The “activist” right doesn’t want to do the hard work of rebuilding a civilization. It’s going to take decades (if not centuries) of building the foundations of a new society. The Benedict Option is too optimistic. As though we are escaping progressivism with the treasures of Western Civilization while the world clamors to get behind our walls. The better metaphor is the Shtetl Option. Centuries of marginalization, second-class citizenship, and oppression. But if we are steadfast and hold to our traditions, especially those traditions that produce excellence, we can make it. But ultimately excellence, quality, arete, are what really matter. And the right needs to acknowledge (as Curtis Yarvin’s noted) the right has a quality-control problem. Until we are willing to do the hard work of creating right-wing institutions worthy of the title “elite,” we are just a bunch of LARPing blowhards.
"So what you're saying is" that all the parents for the over 13,500 US school districts should just allow CRT indoctrination of their children?
"So what you're saying is" that when legal challenges to CRT indoctrination rise to the supreme Court that good Christian Americans should tell the lawyers to drop the case and not even bother for a judgment and to just allow the indoctrination to continue?
"So what you're saying is" we should all mistake the terrain of our lives for your NRX map of the world?
An excellent explanation of why the activist types are just wrong. Sadly, most of them won't care. They'll probably just call you a grifter because "you aren't providing real solutions!"
The total state is merciless and all-powerful. Your idea of helping right-wing movements survive decades of the coming "total state" is crazier than my plan of seceding from the US in this decade and using state power to gain some level of independence from the Cathedral. It only takes one state to start a secession cascade, and 66% of Texas voters are now in favor of seceding according to last month's poll (see my substack).
Brilliant. I'm well entrenched in "the citadel" (MIT, Google, etc), and think you're absolutely on the right track. If you'd ever like to chat, even for the sake of networking, please don't hesitate to reach out.
Big fan of your youtube channel, but I have some critiques.
>So far, so good? Great. But before I go further, I want to re-emphasize the TWO key qualities of the Cathedral which are many times forgotten by activists eager to "fight back". First, the Cathedral is DECENTRALIZED. There is no leader of the Cathedral, there is no CABAL or conspiracy running its consensus. Don't waste your time looking for a literal inner party, it doesn't exist. Second, the Cathedral is EVOLVED. While some of its parts are indeed designed to perform certain tasks, the majority of its bulk is comprised of individual actors independently cooperating to increase their own share of wealth, power, and status.
>Using these intuitive rules and going down the line, we immediately see that very few institutions are in any ways essential. Almost no part of the mainstream media is essential. A fleetingly small part of the unelected government and only the smallest number of elite universities fit our description. For example, using my own back-of-the-envelope calculations, the institutions marked as “essential” come down to super-elite research/education institutions (Harvard, Yale, Berkeley...) , quasi-independent academic peer circles (Nature, Science, etc...), some neo-liberal NGOs (World Economic Forum, Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation...), and a few semi-government bodies (Federal Reserve, CIA...). Your analysis might vary, but if your list looks anything like mine, a certain picture is coming into focus concerning the insulation of these core fixtures from any outside interference.
How does "there is no inner party" and "this is the inner party" square?
And more generally, you seem to have adopted your epistemology from Moldbug, complete with the useless hyperlinks to Wikipedia. I understand he inspired you a lot but his writing from a technical point of view is totally useless -- the point is that we don't know how the Cathedral works. Yarvin doesn't know and is too lazy to find out; you seem to think you know because you took Yarvin's word as gospel, but you don't. Neither of you have actually studied this topic. You can't figure this stuff out from your common knowledge like Yarvin tries to do. At the moment we don't know a lot about the Cathedral so it's too early to say what the best course of treatment is. We need to study the disease more. This means looking at what I call microhistory, reconstructing important uses of power in their full details, examining who is behind what exactly. For instance, the Hart Cellar Act. Obviously we know the Congress passed it. Which party? Who funds that party relative to the other one? We can look at Hart and Cellar themselves. What were their motives? Who were their friends? Who paid for their campaigns? And so on.
