who resisted were destroyed.

Yet few saw the imminent dangers, even after mass slaughter from aerial bombers and armored vehicles. This peacetime’s form of artistic expression, known as “Science-fiction” overflowed with well-trodden, silly tropes. They had human-like cyborgs, ultra-advanced societies with near-magical scientific tools to explore the cosmos, and a powerful, bureaucratic world-government of varying levels of competence espousing the religion of the era.

This religion, called “Liberalism”, was supposed to serve as a buffer against religious fanaticism and charismatic authoritarianism. It served as a religion without the trappings of religion, and its historical documents are rife with nonsense slogans like “separation of Church and State” and “the voice of the people”. Their religion rejected a formalized state religion, all the while being beholden to pieties with harsh legal and extralegal penalties if broken. It was a clever deception, but thoroughly unsustainable, and the edifice collapsed after only a few centuries. Still, there was the intuition in the 20th century that societies of the future would function like they did then on a larger scale.

This isn’t without merit. From their standpoint, it stood to reason that mass democracy conquered monarchies, human rights replaced antiquated religions, and liberalism dissolved various forms of tribalism as part of a continuing evolutionary process. If one assumed the flow of history continued uninterrupted, it would continue to be more of the same.2

Yet the river of human history never flows straight, nor does it stay constant as the banks erode and shift over time, and our current reality is a subversion of these expectations. Instead of a technocratic confederation of allied nations under the same umbrella working together peacefully to solve problems, we entered a world just like the past. Trickery, manipulation, and subterfuge are still a reality of existence. Instead of robots doing their heretical calculations among ships with warp drives, we eliminated them. Instead of an abstract society based on nonsensical human rights, societies are stabilized the way they always have, through religious zeal. One reads these old historical documents and wonders how a people could be so naïve as to assume technology would change man’s nature. Our reality is not dystopian, nor is it a society rejecting all technology. It is the old, natural, and human forms of great houses and disputing factions. Our social forms, though more complicated, could still be easily understood by a soldier of the Roman era.

Instead of a future of metal, we created a future of ecology, dancing with Nature’s relentless guile instead of fighting her. We understand that no matter how advanced a people become, Nature remains an unconquerable adversary. It’s a world populated by actors that don’t solve problems through technical processes, but deep instinct covered through relentless training and millennia of eugenics.

The old visions failed to capture parries within parries, plans within plans, the schemes of hyper-aware savants in a deadly dance for power. Our future felt too strange for the old bards to comprehend in their limited views of the cosmos; forcing it into their constrictive box removes its alienness.

With the rapid ascent of Artificial Intelligence, the seeming victory of Western liberalism, and mass material progress, they believed they were on course to a future of inscrutable technologies, post-scarcity resources, and a stable, democratic world-government. In contrast to the current reality of a single spice on a single planet every interplanetary guild is on a quest for power to control; they were on the cusp of having no wants of all. The growing pains of the machine revolution were assumed to be over, and a new era of prosperity was on the horizon. Such optimism came at an awful price3.

Catalyst for the Jihad

In our holy books, the details of the Butlerian Jihad are purposefully vague4. The mythology of the cosmic struggle is encased in only a few lines of The Orange Catholic Bible:

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,

Theories have abounded, with one camp declaring the robots rebelled against man, leading to a great war that almost annihilated everything.5 Others believe it was a spiritual struggle, with the population rebelling against being controlled by machines. While this mass rebellion is implied by our religious works, our studies have concluded that the rebellion was secondary, used as a tool by natural aristocrats whom machines were impeding from letting them engage in forming history.6

Since the machine revolution, material progress reached heights unheard of, but human beings found themselves at the mercy of a sterile existence. Local shops closed in favor of mass scale, rights like freedom to meet with those of similar backgrounds for business and commerce, once taken for granted, were curbed to reduce economic friction. Laws and customs were flattened to allow the technological machinery to work universally. The effects of mechanization increased human freedom through travel, communication, and longevity, but at the expense of homogenization and a subtle slavery of mind.

In short, the cost of this technological sophistication was the domestication of the population. What was once the realm of the individual turned over to bureaucratic control, where process and procedures replace relational messiness. Disputes were forced into resolution through increasingly impersonal mechanisms; local leadership was bought out and their infrastructure standardized. Elected figures like mayors became figureheads for larger powers. Instead of autonomy, people become subjects to an impersonal system with mandates from above with no redress to a single person. This bureaucratization, called “managerialism”, is a system, a form of computer without silicon, necessary for the functioning of a complex and wholly unnatural mode of being. Mechanical processes, “best practices”, and inhuman Human Resource7 managers were attempts to remove the human from an organization in service of standardization and predictability. Violence became the sole domain of a judicial system that punished those who defended their property or even their own person.

Homogenization from mass communication and the brute military supremacy of the American Empire spanned the globe, becoming what is commonly seen as the first world government, short-lived as it was before the Russo-China Rebellion, the World Upheaval that moved the globe into a multipolar structure. They could travel the entire country and stay at a hotel indistinguishable from the one back home. A man of the 21st century could go to a resort in a far-off country and be inundated with a similar to what he had back home. The business of money and optimization is an all-encompassing beast to feed an ever-more-sophisticated computer world.

While there are small subsets in the technological frontier that mimic the wilder days when new Earthly settlements were possible, once a technique in an industry becomes established with a firm foundation, choices evaporate.8 Creativity and risk-taking become verboten, and the well-defined and predictable get precedence. Even building your own home in an unapproved way would make architectural priests prosecute you. Holistic and ecologically sustainable forms of food production were shut down by a supposedly ecologically conscious government because its form did not match technical documents.9

One does not even need to have machines to act like machines, but the ascent of AI only accelerates this malaise. One can speak openly to those across the world, you can form your cult, but an ever-present algorithm will determine your success. An ever-present surveillance panopticon assures that not only don’t you physically harm others, but that you act in a way amenable to a machine-based society. It subdues human creativity to a sterile, easily transferable technique. As a culture veers towards hyper-optimization above all else, it loses its sense of telos and acts only to serve the ever-increasing complexity of the machine world.

Temples called “data centers”10 were developed across the countryside. New, advanced military thinking machines forced everyone to build ever more complicated ways of facilitating war to ensure short-term survival. Fertility collapsed as the population failed to reproduce due to being relegated to being base animals in a cognitive cage. The process continued long after their art became sterile and decrepit, their food tasteless, and their lives constantly monitored. It continued as a force of its own long after even material benefits declined. The cult of technology became a means to itself. Still, the multipolar states were forced to become like machines in fear of conquest by those who embraced the seemingly unstoppable machine-life.

In order to stop the madness, something deeper that temporal force was necessary. A new form of mind needed to develop that even mass martyrdom could not dissuade. It needed to be living enough to upend life and accept mass hardship to achieve. As the human spirit collapsed into lethargy, a new will to act upon the world in all dimensions had to form. The relationship between man and technology had to be overhauled. It couldn’t be simply state policy; it had to be a religious awakening.

Flesh is Stronger

The ancient philosopher Thulsa Doom, in one of the few existing treatises from the Hyborian era11, spoke of the role technology should have in the hands of man.

Yes! You know what it is don't you boy. Shall I tell you? It's the least I can do. Steel isn't strong boy, flesh is stronger! Look around you. There, on the rocks; that beautiful girl. Come to me my child... That is strength boy! That is power! What is steel compared to the hand that wields it? Look at the strength in your body, the desire in your heart, I gave you this!

Technology, whether it’s the sword or a spaceship, is meant to make manifest the will of the user, not to give ease or comfort. Thulsa advocated hardship for spiritual growth, the primacy of will, and power being based on organization and charisma before brute force.

He realized the core component of a society, for good or ill, was its religious values. He also understood that any attempt at mass movements had to offer more than material gain, it had to have a supernatural purpose, a banner that went beyond material luxury.

Man’s will to survive and grow is built into his very cells upward, the culmination of countless generations who produced offspring. The rest are forgotten by time. Courage and indomitable will is not something possessed through easy climates and a life of robotic living, but hardship. Even in the workings of the mind, every great thinker struggled with the consequences of his discoveries, the riddles of Nature he unblocked, only to be hit with an even more complex puzzle.

Before I continue, I want to again request your financial support for our emperor, Leto II, by paying a tax small contribution to ensure the continued prosperity of our great empire and get the word out on this important document. Paid subscribers get additional important treatises on great ancient works as well as resilience in the Gom Jabbar test.

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All of this comes from an intuition of Nature that goes deep into his blood. It’s in the genes he carries, the primordial memories inhabiting his mind. Countless little instincts and subconscious reactions form the human being, closed off to machine reason. An infernal machine will process countless amounts of training data and model itself to ape a human, but that model lacks the instinct of man stemming from his uninterrupted connection to deep earthly instinct. Every synapse activated, every hormone created, every cell reproduced is part of an irreducible dance of what makes a human human.

The greatest heresy of the machine age was the idea that the organic was weak while the machine was destined as the superior form. Countless heretics of this era, like the infamous demon known as “Samuel alt-man”12 proscribed thinking machines would surpass humans in all realms, delegating humanity to, at best, spectators of its own future. Mankind’s telos from the chief priests of this era preached human slavery to the new gods of silicon and titanium. While we failed to surpass our natural limitations, the machines could ascend past Nature itself. Nature had other plans.

Nature’s Revolt

Man had an ally in Nature. While she is a harsh judge to her subjects, she is more vicious to her rebels. As the ever-present drive for efficiency, atomization, and frictionless interaction of countless parts hit roadblocks, the response was always the same: More optimization, more complicated techniques, man relegated to more rigid modes of being. A thinking computer can make a machine that acts like a human, but only a human has that lineage. After the triumph of technique, instead of these machines elevating humanity, it limited him.

Problems of efficiency demanded more silicon. The complexities of human interaction demanded more complicated laws. Non-conformity in the wealthy upper-strata capable of managing these complex networks became impossible, and a chasm developed between those who were subsumed by the machines to their base desires, those who lived a constricted existence to serve the increasingly complicated rules necessary to keep the technocracy running.

The technique that served so well in times past became an albatross around their neck. Scientific achievement plummeted as academic papers proliferated. Man became less educated as they attended more years of schooling. Competence evaporated as credentials became ubiquitous. As the natural forms of personal honor, social trust, and cultural traditions evaporated under the acid of efficiency, so did the mechanisms necessary to keep it running. Cheating ended up being a more efficient way that studying to get ahead. A society where the average man thinks stealing is morally permissible will overwhelm even the most technologically advanced law enforcement apparatus. The ascent of talking machines, deemed Large Language Models, formed an elite class trained to talk like these talking machines, forming a destructive self-feedback loop. On paper, the machinery worked better than ever, yet human beings outside the techno-class saw the deterioration. Nature closed the eyes of the technocrats to the resentment brewing in a new elite class.

Among the lower classes, empty leisure bred the most destructive emotion in all of humanity: Boredom.

