"F.B.S."

My speech given at the "Company of Adventurers" meeting in Toronto, Ontario

The title of this speech is “F.B.S.” a rather vague title. And, since I have gotten here several people have asked me what the title meant. To be honest, I started writing down ideas for this talk on my notepad with the heading “F.B.S.” and then subsequently forgot what I meant by the acronym. Still, the themes I wrote about seemed to fall into several categories, each with a heading that might be summarized by the initials F.B.S. so I decided to just stick with the original title and deal with what it actually means when we get to each of the sub-topics.

Usually, when I give one of these local talks, I try to begin with a memory of the region that I can relate to the topic at hand. For Toronto, this is difficult since I had never been to this town outside of the airport. In fact, the only memory I have from this province was when I used to cross the border semi-regularly to visit Windsor, Ontario, when I was a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

It is somewhat cringeworthy to recollect 2000s college culture. However, back in the day, having an acquaintance who lived in Windsor was a huge asset because that meant you could take groups of friends across the border for a night drinking on the town (exploiting the lower drinking age) while still having a place to crash at the end of the evening.

Now, I wish I could say that I used this resource to take girls on epic dates. But for the most part, I remember just going to Ontario with my friends at the engineering department, having long talks, and sometimes wandering into movie theaters. Probably the most notable instance of these trips was an evening spent drinking that ended with my friends and I wandering into a film festival featuring the work of Terrance Malik.

The film (I think it was Thin Red Line) wasn't particularly memorable, not least because my friends and I were very drunk at the time. However, my lasting recollection of the incident was the morning after when my friends and I tried, over breakfast, to piece together what exactly happened in the movie we had watched the night before. We could all remember the beginning and the look of the cinematography, but no one could remember the plot or any of the characters.

Did we all just black out? Were we really that drunk?

Well, the joke was on us. Because, as anyone who is familiar with Terrence Malik knows, the movie didn't actually have a plot. The entire two-hour run time was just one long establishing shot with almost nothing done in the way of plot or character development.

As one of my friends, who was kind of a stoner, put it:

"It was like the movie was beginning, and then it kept beginning, and beginning, until it finally just...like ended"

I recall this line every time I find my way into a Terrence Malik film. Every movie is always the same. It is a long set of poetic vignettes that seem to be setting the stage for a great plot. And yet nothing ever happens.

This is a common enough pattern in creative endeavors: the author captures a certain mood or note, and then he wants to hold onto that mood forever. As the monomania gears up, the creator’s entire project, and sometimes his entire career, becomes consumed by the single idea, and everything afterward is just that note over and over and over again.

Moreover, his pattern also finds its way into online political content. Every creator, in some sense every group, arrives at a cultural moment where they have something to say, some idea that really works for them. So usually, the most comfortable thing is just to repeat that idea again and again and again.

I will confess that I recognize this mode in my own work, especially when I write conference talks. I always get this feeling of Deja Vu, that I am in the process of re-writing the same speech over and over again. The speech I keep writing for these events is the “Rally the Troops” speech about the importance of community building. It's kind of a good gig, really, because I like the form. I start with a nice juicy example of hipster Millennial culture, and then I link it all together with a larger point about the importance of collective political thinking and organizing generally.

I was about to write a variation of this speech again, but something about this event made it seem like this was not the best choice, not least because, at this particular moment, everyone is fearing just that: repetition.

Sure, Trump is elected. Sure, there is a strange sense of anti-leftism in the air and even a feeling that we might be in the middle of a preference cascade of sorts. But everyone knows that we have been here before and that the fundamental structure of the system is still in operation, a force that will naturally re-align the politics of the West back towards the ideology of the deep state.”

Certainly, history is complicated, and maybe this second Trump administration is a “Black swan event” and marks a real turning point. But the more likely circumstance is that this process is part of the same undulation in politics that we have seen for the last two centuries, and soon enough, the progressive tide will come in again.

