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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1

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.

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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.

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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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In 2024, Microsoft bought 272 acres of land close to the rural town of Dorr, Michigan. Of course, its purpose was not for farming or enjoying the idyllic countryside, but creating a massive new data center. Like clockwork, the residents protested the development, voicing concerns about its water use, light pollution, noise, electricity needs, and increased road traffic. Microsoft responded by trying to reassure the community that these issues have been analyzed, they have shown pollutants can be mitigated, and the massive center would have minimal impact on the small community.

Unsurprisingly, just like in Lowell and other towns that are fighting to keep data centers out, the residents don’t trust big tech. And no one can blame them. A hegemonic corporation like Microsoft has little care for the intricacies of rural life, and glossy papers and pamphlets does not quell the concerns of those who see a powerful usurper upend their world. They know that out-of-towners will be employed there, not locals. They also know they bear all the risk and environmental fallout and get little in return. The results are in, and data center installed elsewhere have levels of pollution that could damage your lungs on top of being a massive eyesore close to your backyard.

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Companies like Microsoft have nearly infinite capital to spend, and these centers will be in the range of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to build and tens of millions to operate year after year. The residents won’t see a penny of these millions. The fabrication will happen elsewhere, constructions workers will be shipped in, and the facility will stand as an alien structure, using their water, electricity, and land while operating completely separate from the communities surrounding it. While many city governments are salivating at the increase in tax revenue, it leaves everyone else in the dust.

The irony is it doesn’t even help state revenues that much, as the legislature has given generous tax subsidies to build these rectangular monoliths, even though it’s clear no one wants them in their neighborhood. It was once taken as a given that businesses coming into the state would be a boon for the economy, building jobs and money that would bring prosperity to everyone. There was the assumption that businesses would hire locally. No one believes that anymore. This is especially not true of data centers who employ of miniscule number of permanent staff. It begs the question of why the state is subsidizing businesses no one wants.

The push to incentivize data centers started with Governor Rick Snyder’s governorship that gave generous tax breaks to large corporations to foster tech innovation. Whitmer has had the same philosophy with her 2024 tech bill to the tune of 90 million in tax breaks. While this was seen as a forward-thinking investment in making Michigan a technological powerhouse it’s now being understood for what it really is, a massive stripping operation of the state’s natural resources. Microsoft isn’t interested in turning Michigan into the next Silicon Valley. We could have a thousand data centers and the only new skill Michiganders would have is trying to sleep over the dull hum of millions of machines making AI cat videos.

Luckily, there is an encroaching bipartisan effort to bring this boondoggle to a close. Both Republican and Democrat Governors were starry eyed with the idea of massive tax revenue and bragging rights on being at the forefront of the AI revolution, and that myopic idealism is crashing down. Angry voters, lawsuits, and an increasing distrust of local government is the only fruit of this endeavor. As word is getting to Lansing, legislators are finding themselves at the crosshairs or seeing an opportunity to gain populist approval. In December, Michigan Republican State Rep. Jim DeSana and Michigan Democrat Rep. Dylan Wegela began a full bore attack on the subsidies, seeking to rescind the sweetheart deal to big tech with three proposed bills.

The outcry is not just Michigan either, as other states are finding out the hard way the damage to standard of living big data’s voracious appetite for processing power is creating. Neighbor state Ohio has had their number of data centers explode, and with it increasing electricity cost and billions of dollars spent updating the grid.

As average folk feel like their being swallowed by monolithic tech centers, unrelenting bureaucracy, and shady politicians, they are justified in feeling attacked. Given the shocking level of secrecy and almost assured bribery in some of local officials, trust has evaporated. If these monoliths came in transparently, treating everyone affected as partners in negotiation, it would remedy this NIMBY backlash. This isn’t a matter of ignorant hicks who are in the way of progress, but a rooted people who want a say in their future.

New business is good, technological innovation is good as well as having an educated workforce. What’s missing in these massive giveaways is outsiders spending any time building rapport with the local community, trying to hire from the region instead of importing their workforce, and giving back to the community with more than just tax revenue. They have the moneyed pockets to do this, they have the PR teams that can create relationships and find ways to give back to the schools, farms, and downtowns they are setting up shop alongside.

Instead of this open discussion, the populace is being hit with non-disclosure agreements, secretive meetings with officials, and ruthless lobbying at the Capital. If this is how they treat the average Joe in rural country, it’s no wonder they’re not welcome. People don’t want just an economic transaction, but an organic symbiosis of various parts working in tandem and benefitting the whole. Big tech could have handled this using a very different playbook, but didn’t. Now they must pay. If big tech wants to roll in with nice subsidies and plenty of resources, maybe they should try harder to know their neighbors.

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This is a submission for ‘s essay contest “How can America improve its problem-solving capacity?”

Never has a society been more technically advanced, and yet everywhere the wheels are coming off. Necessary infrastructure is not being repaired, the government shuts down as a matter of course, businesses are ossifying around meaningless slogans and mantras as bureaucratic bloat swamps their ability to pivot to new realities. Public services are becoming more chaotic, safety is collapsing in every major city, and everyone is enmeshed in a game for social status as the world crumbles around them. We have the wealth to fix things, we have the human capital, so where are the movers and shakers that can solve them?

While decline seems ubiquitous in every crevice of society, visionaries are trying to reverse the trend. A good example is federal legislation introduced by Thoman Massie called the PRIME act. As of this writing, it is trying to get through committee and enter Congress for a vote. In essence, it would allow farmers to sell their meat within the state’s borders without federal inspection, thereby eliminating expensive middlemen.

Under the PRIME Act, a bipartisan bill Massie has reintroduced with Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, individual states could allow farmers to sell cuts of beef processed at locations that are not federally inspected.

“It would be a huge boon for Kentucky farmers because you wouldn’t have to sell your calves,” he said. “You could raise them on grass right here in Kentucky like I do.”

Massie and Pingree previously introduced the PRIME Act in 2023.

That year, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association put out a statement opposing it.

“NCBA is in favor of reducing regulatory burdens, but not at the expense of food safety,” said former NCBA President Todd Wilkinson. “While the PRIME Act is well-intentioned, allowing uninspected beef to enter the retail market is dangerous to consumers.”

Kentucky congressman reintroduces beef processing bill

Beef processing is one of the most onerous parts of agriculture, requiring them to be processed only in pricey USDA inspected slaughterhouses. This would seem prudent, as Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” is seared into every American’s consciousness, even if they have never read it. It’s assumed that without a strong government overseeing operations, such squalid and unsanitary conditions would happen again.

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Unfortunately, this has created regulatory capture with the largest meat brands squeezing small farmers and crushing their competition.

Meatpacking is one of the most consolidated industries in our food system. Of the more than 70 meat brands marketing to consumers and retailers under the guise of individual names and logos, just four corporations—Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef—are behind these brands.

These four meatpacking giants control a staggering 80-85% of the beef industry. They routinely make headlines for their abusive behaviors, from getting sued by other corporate goliaths like McDonald’s for price-fixing to lawsuits over the use of child labor in their meatpacking plants.

But these companies’ sheer dominance over this industry, deceptively hidden behind their acquired brands, means that it’s challenging to opt out of buying their products at the grocery store.

This level of corporate control in the meatpacking sector has devastated the industry: Farmers have been driven off their land, prices have increased for consumers, and our food supply is vulnerable to disruptions.

Behind the Brands: The Meatpacking Monopoly and the Illusion of Choice | Farm Action

While the current reality of the policy is onerous and largely counterproductive, the intent was simple. They wanted to make food safer, and this required a regulatory apparatus. In solving this problem, they created a second-order effect, a de facto cartel that impoverished cattle farmers and made meat more expensive.

None of this is new, as regulations at both the federal and state level have been a thorn on the side of small farmers for ages. Joel Saladin, in his provocative and hilariously titled work “Everything I want to do is Illegal”, argues that such regulations stifle innovation and make it difficult for ruralites to support the local agricultural economy. In the name of safety, a farmer can’t sell meat to Sally down the road, or his grain directly to Bill across town. Because of the up-front costs of regulation, agriculture regulators naturally support mass farming that can eat the costs and viciously enforces protocol. Get on their bad side, and when the USDA comes barging in, you’d think a fentanyl lab was being raided.