Robert Nisbet, a philosopher of this era, stated:

As Gabor further observed, man’s central nervous system evolved over millions of years, during which alertness, vigilance, and aggressiveness were necessary for survival. Being necessary, these traits were bound to enter the very essence of man’s nervous system. If, as is widely assumed by biologists, few if any significant organic changes have taken place during the past five thousand years, there is certain to be something of a traumatic effect on most people from enforced idleness, unwonted leisure, security from predators, or relative abundance of food. Boredom is in sum a response of the human brain to conditions alien to its long formation.

Boredom, that most pernicious of sensations, is a silent malaise that slowly consumes. Man will lay waste to a civilization to escape its maw. The collaboration of a restless new elite and an aimless lower class formed the perfect alliance. The new elites wanted the old elites displaced; the lower classes wanted to burn everything down. Nature smiled on the vitalistic new elites and laughed at those who thought they built a lasting society outside of her grasp.

The jihad was a multi-generational war of attrition. Those inside the mechanical system put their faith in machines modifying their children’s genes, hoping to create humans better equipped to serve the machine. Smart and docile, it was a cruel irony they inherited a world that rewarded instinct and cunning over analytical minds and agreeable demeanors. As algorithms limited communications, subtle forms of coded speech proliferated. As currency became more restrictive, black-market trading took over official economies. As violence became more restricted, petty vandalism and disruptions constantly impeded the machine society. The machine world erased human cultures, but man’s barbarian within reawakened.

It’s inconclusive how much the revolution was instigated by genetic pressures, where those cognitively resistant to machine slavery reproduced at a higher rate, or by social pressures due to a deteriorating quality of life. What started as minor disruptions, cutting power cables, home-grown EMP’s, and signal scramblers, soon wore down infrastructure. Rural mobs pillaged data centers, automated mail-delivery vehicles were overturned, and a lack of will to repress the minor rebellions led to greater ones. Supply chains were maximally optimized, ignoring even basic redundancies. Even a ten percent disruption in supply chains caused a cataclysmic feedback loop. In Russia, China, and America, the rebellion spread in perfect alignment13, like a great spirit took over the heart of man. The cathartic will to destruction went unabated, and local warlords took control as the brittle logistics networks collapsed and the world fell into famine.

The Great Purification

It is estimated that the world population decreased twenty percent in the next fifty years. This, in addition to a century of low fertility, brought the population to four billion. Starving city dwellers flooded out to the countryside, and the machine state was ground to dust. In the surviving literature, little can be found regarding a lament of what was destroyed. As decrepit and harsh life was, either no one wanted to go back or those who wanted to resurrect the old order were eliminated.

Not that all technology was condemned. Small metal shops, building simple motors and tooling, remained running by human workers. Any machine with a whiff of agency, however, was scrapped. Anyone activating a defunct thinking machine was summarily executed. Any warlord who tried to harness thinking machines was invaded and his entire tribe exterminated. Within a decade of instability, a powerful religious taboo formed and spread through the generations. There is some debate whether the shift represented a real shift in sentiment, or whether the ban on thinking machines was a cynical ploy by local warlords to keep power. While more debate can be had, I side with the former.

With time came stability, and local warlords evolved into hereditary houses. While conflict still erupted, commerce and trust formed again. Even more interesting, local bands of like-minded individuals started forming and specialized, forming some of the great guilds still seen today. In the land once called Massachusetts, a collection of scientists and mathematicians congregated and reproduced. Because they could no longer do their work through thinking machines, advanced techniques of mental calculation were created. Strict assessment and education of their youth brought with it a hard eugenic push toward abstract calculation, and the Mentat was born.

The purveyors of apothecary, who were once called doctors, delved into the biological arts. Now freed of bureaucratic controls in the form of “human rights”, these doctors performed profane experiments to unlock biological potential. Like before, the eugenic effects pushed their genetic makeup toward a certain specialization and frame of mind, and the precursor to the Tleilaxu were formed.

Not all guilds had geographic boundaries. Women of a certain disposition learned to communicate amongst themselves in a violent, male-centered world. Because they lacked the physical prowess to work directly in their interests, they learned secret languages, eventually developing the “weirding” method of speech to force compliance.14 Thus, the seed that became the Bene Gesserit sprouted.

Eventually, a loose, globe-spanning confederation formed that brought enough stability for long-term cooperation. While the friction between the great houses, guilds, and orders remained, the power dynamic and interdependencies formed a balance where none could gain the permanent upper hand. The old frictions the managerial order tried to optimize were seen as a facet of existence, a sturdy fence that impeded social decay. Because of the relative “slowness” compared to times past, plans were made with a generational timeline.

The New Order

When man let the machines think for them, their minds atrophied. When process and procedures were demanded instead of mastery, civilization stagnated. Yet neither of these were corrosive in themselves. Every musician on the lyre needed to learn the right technique. Our great ships are glorious in their simplicity. Our social fabric is awe-inspiring in its stability. Yet only so much of the transformation can be put into simple words; it must be felt.

Every master remembers when he first broke the rules, that his sense of the thing in itself surpassed all written knowledge. He has transcended the crutch of technique and understood at a fundamental level. Like when Paul Atreides became the Kwisatz Haderach, he entered a plane the machine-thinkers could not enter. Such skill only comes through meticulous and ruthless training, facilitated by other masters of the craft. Man was never meant to follow rules and techniques to the letter, but to surpass them. It’s the instinct that allows a blink to say a thousand words, to counter a strike before one’s opponent even contemplates it, the intuition that makes the subjects of an empire pivot without proclamations.

The ethos of the new society would sacrifice efficiency for stability, the organic before the mechanical. Processes and procedures were demoted in favor of fostering true mastery. The simple and robust solution was always chosen over the complicated and optimal one. Instead of abstract and deracinated educational institutions, the guilds formed apprenticeships with its members spanning several generations of transmission from father to son, forming once unfathomable knowledge of their craft. Political organization became hereditary as the people under their authority became extensions of their being. In many ways, individualism waned, though it flourished in new agency within one’s craft and local sphere. The individual has responsibilities and can even wield violence if necessary, but retribution for behaviors that deteriorated social cohesion was punished swiftly and severely.

In mankind’s earlier quest for optimization, he forgot to hone his own senses. As he eyed the numbers moving across the screen, his awareness of his surroundings faltered. This restructuring created a powerful social pressure within humanity. While man of earlier ages sought their salvation in mathematical equations and idealistic systems. As reliance on abstract forms evaporated in favor of the tangible, the elite classes needed to become more radically in tune with their own senses.

While the pace of technology slowed during the new era, projects that spanned multiple generations, once considered unfathomable, became a reality. The first manned starship to Alpha Centauri was seventy years in the making, and several more followed. Technicians who began the work understood they would never see their masterwork travel space, but their grandchildren would.

The Golden Path

It would be easy to scoff at the hubris of the architects of the machine society. Yet the trials and tribulations of this age were a necessary step to understand what we, as human beings made of flesh and blood. Like ancient chess masters who were easily defeated by these thinking machines didn’t fall into myopia and boredom but formed a deeper understanding and appreciation of the game, the machine society brought to the forefront our capabilities as a people. Just as the scaffolding and guardrails of childhood have to be discarded to grow, so it was that humanity had to escape and cast aside the machine society.

Until the last sun burns out from the cosmos, humanity’s future will be one of perpetual struggle. To flee is cowardice. In our current day, our glorious and prescient emperor has, through means no one truly understands, continued this development of humanity. While traitors and subversives have tried to circumvent Leto II’s plans, they will be crushed. The future of mankind depends on it.

We must embrace the struggle. It can’t be offloaded to a machine, nor can we escape to comfort and escape Nature’s jealous grasp. This is the future laid out for us. This is the Golden Path.

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The mad emperor’s apprentice, photographed below, saved the world from total destruction.

The award is bestowed by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a well-known paragon of objective, critical analysis that isn’t beholden to any donor. The fact that the Asness Family Foundation gave 2.4 million dollars to the AEI does nothing to sway their brave, principled positions. This can be seen from the current chair of this incredible honor, a scholar who has sent shockwaves through the entire establishment with his shocking, unorthodox views preaching hard truths everyone needs to hear. With an extensive bibliography giving truly unique insights into the political landscape, including “Liberal Fascism” where he argues Liberals have gone too far, and “Suicide of the West”, where he expresses Nationalism and Tribalism is a threat to Democracy, you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t care what sacred cows are slaughtered. The current chair, , is the only man capable of wielding this terrifying responsibility.

Of course I’m joking. No one cares who the Asness Chair of Applied Liberty is, and you’re more likely to get a chortle from the sheer pompousness of the title, alongside the more juvenile reason that Asness sounds hilarious. Jonah Goldberg has been a hack his entire career as a pundit, and even those in the think-tank world would be hard-pressed to think of a single interesting thought he’s had. His biggest claim to fame amongst most is being the cantankerous guy who sometimes appears on 24-hour news channels or the butt of the joke in Ben Garrison’s most surreal comic.

Pompous academic titles are a mainstay of the think-tank and university world. Most of my readers have likely had to suffer through some guy getting an honorary doctorate in an already overlong graduation ceremony. While most on the outside consider these awards strange and pointless, it’s catnip to many inside the system. In the non-profit and college world where most people aren’t getting rich, it’s the way to tell the world they’re influential, that they’re important. Academics take great pains to showcase their lofty credentials that tell their audience they’re worth listening to.

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It’s also a very large and incestuous ecosystem. There isn’t much real debate per se, but institutes inviting people from other aligned institutes for lectures, with the guest keynote speaker being bestowed honors. On the occasion debates are hosted, punches are pulled in the name of decorum. Then there’s the intellectuals moving from organization to organization but never really leaving the system, creating a vast network of aligned people to push his particular brand. There’s also the open secret of other perks, like aligned think-tanks buying thousands of copies of your lousy book. All of this is funded by people stemming from ultra-rich foundations to upper middle-class donors who want to donate to their intellectual cause. This ecosystem has made lucrative careers for many, giving the opportunity for intellectuals and faux-intellectuals to work full time for their political causes.

While left-leaning think-tanks are notorious for changing their principles on a dime based on political realities, right-leaning think-tanks quickly become ossified. They are notorious for fighting battles using weaponry from a generation ago, all the while being puffed up about principles as battle after battle is lost. A lot of this sphere is still stuck in a Bush-era proto-libertarianism steeped in equality of opportunity rhetoric that has been left to the dustbin of history. While this is often due to a donor base consisting of old guys whose political opinions never evolved since their twenties, it’s also due to their inability to change course when the solutions they promulgate either don’t work or have no practical applicability anymore. Some of this is understandable given how brutal the backlash can be. You see this in the Heritage Foundation, who paid dearly for going off the plantation.

It would be easy to dismiss the respectability pipeline as a cynical cash grab for public speakers and educated midwits to fleece suckers who think they’re getting an intellectual discussion while being firmly in the bonds of out broken political Overton Window. If one looks outside the haughtiness though, there’s a need being fulfilled. If you look past some of the fossils and clear shills, there are some incredibly sharp individuals.

All the high-minded titles and conferences in this ecosystem gives the aura of status, the reassurance that intellectuals are on the case to solve America’s problems. To be fair, they largely are. Obama admitted the Affordable Care Act stemmed from ideas originating in the Heritage Foundation. The RAND Corporation is practically holy-writ in parts of the defense industry. Institutes have incredible leverage on policy and public relations when they speak before Congress, and they often are the catalysts for springboarding political careers. You can’t discard the whole infrastructure.