The “activist” right doesn’t want to do the hard work of rebuilding a civilization. It’s going to take decades (if not centuries) of building the foundations of a new society. The Benedict Option is too optimistic. As though we are escaping progressivism with the treasures of Western Civilization while the world clamors to get behind our walls. The better metaphor is the Shtetl Option. Centuries of marginalization, second-class citizenship, and oppression. But if we are steadfast and hold to our traditions, especially those traditions that produce excellence, we can make it. But ultimately excellence, quality, arete, are what really matter. And the right needs to acknowledge (as Curtis Yarvin’s noted) the right has a quality-control problem. Until we are willing to do the hard work of creating right-wing institutions worthy of the title “elite,” we are just a bunch of LARPing blowhards.
"So what you're saying is" that all the parents for the over 13,500 US school districts should just allow CRT indoctrination of their children?
"So what you're saying is" that when legal challenges to CRT indoctrination rise to the supreme Court that good Christian Americans should tell the lawyers to drop the case and not even bother for a judgment and to just allow the indoctrination to continue?
"So what you're saying is" we should all mistake the terrain of our lives for your NRX map of the world?
No, no, and no.
Welcome back Dave. -cringwalker here
An excellent explanation of why the activist types are just wrong. Sadly, most of them won't care. They'll probably just call you a grifter because "you aren't providing real solutions!"
Oh man...I can't say that I have too many disagreements with this post. Will be looking forward to your post about the earnest socialist.
The total state is merciless and all-powerful. Your idea of helping right-wing movements survive decades of the coming "total state" is crazier than my plan of seceding from the US in this decade and using state power to gain some level of independence from the Cathedral. It only takes one state to start a secession cascade, and 66% of Texas voters are now in favor of seceding according to last month's poll (see my substack).
Brilliant. I'm well entrenched in "the citadel" (MIT, Google, etc), and think you're absolutely on the right track. If you'd ever like to chat, even for the sake of networking, please don't hesitate to reach out.
Big fan of your youtube channel, but I have some critiques.
>So far, so good? Great. But before I go further, I want to re-emphasize the TWO key qualities of the Cathedral which are many times forgotten by activists eager to "fight back". First, the Cathedral is DECENTRALIZED. There is no leader of the Cathedral, there is no CABAL or conspiracy running its consensus. Don't waste your time looking for a literal inner party, it doesn't exist. Second, the Cathedral is EVOLVED. While some of its parts are indeed designed to perform certain tasks, the majority of its bulk is comprised of individual actors independently cooperating to increase their own share of wealth, power, and status.
>Using these intuitive rules and going down the line, we immediately see that very few institutions are in any ways essential. Almost no part of the mainstream media is essential. A fleetingly small part of the unelected government and only the smallest number of elite universities fit our description. For example, using my own back-of-the-envelope calculations, the institutions marked as “essential” come down to super-elite research/education institutions (Harvard, Yale, Berkeley...) , quasi-independent academic peer circles (Nature, Science, etc...), some neo-liberal NGOs (World Economic Forum, Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation...), and a few semi-government bodies (Federal Reserve, CIA...). Your analysis might vary, but if your list looks anything like mine, a certain picture is coming into focus concerning the insulation of these core fixtures from any outside interference.
How does "there is no inner party" and "this is the inner party" square?
And more generally, you seem to have adopted your epistemology from Moldbug, complete with the useless hyperlinks to Wikipedia. I understand he inspired you a lot but his writing from a technical point of view is totally useless -- the point is that we don't know how the Cathedral works. Yarvin doesn't know and is too lazy to find out; you seem to think you know because you took Yarvin's word as gospel, but you don't. Neither of you have actually studied this topic. You can't figure this stuff out from your common knowledge like Yarvin tries to do. At the moment we don't know a lot about the Cathedral so it's too early to say what the best course of treatment is. We need to study the disease more. This means looking at what I call microhistory, reconstructing important uses of power in their full details, examining who is behind what exactly. For instance, the Hart Cellar Act. Obviously we know the Congress passed it. Which party? Who funds that party relative to the other one? We can look at Hart and Cellar themselves. What were their motives? Who were their friends? Who paid for their campaigns? And so on.