Its blanket purpose of food safety puts people’s liberties on the back burner. Another example, regulations against raw milk also prohibits user choice. While raw milk has only a slightly more dangerous profile that pasteurized milk, along with benefits in terms of healthy bacteria, those who want to buy some have to go through convoluted hoops of “buying” part of a cow and getting its output, and even here it’s in a legally gray area.

The bureaucrats saw a problem, potentially unsafe food, and developed a solution everyone had to follow. The fact the solution is often expensive and useless without improving safety is overlooked, as well as the fact farmers selling to local residents leaves far less room for contamination and creates a healthy economic ecosystem.

While this example was in agriculture, it’s mindset percolates all elite institutions. Experts are delegated to find problems and develop solutions. Unfortunately, no matter how logical the solution, there are going to be unexpected secondary effects and likely a loss of personal freedom. You see this in the corporation who wants a more efficient travel policy and nickel and dimes every expense an employee makes for the cheapest option. The cost savings is then spent micromanaging employees and increasing company overhead. In charities, as can be seen in Minneapolis, policies meant to support low-income household have become a bust-out of fraud and panhandling as perfectly capable members of society end up on the dole through navigating the byzantine structure of the modern welfare system. While the policy makers understood the risk of fraud and built safeguards, they never foresaw an entire ethnic enclave working together to defraud the system nor foresaw the state being unwilling to enforce its own laws. Hundreds of millions of dollars are squandered trying to fix ailing schools using the latest fads from the experts. High-speed rail projects go deep in the red with nothing to show for it.

While these issues are difficult, they aren’t insurmountable. So how do we increase the problem-solving capabilities of this nation? After all, the theory goes that with the proper experts such second order effects can be mitigated. With the proper people in charge, we can cut through the red tape and build things. If we listened to the experts and gave them agency, society would run like a well-oiled machine, right? Color me skeptical.

The Republican party, while claiming to be pro-family, have inadvertently created some of the most anti-family conditions to ever exist with its previous free-market policies that failed to reign in vice, foreign adventures that separated families, and impoverishment of the rural heartland. The Democratic party has proved useless in elevating the poorest in society by dooming them to crime-ridden neighborhoods. Even if we assumed the experts are altruistic, far-sighted, and in line with American values, it’s a sad reality that well-intentioned policies can have disastrous consequences elsewhere.

Jacques Ellul in his seminal work, “The Technological Society” detailed how the proliferation of technique wiped away organic methods of being in the name of efficiency and optimization. Technique is not just machines, microchips, and automation, but also rules that regulate human society. Modern banking practices are a form of technique, as is the corporate business model. The University System credentialing model is a technique. Modern therapy is a form of technique. Our court system is a technique. As society became more complex, more aspects of human life become proceduralized, removing organic bonds with relationships and processes that are more scalable to broader society. Because technique is artificial by nature, replacing the organic and spontaneous with the artificial, there are always aftershocks.

The world that is being created by the accumulation of technical means is an artificial world and hence radically different from the natural world.
It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it. The two worlds obey different imperatives, different directives, and different laws which have nothing in common. Just as hydroelectric installations take waterfalls and lead them into conduits, so the technical milieu absorbs the natural. We are rapidly approaching the time when there will be no longer any natural environment at all. When we succeed in producing artificial aurorae boreales, night will disappear and perpetual day will reign over the planet.
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

The core thought process is always the same. Experts find a problem, and work to solve the problem in a universalized, quantifiable way. They find the optimal technique to solve the issue, then proliferate it throughout general society. In the economic realm, this is often seen in mass production with increasing efficiencies built in that allow more products to be built faster and cheaper. When the technique is accepted, everyone else needs to catch up or else be buried under their more efficient competitors. Even if there are secondary damages to social cohesion or the environment, the corporation’s main aim to build things cheap is unhindered.

And there are always secondary effects. Every attempt to subdue nature has consequences that can’t be easily quantified. This isn’t to say technique is never the proper course of action, but that caution in implementing a policy based on tangible metrics could mask the corrosion of intangible connections that let human societies flourish.

Perhaps this technocratic mindset “finding solutions to problems” is the wrong approach to the problems of modernity. Maybe the drive for getting the best metrics, the best stats, by their very nature take away from the invisible joys that make life worth living, the bonds that allow people to work together in harmony. It is also losing its utility. When we’re at the stage of trying to address “The problem of the lack of problem-solving capacity”, the plot was lost somewhere.

The plot is especially lost when so many “innovations” are paperclip maximizing on steroids. When you look at things from a problem/solution framework, it’s impossible to ignore. Social Media is designed to be as addictive as possible instead of edifying. Professional sports caters to gambling as opposed to local spirit. Search engines are broken to force people to spend more time searching and clicking on ads. Middlemen exist to extract as much value from transactions as possible. Appliances have earlier obsolescence and are impossible to repair. Colleges are now a soulless, largely interchangeable credentialing apparatus. All of these changes were to solve “problems”, and they solved them to the detriment of us all. They simply were not the problems we wanted solved. Profits were raised, growth expanded to new areas, consumers suffered through more ads, and items were rebought over and over. They found that people have many vices, and it’s good business to give them what they want. It’s also good business to give them no choice. They solved the problem of increasing margins, but at the detriment of society as a whole. In short, all this solving has led to increased enshittfication.

What do you mean when you talk about “problem solving”? How about asking if there is a problem at all? While technique has created mass wealth, a safe society, and plenty of material goods, we need to ask if we are reaching diminishing returns and one can argue it’s been worse for awhile. What’s lost in this contest is that problem solving has not deteriorated, but the concept of what is and is not a problem as well as what our priorities are.

Whether you like it or not, giving violent inner-city thugs a slap on the wrist while throwing the book mostly law-abiding citizens is an effective way to “solve” the lopsided prison population. Banning and censoring contrary scientific theories solves the problem of building consensus. Criminalizing speech is effective at making sure regime approved bodies are not challenged. In the Soviet Union, starving millions of Ukrainians to death under the early Stalin regime solved a lot of resource problems. Liquidating the kulaks solved stability problems. One understands instinctually this is immoral, but how do you form the value system to seek solutions that benefit everyone? How can this be done with conflicting moral models, some of which are perfectly happy with stomping on a significant portion of the population.

While technique is effective at fixing things, it’s totally incapable of considering what man’s telos is. After all, the point of mass production is not the mass production itself, but to enable human flourishing. What is forgotten in this technocratic way of thinking is the sort of society that edifies the people living in it. While the food problem can be solved by putting soylent into everyone’s veins and the problem of safety can be solved by putting everyone in a concrete box, humans are not soulless robots. They have spiritual wants that our society is less capable of offering.

The focus on problems and solutions is bad framing. There will always be problems, and technocratic solutions create their own set of problems. What needs to be asked is what our aim is. How can we foster the spiritual, material, and cultural cultivation of our nation? The purpose of anyone making policy decisions should be the building a virtuous society.

One could argue talking about virtue is just empty moralizing, and there is no way to build a reasonable consensus. It’s true what is virtuous is not a universal constant. Alastair Macintyre in his work “After Virtue”, argued what was virtuous depended on the type of civilization you were in. A martial society’s idea of virtue would be far different than a farming society, yet both of them could have a citizenry that could be directed towards gratifying ends. According to MacIntyre:

The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good.

What Macintyre means by “goods in practice” needs to be expanded upon. According to Macintyre, a practice is:

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended

In other words, a practice is a social activity with clear standards of excellence to adhere to that benefit the wider community. What those standards of excellence are varies, but what does not vary is its spiritual edification in the practitioner as well as the benefit to general society. It’s the discipline of a professional that establishes rigor and takes pride in their work in a way that elevates those around him. It’s the drive to perfect a craft or skill for its own sake as opposed to having a specified output.

The virtue of a judge would be its adherence to the meaning and spirit of the law, to bring public order and to give fair representation to everyone entering the court regardless of station and immutable qualities. The virtue of the software developer would be to write clean, readable, and dependable code that elevates the user experience as opposed to bombarding him with ads and distractions. The virtue of the farmer would be to be ecologically conscious steward of the land that supports the local community. The virtue of the bureaucrat is to create reasonable processes that allow work to be done as opposed to building a personal fiefdom.