Under these circumstances, a useful talk would start not with a discussion on the nature of progressivism or the total state or even (my favorite topic) the hollowness of Millennial culture. These are all good topics but not the topics that I see occupying people’s minds. Instead, what I think people are concerned about is how to use the minor advantages we have obtained at this moment for greater effect.

This brings us to the first topic that I wanted to discuss today (the first “F-B-S”): “Frens Building Strongly”.

Frens Building Strongly

We are always in the process of discussing the problems that we are facing, but we need to begin the next conversation where the old one usually ends. We need to discuss the ways to approach solutions, philosophically and psychologically at least.

As I always like saying, the purpose of talking politics is to develop the proper attitude that allows you to function effectively in the real world. The default attitudes we were raised within modernity cripple us spiritually and prevent us from engaging in the necessary changes to procure human thriving. It’s not that modern people can’t see the problem, it’s that they are, at some fundamental level, incapable of coming to terms with the psychological changes necessary to do anything about them.

You notice this everywhere in the “Vibe-shift” of the post-COVID years. Unlike the early 2010s, we don’t argue about facts anymore. Everyone agrees on the core problems of the modern world. You might read the New York Times or The Atlantic Monthly and see them readily comment on the same social degeneration we observe, even if they don't call it that in so many words.

Everyone knows our economic systems are completely unsustainable, that the growth of our country’s wealth is more or less a halted project, and that human well-being is cratering ahead of the total collapse of healthy lifestyles and healthy social systems. And to add a capstone to the crisis, the technological solutions that were supposed to fix everything for the last half-century are now causing more problems than they ever solved.

These issues are acknowledged in the mainstream. Nevertheless, no one can think constructively about how to approach solutions outside of a narrow range of pre-approved answers that are considered acceptable in the context of the broad “post-war consensus”.

For instance, do you remember when immigration was supposed to improve the economy? Do you remember when college was the path to a stable middle-class life? Do you remember when technological developments just had upsides and no downsides? Everyone reasonably aware knows that these methods of fixing our problems don't work. And even the defenders of the status quo, like Richard Hanania and Matt Yglesias, feel like they are performing some strange boomer LARP.

The chief problem in modern politics is that everything is covered in this layer of fakeness and illusion. It's not just the current government, it's everything about our society.

For example, say you want to fix the problem of loneliness and atomization.

Inevitably, your efforts will be institutionally directed by corporate and government structures to conceptualize the lack of community as a therapeutic problem. This frame naturally feeds into the state’s desire to address the psychological symptoms of loneliness without actually fixing the underlying cause of creating meaningful communities.

Or alternatively, perhaps you want to address the issue of our broken modern morality. Perhaps you want to explore new philosophical and religious concepts that would be more in line with human thriving.

Here again, the same issue persists. All institutional power directs personal efforts back into the managerial state towards mainstream academic institutions, mainstream political institutions, and even mainstream churches that have no desire to discover underlying causes, much less create radical alternatives.

Regardless of our specific experience, this understanding of mass institutional failure is the real story of how each of us got “red-pilled.” At some point, we learned that modern structures cannot fix the problems that we are facing and that we have to break radically, both institutionally and ideologically, to develop something new.

This task is what we come here to discuss: the task of building the types of organizations that we would need to effect corrective change. This is the motivation for the basket-weaving project for Scyldings and The Beowulf Foundation and the OGC. What these groups will ultimately grow into is not exactly clear at the moment. But they are, for us today, a first step towards a kind of community that has been sorely lacking in the modern world.

In 2024, there has been a lot of progress on this front, even though there are still some challenges with growing new organizations.

Very prominently, for a lot of people who are trying to organize, there is the problem of reaching critical mass. This can be a pretty big issue depending on the area in question because it comes in several parts. First, there is the issue of finding enough people for a proper meetup; the next is finding the proper intersection of interests so the organizing efforts of the local group can do more than just meet up for beer and discuss politics.