I’ve met some truly formidable individuals who are either alumni or currently employed or the think tank circuit. While in times past you had to sift through a lot of strivers, it’s easier now for the best to trickle to the top. Prestige magazines linked to these policy non-profits are sinking or swimming based on their ability to ascertain current realities. Near infinite pockets are not able to control intellectual discourse anymore. The dam has burst, and while previous generations were able to suppress the Joe Sobrans of the world, the field is wide open to those who have something useful to say.

There are think-tanks that are now willing to skirt the margins of allowable opinion. ’s , the author of “The Unprotected Class”, has aggressively sounded the alarm on rabid anti-white racism that polite company was supposed to ignore. He was nominated to a position by Donald Trump, only to have to withdraw after Republicans, in typical fashion, cucked to pressure.

While many on the right have reservations about The Claremont Institute, one has to realize that these topics once verboten in polite society are getting traction largely because foundations with respectability are willing to take them up. While one can say that everything “edgy” these think-tanks now promulgate was be found in right-wing social media ten years ago, these posters were incapable of giving the “permission structure” many in elite circles need.

When a guy with the handle “Dogs Don’t Have Thumbs” dismembers a CATO immigration activist using his own study, it makes for hilarious fodder. This sort of humiliation does lower the hack’s status by making them look clownish, but no one is going to quote “Dogs Don’t Have Thumbs” at a congressional panel. Constantly beating-down high-level media pundits and public intellectuals by stating the obvious realities of modernity and watching them squirm makes them less admirable, but it doesn’t increase the status of the schizo-poster with the Anime avatar among most elites. While the X guy named “RetardedPinochet” might have better rhetoric and stats, no one but J.D. Vance reposting the bangers on his alt account is taking him into account. The aesthetics aren’t there. You need someone in a suit with institutional backing say things in a different, more palatable tone.

It’s the same idea as the “permission piece” in journalism, where a once taboo topic whispered under hushed tones is brought to the limelight by a prestige journal and therefore allowed to be talked about in the open. The opposite is also the case, where a prestige journal says without reservation that a topic is verboten, usually by trying to destroy an up-and-coming intellectual who dares cross a certain line.

While the insufferable circle-jerk of titles and honors make most sensible people blanch, strivers eat this up. It’s a signaling mechanism. There’s also a large cohort of people who want to be part of a greater cause, and willing to give little compromises to get there. You’ll be shocked how many smart guys will suddenly give full-throated advocacy for your cause for the right paycheck. Yeah, they’re mercenaries who pretend to be principled bulwarks of integrity, but they could be our mercenaries.

The Age of the Shitposter has Ended

There’s been a lot of handwringing over the future of the online right-wing movement. Many have justifiably lamented the deterioration of social media into silly infighting and rage-baiting. There’s a lot of ego in this sphere, and the usual trampling of taboos have lost their edge. This is inevitable, as you have thousands of people with large accounts dependent on engagement, a fickle algorithm, and a paucity of funding. This is an improvement from five years ago, where some people can actually make a living instead of worrying that getting doxxed will destroy their livelihood. Still, even the smartest anons aren’t getting the ear of congressmen, aren’t being tapped to write legislation, aren’t strategizing election campaigns, and aren’t being paid enough. The data wonks might have the argument, the poasters the rhetoric, but they don’t have a face that gives reassurance he’s a proper “expert”.

It doesn’t help when even the purity of posting for love of the game is gone. There have been countless scandals of accounts being paid off, run by foreigners, or devolving into thoughtless rah-rah-ism or blackpilling. The guys in it for the laughs are decreasing while many sharp guys with paying jobs don’t have the time to commit to nonsense online wars.

We’re seeing the limits of populism, whose energy always devolves into chaos and backbiting. This doesn’t mean populism’s ascent was in vain though. Mass appeal helped smashed through old dogmas and left the intellectual class humiliated by failing to see the signs of the time. The initial energy was necessary, but what’s next can’t be the mob, but core values embraced by the right: hierarchy, discipline, loyalty.

Instead of countless independent anons shooting from the hip, the best and brightest need a mechanism to band together, have each other’s back, strategize messaging, and gain real funding. They need to convince the upper classes with as much fervor as they spent recognizing the needs of the left-behind working class. They need to ally with politicians, businessmen, and philanthropists that can write a check without worrying about being humiliated. Tastemakers have to be elevated, prestige has to be granted, and message coherence has to be enforced. In other words, they have to operate like a think tank.

It might seem strange to dunk on think-tank culture for the majority of this article only to advocate following its tactics, but this is precisely the next step.Imagine if a couple dozen anons got together and form “The Institute for American Excellence”. They get a reasonable studio setup, get a good graphic designer, and do press releases and an interview circuit with other “thought leaders” who can interact with well-educated people from multiple backgrounds without sperging out. They make their hardline stances sound nice and nuanced, the clear thinkers in the room. They make a yearly multi-day conference, “American Excellence University”, that people pay to attend.

The difficulty, of course, is funding. They’re going to have to get someone from the wealthy classes to write the check. While billionaires are more than happy to spend hundreds of millions in updating college sports facilities, many on the right are stingy about money that doesn’t show immediate returns. This isn’t insurmountable, and a lot of our guys could do incredible work for a fraction of the tens of millions invested into outlets like Daily Wire. Sure, many rich boomers are going to give their last donation to the Cato institute, but the next generations will have a more pragmatic view.

Maybe some can start schmoozing with the guys working in the old think-tanks. If they have the creds and can somewhat hide their power level, maybe they’ll get employed. They can moderate their beliefs and build their network, giving feelers as to who has the more edgy beliefs. Maybe they’ll get to talk to donors and build relationships. Some can build a respectable persona and start writing articles for prestige magazines. They can spend as much time building rapport with in-real-life personas as one does in a discord chat. Get connected enough, and you might find someone willing to cut a check.

We already are seeing some of this transformation. Probably nothing shows the vibe shift that’s occurred better than comparing Trump’s 2016 Inauguration to 2024. 2016 had the “Deploraball”, with underground right-wing influencers walking through a swath of police and protestors to get to their venue. The 2024 election ended with the “Coronation Ball” run by Passage Press, a black-tie affair featuring Curtis Yarvin alongside Steve Bannon. While I don’t know who funds Passage Press, I do know that its founder, Jonathan Keeperman, is a refined, talented man who doesn’t crash out every other week. He’s a guy who can make deals, be respectful, compromise, and play the long game.

Of course, there’s the argument that any moderating presence is a sign of cucking out. It’s true that many get sucked in and turn into insufferable hacks. The twenty years prior to Trump entering politics was full of them, most of whom never realized they spent a good deal of time making argument and papers that had nothing to do with reality. When money comes, so does the temptation to moderate a little too much, counter-signal views you actually believe in, throw your friends under the bus, and to sell out one’s own mind for accolades and steady funding. Yet we have no choice, as the anarchic flurry of online politics has no staying power.

None of this is to decry the posters of times past, nor to denigrate those who have no interest in playing the new game. There will always be a place for funny memes and online spaces. What needs to end are the countless beefs, turf wars, and catty backstabbing that is a core feature of populist politics. Anyone serious needs to look at how to make friends more than dunking on enemies, how to find common cause with people who are 75% aligned rather than countless purity spirals. Most importantly, we need to build the permission structure necessary for the milquetoast but status-conscious liberal in suburbia to break rank. Instead of constant provocative posts designed to get a rise out of your enemies, you need something to allow your current enemy to respectfully come to your side.

Being in the online space for a decade, I can say with confidence that the talent among anons is far superior to the Jonah Goldbergs of the world. All that’s needed is putting the scaffolding in place to give them a platform to speak in exquisite meeting rooms instead of in the realms of discord, to give an oratory at a lavish banquet hall instead of behind a silly X avatar. In order for this to happen, they need a livelihood to be compensated to the personal risk in doxxing or even semi-doxxing oneself. Based on everyone’s risk tolerance, steam-clean your old suit, get it tailored nice and fit, and get out there.

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The grim extent of this observation came when I got sick and missed school for a full week. I asked the teachers to tell me what I missed and was gruffly advised to get the assignments from my classmates. Thanks. I assumed I would be spending several long nights getting up to speed with the material, but easily got caught up over the weekend. One class had test prep for a couple days, another made a vocabulary game, and the literature class spent its time as an open hour to work on a five-page essay. Far from being hopelessly behind, in eight hours I accomplished an entire week’s worth of work. My grades didn’t suffer a bit. Anyone who understands elementary math can see the problem and if they can’t, no amount of additional school will help them.

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In modern times, the response to the inefficiencies of teaching to the lowest common denominator and unruly classmates hasn’t been an aggressive overhaul to allow far more rigorous academics and separating students based on skill, but doubling down on the same failed policies. Gifted student programs are being erased, algebra options are being removed from middle schools, problem students are sent back to class, topics are less information dense, and even outstanding teachers are hamstrung by the overwhelming force of the educational bureaucracy. And this doesn’t scratch the surface of the misuse of technology on an already brain-rotted generation.

When my son was almost of age to enter kindergarten, I had strong reservations about sending him to the same grinder. The private school we looked at was 30 minutes away in the opposite direction of my work and would burn a massive hole in my wallet. I wondered if it was worth it. Public schools were out of the question. Then, serendipity struck when Covid happened, and I was stuck with the choice of putting my son on a screen for seven hours a day or homeschool. The choice became a no-brainer.

I estimated that 45 minutes of reading, writing, and math drills would put him at grade level. It ended up jumping him two grades within six months. I don’t think this is because of exceptional cognitive skills, as I know other parents with similar stories. At that point my family was sink-or-swim with homeschooling. I could never in good conscience spend several thousand dollars to have half my child’s day wasted in classroom management when I could do it myself. With this came socializing with fellow homeschool travelers. While homeschoolers twenty years ago were very isolated, it’s grown to six percent of children now. Not an earth-shattering number, but expansive enough where families can pool resources together and build social cliques. Homeschooling had matured, and infrastructure was in place.

Contrary to many complaints about a lack of socialization, homeschool families band together. We are part of two co-ops with over a hundred families, some with more than six kids, that has become our social bedrock. Talking to them has given me a broader understanding of the movement, warts and all. While I have total confidence I made the right choice, like any social group, it has its share of problems. These aren’t relegated to just homeschoolers, but it seems they get cranked up to eleven due to its relatively new and unregulated nature.

Mom Beefs

Most married guys are aware of their wives’ frenemies. They’re kind of friends but also in an existential winner-takes-all competition that allows neither to relax. A thousand little status games are being played, and the score is being kept. Levels of favors are assessed, they will analyze every speck of dust in the other’s house, and the competition of whose kid is flourishing the most is always prevalent. Is Rachel’s son doing Algebra II while Heather’s daughter is in pre-algebra? Is little Jimmy doing great at sports while Tommy is picked last? Rest assured that’ll find a way into the conversation. The guys will be swigging a beer hanging out on the patio while this cold war brews inside. If you missed it, don’t worry, you’ll hear the play-by-play later.