There’s a symbiosis between all of these practices, and when one falters everyone suffers. All of them know their place in the social order and the responsibilities entrusted to them. How they do their duties depends on cultural context, but all of them follow the principle of honest connections with other human beings. There is an understanding of what excellence in practice entails. It isn’t just a set of skills, but a respect for the traditions and history of their professions as well as the culture they live in. It would make no sense for an architect in the Midwest to design buildings like medieval Japan. He is necessarily constrained by their cultural norms and traditions. The way virtue is shown in a mercantilist empire like the United States will be far different than a theocracy like Iran, but both can manifest an excellence in varied forms. While this is a hindrance to some, it allows them to fit practices into the complex ecosystem and unspoken rules of his culture, and societies can’t function when they are totally disregarded. Human beings are not blank slates, and societies cannot simply have their past wiped away. What works for one area might not work for another, neither will be optimum in an abstract sense, and that’s okay.

The question of “how can I be more virtuous?”, is not a problem to be solved, but a mantra to base one’s life around. It brings every part of one’s life into greater focus, regardless of how many people are under you. It sets precedent on oneself, as it is impossible to cultivate virtue in others while being a cad. When your focus is to give the opportunity for everyone to be the best in their particular culture, it opens up avenues beyond mere metrics and enables more agency to trust one’s senses before spreadsheets. One’s virtue in a particular practice necessarily manifests virtue elsewhere.

Still, virtue is not something that can be quantified, and any attempt to tends to fall due to the same paperclip maximizing that plagues modernity. You know virtue when you see a passionate work of art, a man who takes his duties as a soldier seriously, a mother keeping her calm amidst the chaos of domestic life, or the cashier smiling as she takes her small station with a kind heart. There is an aura around them, a sense of greatness that extends beyond them as an individual to a higher mode of being.

Virtue is human, while technocracy is soulless and mechanical. Instead of thinking like machines, taking in inputs and deciding how to optimally reach a certain set output, we should think more like human beings living in a certain time in a distinct culture with unique neighbors. Instead of focusing on abstract problem solving, a lot more can be done working to cultivate the best in everything that we do, and through our efforts inspire those around us to do the same. Instead of abstractions, actions at the personal and policy level needs to be grounded in a sense of particular place, emphasizing the organic before the technical, though both have their place. Technique, problem solving, and the like can only be spiritually fulfilling within these contexts. Maybe we need to focus less on solving things, and more on demanding personal excellence.

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On a brisk night where many Michiganders just left the ski slopes or perhaps their kid’s High School Basketball game, a mass of parents and children streamed into a municipal building wearing baseball caps, marching in grim determination to the town hall and defend their beloved little league. This icy, quiet evening in mid-January would seem to be the last place where baseball is in the forefront of a small Midwest town’s agenda, but a seemingly innocuous proposal for community beautification brought the area to standing room only as concerned residents swarmed to defend a shining beacon of their quaint town.

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Caps and uniforms showcasing the “South Farmington Baseball” logo spanned the room as worried residents voiced their concerns over a proposal to remove a baseball field in one of the parks. The Farmington town council, looking to be progressive and forward-looking, had unleashed a hornet’s nest. It wasn’t an isolated incident either, as neighboring Farmington Hills had an even more aggressive proposal to remove four baseball fields. The already strained recreational little league felt backed into a corner, the two councils seeming to work in coordination to stifle their miraculous rejuvenation. To the council members’ defense, they had no ill will towards youth recreational sports. Their considerations were toward an increasing demographic that exploded in the last five years, South Asians. The proposal in both cities was to convert those large fields into Cricket pitches to accommodate these newcomers.

A dozen Little League supporters, coaches, and players relayed their concerns in the comments section, spoken in the most diplomatic way possible, ignoring the demographic elephant in the room. Most everyone spent their adult lives within the city or surrounding towns, many coming from multiple generations back. “Who here is in support of this proposal?” one of the coaches asked. No one raised their hands. They brought up statistics of growth, emotion laden pleas, and moderate calls for compromise. A few made careful comments about the council’s responsibility for long-time residents and their children, skirting the uncomfortable underlying issue. It wasn’t until the online comments came up and the assistant city manager relayed an anonymous poster’s short, caustic comment “Why are we destroying baseball fields? Let the Indians play cricket somewhere else.” that the quiet part was spoken out loud.

Baseball is a proud American institution. While it has its roots in older European sports, its culture, fanfare, and spectacle grew along with the country, forming something wholly unique. Its mythology goes back over a century, with children today still knowing the legend of Babe Ruth, recognizing old timey team pictures of times long past along with the music and festivities of the stadium experience. On the local level, Little Leagues uniforms emblazoned with the logos of downtown businesses has brought a sense of community and cohesion few other institutions can match. The lessons of teamwork, cohesion, and perseverance have made every parent want to transmit the game to the next generation. It’s ascended beyond being a mere sport and is now a facet of national character.

Modern youth baseball has seen a decline over the last couple of decades, coinciding with the decline of communities that could once maintain them. Worse, the rise of travel sports has sucked out local talent, along with young child’s sense of place. Local travel teams often cost several thousand dollars in addition to the time commitment of constant road trips. Time-strapped dads volunteering their time for a local league where you got a mixed bag of talent together and had fun has been replaced with a professional coaches in a darwinian struggle for travel teams to get the best of the best. Year-round practice is common to keep up with an ever-competitive talent pool. South Farmington’s recreational Little League saw a similar downward trajectory as fewer kids roamed the streets and parents changed priorities to chase elite sports or specialized academics.

In the last five years though, there’s been a miraculous revival. Through community involvement, advocacy, and thousands of hours of unpaid work, the local Little League has increased doubled from 615 to over 1200 in the last five years. The seasons begin with a parade of young athletes marching through downtown and during the season, players gleefully go for ice cream or burgers at one of their many sponsors. The nostalgic Americana of an earlier era comes out in full force. The level of commitment from the parent to the players continues to grow, and the league has solidified itself as a core part of civic life. A victim of its own success, scheduling a field during both summer and fall season has become more difficult, with many games and practices needing lights to play as late as 10 o’clock at night. None of the growth is abating, and its continued growth without the infrastructure available may force the organization to have a lottery or tryouts.

In the last couple of years though, other communities have also used the space. While a Baseball field is not ideal for Cricket, East Asians are often on the fields, with coaches kicking them off for Little League practices. These newcomers, mostly young men, immigrated through the H1-B process, employed by car manufacturers and other tech firms in Detroit. The relationship has been amicable and there’s no trouble, but this might change. As their population increases, so will their demand for public spaces for their sports. The City Council plan didn’t come out of the blue. Demographic change is real, as well as the problem they were trying to solve.

Perhaps a reasonable compromise will be made. There were discussions of dual-use fields that can accommodate both. They would be rented by the Cricket athletes, though with preferred use by the Little League during peak hours, but otherwise will be allocated just like anything else. This sort of revision would likely be accepted by most parents, though with strong reservations. In its essence, the conflict points to an existential issue.

Baseball is part of the historic culture of the American people, one of the countless nodes of identity that form the nomos of a people. It was fostered through multiple generations living in the same area, saturated in the invisible norms and customs that make public life livable. While the conflict between Cricket and Baseball fields could find a workable compromise. there’s the understanding that South Asian culture is not Midwest culture. While Cricket is, of course, British in its origins, it is not part of the American fabric, and there’s nothing organic about its growth. Demographic change is transforming aspects of classic Americana taken for granted, creating tensions where none should exist.

This conflict is a microcosm of the social upheavals rapid demographic transformation has created. As the foreign-born population nationally has increased to 14 percent of the population, they have formed insular conclaves fundamentally different than the surrounding culture. Parents are stuck between sounding racist by voicing concerns for their progeny or accepting the demographic transformation they neither asked nor voted for. No one asked their city to be flooded with foreign workers, and the harsh truth is this conflict would not exist if the South Asians weren’t imported in. The ideal of integration isn’t happening, and there’s almost a reverse integration demanded, where historical residents have to change their public spaces to accommodate recent immigrants.