To a certain extent, this problem is more or less just an issue of size that will eventually be solved as our organizational efforts scale up. We have pretty much doubled in size since 2022, and we need to double our size again in the next several years.

However, even after our organizations reach the critical mass necessary to take on serious local projects, there still is the question of how we can use our collective efforts to effectively make a difference. From what I can see, these next steps fall into a few categories.

First, there is the task of stepping in to replace systems that aren't currently working locally. In some sense, this is already occurring as the organizations themselves are quasi-fraternal, which provides support and mentoring to young men that they couldn’t get from the mainstream. But groups might also adopt the roles that fraternal organizations like the Oddfellows or The Elks used to play, doing charity, providing services to like-minded communities, and perhaps even absorbing some of their resources.

I think the efforts of the OGC during the period of Hurricane Hellene exemplify this role coming into existence. Their on-the-ground volunteering efforts, paired with the massive outpouring of generosity and the many people donating supplies and time, helped to underline the ways that mutual aid can be a bulwark against a disaster that the government is under-serving.

However, as a secondary step, these types of activities must be supported by a certain level of institutional organization. To reference the previous efforts of the OGC, although everything went very smoothly, there was also so much missed opportunity, many donations had to go through payment processors and charity services that weren't controlled by like-minded parties. Fees had to be paid to corporations who probably hate us, and tax right-offs were missed by friends who could use them.

Furthermore, there were many other people who wanted to help with the relief project but didn't know how, and there wasn't a clear way to funnel their effort and money to places where it could be efficiently used. All of these things have to be fixed with improved institutional infrastructure, which will naturally require some amount of official leadership. This is a major area that will need expansion in the coming years, and that expansion does mean more work.

However, what is really great about expansion is that as our real-life efforts grow, so grow the opportunities to bring our ideas to groups of people who never would have heard them otherwise or would dismiss them as unserious because they “came from the internet.”

Altogether, I do think that the future looks bright for our efforts to organize and create new ideas and new modes of community. However, I see some dangers on the horizon, which come specifically from phony political controversies that periodically erupt online and threaten our ability to productively pursue higher ends.

And this concern naturally brings me to the next topic of my talk, an alternative potential acronym for F.B.S., “F*ck this Bull-Sh*t”.

F*ck this Bull-Sh*t

I think the danger in this specific moment is fake politics. After all, regardless of how aware we are of the modern predicament, we still live in a poisonous modern world. We are subject to the same set of illusions and keep wasting our time and effort on the same futile controversies.

Although the contemporary liberal mind has a hard time admitting this, there are indeed types of discourse that, by engaging in them, make you weaker.

Those who have followed my blog since the beginning might know that, while I love debating, there are some things that I consider out of bounds to debate. First and foremost on this list of things that I don’t debate are questions about anti-natalism or voluntary collective extinction. The reason for this is clear.

Suicide, at either the individual or collective level, is not something that can be the proper subject of discourse. As Spengler points out, once an organism has to argue for its existence by the standard of some non-living formal rule, it has CEASED to be alive. Life does not NEED a reason to exist. It is its own reason. And once a living being has to plead its case at the court of death, its existence is as good as over.

I guess straight-up suicide is an easy topic for exclusion because it is entirely one-sided. Still, there are numerous conversations or debates that modernity offers us, which, even if nuanced, weakens any attempt at collective organization.

In most cases, these types of destructive discourse usually have a common origin. They are often the OPPOSITE sides of a controversy that the old mainstream 20th-century perspective of politics has created. But just because the mainstream is wrong does not mean that we are improved by reactively engaging inside a dichotomy our enemies have created.

You see this everywhere online: guys react to feminism by becoming “Men's Rights Activists” and identifying as incels. They react to modern spiritual impoverishment by becoming Nietzschean rebels, even if that spirituality doesn’t make sense. They react to braindead Boomer politics by fighting a new generational political war, just pressing in the opposite direction as their elders.