In planning, a mental tally sheet is made of who is hosting what, and how many times as well as the caliber of dishes presented. Something as simple as a rotating system is out of the question, and instead there are a swath of passive-aggressive texts asking who wants to host next as they all try to avoid the need to clean and sanitize the house at the level of a royal household.

Even in homeschooling, kids will be kids with all the trouble that entails. Sometimes it explodes into accusations of bullying, leaving dad to assume he has to get involved. Often, he ends up just making things worse as the narrative he was told had nothing to do with reality and he’s stuck eating a heaping dish of crow. The smart dads only have to learn this lesson once before bowing out of the drama forever and just assuming both moms are insane. The kids can work it out as long as they don’t come home bloodied.

Because there is no underlying authority like a principal, designated teacher, or other to moderate these disputes, they can spiral out of control. Because there is no set curriculum. the space is ripe for showmanship and getting ahead of everyone else. Because there are no formal school events, the ad-hoc ones have a more anarchic nature to interactions. The lack of a clear set of rules everyone follows tend to exacerbate conflict in an emotionally precarious realm.

Checked-Out Dads

I admit a large pull for homeschooling was my ability to set the curriculum for my kids. While homeschooling packages are far better than secular school counterparts, they are still in the post-war consensus framing. World War II was still “the good war” for freedom, To Kill a Mockingbird is still holy writ, and the blessings of democracy are assumed. My oldest son has almost reached the age where I can teach these subjects with far more nuance and I’m relishing the opportunity to converse with him. My excitement, however, is not shared by the other dads.

One common feature I’ve seen in all the dads is they are present for their kids but leave too much of the planning and work of education to their wives. While this makes sense for many households, especially the ones where dad is working 50+ hours, what makes little sense is their total indifference to teaching materials. Any time I ask what books their kids use, what math methods they teach, or the literature their kids read, they tell me they have no idea and I should talk to the wife. It’s infuriating.

The dads aren’t bums. I see them going swimming with their kids, playing catch, teaching them how to use tools, and overall being present in their lives. Yet they are totally ignorant of how the core subjects are being taught. They will enforce discipline if the kids are giving mom a hard time but are otherwise hands-off. I don’t think any of this is malicious. They don’t see school as “women’s work” but simply have other priorities with the kids when they’re home. The problem is that fathers are much more likely to be able to tell some hard truths that the kids won’t get in a textbook and give an opinion that’s outside the bounds of “respectable” thought.

Wild Variance in Outcomes

I’m a homeschool maximalist and believe in no regulation for homeschoolers. Luckily, I live in a state where such a policy exists. That being said, I also believe some parents should not homeschool. Contrary to internet discourse, it’s not because they aren’t educated enough either. Anyone with a reasonable high-school education can teach their child the basics and get help for the rest.

What’s lacking in many is will and discipline. As the number of kids grows, the rigor of routine needs to grow as well, and failure to do so will spell doom for learning. I know a family of thirteen kids whose house runs like clockwork, with every child helping the younger ones down the line. I also know a family of twelve whose oldest son could not write a proper sentence in high school. You have the striver parents who homeschool to cram even more sports, music, and other activities in, and those who just let the children run feral and play in the fields.

Even for those with a lackluster education, they do okay. They go into trades and live a decent life after their happy but thoroughly undisciplined childhood. This is hardly ideal, and some of these kids would have been better off in a different line of work. There is no real baseline, which is a godsend for the kids who can exceed the bare minimum with little fuss and get on with their lives, but it leaves some kids behind in getting even a rudimentary education.

This can be seen most in the arts and sports, where you have one cohort that sings Latin Hymns, plays two instruments, and eschews sports while the other side has kids who play organized sports year-round, coached by a dad who is more passionate to win than the professionals. It becomes two worlds that don’t overlap. There’s little balance between the extremes because of the natural separation of cultures due to different mindsets.

There are also parents whose kids walk all over them. Every tantrum is met with pleas for better behavior, every lack of discipline blamed on ADHD or some other malady. Their homes are bedlam, and if the kids can’t get stability at home, they should be somewhere else most of the time.

Distance

While there are a lot more homeschoolers than the more legally nebulous times of years past, and acceptance of homeschooling has increased dramatically, it’s still hard to get the kids together. Homeschooling families are overrepresented in the homesteading community for obvious reasons, so many are spread about across the vast countryside. There is far less density of homeschoolers, and the closest homeschool family we know of is over a mile away. While this doesn’t seem that bad, unfriendly traffic makes it hard to tell the boys to just take their bikes over and play. They need a ride. The more kids, the worse the logistics, and unfortunately a lot of our kid’s friends live 20 minutes away, largely because the co-op we go to is in that area.

While kids riding bikes around the neighborhood isn’t as prevalent because of moms freaking out over stranger danger and kids being inside glued to their phones, there is still the random field hockey game in the middle of the street, but interaction is harder because the kids know each other from the public school. It puts homeschool kids at a disadvantage.

The Homeschooling Movement is Due to Systemic Failure

Educating children is a paradox of sorts, as the parents are the primary educators, but they need the support of wider society to do it well. As educational institutions collapse, the increase in popularity is homeschooling isn’t from an ideological commitment, but more often an escape from a system that is either corrosive to their value system or incapable of properly educating their children.

The Supreme Court has spoken in absolute terms as to parental rights regarding homeschooling but allow states to handle the details. Some states, like New York or California, have stringent requirements that try to corral homeschoolers into a standard public-school education as much as they can. Others, like Michigan and Texas, don’t even require filing a homeschooling intent.

Overall, educational outcomes for homeschoolers range from equivalent to public schools to far superior. Because there is little leverage in talking about lack of education when the public schools are failing left and right, and the graduation mill of modern K-12 education is such that practically no one fails, they focus on more nebulous reasons like avoiding abuse. They often use gruesome case studies of neglect that had nothing to do with homeschooling, not to mention ignore the horrifying number of sexual abuse cases in schools.

As I said before, I don’t believe in homeschool regulation, even if I concede some parents are a poor fit. Calls for more homeschooling oversight are all done in bad faith and designed to make homeschool onerous and legally fraught enough to scare people away and keep them in the standard system. They are a tool to allow busybodies to harass parents into compliance. You’ll never see a more rabid group of activists than homeschooling parents when the legislature threatens their ability to teach at home. They are a small cohort, but regularly flood the capital and unceasingly call their local representative to fight even the most mundane of regulation. And they’re correct to do so.

I could see the argument for minimal standards if public schools were universally safe, well-staffed, had appropriate rigor, and were willing to fail those who couldn’t muster the harder material. Yet in our current environment we know that’s not possible. Useless admins are continuously handcuffing teachers on the ground, and day-to-day operations grow more strained. Most teachers I know either quit or retired early, and the system is getting worse. This collapse that has percolated through both the richest and the poorest schools, has done more to make homeschooling acceptable than any other factor.

Maybe a single percent of parents would homeschool if the public schools were excellent. It’s a lot of taxing work and most parents would be happy offloading it. The growth of homeschooling is not because of a new, radical philosophy, but the disintegration of public trust in education. It’s part of the transition from high-trust to low-trust, from civic-mindedness to tribalism. A confident, cohesive society has no problem with every kid in a geographic range going to the same school, learning from the same textbooks, and digesting the same value system. The attempt to stem homeschooling and force everyone back into the failing box will not make people more trusting, but increase resentment among both youth and parents.

So yes, there are issues. Yes, a standard education in a trusted setting in a set region would be ideal, but that’s not our world. For those educational bureaucrats who lament homeschooling, I say, “physician, heal thyself!”

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Few phrases in the modern lexicon are as corrosive as “Elite Human Capital” (EHC). The phrase itself treats man like a fungible good, an interchangeable cog to put in the right place so that the watch runs as expected. It’s a delegation of a human being to a number, a production unit.

More baffling are those who proudly proclaim themselves Elite Human Capital. They have the right IQ scores, the right ideas, the right education. Put them in charge, they say, and the problems of modernity would go away through their strong leadership, rock-solid analysis, and key insights. They enter the striver pipeline, go to the right schools, have the proper secular religious beliefs, and are rewarded. The path is simple if you follow the designated rules of the academy, know who to schmooze with, and are the right race and sex. This has changed as the plane of allowable ideas has steadily eroded and immutable qualities have blacklisted a significant portion of the population from elite circles. Now counter-elites are forming.

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Many of these “counter-elites” are spiritually the same, the progressive elite’s mirrors. The only difference is the solutions offered. These types are all over the right-wing internet. They are just as abstract, just as technocratic, just as barren of tradition. Replace equality with human biodiversity, replace secular values with cold rationalism or vitalism, replace natural bonds with technocratic governance. Put everything under a different universalist umbrella but give them power instead.

In both the right and the left’s neglected elites, we observe the same seething, the deep anger of those who feel the world screwed them over, the secret kings who are aghast that their brilliance has not earned them rulership. To be fair, many of these individuals possess high intelligence, and life has dealt many of them a lousy hand. What’s baffling about this type of person is the amount of pride they take in being seen as a simple, fungible unit for the administrative machine. If fact, their self-identity is wrapped in being more economically valuable than those less intelligent, less skilled, less refined. Often, they have the brains and the competence, but no opportunity to use them to full effect. Unfortunately, this often leads to animosity not toward the elites in power who ignore them, but towards the common man they don’t understand.

To Elite Human Capital, those morons who watch Fox News, listen to Candace Owens, or watch the TPUSA Halftime Show are irredeemable, useless to the cause, a liability. They need to know their place and defer to their betters. Giving a political voice to these chuds has turned progress back decades. After all, it’s their fault more refined dialectical points are ignored. They’re making certain ideas low-status. Slop directed at the masses are reducing the prestige of their obviously correct opinions.

It’s not an exaggeration that they see the average blue-collar worker as cattle to do as they’re told to bring the future technocratic paradise into being. The same worker’s contempt for this elite hubris is more evidence those halfwits are to be sidelined.

Many glorify the blue-collar life from a myopic view of a wholesome past with little resemblance to current reality. This is especially true today, as the lower classes are degrading into drug abuse and rampant dysfunction. Often this naive elder tells young men to live in a small town and get a local church girl. Still, the archetype in their minds isn’t without merit. There is a gritty virtue to those electricians, HVAC installers, and roofers. While those jobs were never glamorous, they had a quiet dignity that once allowed laborers to live in modest means. Many of these workers in times past worked their way from the bottom to run the business twenty years later. Their political opinions were often inaccurate but directionally correct. While EHC sneered, Trump showed what such masses can do when directed towards a goal, however haphazard and chaotic our president has been.

With their sneering attitude, it’s clear these so-called elites have led nothing more important than an internet mob. We have a mass of elites who have no clue how to be magnanimous, charismatic, or a team player for those with similar aspirations. Most of all, they never understood how to get the best out of someone. While there are countless examples among the punditry class, they exist in your company, in your neighborhood. Their kids go to your school. These strivers who checked all the boxes are everywhere, but likely the best archetype of this person comes from Khan Souphanousinphone from King of the Hill.