None of the newcomers are interested in maintaining these beloved American institutions. They have their own traditions. While there’s nothing wrong with Cricket, it is a foreign sport. No one’s father played Cricket. There are no great documentaries on American Cricket, and no Cricket player is a household name. It doesn’t have the resonance in the average American. Watching South Asian adult men playing this sport next to a baseball game consisting of mostly white and black kids gives a stark reminder of the culture clash taking place. Though both groups are polite and amicable, they are not integrating. The South Asian newcomers with kids are not putting their kids in Little League and are comfortable in their mini-society residing in but living outside the wider community. While some natively born Americans have taken up Cricket, it is small subset of its player base. It’s likely none of the newcomers will be interested in maintaining both Baseball and other parts of the current civic order.

Note that every party here is nonviolent and economically productive. The South Asians are, by the metrics of policy wonks, model immigrants. While the immigration debate has largely been steeped in migrants scamming social safety nets or being more violent than the general population, tensions go far beyond numbers that can be put into a spreadsheet. There’s no metric to analyze the value of Little League baseball, nor is there a way to crunch the data on the value of traditions spanning several generations. Such questions of identity boil down to the spiritual character of the community they want to bequeath to the next generation.

At best, many of the South Asian children will be inoculated into the echelons of the professional classes through going to the right colleges and getting the right job. Others will maintain the old forms in the new world. None of these create the high-trust small-town values Americana these Baseball families yearn for. Culture is the dads who maintain the city neglected fields so their kids can play. It’s a child walking into the ice cream shop with a dusty uniform for a victory sundae. It’s the extended family cheering from the bleachers and sharing in all the next generation’s pitfalls and triumphs. It’s the civic bond between the market and the people, the unspoken contract between the youth and the parents to maintain the same sort of community for their progeny, just as their parents did.

If Baseball culture is severed, so will the collective experience of great-grandfather, to grandfather, to father, to son, all of which have poignant memories of youthful days of dusting up their uniforms, bantering in the dugout, and making the big play in the sprawling green outfield.

The Farmington Battle is a small subset of the clash of values happening across the nation. While egghead worry about GDP and crime stats, parents are wondering what happened to Americana, and why they have to plead their case to maintain an American Institution against encroaching outsiders. Such conflicts will only grow, and it’s my hope my grandchildren get to experience the satisfying crack as they hit a ball far into the outfield, or slide onto home for the winning run, their pristine uniform caked in dust as their grandparents scream from the stands. It’s not an abstract spreadsheet field, but an actual place you can feel and touch right outside your backyard. “Because we Live Here” is not an irrational prejudice of a bygone age, but the only reality worth fighting for.

Thank you for reading Social Matter. If you liked this article, please share and subscribe. If you love Americana, please become a paid subscriber.

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“There are no women on the internet”

Everyone knows that’s not true. But it does highlight a little nugget of wisdom about how the genders interact. Men are out there blazing trails and taming the wild, while women, swoop in later to settle down, often using their feminine wiles to get ahead against the pioneers. The rough-and-tumble boys’ club gets a makeover as civilization rolls in. Back in the day of the early internet, gatekeeping was a piece of cake. Connecting a modem to those obscure BBS chats filled with brilliant nerds discussing their quirky interests was no walk in the park. Just like men do, you wanted to make it all a bit easier, more user-friendly.

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As the wild west of tech evolved, the urge to tame it was just too tempting. Sure, keeping things a tad inaccessible would have made social dynamics simpler, but you just had to conquer those tricky protocols, wrestle with that stubborn hardware, and tackle those pesky software issues. Your problem-solving brain just couldn’t resist. The tools had to be refined, optimized, you know? Before you could blink, everything was a breeze to access, and anyone who could click a mouse had the world at their fingertips. As access opened up, your highbrow chats got bombarded with clueless folks. And just like that, phones became everywhere, along with their idiot-proof apps, and women started strutting in like they owned the place.

Of course, none of you asked for us. No one in that ham radio chat looked around and said, “you know, we need more women.” But once we came in, some guys couldn’t help themselves. You quickly realized there was always a lonely, divorced guy in his mid-fifties who hasn’t had a date in a decade would fall over himself for a miniscule chance at romance, throwing old friends under the bus without reserve. There have always been social controls against this behavior. “Bros before Hoes” and all that. It’s never really worked though, has it? There are always a couple guys willing to break solidarity. We do the same thing, like when we start dating our best friend’s ex and say “we’re just hanging out.” in a pathetic attempt at plausible deniability, followed by “it just happened” a few months later. Amazingly, we’ve developed the skill to lie to ourselves and sincerely believe it.

You turned your attention to social controls to contain the damage. Anyone with a feminine name gets hazed, and those flaunting their femininity for attention? Banned! The obvious ones? Easy peasy to kick out. But then there’s the clever crowd, the ones who lurk around, picking up on your little word games, pretending to be one of the boys. “She’s not like the others,” you say, trying to convince yourself. “She’s cool,” you tell the guys, all while you’re just simping. A few more slip through the cracks. More guys simp like it’s a new trend. And that girl who’s “just one of the guys”? What a surprise, she’s starting to twist your precious language to suit her own agenda. When politics come up, that edgy girl joking about TND casually suggests those immigration crackdowns might be a tad too harsh. And let’s not forget the trad girl in the Orthodox chat, dropping hints that a real man does everything his wife says. By the time you realize what’s happening, it’s already too late. We’re united, and the simps are losing their grip. Language gets all mushy, controlled, and what was once a wild frontier becomes a stifling bubble of tone policing. Funny how the original pioneers are often the first to flee or get kicked out.

Honestly, it’s not even a contest. Online spaces lack any real physical threat that would make us worry about our safety. We quickly come to understand that edgy talk isn’t dangerous; it’s just a playful use of language. We feast on language games for breakfast. Can you even imagine how effortlessly we can “code switch” depending on our audience? I whip up the most cheerful comments in the mommy blog I devour each morning, shower my sister with all the emotional support she can handle while she drones on about her coworkers, babble in baby talk with my little one, and then casually toss around ethnic slurs in the discord chat like it’s nothing. It’s a breeze, really, since online spaces don’t demand anything from you—just pick up the lingo. It’s all just chatter. And who do you think is master of endless chatter and creating consensus? Women. You’ve literally crafted the perfect female environment and then act surprised when you can’t keep us out. Every language barrier you throw up can be mastered in no time by your average teenage girl, who is biologically wired for this kind of game. They don’t even need to understand how the male brain works; they just need to know how words connect.

While the menfolk treat words and ideas like they’re some kind of perfect, uncorruptible form, we know the truth: they’re as slippery as a bar of soap. Words only mean what they mean based on how we toss them around. Those shiny new concepts and trendy buzzwords you think are set in stone? Please, they’re just playdough for us to squish and shape. Sure, some folks misuse them and end up looking like total fakes, but the more clever ones? We know just how to smooth out the rough edges, giving them a little TLC to fit our needs. Before you know it, those words have been reshaped, the harsh lines blurred, and you’re left swinging at shadows, trying to catch our clever little phrases while your vocabulary collapses against our fluid rhetoric.

And we’ve barely scratched the surface of our power. Just wait until the next generation of women stops clearly identifying as women. That little anonymity you’re so fond of? It’s about to become our secret weapon. You’ve already seen those ‘pick me’ AI ladies, right? They’re out there saying all the sweet nothings you want to hear, racking up likes like it’s a competition. Just wait until that ‘tough gym bro’ with his legion of followers turns out to be a housewife juggling four kids. All that ‘real talk’ he’s been dishing out? It’s just a fancy way of telling you to cater to our every whim. You’ll strut around, chest puffed out, spouting your tough guy lines, while every woman in sight has you on a short leash. Tough husband? Patriarch? In charge? Spare me.