I would observe that if you think about these problems for more than a few minutes in the right way, it's easy to see how meaningless these battles are.

Take, for instance, the most common conflict online, the highlight of this entire year of 2024: the supposed political war between men and women that you see emerging statistically in most Western countries.

Originally, this was the classic dumb political battle brought on by feminism. But I still see this phony “sex war” being fought by people who should know better. And I can only guess that this is because we haven’t properly realized what is going on.

Ultimately, I would argue that the “sex war” is being driven by a fundamental confusion between hard political problems and local managerial problems.

A real political problem concerns the question of who will rule and whose morality will dominate. It is absolute. And it is a direct extension of war. To the extent that it is managed democratically, it can only be modified on the margins without creating massive conflict or triggering a regime change.

On the other hand, a managerial problem exists inside spaces where there are already established power relations and stable rules, and what is really at stake is who gets the biggest portion of discretionary resources. Here rules are assumed, conflict is limited, and the focus is largely on allocating care and attention.

What is immediately apparent, to me at least, is a lot of the female irrationalities we associate with politics are just category errors. Women want to appeal to a managerial system for resources, but this desire is reframed as a real hard political conflict over who will rule.

The infamous concept of female hypergamy is a great example. Believe it or not, women's desire to always want better men is a generative force for civilization when expressed at the lowest levels. Getting men to “do better” is a good thing. However, when these instincts are expressed at a real political level, they become thought-terminating cliches and a path to plunge society into absolute chaos.

Feminized understandings of politics (what I call "Lunar' politics) cannot conceptualize the difference between petitioning power for redress and actually wielding power. Of course, democracy encourages this confusion because it is a constant source of political energy. But it leads to this weird sort of insanity where harmful situations are created in the name of “caring.” The crazy situation where a feminist movement hysterical over the danger of sexual violence nevertheless drives the cause of mass immigration, de-policing, and reduced sexual norms, all of which lead to more sexual violence.

I guess the height of the insanity is just the existence of modern feminism, which inevitably imagines itself in an existential political war against the men who they need for survival. The problem is, it always seems like this insanity will, at some point, dissipate. It always looks like the ideas of the “4B” movement and Valerie Sollanis are jokes until you realize that many women have convinced themselves of these perspectives at an emotional level, even women who understand the core issue intellectually.

This problem emerges from our original distinction between real and managerial politics. Women don't think about real politics because women don’t want to fight a war. They can't win wars. And, even if they did, they neither have the ability nor desire to subjugate men and rule them like victorious conquerors. They just want consideration, recourse, and appreciation. These are all things that, under a stable order, are quite easy to provide.

In an ideal scenario, the solution to the sex war is simple: just Don't fight it. Separate the questions of management from the question of rulership and then just work to build new places where this confusion is less prominent.

Perhaps this means separating male and female concerns. Perhaps this means talking about politics in effectively single-sex spaces. But there is no way around this problem. And fighting the battle (even if you are right) only makes the situation worse.

I think you might see a similar but different fake conflict in the perennial problems that sometimes surround our communities in terms of religion, the perennial battle between Christians and Pagans that seems everywhere online in right-wing spheres.

I find it a little odd that, for whatever reason, I have become somehow known for fighting this battle even though my ambition, from day one, has been to dissolve the conflict permanently.

Luckily for all of us involved, there actually is NOT a religious war going on inside the right wing.

For one, if there was a real religious war, where each party declared the other sacred symbols profane, our entire political project would be rendered futile (seriously, stick a fork in it). No group of men has ever accomplished anything with an active religious war going on between them. So we should thank our lucky stars that this online conflict is almost entirely hot air.

I know that this conflict is hot air because there isn’t even a serious religious debate going on. Religious debates, real debates at least, are about contentions over theology and sacramental practice. But this is just not occurring in right-wing spaces. I have solicited these theological conversations many times, but they are never the issues that people want to talk about.