The first conversation is Hank Hill welcoming Khan to the neighborhood, saying matter-of-factly that since they were neighbors, they were friends. Khan then impotently tried to explain that he is Laotian as Hank continually asks if he’s Chinese or Japanese.

Khan is a classic striver, achieving employment at a high-paying tech sector job and constantly trying to hobnob in elite circles. His contempt for his “redneck” neighbors is equaled by his shamelessness in sucking up to high society, often to his own humiliation. A common theme throughout the show is Khan’s anger at not getting the recognition he thinks he deserves, often seething that a bumpkin like Hank often gets more admiration from those in the neighborhood.

I loved King of the Hill in its original run, and while the last seasons Flanderized many of its characters, there were laughs throughout its entire run. They time-warped the characters for a continuation last year, with Hank just getting home from working for years in Saudi Arabia. He now has a grown-up son and is wealthy enough to retire. It was a clever setup, as it made clear a subtle theme throughout the show’s original run that Hank was not only religiously fanatical about propane, but incredibly talented. In the original seasons, Hank was assistant manager of Strickland Propane, a clearly maltreated employee who nonetheless did his work with religious fervor.

It was heartwarming that he went to better things, even if only foreigners could truly appreciate him. He was highly skilled, far more than his old layabout boss. In the reboot, Hank gets calls from his former Arab boss begging him to come back by offering him ….a sword.

Given that the international stint gave him more than enough money to retire, he likely rose to a powerful position. After decades of being underestimated and underutilized, he proved what his Texas gumption and perfectionism could do. For all his ignorance in many subjects, he could really lock-in when it was something he cared about. You feel he would have been an incredible Secretary of Energy.

Of course, Hank didn’t have refined political opinions, and most of his pontifications amounted to a warmed-over Reaganism. He didn’t listen to the right music or hang around in the right crowds. He certainly had no care for new trends. Yet in the game of “Elite Human Capital”, he surpassed his smug and elitist peers. Even more, even when he was higher-status than some of his colleagues like Bill Dauterive, he did everything he could to protect him, even when it required humiliating himself. He had no care about status games, and likely no cognizance they were being played.

This sense of duty made him an excellent mentor, even when unwanted. Teaching the proper setup of a grill gave him more joy than anything and he had the patience to mentor as simple a task as cleaning a propane tank. While it’s never seen what Hank did in the Middle East, rest assured he mentored with as much care and reverence as he did at his middling job at Strickland Propane, and rest assured he didn’t care if his underlings were “Elite Human Capital” or not. He was entrusted to give support, and support he did.

It’s not smarts that separates the wheat from the chaff, but the one who will put in the time to elevate those around him and find opportunity in lousy situations. A common theme of every good leader is the tenacity to have high expectations of everyone under him, and to have higher expectations for oneself. A good engineer is not the one with the best designs or code, but the one who can properly explain it, build rapport, and patiently endure the less talented. Watch the respect a senior engineer gets when he’s willing to get down and dirty solving problems with the lowly technicians and you’ll see what loyalty and admiration he receives. While everyone likes the idea of being the gruff and brilliant scientist whose intelligence no one approaches, those guys will face some interesting problems, but they won’t be leading anyone.

If you want a slice of the general population, go to a men’s charity organization. You’re likely to see a small portion of creative, competent guys who are natural leaders. There will be most who are your everyman, the reliable types who like to come over and chat a little but leave the heavy planning to others. Then there is the bottom rung, the ones who make the meetings run long with useless tangents, the ones who have an enlarged view of their value or are sometimes just plain lonely. They slow things down and make an easy twenty-minute discussion turn into an hour. And these are the people who actually show up.

Your average Elite Human Capital type would point at that bottom rung and say the organization should get rid of them. Heck, the top guys should just convene offline, make all the plans, and tell everyone what’s going on. That would be nice and efficient. Yet anyone with such a policy will quickly find themselves with no volunteers. The lousy treatment those who just wanted community received would appall the everyman. He would understand you’re not on their side.

Every healthy organization works the opposite way. The top men patiently listen to the timewasters and redirect them. They’ll chat even more after the meeting is over and give advice. They’ll give a gentle nudge in the right direction to the most seemingly hopeless of cases. They find a task for the most bumbling of members. They magnanimously give their time and expertise to execute things that Elite Human Capital would consider beneath them.

And you know what? Those “worthless chuds” can flip a pancake for that charity event, hand out tickets to that 50/50 raffle, and even hand out flyers for your city council run. Those “losers” with their unrefined opinions can be your strongest warriors on the ground when given direction. A leader understands that those with less talent need meaning and place too, and can bring value to the table where everyone else sees a hopeless nobody.

What separated Hank from the EHC types is this sense of place. He doesn’t love people because of their SAT scores. He loves them because he is a Texan, and while Khan is originally from Laos, in Hank’s mind he’s a Texan too. Hank’s co-workers are like his adopted children because of his unbeatable work ethic. There’s an almost childlike innocence to someone like Hank, whose rigid sense of right and honor elevates the business he works in, relationships throughout the entire neighborhood, and even his marriage to a well-meaning but insane woman.

Elite Human Capital can’t even compete with such a simple and, in ways, naive worldview. There is no sense of such deep loyalties, no spiritual sense of what they are. They are proud to have the right opinions, to be in the right groups, and in the process have become cynical to the core. They can solve complex problems, but what they can’t solve is what it all means. Giving them power would be akin to handing the keys of the city to a foreign mercenary. Sure, he could run things efficiently, but he hardly has your best interests in mind.

A question I have for all these Elite Human Capital types is, could you get your local Rotary Club to accept your proposal? Would you patiently go through the bureaucratic nonsense necessary to make a new park? Do you have the patience to deal with those less intellectually gifted than you, build rapport, and give direction? You want to lead men, direct policy, change the world, and yet why would anyone follow you? Why do you think your Cambridge degree confers that respect upon you?

There are quiet elites everywhere. They aren’t just in the think-tanks, but in your neighborhood HOA. They’re keeping the fools in local government from driving the entire city off a cliff, the friendly guys who worked in the same factory for decades and can tell you how the machine was repaired fifteen years ago. There are countless little heroes at every level your policy wonk is dependent upon. Those guys are going to have some strong opinions and unkempt manners. If you want some social tact, you’re often not getting it, yet those men keep the world running. As said:

My fellow sandblasters possess ardent tempers which flare up without warning and pour forth sublime rage through their few remaining teeth. Though they often look like they are a single cigarette away from death itself, they equally possess an adamantine will to preserve their autonomy absolutely. Such a man can never surrender to the pretenses of civilized society—he is far too bestial.

And yet the paradox of it all is that society is entirely dependent on men like this, because for all their flaws, they are among the hardest workers on the planet. They keep the lights on in your homes and the gasoline flowing through your cars.

I would go further and say running through these rough characters’ veins is a resourcefulness that can’t be taught, an eye for nature that no book can portray. Give many of these guys opportunity and more responsibility, and they’ll rise to the challenge. He’ll have an instinct for the industry your recent MBA hire can’t touch. He’ll see through the bullshit everyone else ignorantly swims in.

In the reboot, Khan is living in the garage, divorced and humiliated after the dishonor of his collapsed marriage. In typical neighborly fashion, the guys come over and invite the disgraced bachelor to hang out with them. Even through all the contempt, they’re willing to offer a chance to get him on his feet, which he brusquely refuses. It should be obvious such contempt rots the soul, and the same malignant spirit that likes to punch those lower than him lives in the dad who beats his kid after getting reamed at the construction site, or the middling manager who gets sadistic pleasure out of domineering his more talented but weaker underling. Because of their impotence in getting the attention and respect of those above, they take frustrations out through those they should be protecting.

Being elite means being willing to start small and execute that task well. If you can’t be trusted on minor tasks with mediocre teams, you can’t expect the current elites to give you a chance. For those who are wrongly kept out of high society through DEI woke regime, you’re not doing yourself any favors taking out your anger on those from whom you could earn loyalty. In every walk of life there are a plethora of people overlooked because of their disagreeableness, race, or plain old malice. Your elite ally might be the repairman who enters your home, the college grad who can only get landscaping work because of a leaked video of him saying the word of power, or the young adult who never got his feet on the ground. Maybe instead of trying to get the recognition of those in the ivory towers of a dilapidated institution, look around at the diamonds-in-the-rough all around you and make something new. There are millions of Hank Hills in this world for those who have the humility to look.

Thank you for reading Social Matter. If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing and subscribing. For paid subscribers, the quick bonus feature above “Like Father, Like Son” explores how Hank influenced his son in hidden ways.

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I recently read Johann Kurtz’s excellent “Building a Legacy” and it gave me a necessary kick in the rear to decide what I’m doing for my posterity that goes beyond an inheritance. I homeschool and am their primary instructor along with co-ops that will build their foundation. We do pretty well with extra-curriculars like sports and I’m getting them into woodworking and am starting to do more outdoors stuff now that everyone is getting older. I also have friends and a cohesive band of families with the same life philosophy that I’m hoping against hope will eventually bring marriageable prospects. Not bad, but my career at a large corporation doesn’t translate to anything I can transmit easily, nor do I have good channels to local politics. I have a way to go.

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Scott Adams passed away on January 13, 2026 after a battle with cancer. His career trajectory was as strange as his famous newspaper comic. He started out as your basic office drone, not even proficient in technical matters, but having a keen eye for exposing the lunacy of 1990’s managerialism. He used his minimal artistic talent to great effect, creating the comic strip “Dilbert” that poked fun at the average office worker’s experiences.

With it he built a media empire. Contra Bill Watterson who kept the beloved “Calvin and Hobbes” under his full protection, Scott Adams would license his IP to anyone who could write a check. There were calendars, plush dolls, mousepads, a grossly underrated TV series, and every other bit of paraphernalia featuring the engineer with the curly tie. In the process he became fabulously wealthy.

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Like most newspaper comics, it far outstayed its welcome and became stale by the early 2000’s, reaching zombie status alongside Garfield, Family Circus, and other dated staples of dying print media. This is likely due to Adams being out of the workforce for over a decade as well as limiting his comic to the corporate environment, casting aside some of the zanier characters like Bob the Dinosaur. He also toned down the silly plots, like when Dogbert tried to raise a cucumber army to conquer the world or his hilariously un-PC book of etiquette. In a grim irony, he corporatized and sanitized his own artistic work for market appeal. He knew how to milk that cow dry, but a redemption arc not even he saw at the time was coming.

The comic revolved around a talented MIT grad named Dilbert employed at a nameless corporation. He lives with a megalomaniacal dog, appropriately named Dogbert, who serves as his opposite. Dilbert is introverted, loves technical challenges, but lacks the confidence and social tact to change his dead-end career trajectory. Dogbert is extroverted, a grand thinker whose only barrier to world domination is not caring enough to follow all the way through. While Dilbert is the personification of a timid mind incapable of willing his reality onto the world, Dogbert is unrestrained ego.