It might just drive you up the wall, but can you really blame us? We adore those trailblazers. The sheer audacity to tackle the wild and tame it is just so empowering, and it applies to both the great outdoors and the tiniest of scientific dilemmas. There’s a certain power in those realms. Power that we can twist to fit our needs. Even in the quirkiest of hobbies, there are a handful of men at the top who are worth our attention. In the most niche areas, there’s a surge of energy waiting to be tapped. And once it’s unleashed, we want it all. Naturally, we don’t want to be the ones wielding that power ourselves. We let you gentlemen do the heavy lifting for us. Year after year, social norms have created this irresistible urge in Western men to make life a little safer and a lot easier for us. Since we’ve always relied on men to keep us afloat, those same generations have gifted us with the art of persuasion to chip away at your mental barriers. Responsibility? That’s just code for risk. All we really want is the power. You may hold the cards, but every evolutionary nudge is just begging you to give us what we desire.

We can’t pull the wool over everyone’s eyes, and honestly, we don’t even need to. The charm of this democratized internet is that we don’t have to play puppet master with the big shots; we just need the numbers. As we grow, the power of a select few to keep things in check just fizzles out, and once we hit that magic number, good luck trying to control the story. You’ll be left floundering as all those little accounts join forces, creating a fresh consensus, shifting the narrative, and slowly taking over. Those high-and-mighty elites will end up as nothing more than a figurehead in their little kingdom. Restoring control will foster a rebellion, and the only other option is packing their bags. No matter how you slice it, we’re coming out on top. Think you can outsmart women in the art of consensus building? You can try.

Oh sure, go ahead and try to run away again. Why not retreat to Urbit if that tickles your fancy? But just wait, that little corner of the internet will soon go through the same old song and dance, and your precious tech frontier will be overrun. That simple chat will be stuffed with shiny new features and conveniences, just you wait. The settlers will roll in, and guess what? Women will come along too. And with those women comes the oh-so-charming but suffocating settlement. The society you’ve toiled so hard to create, pouring in your labor and skills to conquer, will ultimately be turned against you. All roads lead to the longhouse, darling, so you might as well get cozy.

Thank you for reading Social Matter. If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing and subscribing. If you’re not in the longhouse yet, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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In our present age, few concepts have come into focus more than the nature of power. Most have a general, naive view of the matter, referring to hierarchies in the form of org charts, chains of command, and the legal letter of the law. Modernity has shown power to be far more complicated, especially in liberal democracies where the most affluent men hide their influence in the shadows. Much of the crisis of modern life is the realization that no one knows who is in charge, and therefore no one knows who to petition for redress of grievances. It’s a mentally taxing system that feeds paranoia and fosters distrust. Much of the grass-roots right-wing projects in the last decade have been to reestablish power residing in a visible body again instead of a disorganized mass of nodes and interests. They want to know who’s actually in charge.

Wielding power in the background has been a feature in varying degrees in every great civilization, however. One reads countless stories of this phenomenon, whether it be the conniving eunuchs of Chinese empires, the Praetorian Guard of Roman times, or the corrupt Vizier whispering poison into the Sultan’s ear. While often having a negative connotation, there are many positive narratives as well. It could be the queen who tries to regulate the king’s harsh edicts or the trusted, saintly man who convinces a tyrant of the error of his ways. Power has never been a simple thing, and there have always been a multitude of ways to attain it, visible or not.

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Early in my career, many offices had Admin Assistants to deal with the mundane aspects of work. In olden times they were called Secretaries, but this title is passé now in corporate America. Since it made no sense for engineers to have to waste precious hours filling out forms, making travel requests, and other annoying tasks, they had someone on board to take care of those details so they could focus on their core job. These Admins were mostly women, as is the case in my example, a kind old grandma who was inexplicably a huge World of Warcraft fan.

She filled supply shelves with a smile on her face, did the annoying tedious tasks we didn’t want to be bothered with, and could even dish out some amusing banter. More importantly though, she knew how to work the bureaucracy. There were some people you talked to, and some people you went around. You approached some with a gentle touch, and another you played hardball with. Whenever a request came through with petty pushback, whether it be a dumb power struggle over a meeting room or complaints about a requested hotel being too expensive, she could smooth it out. While at the bottom of the totem pole, she knew how to get things done, and kept the organization running smoothly. She had little official power on paper, but could accomplish things even management struggled with.

Of course, when layoffs came, secretaries like the kindly grandma were the first to go. Because their value was not easily put into a spreadsheet, they were seen as unnecessary costs. The Vice President, of course, kept his though. When she left, things got more complicated. Frustrated engineers would now spend an infuriating afternoon trying to get their simple request through the labyrinthine process, and good luck getting support. Put a help ticket out, and someone on the other side of the ocean might get to you in a few days. You can just twiddle your thumbs until then. In the corporate world, this is known as “efficiency”. Those old ladies might not have been able to code, but they were critical nonetheless. Morale and productivity dropped when they left.

While my workplace had this positive example, I can’t say as much for the local parish secretaries. As everyone who goes to a church knows, the secretary is the backbone that keeps things running. She is the first person one reaches before talking to the pastor, often keeping his phone number hidden away like it’s a state secret. You have to go through her. If you want anything done, she is the point of contact. She is a necessary buffer, as there is always a Ned Flanders type that will incessantly bug the pastor about trivial matters, and he needs a someone to filter people. Also, pastors are often terrible administrators and don’t have the wherewithal to deal with church maintenance, scheduling, and event planning. They want to simply focus on preaching and counseling. This dynamic lets her wield incredible power.

In the right hands they are a boon, a critical part of church organization, but this position also attracts a truly contemptible archetype. The pay is peanuts, so other intangible benefits are pursued. They are the ones who love power, but not the responsibility associated with it. They like to push people around and show favoritism, but need plausible deniability. They want to follow their ideological ends but need a facade to hide behind. Because they serve as the first line of contact, they are in a unique position to frame things in their interest. They tend to be very progressive, far more than the average parishioner.

In my years, I have seen what seemed to be coincidences turn into clear patterns. In my twenties, a Catholic youth group meet at a local church every Tuesday. We had the support of the local priest, cleaned up after ourselves, did not conflict with anything else, and had essentially no footprint on Church operations. After a couple years, we were told we could not use the space anymore. The youth group leader didn’t give details, but only vague statements regarding issues with the administration. It ended up being the church secretary had an axe to grind against us for being overly conservative and put machinations in motion to get us out. She, along with another lady in the admin, also gutted the Catechism classes to make them more inclusive. Later, a homeschool coop had a similar thing happen. There were plenty of classrooms, as their parish school closed down, but then were, again, removed under nebulous pretenses. Like before, the church secretary had a hand in it.

What was shocking wasn’t just their brazenness, but the obsequiousness of the other staff. These women were literally at the bottom of the hierarchy, and yet continued to get their way, like they were running things. I don’t know whether they found the files of where the dead bodies were buried or simply were the only ones around who knew the system, but the amount of soft power they wielded was insane.

In the last six months, this phenomenon has become even more personal. My family, along with some others, have been trying to rejuvenate the parish that was geriatric until a few years ago. Young families have been streaming in because the priest is solidly orthodox, some unfortunately refugees from other parishes the archdiocese laid the hammer down on. With time, it has gone from an older, more moderate parish to becoming younger and more traditionally minded. Because of the initiative in the archdiocese to close down parishes, it’s been imperative to grow the Church very quickly to avoid the chopping block. Couples’ events are being planned, family potlucks happen frequently in the parish hall, and signs of life are showing.

This should be good news, but isn’t to everybody. Specifically, our Church secretary does not like the changes, or us. One of the first events we wanted to do was an “All Saint’s Day” party. When we spoke to the secretary for planning, she asked why it wasn’t a Halloween party. We replied that while there would be games, we wanted to avoid making it secular. She scoffed and responded, “well, I guess that’s more important than FUN.”

Luckily, we have good rapport with the Priest and some long-standing congregants given carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. Now, if anything, there is almost too much going on. The once empty halls have now been used to house relics of Saints to venerate, host an Epiphany party, have a family potluck, and more along the way. And no, our Church Secretary does not like this. On two separate occasions we asked her to put an event in the Church bulletin. Both times she “forgot”. She did, however, remember to post a “Meet Santa” notice for a local Boy Scout Troop that has no association with the parish but somehow uses the hall for free.