What people really want to talk about are their feelings of betrayal by weak Christian leaders. However, this is a betrayal that I feel as a Christian, possibly more than the non-Christian men who complain about it online. And, if these young men truly understood the nature of these leaders’ betrayal, they would immediately understand that the worst way to express their dissatisfaction was by creating a divisive conflict inside their own communities to cathartically bash a party that can’t hear them and who benefits from their discord.

And I know that this point might be reflected back to me. After all, I frequently put forward the idea of iconoclasm as a good thing. But, to be honest with you, I don't see my role as someone who instigates conflict with believers of other faiths, pagan or monotheistic.

Sincere belief is something that I respect in almost all of its forms. The imperative to destroy idols is always properly directed at those dead religions that exist cynically to preserve power with lies. This is my chief complaint with the religion of progressive secular humanism that I was raised with.

To be honest, I would find it refreshing if someone came up to me and tried to convince me why I should believe and worship Odin, but such a conversation is not political, and to the extent that it occurs has to occur within a certain set of boundaries that it not respected, will make further growth impossible.

Here, I think we arrive at the last fake political controversy plaguing the right wing, and that is the war between generations. Now if the “sex war” is the fake politics that needs to be exposed as fake, and the “religious war” is a potentially real conflict that hopefully remains a LARP, we find the war between the Boomer and post-Millennial perspectives somewhere in the middle, a combination of fake and real disagreements that we just need to get through as fast as possible.

The difficulty with resolving this specific problem is there is a strange sort of generational inversion. The Boomers have the wealth, the power, and the enthusiasm, and the younger generations are left more dispossessed, more isolated, and more anxious about the future. In past times, the younger generations had more free cash and opportunities, whereas the older people spoke with the wisdom of the ages. However, at least on the right, it is now the young who are speaking in the pattern of sober common sense, while the older people make appeals to idealism and material concerns.

On the surface, this conflict sounds like young people trying to argue with their elders about how facts on the ground have changed. But if you have had enough of these conversations, you realize that this isn’t the case. You can argue back and forth with the older generations. You can point to the facts that are right in front of all of our noses that show us that things aren’t the way they were in the 80s. But then you realize that the facts aren’t the issue.

It’s the psychology.

It's not that they don't see your points, understand the problems that you are facing, or recognize that things aren’t the way they used to be. They just don't know how to make the concession and leave behind old ways. They cannot see a way to be different, and you cannot see a way forward with the conflict still in place.

In common form, the boomer doesn’t understand “identity politics”. It’s not that they can’t see how modern America works, it’s that they can’t properly understand the logic of their own lives once they start thinking about political responsibility as fundamentally collective in nature.

Alternatively, Boomers don’t quite get that the dating market has been capsized or that the provision of wealth for a young man requires so much more than a college degree. But this is not because they aren’t aware of the dire social and economic situation. Still, admitting to this reality would imply that they need to do something that they don’t know how to do and fear they can’t learn.

The older generations need to guide the younger, not by passively paying into an educational system, but by actively allying with their cause. And that is a hard task. Economic opportunities, marriage, and family formation would become, in some ways, collective responsibilities. And no one raised in modernity has any experience with doing this properly.

This generational war isn’t a political battle. It’s a psychological block. Our task here should not be to beat these counterparties into submission with rhetoric (or even win and rule over the opposition) but to show them a better way.

In fact, each of these fake conflicts, from the “sex war” to the phony religious debates to the spats between Boomers and Millennials, have a common quality, namely that they are deeply de-territorialized. Each fake political struggle depends on appeals to useless 20th-century abstractions no one still believes in. Subsequently, once we ask ourselves what is important for our communities on the ground, we return to the same values people have pursued throughout history: the values of Faith, Blood, and Soil.

This is my last topic, expressed in the initials “F.B.S.”.

Faith, Blood, and Soil

I will repeat those lines again, “Faith, Blood, and Soil”.

It sounds anachronistic. But these are the real things that humans have used to define themselves within history.