His coworkers range from the hypercompetent but erratic Alice to the slothful Wally. He’s subordinate to the Pointy-Haired Boss, who either dreams up silly tasks or enforces nonsensical dictates from above. It’s a nauseating, labyrinthine hellscape of avoiding responsibility, meaningless chatter, shattered ambitions, incompetent hierarchy, and gratuitous violence. All but the last one is something everyone working in a megacorp has experience with, and the violence and general goofiness fit right in with the surreal world we take for granted.

Everyone has had a version of the pointy-haired boss who memorized the right slogans but was an incompetent fool. Many found resonance in the earlier comics that portrayed the boss as far more vicious, uncaring, and Machiavellian. There was a widening disconnect between the managers and the people they oversaw. This rift has caused all sorts of insanity as the two worlds have split apart. The employees see a plethora of purpose statements, pie-in-the-sky budgetary spreadsheets, nonsense initiatives, and a total lack of order. The managers see employees trying to skirt work, getting caught up in meaningless minutiae, and doing technical tasks they don’t understand anymore. Their ability to communicate has been destroyed.

Sometimes in the face of absurdity the best medicine is to laugh, and “Dilbert” let them do so. Scott Adams had plenty of material from loyal readers eager to tell their stories of stranger-than-fiction memos coming from inside their organization, clueless disrespect, and ignorance of the basic laws of physics. He caught onto a wave everyone was familiar with, especially with the rise of the desk jockey with the computer that allowed an explosion of busywork while making actual verbal communications less necessary.

There’s a less humorous side to this story though. While sometimes laughter is the best medicine, its catharsis will sometimes make someone more at ease with their plight. It feels good to know that there are others who have the same idiotic management styles and touchy-feely wording to mask system decline. It builds rapport with others in various fields to know they are not alone when their budget gets arbitrarily slashed or when the doofus next to them gets promoted. This shared suffering, especially when unavoidable, helps people get through rough patches. Unfortunately, in larger doses it creates a sense of learned helplessness and inability to form agency in one’s own life.

While knowing you are smarter than your boss and grossly underpaid gives a nice ego-boost, you’re still stuck in a dead-end job. Understanding of your situation is the first step in improving your plight, but it’s not an end in itself. As Dilbert became a national phenomenon, countless office drones found a way to laugh, but not a way to escape. If anything, it reinforced the notion that it was the same everyone and such an escape was fantasy.

Dilbert served as the quintessential engineer. He was great at solving objective problems but was paralyzed in his own life. He knew he could do better. He knew the company didn’t deserve him. He knew his talents were being wasted away. Yet he stayed.

Logic would state that those who are most dissatisfied with their work are most likely to leave, yet that’s not how it plays out. Often it’s the guy who doesn’t mind his job but simply wants a new experience who leaves, or the one whose career track is passable but not where he wants to be. Often the loudest complainer, the one with the most emotional scars from being constantly stepped over for promotions and ignored, is the one who plants his feet firmly in the corporation and never leaves.

Sometimes he becomes like Wally, shirking his duties and leeching off the company, but often he will still slave through those brutal 70-hour work weeks to make the deadline, accept a 3% raise every year, and watch as his co-workers leave for better pastures. The same man who dreams of quitting every day will shudder in horror when layoffs are incoming. He takes consolation that he isn’t as clueless as his boss, not as fake as the executives who pretend to like their employees. He says he’s brave enough not to lie to himself, all the while convincing himself he could leave any time. He reads the Dilbert strip every day, relieved he’s not alone. Instead of giving a necessary morale boost in getting through some ugly times, it became his life preserver to justify never improving his plight.

There is a mass of office drones enslaved not through whips, but the shackles of their own minds. Somehow, their calculations always say it’s too risky, that they are bound to fail, so better to stick with the familiar. They have their Dogbert plush toy and the 365-day calendar on their desk, but the cubicle prison still shuts them in, slowly sucking them of their dreams. They need a prophet, a modern-day Moses who can lead them out of their slavery and into freedom.

Scott Adams found his way back into mainstream discourse by being an early Trump analyst. While other pundits were putting on their serious face and balking about threats to democracy, Adams focused on the orange man’s ability to weave a story and engage with his audience’s imagination. Countless people began reading the blog of this old man, a cartoonist of a newspaper daily whose glory days were far behind. It wasn’t just a shot in the dark of a man looking for a new angle, as Adams had been interested in hypnosis his entire life, and saw the same enthralling, attractive energy emanating from a New York real estate mogul. Everyone wondered if “the Dilbert guy” was for real, and Trump’s election solidified him as a visionary.

Previously he had released a book in 2013, a biography of sorts named “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.” While going through his life’s struggles, it read more like a self-help book, telling of the mindset and strategy that could make an average guy fail time and time again and still come out on top. While self-help books are rightfully maligned, this work stood as a truly fresh view of how to live a fulfilling life. He tells of catastrophic failures like the “Dilberito”, a burrito trying to leverage the popularity of his comic into the food industry and failing spectacularly. He talked about how to develop systems instead of goals, take risks but walk away from sunk costs and other advice. Overall, it was the emphasis of action over rumination and risk-taking over a lousy status quo.

In his later book, “Win Bigly”, he emphasized the near blasphemy of telling grand tales and playing a little loose with the facts as opposed to a factual but ultimately unengaging story. Everything he said went directly against the average person who read his comic, a technically proficient, facts focused, and deeply analytical mind. In “Loserthink” he goes into the mental habits of the Dilberts of the world and how they impede their own happiness. In the end, he essentially encouraged people to accept some methods of those in the corporate ladder he mercilessly lampooned in his comic. When one listens to his countless videos and written articles, you don’t see a nerdy guy advocating being a nerdy guy. You see a man who wants you to be the anti-Dilbert.

Of course, his emphasis on grand ideas, psychological tricks, and playing easy with minutiae made him a lousy philosopher, and those who took his ideas to the extreme would find themselves inside a chasm of nihilism. His last act, a conversion to Christianity straight out of Pascal’s Wager, shows a personality far too obsessed with being clever. He knew what he was doing though. He knew that his readers didn’t need a grand philosophical theory they could study for decades while doing nothing in their own lives, but a powerful testament that would take a battering ram to their psychological walls, leaving nothing but waste of their mental barriers. They didn’t need more mental masturbation. They needed a jarring slap in the face.

When Dilbert got cancelled in 2023 after Scott Adams showed his power level, he didn’t seem to care. He started Dilbert Reborn for a while, but it petered off quickly. It was clear he was tired of the comic and likely grew sick of writing it a long time ago. It was also the most poetic way to go out too. After years of laughing at a suffocating corporate hell and his own comic turning into shackles, Dilbert’s creator had enough. He pulled a Leeroy Jenkins and set himself free, even if it meant destroying the catalyst for his success.

He had already found new success and had plenty of f*ck you money to not worry about cancellation. Of course, he failed plenty also. He slipped in the Covid debacle and quasi-advocated for the vaccine, trying to be too clever for his own good. Even after trying to sue Ben Garrison for one of the most brutal political smackdowns ever drawn, he recovered. He failed and got back up, just like he did his entire life. He became an arch-enemy of polite company in the woke era, a lolcow of dissident discourse, and made some questionable decisions in his personal life, yet he persevered, laughing all the way.

It remains to be seen what Scott Adams’ legacy will be. Dilbert is unlikely to become a beloved icon of the newspaper comic era like “Calvin and Hobbes” or “The Far Side”, but everyone can agree it scratched an itch that needed scratching. I see his nonfiction having longevity, written in a fun, brisk style that truly challenged his readers to get out of stifling and counterproductive thought patterns, especially in their careers.

It would have been easy to take the Jim Davis “Garfield” route by playing it safe and soaking in the licensing revenues as a has-been comic. Yet all his tinkering in seemingly unrelated fields of hypnosis, psychology, and neuroscience gave him insights that led him to new pursuits. None of his life was planned, but it’s rare to see such a character arc developed like it was written for a screenplay.

It’s the story of the office nobody who fell into fame and fortune through his storytelling, fell down and got back up over and over again, and at the end of his life helped his loyal fans to escape the doom and drudgery of the world he lampooned with a smile and wink. He killed Dilbert, and beckoned us to do the same.

Rest in Peace Scott, you were truly one-of-a-kind.

Thank you for reading Social Matter. If you enjoyed this article, please share and subscribe. If you are a pointy-haired boss, please become a paid subscriber.

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Fast forward to now, and no one thinks the campaign was a success. Its main spokesman, Joshua Harris of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” fame lost his religion and got a divorce. Almost like you shouldn’t base complex social relationships on an inexperienced 21-year-old. The attempt to change dating into a nebulously defined courtship fell to the wayside. Worse still, even for those who stayed chaste through their entire single life, a slew of frustrated men found out that years of purity pledges turned their brides into sexually frigid shrews. After all the years of saving sex for the beauty of marriage and a large amount of strong repression, they now saw sex as gross. Women found out that the man she thought was “strong” for not going too far while dating was actually gay.

Still, for all the failures of purity culture, secular culture is in worse straits. Fewer people are in relationships now, pornography is rampant, marriage is declining, birthrates are plummeting, and what was once a lively sexual market has become a minefield of taboos where even cold approaching is considered uncouth. Secular culture is learning consent as their only basis of morality is unwieldy in dealing with sexual relations.

I remember reading a post where a woman was asking for advice. She went on a date with a guy and agreed to go inside his house afterward. She sat on the couch with him and said she didn’t want sex. The guy, as guys are wont to do, gradually escalated with kissing, touching etc. When she showed no resistance, it culminated with him carrying her to his bedroom and having sex. She said he never blocked her exit, and she could have walked out anytime but didn’t because she didn’t want him to feel bad. She wondered if it was rape. The board exploded with calls for her to go the police to report rape because she never gave active consent, acting like this boorish guy deserved to get years in prison for seducing her. In modern morality, because she didn’t give a verbal, enthusiastic yes, it was rape. Such a morality turns the entire erotic dance into a lawyerly contract, and it’s just as exciting.

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If the man blocked her way, threatened her, or otherwise forced himself, the case is more clear-cut, though this brings the problem of how you prove such an assertion. The Believe All Women movement focused on taking a woman’s word for it, but in reality this turns every legal mechanism into a kangaroo court, especially when even enthusiastic consent can be rescinded at any time. None of it would stand in court using classic Western legal norms, which is why women once avoided going alone to strange men’s homes.

In a nation where the only morality is consent, people are finding out what a nebulous term consent even is, and the reason there were many guardrails to assure consent was actually consent in messy human relations. There’s an idealism that sexual relations can exist in a sort of platonic form, free from any sort of psychological conflict. Yet the quest for that idealistic form has created a mass of conflicts. The woman above likely didn’t want sex but was worried he would lose interest if she didn’t put out. And she likely was right. As expectations change, so do the calculations of what one needs to do to maintain it. Where does psychological coercion start? Who decides?

If you look at modern dating discourse, there are men who say if she doesn’t put out on the first date, she’s not into you. After all, there’s no taboo against sex anymore, so if she likes you, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t. Others give more leeway and argue she has to put out by the third date or you’re just a meal ticket for a bored girl looking for something to do. We’ve have non-monogamous couples, friends with benefits, situationships, and every other association known to man. With all taboos destroyed, there’s a mix of extreme openness and extreme paranoia that has sucked all mystery away. Sex is always on the table, and therefore with time it’s seen as obligatory.