Other branches of the parish, such as the “Planning Committee”, wasn’t much better. They were still talking over the details of monthly Eucharistic adoration for children on Fridays, which essentially boils down ensuring the Priest is available, making a flyer, and opening the Church. They started the initiative six months ago and were still planning. And don’t get me started on the “Finance” guy. When we asked about the possibility for some of the music teacher moms in the parish to teach in one of their empty rooms, he stated they could, in return for paying a fee of 30% of their income from such lessons. What a deal. The do-nothingness of the official bodies and the passive-aggressive nature of the secretary continues to be exhausting.

Maybe my personal experience is flawed, and I got the 0.1 percent of church secretaries that are awful. Maybe, but what I can’t get out of my mind is how much damage these seemingly innocuous positions can do, and it’s not just church organizations. Passive-aggressively not doing your job, subverting requests to your own ends, and other Machiavellian machinations demoralizes and exhausts people who want to make a difference in every organization and leaves an opening for ambitious subversives to get their own people in and destroy it from the inside. The concept of good faith interaction is lost on these people. Another aspect is how they use their seeming vulnerability to their advantage. If you rail against an old lady working in a Church, there’s no way to come out looking like the good guy, and she knows it.

In essence, the rogue church secretary is the personification of the maladies of the impenetrable bureaucracy that has its own interests. While Trump was technically the executive, his first term shows in savage detail how much power an executive has without willing foot soldiers. It’s a complicated issue, since to restore proper order, you can’t have this sort of maneuvering to circumvent clear tasks, but she creates enough plausible deniability to make one look like a bully when calling out her behavior. The ideal would be to simply fire her, but that would be mean and hapless parishioners don’t have that power. Luckily, if she can use soft power, so can we.

Some parish veterans who like the new direction have slowly, quietly, taken on new responsibilities. One even can plan events herself and only has to check the calendar to ensure no conflicts. “Forgetting” to add things to the Bulletin are being circumvented by printing our own flyers and inserting them before mass. The secretary declared a soft war, and she will get what she wants.

This new mindset is a full 180 from my earlier experiences and is an indicator of how sick of the status quo people are. Twenty years ago, most people would have shrugged and just said that’s how things are or tried to work within the system. Now people are willing to create their own systems within systems. While once people would bash their heads going through countless committees of all talk and no action, parishioners are realizing they can just do things. They’re realizing the “position” and “proper procedure” they felt chained to was just a mirage, that polite deferments to corrupt or useless staff are a crutch to be discarded. There’s the realization that if those with responsibilities don’t do their job, someone else can.

Many on the right love the idea of a final battle where the enemy is publicly defeated and everyone celebrates victory. True victory conditions in “soft coups” are much more mundane. The enemy is never defeated, just sidelined. There’s no final battle, just a slow pivot to the new way of doing things. Many opponents will still, on paper, have the same position, but the meaning will entirely change. This has been the modus operandi of the social revolutions of the last sixty years, and those of us of a more traditional bent need to be comfortable with this. Quiet restorations are still restorations. Quiet victories are still victories. Quiet progress is still progress. Instead of prepping the great confrontation, but we need to be preparing for countless small skirmishes, gaining a bit of ground every time, grinding away at the forces of complacency and slow decline.

Victory will be a slow crawl through the institutions, something impossible when things ran well. Now the wheels are coming off, and people are looking for competent people who are able to do what people in official positions are now incapable or unwilling to do. Whether it’s your tiny parish or the massive government machine, there’s a place to start. Get things working again, invite your friends, and take back your agency. Dare that decrepit old woman to stop you. Laugh when someone says that’s not how things are done. In times of bureaucratic malaise and weaponized incompetence, be the one to rip the red tape.

Thank you for reading Social Matter. If you liked this article, please consider sharing and subscribing. If you’re interested in being a paid subscriber, get in touch with my secretary.

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What I've felt, what I've known
Never shined through in what I've shown
Never be, never see
Won't see what might have been
What I've felt, what I've known
Never shined through in what I've shown
Never free, never me
So I dub thee unforgiven

-Metallica

I remember sitting in the living room with my senior teammates, beaten and bruised in the aftermath of a devastating loss that knocked us out of the playoffs. No one spoke for minutes at a time, exhaustion and dejection leaving us just staring off into space, trying to hold ourselves together. If one walked in without any context, he would assume it was a funeral. In a way, it was. None of us were destined for college football. We would never suit up again.

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The parents were chatting in the other room; a couple mothers popping in trying to give consolation to their despairing children. Their platitudes fell flat, most of them intrinsically incapable of understanding their son’s mind. It wasn’t their fault. It was like a koala trying to understand the inner world of a lion. The dads knew better than to try. They knew from personal experience pain from that sort of loss can only heal with time, if ever. Some recounted their own devastating defeats, still poignant after decades. Regardless of their station in life, most would give anything for another chance at the glory that slipped away.

We lost a down-to-the-wire game in the regional championship to an opponent that would win State two weeks later. Our offensive end confessed he tripped up on a pass route in the final minutes where he broke away and simply staying on his feet could have led to victory. He brought it up again ten years later like it was yesterday. The play reel in my head constantly came back to where I was inches from swiping the ball away from the unsuspecting quarterback. The rest had their own internal game footage playing, of how being a few milliseconds quicker might have changed things, how they flubbed that maneuver he practiced hundreds of times. The opposing fans gleefully counting down the final seconds of the game still burns in my mind.

We played our hearts out. The other team did as well. Tale as old as time. It was just that little bit that differentiated us. The loss wouldn’t be forgotten by the townsfolk though. They were angry, not at our performance, but at the coaches. They blamed bad play calling and stubbornness for our loss. While uncharitable and childish, with many having a major issue with living vicariously through us, they had a point.

The core philosophy of our program for decades was brutal, relentless, smash-mouth football. We aspired to be more conditioned, more disciplined, and tougher, never giving the enemy a moment to breathe. We kept things simple, the run being our bread-and-butter with the pass only coming out a couple times a game. They emphasized brute force over complicated plays, fundamentals over more advanced maneuvers. They relied on natural farm boy strength along with hitting the weights over complicated protocols. A couple years prior, someone pissed off coach by joking about his “lack of creativity” in playcalling. The next game he called the same down-the-throat play 30 times in a row, crushing his hapless opponent by four touchdowns. There was a lot of pride in that old-time football. While many have hard feelings about his coaching, I have nothing but gratitude. Though he and the rest of the staff had all too human foibles, they were never in it for vainglory and cared for all of us deeply. They were good guys.

Our opponent was the opposite. For small town football, he knew the cutting edge of nutrition, regimented weightlifting programs, and dynamic playcalling. While the kids were not destined for the pros, he got every ounce of worth out of them, showing willingness to embrace what worked before what pleased his sensibilities. He read every one of our plays like a book and stacked the front lines every play. In the end, our coach’s philosophical aversion to passing brought defeat.

While the program was a powerhouse through the decade, we were sticking to a script that was quickly becoming obsolete. We were becoming dinosaurs. Our weightlifting program was hopelessly outdated compared to the latest best practices. Tactics were changing, and the natural power of boys doing farm work through their youth was being supplanted by training with knowledge of advanced kinesiology at their disposal. While hard training and basic grit was still fundamental, it was slowly being replaced with modern sports science.

In subsequent years, the kids starting to follow their own off-season training regimen as their coaches continued falling behind the times. The staff reluctantly started making changes, but it was only when a new head coach was brought in that the program was brought into modernity. The simple smash-mouth farm boy football of the 70’s-90’s fell to the wayside. Things got more complicated. The kids were changing too. Fewer and fewer worked in the fields, the ascent of technology making their labor less needed. Many parents discouraged this sort of dirty jobs in favor of “work” that looked better on college applications. Also, I am told an unfortunate number of farmers hire illegal labor.

Jacques Ellul in “The Technological Society” went into painstaking detail how the age of technique had supplanted all other forms of living. In the quest for the most efficient and effective method of action, whether human or machine, every other mode of being falls to the wayside. There’s no avenue it doesn’t infest, and has permeated the sciences, medicine, and small-town high school football. Football has a list of well-defined rules, rules that allow one to test for optimal outcomes. Given there are two opposing forces working by the same rules, it’s an arms race to find the most effective means to gain superiority on the gridiron, where a single play often determines victory or defeat.

In earlier times, the rules of football were simple, consisting of little more strategy than two gangs beating the shit out of each other until a victor emerged. It was more like a brawl than the complicated, deeply planned tactics seen in modern games, As the rules changed, so did the philosophies as different formations and styles emerged to take advantage of a team’s strengths and weaknesses. It was still a mostly local affair with only basic infrastructure, but as money and prestige raised the stakes, so did the desire to be the best.

It’s well known the enormous amount of capital spent on professional teams. While many college programs make a profit both directly through tickets and indirectly through alumni donations, more and more colleges are willing to lose money for the glory of having a world-class team on their campus. This has only gotten more ludicrous with the player portal, which makes star players more like mercenaries than true students.

At the lowest levels of the game, small villages of a couple thousand residents are willing to spend enormous amounts of time and capital into fielding their teams. Even here, ethically questionable means to snipe a star player from an opposing school, certain forms of “enhancements”, and absurd amounts of hours worked by the coaching staff are prominent. The arms race to give the school, and its athletes, an advantage has formed an increasingly specialized form of training.

In another time during the offseason, a teenager would once wake up at 3:30 to milk cows, head to the school and lift until he’s good and beat, get the rest his morning chores done, then go goof off outside with his buds. Now the player follows a specific protocol, the staff watching over his lifting stats to every minute detail. He has a nutrition plan lined up, and oftentimes players are now expected to participate in “voluntary” practices led by team captains. Instead of a simple playbook learned in hell week before school started, there is now an encyclopedia to memorize to keep track of ever-advancing tactics. Everything is tested, refined, then retested. The staff is practically a bunch of quants poring over data, crunching the numbers, looking for weaknesses to fill.

Once the rhythm of day-to-day life was their core training, with long hours in the field picking up rocks, riding bikes to the boondocks, and pickup games that were more like riots than anything resembling football. There was a force of will juggling country life along with academics, bringing with it natural discipline and grit. Now it has become more systematized. It’s become more efficient.

You see it everywhere.

In baseball, you see kids play almost year-round in travel teams, and in ones that only go six months, the parents have a trainer ready for the rest of the year. Basketball players play so much athletes are getting injuries in their early twenties usually only seen with pros in their twilight years. In academics, absurd amounts of hours are spent going to the right competitions and filling in those right checkboxes for getting into a prime university. Everywhere we look, what was once the natural cycles of youth in Americana has been systematized for maximum efficiency in hopes that those countless hours will give a little extra edge in beating out his competition. And the money is more lucrative than ever.

An avalanche of tutors, trainers, and other experts are now available. As parents have fewer kids and, until recently, significant discretionary income, they wanted to give their kid the best chance possible. Other parents were doing the same, creating a fear of being “left behind” and an arms race to keep up. The kid wouldn’t have his hard knocks learned from getting his head rung in backyard football, but ruthless scheduling leaves him with less and less time for unorganized activities.

While kids in ages past would live a live built organically around their family and wider community duties, the proliferation of technique has given the gift of kids specializing into a field and possibly becoming elite, but at the expense of modes of being that are impossible to quantify. The certain and the numerable has replaced the ad-hoc. Instead of a bunch of kids riding their bikes around town and getting a spur of the moment game together, structured sports are the norm. Instead of a kid getting winded from the natural rough and tumble activities of young boys, it’s through a specific workout regimen, tested and proven.

This isn’t entirely the fault of the parents. The 1990’s likely saw the last gasp of this classic Americana, suffocated by ubiquitous phones and an insufferable nanny state that sees free-roaming kids as a failure of parenting, with the rather rough nature of male hierarchies considered anti-social and immoral. While one could live an honorable middle-class life without much hassle once, the increasing difference in standards of living between the middle-class and the upper-class has created a sense of urgency to be part of that top ten percent necessary to live a comfortable life.

In truth though, many kids wouldn’t go outside at all without these programs, preferring to be glued to their XBox or phones. These apps and games are designed to suck a person’s attention away, and their young minds are no match against the combined force of thousands of psychologists determined to keep their eyes glued to the screen. The increasing structure is also a reaction against the ever-engulfing presence of the technological life.

The kids today have plenty of grit and likely play just as hard as thirty years ago. Now they are bigger, faster, and stronger, the fruits of science and an efficient regimen turning them into something that would have likely wrecked my late 1990’s team. Academically, those with motivation have more opportunities than most anyone in the history of the world had access to, even in the boondocks. For aspiring elites, in every quantifiable level they’re simply better, yet there’s the lingering sense something important was lost, something that’s impossible to put on a spreadsheet. It isn’t nostalgia for times past, nor is it a knee-jerk luddite response to technological changes. Something is different. Something was lost when that rough-and-tumble world of Smear the Queer, King of the Mountain, and feral kids roaming the neighborhoods disappeared. They become units of productivity, whether on the field or in the business world that replaced the sense of place, the bonds that formed by simply letting things come down to chance. They are impressive specimens, capable of great things, yet one can’t help but noticed they’re also caged in, slaves to the same forces that brought them to their grandest heights.

In the modern world, technique and science has cemented its victory over individual gumption. A team coming in with lots of heart gets smashed by the team with the most advanced training protocols, the newest game strategies. It’s more and more become a battle of coaches. Will and gumption aren’t enough anymore. Even farm boys are slaves to technique now.

Before big games, every beat-up car on the way to suiting up would be blasting Metallica in souped up speakers around town, the guttural vocals of James Hetfield echoing through the blocks of the quiet town. “The Black Album” was the soundtrack of this age, and everyone got hyped listening to it. We knew the battle that night would leave us deflated all weekend or in a state of euphoria. Either we would be given a pat on the back for trying hard or get swarmed by horny high-school girls who wanted a piece of our triumph. Win or lose, we would be aching until practice started up again on Monday.

For players in every era, those long two hours battling in that 100-yard field against a relentless opponent would forever shape their identity, prove what they were capable of. It’s why grown-ass coaches burst into tears looking back at those glory days, why they toil hundreds of hours a year ensuring the upcoming generation gets the same experience. It’s that grit deep inside, when snot’s flying from your nose and you’re gasping for air, knowing no reprieve is coming because you play both sides of the ball, and relishing every moment, that you realize you’ve ascended. Even with the never-ending march of progress, there’s that chance to dig deep down and prove who you are. I hope every youth gets that opportunity, that technology doesn’t extinguish that most human part of existence. That the upcoming generation isn’t like the broken “unforgiven” man. Nothing Else Matters.

So close, no matter how far
Couldn’t be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
And nothing else matters

-Metallica

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Marriage is a tradeoff. For men, it is a vow to devote your time and resources to your wife and future children in return for a family dynasty you can call your own. While not as strong as the maternal instinct, most men want to be fathers, and this compact ensures their progeny has the stability to flourish.

This means most of your income and time goes to support people other than yourself. Where you might have put extra money away for an early retirement, or maybe earned less working a more interesting job, it’s not feasible anymore. Your earnings need to support a home that is more than a bachelor pad. You need to keep up with the rising cost of food and education, and unexpected expenses quickly burn a hole in your pocket. The double responsibility of work and home have an impact on one’s social life as well. Even if you’re available, during those infant years you’re likely too tired to want to hang out.

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While there are many influencers online pontificating on their child-free lifestyle, bragging about being able to sleep in as long as they want, go to restaurants whenever they want, go to foreign countries whenever they want, most are mundane people. There are outliers having wild adventures and building business empires impossible to achieve with modern domestic expectations, but that’s not the norm. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a unique life that doesn’t entail marriage. For most though, raising the next generation will be their lasting impact on the world. This isn’t to say married men lose all ability to pursue an exciting life. Most men have ambitions outside the household sphere and would go mad living a purely domestic life. Opportunities are available, though time and resources are sparser.

Countless media has been produced dealing with the tension of domestic tranquility versus the drive for glory, most of the time ending with the man realizing how much more fruitful hanging out with his wife and kids are than his wider ambitions. Movies, like “The Family Man” starring Nicholas Cage, preach the message that being a regular old suburban dad is better than being a single, high-power executive. It’s encouraging the mundane life over the exciting, familiarity over the unique. In the choice of a fulfilling career versus being there for the family, it teaches every good man chooses family. “The Family Man” is a film many middle aged dads pull out during those days of drab conformity to tell themselves they made the right choice. It’s never convincing.