Probably the strangest evolution is the inversion of marriage. While once sex was seen as an inextricable part of one’s conjugal duties, it’s now treated as, at best, a secondary concern. In earlier times, marriage equaled sexual consent. Now it’s seen as completely acceptable to totally withhold sex from one’s spouse while also making it morally unacceptable for the jilted spouse to get his or her wants taken care of elsewhere without the other’s permission. Sex outside of marriage is seen as liberating and no big deal. Sex inside marriage is seen as a little vulgar and going against the ideal platonic form of two people loving each other in a wholly metaphysical way.

For those looking for a temporary, no attachment fling, it’s a godsend… for a while. If you are attractive with good charisma, you can have sex with plenty of available people. Sex is fun, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it. Some pundits on the right like point to this as proof that traditional chastity in the modern world is detrimental to your cause, and you’re not going to find a good wife by sticking to the old sexual norms. In a world where sex is easy, only the most asexual types are going to wait until marriage, and then you’re going to have a really bad time. This is especially true when people are now marrying in their thirties. You can only make people wait so long.

Of course, submitting to thoroughly modern dating practices means you will have a thoroughly modern marriage. A partner who you slept with on your third date isn’t going to be more traditional, isn’t going to be willing to have more than 2 kids, isn’t going to start taking your religious faith seriously, and isn’t going to sacrifice herself for your higher aspirations. A modern marriage is a farcical contact where dissolution is on demand and everything is divvied equally, if you’re lucky, with no recourse. The data is in, and it’s also a fertility sink. If you’re okay with that, go for it. Otherwise, the only way to have a different sort of marriage is to foster a different sense of what a marriage is. This requires living those principles, even if no one enforces them.

The argument about people being incapable of waiting too long isn’t without merit though, and religious institutions aren’t helping. Many Catholics parishes require engaged couples to go through over a year of marital training. While this is an attempt to circumvent the abysmal divorce rate, in reality it just makes the chastity they demand far more difficult. Telling a couple who has likely been exclusive for over a year to wait another year-and-a-half is near impossible for two lovebirds, while likely doing nothing to avoid divorce. Sorry, but people aren’t getting divorced because they didn’t read Theology of the Body. Both Catholics and Protestants also emphasize getting established first, a more and more nebulous term with each passing year. Such work to “get established” now often goes into their late twenties.

There are a couple studies showing a possible lack of bonding ability with many partners, and there might be some truth to it. There’s also the argument that no-attachment sex damages a person’s sense of self, especially for women. It’s argued such an intimate encounter can’t be psychologically separated so easily as a simple fling. This may also be true, but issue is more fundamental. The drive to separate sex as its own thing outside the other cultural norms of society have erased any sense of long-term romance. Relations being circumscribed to quick bedroom flings have removed the mystery and exciting tension of sex.

As anyone in a romantic relationship knows, there’s a dance going on between the sexes. In previous times the game was understood. Women show interest but not too much interest. They would vie for his attention but be subtle about it. Men would find ways to show their value and work to disarm women’s defenses by clever language and charm. As tensions grow, the woman gives more contact in a structured environment. Eventually, if they saw themselves as having good social standing, had value compatibility, and held a solid dose of raging hormones, they would get married.

While sex was usually within marriage, about every family tree has that entry where a kid entered the picture a few months after the wedding and everyone just pretended not to know how that happened. Even with these cases, the courtship process was secure with means to gauge romantic attraction and compatibility without leading to sex. There was verbal sparring, teasing, sexual tension, and an opportunity to “break” the rules a little in a romantic frenzy. There was an order where men and women had a structure to gauge the other person without romantic compatibility being solely through sex.

When marriage and sex arrived, there likely wasn’t the stilted repression we saw in purity culture. They had an outlet to act sexually, even if restrained within social games. Purity culture tried to succeed through emotion and piety without the social scaffolding that allowed chastity to work in the past. Both secular culture and ill-advised purity culture have none of this, making sex its own thing either by eliminating all taboos and turning it into an act akin to using the bathroom, or elevating and abstracting it to the extent that its actual reality becomes disappointing while you’ve stifled your natural impulses to the extent sex becomes weird and awkward.

Probably the greatest forgotten social technology is the formal dance. Even the bump and grind “dancing” of bars have gone by the wayside. It’s hard to find anywhere even in large cities that has a robust dance scene, and schools certainly are not teaching them. There is the carefree and jubilant style of swing, your waltz for more secure relationships, and tango for your very intimate couple. It was a formalized interaction than ensured exploration, fun, and tension in a safe environment.

Instead, social networks have atrophied, and with it the chance encounter of meeting a friend of a friends of a friend at a dinner party and hitting it off. Walking up to the cute co-worker is risking your job. While humiliation is always on the table, it has accelerated with a small cadre of psychopaths who will humiliate you not just to a closed group, but the whole world. The physical sphere has contracted while the online sphere has a simulacrum of opportunity while rarely delivering.

A paradox of modernity is pornography is nothing more than a click away, you can have no-strings-attached sex without anyone blinking, and you can dress as provocatively as you like, but still be tragically under-sexed. While the outward forms are still there, they have been turned into nothing more than a bodily function, lacking the emotional and spiritual connections other generations took for granted. People in healthy relationships know sex is not just about sex, but flows into everything else.

Sex is an entire way of being, and when put it its proper place, gives a meaning and emotional resonance far greater than the best temporary fling. A firm grasp of the palms can be more emotionally powerful than the best orgasm. Making out in the woods behind the teacher’s back can be more exciting than the best foreplay. A clever seduction of one’s wife when she “isn’t in the mood” is more rewarding than sleeping with a supermodel.

Modern ideas of sex don’t work because it has the same mindset as one who fast-forwards to the climax of the movie. There might be a temporary thrill, but it will be forgetting and not have lasting impact. Sex without the tensions and social games is a short spectacle akin with watching a YouTube short. Entertaining, but ultimately a timewaster and eventually a bore.

Secular sex is sterile, a flaccid wasteland bereft of excitement, hazard, and long-term bonding while also suffocating in rigid legalism and bizarre and stifling rules. Religious ideals of sex rely on abstract principles and emotivism, failing in their own way in creating sustainable norms. Both has failed to create a cultural scaffolding that allows the sexes to feel the excitement of older forms of romance. Neither is healthy.

While those awkward school dances where teachers told the boy to leave “enough room for Jesus” while dancing with his crush are mocked, it was the scaffolding young kids needed to learn how to live in the strange new world their maturing bodies threw them into. While some of these formal rites still exist, they tend to go extinct after prom. The ability to pair off in a physical environment is looked at with terror, with easy apps giving a filter and a sense of abundance. formalized rituals to pair off men and women have fallen to the wayside, and co-ed spaces like work have been completely sterilized.

Young adults don’t dance. Young adults don’t talk to girls in bars. Young adults don’t have Church groups to attend. Young adults don’t have family members setting them up. All the usual ways to get a guy and girl in a sexually charged situation that can foster an organic encounter and pairing off has been mechanized into a sterile app. While one can argue that this makes less discomfort, the discomfort is part of the process. You can’t avoid discomfort and risk in pairing off any more than you can run a marathon without breathing hard.

If secular culture can’t foster pairing, and religious culture failed to, where does that lead young singles? It makes one wonder if real love is possible anymore. I look at my grandfather, married over sixty years to my grandmother. He held on solely to care for her when her mind failed and then died two weeks after she did, mission accomplished. I look at my grandmother on the other side of my family, who sat by her husband’s bedside for six months as he succumbed to cancer. She lived alone for 25 years with a prayer card with his image she prayed from until the day she joined him. They had cultural norms that fostered it, the role they played was in the air they breathed, never questioned.

Anything created today will necessarily be artificial. Anyone who wants a healthy relationship will have to LARP. And sadly, this means the love others felt in a cohesive society with established rules and roles will be unattainable for the vast majority living today. Everyone has been impacted by an anti-culture that forces men and women not to hone their instincts, but to reject them entirely. Men have to fake an untamed, confident aggression that was beat out of them in their youth. Women have to fake the subtle charms their teachers and peer groups scoffed at. The romantic games others took for granted since their youth will need to be learned in adulthood. Fake Taboos have to be followed like they have real social consequence if broken.

For some, the programming can be broken. For others, their entire lives will feel a little bit like faking it. It’s hard to maintain a marriage when there’s little stigma in ending it. It’s frustrating when an attractive girl looking for casual relationship with benefits has to be refused. Going on a date in formal attire with and learning social graces is uncomfortable. Limiting your prospects to those who somehow didn’t get indoctrinated into the mass anti-culture or is willing to LARP with you will greatly reduce your prospects. Your LARP will likely break many secular pieties.

A return to romance will create new own rules, customs, and taboos to bring excitement back into relationships. The total openness of secular society will need to be destroyed, but the purity culture scolds will likely be aghast as well. There will be no direct RETVRN to old customs, but the free love ideology of the 1960’s is also dead. What will be created will not be a mix of the two, but an entirely new phenomenon built from sweat and tears to confront the world as it is,. It won’t be the one that scolds the best, nor the one who points to abstract rules and ideals. The winner will be the one that successfully transmits his culture through the generations, the one most capable of both reproducing and building the stability necessary for value transmission. The one who lets go of reason and learns the dance, the ones who made their LARP reality.

Of course, the discussion so far hasn’t even gone into what fundamentally gives sex its excitement: children. gave a fantastic essay that everyone should read, but this excerpt stood out.

Likewise, folk expressions almost always reveal something about mass psychology, because they cannot be forced. They are intuitively adopted and spread. One relevant one here that is functionally universal and long-lasting is “mind-blowing sex.” We’ve all heard that term before.

That’s because it intuitively resonates with the above concept. What does it mean to have your “mind blown”? Some horizon is expanded, something new is introduced, you are changed. People subconsciously understand this, so they use and adopt this term - almost as a necessity.

All this is downstream of the absent baby. The transformation of maiden into mother is a kind of sublimation or refinement - a wholesome conclusion to sex. When that potentiality is intentionally blocked (it’s beyond our scope here, but simply “not getting pregnant” is philosophically distinct from “intentionally not getting pregnant”), there are only so many things that can attempt to mimic that transformative process - most involve a type of debasement.

While contraception has increased freedom, it’s done so at the expense of sterilization. Sex with the intentional effort to prevent pregnancy removes much of the drama and mystery of relationships. It also removes the stakes. Unhindered, full intercourse leads to the creation of a child that shares both member’s genes. As the child grows, he will be permanently influenced by the temperaments of his parents. Those who make things work will impact a child’s development, as will parents who abandon him. It forces both to have skin in a game that has far-reaching consequences. New life means they are stuck together permanently. Romantic love has always been secondary to propagation of children, because love requires the potential of the former to attain the latter.

If modernity destroyed romance, maybe just making the best of it would be a reasonable option. For those who want to continue their line and leave something better, you have an obligation to give them something better than what society has to offer. You want them to understand the fundamental transformation of mind, heart, and soul that a romantic relationship can have. Even if you are too beaten and jaded to feel it yourself, you can at least point to a healthier alternative. Your wife or husband will LARP along with you but get enough LARPers together and it becomes real for the next generation.