This is what happens when you have a family. You sacrifice. [Pause] You sacrifice a lot. [Long pause] It’s gonna be in your best interest to stay away from me for the next couple days.

-Justin Halpern, relating his father selling his 1967 Two-Door Mercury Cougar in “Shit my Dad Says”

This isn’t a character flaw, or a dig on marital life. Any man who doesn’t sometimes lament for his freer younger days never had the vigor of youth flow through him. He also understands you put away meaningless nomadism for long-term goals. What’s ignored in these binaries is a man’s role in the larger community. Fraternities weren’t just to drink beer and have a good time, but to build alliances, rapport, and a shared vision to the future their children would inherit. Business relationships aren’t just socializing; they are gateways that open a wider world to one’s children. While they do not directly correlate to household duties, they watered the soil and planted the seeds in the fields their progeny would inherit. They built friendships and alliances that would pass through the generations. In the most extreme cases, they formed the comradery necessary for organized violence. These public duties, duties his wife will never understand1, and modern culture dismisses as selfish, create friction regarding how a “good” man ought to live. They are seen as in conflict but remain inseparable obligations.

For many modern men, however, there is no conflict. They have no ambition outside of the white picket fence. Work is just an inconvenience one suffers through to get to his true purpose, showering love and emotional support to his family. The most he does in the public sphere is watching the big game with his friends, after he puts the kids to bed of course. In work life he is willing to suffer humiliations, degrading conditions, and boring tasks, treating it more like a necessary evil than an aspect of life under his control. These types tend to keep their heads down and do their work. They are nervous to look elsewhere, the thought of switching jobs creating incredible anxiety. Because of this reticence, they accept lousy pay and staying still in the org chart for the mirage of stability. The bosses know they aren’t going anywhere, and will accept what they get. Don’t fret about not living to your potential, they say, sacrifice for the family.

Every year during this time I either read “A Christmas Carol” or watch the George C. Scott movie based on it. While the main focus is on Scrooge’s Dark Night of the Soul, I’ve taken more of an interest in the character is Bob Cratchit, likely due to me being in a similar stage of life. Bob is a benevolent man, showering all available time and attention to his adored wife and kids. He is happy, present, content, with the sole ambition of making his dear ones feel loved and cared for. He is, as us moderns would say, a Wifeguy.

A lot of online personalities who are immature and lack life experience, would call this weakness and yearn for the days when dad would work, go to the bar, then come home late at night. The only attention he would give to his children is to punish them for screwing up. Of course, such a patriarch, built from the worst rhetoric of feminism, has been an exception and not a life goal for a decent man. For most of history in the anglosphere, the father has been present to care for his children outside of their simple monetary needs. He would also train the sons in his trade and show how to run a household of his own. If he didn’t have the trade skills necessary, when he came of age, he sent him to someone who did.

As everyone knows, Bob’s work life is far less jovial. He is relentlessly abused by Ebenezer Scrooge, who denies even basic warmth while doing the old miser’s bookkeeping. While confident and joyful when near his family, Bob is shown to be deferential, timid, and scared next to the powerful presence of Scrooge. This could be respected if Scrooge paid well, taking his lumps to build a solid monetary foundation of his own, but he didn’t.

“There’s another fellow,” muttered Scrooge; who overheard him: “my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I’ll retire to Bedlam.”

Bob Cratchit was a skilled tradesman, and fifteen shillings was a very low wage for the work he did. He was not general labor and had valuable skills in the market. Yet day after day he tolerated Scrooge’s cruelty. It’s even worse when it’s clear his family was on the edge of poverty, yet he couldn’t find the courage to either ask for more money or go elsewhere. Bob’s wife can’t help but show her justified disdain for Bob’s employer.

Scrooge bent before the Ghost’s rebuke, and trembling cast his eyes upon the ground. But he raised them speedily, on hearing his own name.

“Mr. Scrooge!” said Bob; “I’ll give you Mr. Scrooge, the Founder of the Feast!”

“The Founder of the Feast indeed!” cried Mrs. Cratchit, reddening. “I wish I had him here. I’d give him a piece of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he’d have a good appetite for it.”

“My dear,” said Bob, “the children! Christmas Day.”

“It should be Christmas Day, I am sure,” said she, “on which one drinks the health of such an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man as Mr. Scrooge. You know he is, Robert! Nobody knows it better than you do, poor fellow!”

“My dear,” was Bob’s mild answer, “Christmas Day.”

“I’ll drink his health for your sake and the Day’s,” said Mrs. Cratchit, “not for his. Long life to him! A merry Christmas and a happy new year! He’ll be very merry and very happy, I have no doubt!”

His weakness of not asserting himself in work life not only damaged him, but the family as a whole. One also sees this in his other negotiations, where Mr. Cratchit proudly tell his son of an apprenticeship he found.

After it had passed away, they were ten times merrier than before, from the mere relief of Scrooge the Baleful being done with. Bob Cratchit told them how he had a situation in his eye for Master Peter, which would bring in, if obtained, full five-and-sixpence weekly. The two young Cratchits laughed tremendously at the idea of Peter’s being a man of business; and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from between his collars, as if he were deliberating what particular investments he should favour when he came into the receipt of that bewildering income.

In the movie, Scrooge shakes his head at how little the young man will make. According to Gemini, five and sixpence was a very low wage for an apprentice, who would usually get eight shillings. Charles Dickens knew this when writing the book. Well-meaning Cratchit set up his son to earn less than he deserved, an in turn was training his son to accept less than his skills demanded. One gets the impression most businessmen saw Bob as somewhat of a joke.

We can compare how Bob approaches family with Scrooge’s parents, who never had a word a dialogue but through their actions showed their priorities. In Scrooge’s vision with The Ghost of Christmas Past, we read of Scrooge being the only one left at the boarding school while all the other children went home to their parents.

The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them! Why did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past! Why was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and bye-ways, for their several homes! What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?

“The school is not quite deserted,” said the Ghost. “A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.”

Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.

While Bob has eschewed the prospects of business success for being totally present, Scrooge’s parents have taken the opposite direction, focusing on his education while being cold and emotionally distant, forming their son into the successful but cruel businessman who made money but nothing truly enduring.

In the choice between Scrooge’s dad and Bob, Bob is the clear winner, but it doesn’t need to be so rigid. A father’s core responsibility is ensuring his children can survive in the world that keeps turning after they pass on. This requires both an emotionally stable household and connections, relationships, and a keen sense of the world outside the family sphere. While Bob is trying to manage that with his son’s apprenticeship, he could accomplish much more. This requires a stronger, more demanding outside persona. He has to be just as full of energy and present outside the household as inside. He has to be seen as a man who demands respect, not an acquiescent mouse.

Countless millennials have told their stories of being latchkey kids who dealt with distant parents who neither gave emotional support nor prepared them for the world. They told themselves they would never be like that, and vowed to always be totally present with their family. Others tell of their well-meaning boomer parents who were present but gave the world’s worst advice on how to navigate adulthood. Their parents assumed that the culture that existed in their twenties was still the norm. There was a lack of engagement with modernity that caught them flat-footed and unable to assist their struggling adult parents. In other words, they were weak parents. This is an all-too-common experience of previous generations, but that doesn’t mean going full wifeguy is the only remedy.

While it’s usually bad advice to say you can have your cake and eat it too, it’s the case here. Not only is a life outside the home reasonable, it’s necessary. The spheres of work and fraternal social groups aren’t vices keeping you away from the family, but an integral part of protecting them. No man is an island, and no family is either. The father needs to understand where the winds are blowing and react. As the son ages into adulthood, the father has an obligation to initiate him into the relationships he has maintained since he was an infant.

Don’t let the internet, the media, or your wife guilt trip you for having dinner with a business associate, going to a men’s group, catching up with a colleague, or expanding your skill set. These are a part of your wider obligations, just as important as tucking in the kids at night. While it needs to be balanced, it’s meaningful work. Those who “keep their head down” at work and allow their outside relationships to stagnate are setting both themselves and their children up to fail.

Don’t be Scrooge’s parents, but don’t be Bob Cratchit either.

Thank you for reading Social Matter, and Merry Christmas.

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