Maybe we did get screwed over. Maybe classic romance is impossible in a world that devolved to base instinct. Maybe so, but you can till the soil for the next generation. I’m long out of this game, getting married just as the dating market collapsed, but am part of organizations that are trying to reinvigorate pairing. Our kids will attend barn dances and formal gatherings. We are building social networks of like-minded families that will form our children’s dating pool. I’m hoping similar efforts by other will create an organic network that can serve as a counter to modern norms. We embarrass our nephew by offering to set him up. I hope every adult does the same.

Not everything is lost, but expectations will have to be managed, and a healthy dose of ineffable confidence will need to be internalized. As fertility falls off a cliff, those who power through will truly inherit the earth.

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It was also heavily Republican leaning, an anomaly given the proliferation of progressive NGO’s and other left-wing organizations with the financial war chest to fund political activism and organization with ease. This particular event was planned by an up-and-coming media outlet, unabashedly right-wing but avoiding the sensationalist and embarrassingly kitschy format of conservative media. Jay Murray, a contributor to the outlet, held the conversation with the councilman. Mark Naida () was the facilitator. In an age of constant slop, an up-and-coming news outlet named Michigan Enjoyer has successfully sidestepped the pitfalls of alternative news.

Institutional media began its rapid descent with the dawn of the internet and has shown no signs of revitalization. Cable news channels cater almost exclusively to the geriatric, and paper newspapers have turned into something more resembling a pamphlet. While prestige publications like the New York Times have managed to transition to the new ecosystem, your more everyman news sources have had their reporting staff pulverized, relying more and more on “access journalism” that relies on officials practically dropping a finished article on their desk.

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Local news has been hardest hit. Where once a newspaper could have significant staff devoted to getting to the story or funding long investigations, medium-sized cities now find themselves with a miniscule number of staff, with many being forced to consolidate into larger organizations. This consolidation has only accelerated the extreme bias and isolated nature of the media class, increasing the power of those who own the only news media for wide swathes of the state as well as politicians who can blacklist reporters from events.

While news reporting has been notoriously left leaning for its entire history, even those who don’t share the newspaper’s politics have been hurt. It’s hard to spread the word for local events, oftentimes relying on network effects on social media. A common paper of record to base water-cooler conversations around no longer exists when everyone goes to their specific niche to get their information. As much as reporters themselves are guilty of misinformation in the current age, a responsible newspaper could ground those who heard the wild theories of Aunt Brenda regarding council affairs.

With an aging viewership and a lack of a sense of balance in reporting, this is a prime opportunity for an innovative mover and shaker. On the right, news media is still saturated with reactionary, hot-take culture that spreads outrage at news rather than doing the grunt work of deep-dive investigation. Websites are an eyesore of advertisements and surface-level “analysis” in the classic Team Red vs. Team Blue framing. For large media, the counter to the slop that is pasted on the front page of CNN is slop posted on FoxNews. Right-wing media has been almost universally focused on national politics, much to the detriment of the cause as a whole. Left-wing radicalism has made its way into many cities with a minimum of resistance as big donors focus on Washington instead of their own towns.

Michigan media is in rough shape, and much of the country is no better off. Most of the state is consolidated into a few conglomerates: MLive, The Lansing State Journal and The Detroit News. For those who still get the Lansing State Journal, what was once a thick and robust newspaper has been trimmed down to its bones. While this would seem to be the case of smaller companies getting swallowed, it was probably for the best, as many of the small city newspapers would not have survived if MLive did not grab them. The number of reporters on the ground in the state is miniscule, and Governor Whitmer has taken advantage of the sparse media landscape by blacklisting reporters that give her negative coverage.

While five years ago the right could complain about the lack of institutional capital to build infrastructure necessary to support local media, that’s no longer the case. There’s money flowing around looking to overtake and replace the ossified organization of Old Media. Mark Naida’s Michigan Enjoyer is proof it can be done.

Mark is a veteran with a wide swath of experience in classic and new media. He’s worked with CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Pirate Wires. He navigated their structures, found their strengths along with their flaws, and concocted a different strategy. Instead of having full-time employees, the work would be crowdsourced to the population itself, and those who had a solid scoop would be compensated. This format has allowed Mark to set up a vast network of reliable reporters all over the state. Instead of the stodgier professional format of Old Media, he allows contributors to write in their own voice.

Probably the most visionary direction he took is having a clear political direction while not being consumed by it. The reporting, instead of taking a side in the daily fracas of factional fighting, is largely focused on one’s identity as a Michigander and the state’s uniqueness, a cozy mitten surrounded by vast bodies of water. It oftentimes gives slice of life pieces and giving space to little known attractions and historical markers, such as writing about the location of one of Hemingway’s short stories in addition to political fights. Instead of focusing on solely on squabbles or relying on rage-bait, it’s focused on fomenting a sense of place to its readers, giving a kaleidoscope view of the unique heritage they share.

It seems to be working. Their Social Media growth has been impressive, clocking 100k followers on Facebook and almost 50k on Instagram. And a lot of the current success is on Instagram, where the personable style and sense of fun play well with Millennials in a time where most news outlets would kill for a younger audience. For a small operation of just two that started in 2024, this is impressive output. It remains to be seen whether growth can reach a critical mass and expand enough to form a sustainable revenue model, but the future looks rosy.

One of Mark Naida’s main focuses is creating an accountability mechanism to the left that is as powerful as legacy news sources go after the right. He rightly stated conservative media is incredibly reactionary and puts little effort into real investigative journalism. Instead of doing the work to dig and find the stories, most media focuses on putting a spin to an already existing story in the ecosystem. This has allowed progressives to dominate the frame of discussion for decades and keep focus on the malfeasance of conservatives while ignoring rampant corruption from the left.

Michigan Enjoyer has made FOIA requests to get to the bottom of Whitmer’s disastrous nursing home policy during covid, only to be given hundreds of pages of completely redacted docs, forcing them to file a lawsuit. They found out a campaigning senator didn’t even live in the state but spent most of her time in Washington D.C., they found local corruption with council members trying to give themselves a golden parachute. Because of many years of turning a blind eye to certain forms a corruption, digging them out is not a difficult task, but someone has to spend time in the trenches.

Probably the biggest white-pill to the entire endeavor is the move to live sessions. New web sites rise and fall like the seasons, but they become something special when you can make the leap to real-world organization. Given the numbers in their event last month, there is a deep yearning for coverage of topics close to home. As the media landscape has become desiccated, there is no limit to the amount of influence one can have with the right organization, personality, and will.

The mass turnout and increasing popularity also shows how much the landscape has changed regarding funding and the ability to operate out in the open. After the first Trump term and the Covid reign of terror, anything that even smelled of MAGA was blacklisted from any chance at financial capital. That doesn’t happen as much. Now there are venture firms who are willing to take advantage of the gaps in the social landscape and work with right-wingers with the necessary skills to pull it off. While many millions go to garbage like The Daily Wire, there are a new set of elites who understand the game has changed. Even for those without outside funding, no one is stopping a local sleuth from popping on his camera and going to town-halls, giving interviews, poring over financial records, and building trust with her neighbors. In influencer culture, anyone can have a little empire, and no one is constrained to hot takes. There’s a real want for people who will do the hard work of independent research.

While not as sexy as national politics, the inability to properly congregate locally has strong upstream effects too. There are open socialists gaining control of major cities. Soros funded the campaigns for many District Attorneys, winning with a pitiful sum of money when nobody was looking. The 2020 election was notorious for a lack of right-wingers on the ground that could tap the brakes on the mail-in-ballot juggernaut. All of this was the failure of local organization. What is necessary to organize is a source of truth, an oracle one can assume is accurate without suspicion.

It’s not just local news either, but culture as well. There has been a recent flare-up over Evie, a magazine started in 2019 as an anti-feminist Cosmo. Instead of the usual lewd women’s magazines talking about casual sex, casual misandry, and progressive politics, Evie praises motherhood, traditional sexual ethics, and femininity. And it manages to do so without sounding like an insufferable moral scold. Many argue the magazine is astroturfed, or it’s propaganda just as vapid as its left-wing counterpart. There’s some truth here, but the sexual revolution was hardly an organic phenomenon, and it’s going to force a lot of counter-propaganda to restore healthy values. There’s a lot of fake it till you make it here, and the fact it’s causing impotent rage that is bringing attention to a positive alternative is a win.

All of this is to say there are no excuses anymore, and we need a thousand outlets like Michigan Enjoyer along every realm. Instead of a bunch of pantywaist guys having “man talk” about current topics in a glossy, wholly artificial, and stifling intellectual atmosphere….

or being enraged with “woke” hollywood….

or making eyesore “hot take” websites…

we have the opportunity to form countless small, coordinated, and sincere outlets to nurture a new media ecosystem.

We need new text media as well as video news. We need family and lifestyle content that’s aesthetically pleasing and gives a glimpse into alternative value systems. We need art and literary criticism that can serve to be new tastemakers. While theorizing is fine, mass support requires focusing on the tangible, the day-to-day concerns that give guidance and meaning to those who don’t delve into online politics.

While many of us can find the esoteric accounts on X that has the inside scoop, or the schizo-poster that is somehow always right, there needs to be a bridge to the common man. As much as the idea of misinformation has been weaponized against those speaking truth, there needs to be trusted outlets that can maintain quality control. Factchecking, balance of viewpoints, and journalistic integrity have been corrupted by institutional media, but they are necessary. Alex Jones gets a lot of stuff right, but there’s a reason your average Joe gives him no credence. While a guy with an Anime gif has an impressive skill in deep-diving recent topics, most of the not-extremely online see him as a weirdo, not a thought leader.

Success boils down to letting go of negative identity, reacting and basing your sense of self on what you’re not, whether it’s those damn Democrats or those bigoted Republicans. To have a sense of self that is based on your immutable qualities, what tangible things you value, what tangible things affect your daily life, and the lengths you will go to maintain them. Owning your enemies is cathartic, but your life can collapse into anarchy along with your worst enemy. A positive identity is able to give a vision for human flourishing instead of shrill moralizing. It can have a vision of the future without whining that modernity is nothing like advertisements from the 1950’s.

For those readers who are interested in a similar effort in transforming the media landscape, , who generously gave his time for me to interview him, has also offered for anyone interested in beginning their own effort to reach out to him. I encourage such trailblazers to do so. It’s time to build, and enjoy every minute of it.

Update:

Enjoyer was supported in its branding by WILL, run by one of our guys. A spokesman said the following for those interested.

“WILL is a branding and publicity agency that specializes in brands seeking to capture market share in categories dominated by corporate actors. We believe the identity of a brand should arise from the authentic vision of its founder—from his WILL. Yet the marketing world has been overtaken by mediocrity, ugliness, and propaganda. WILL works exclusively with projects driven to disrupt this status quo by building something genuinely beautiful. This means web design, social media, video, paid media, email design, and growth. Here are a few fine examples of our work:

Galvanick, Chariot Defense, Polymarket, Enjoyer, SolveAI”

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