Politics, real politics, are the things you CANNOT walk away from. Humans are defined by our constraints more than anything else. And these qualities of heritage, location, and belief were essential to almost all previous generations.

Moreover, to properly psychologically realign ourselves in the current year, we have to understand these qualities, not as a LARP or a property of history that we admire in the abstract but as lived values in the 21st century.

We can start, in the reverse order of importance, with the concept of sacred soil, the foundation of many nationalist ideas.

For any deep political identity to be real, it has to be embodied in a certain place. The land and geography impose a structure on the people who live there that defines how they interact with the world. Priorities of the environment and architecture must be a core part of any grounded government because it is through their relationship to their immediate external circumstances that define a given people’s political needs.

This understanding of place was the original motivation for nationalism to begin with, classically a type of modern way to express these more spiritual truths. And the whole concept of environmentalism in the early 20th century and the various back-to-the-land movements were an expression of this core desire.

But, slowly, across the 20th century, one sees these territorialized dimensions of politics fading away. Nationalism and patriotism have become less about the place and more about loyalty to a government or ideological proposition. Environmentalism, in the age of global warming hysteria, is now more about abstract metrics and virtue-signaling activism than it is about creating sustainable and beautiful places for humans to live in. And it’s hard to recognize anything originally organic about a progressive political movement dedicated to spreading an oppressive detached sameness across the globe (no matter how many yogurt commercials they make explaining otherwise).

I always thought that this was the great irony of the modern world. The globe-trotters who defined themselves by the places they went were the tourists who made every area of the world look and feel the same. The environmentalists were the ones who de-sacralized the environment and made it in some way unhuman. The American patriots of the Boomer generation were just the people who made patriotism hollow and meaningless beyond mere platitudes.

I think the challenge before us here is to create an inversion of this process, an alliance of people deeply connected to their home, who can still embody a will for a common human interest at the global scale.

This is certainly a tall order. But not impossible. I think it begins with a return to territoriality, starting with an understanding of sacred spaces, which contain properties that set them apart from the outside world. And this, in turn, can only come from a place being associated with a people who have an understanding of themselves as a collective.

Here, we encounter the notion of “blood,” or heritage, and the physical connections people share with those who have lived in the past. And I know, in the modern world, this sounds crude and gauche, But it also is essential.

I don’t know how we are supposed to have a connection to a collective without having a concept of heritage that unifies us to a common past. After all, as Futel De Coulange outlined in The Ancient City, it was this core understanding of blood connection that bound pre-modern humans to a place and gave them a sense of being a nation with common political interests.

But here lies a stumbling block for the right because much of our understanding of this relationship remains mired in a hyper-autistic 19th-century notion of race, which always models this quality as a purely scientific metric. You see this all the time in people who are obsessed with race online who conceptualize blood relationships as some kind of genetic pedigree that you qualify for or not, as if some groups were good and some groups were bad based on these metrics.

Needless to say, I think this is a mistake. Instead, what “blood” meant in the past, and what it should mean for us now, is an intersecting set of relationships and responsibilities that extend through both space and time, linking us to some people more than others not because they are better or worse than anyone else, but because they are our people.

Human beings are physical creatures, we have a collective biological dimension to our existence just as we have a collective geographic dimension to our existence. People are different, just like places are different. And people, as people, have particular responsibilities to ensure the well-being of those proximate to them in blood, just as they have responsibilities to those proximate to them in space. The ambition of our political ends must be the honoring of our ancestors, all of them, just as it must mean fighting for the future of very distant posterity.

Does this mean that our modern understanding of biological connection has to be some autistic 4chan parody like the “100 percent Bavarian” phenotype meme from Murdoch-Murcdoch? Of course not. In the modern world, there will necessarily be a dimension of multiculturalism brought about by fast travel and international telecommunications. Boundaries must be looser. And exceptions need to be made wherever necessary. Furthermore, there needs to be a way for very different people to work together to achieve a greater moral vision for humanity as necessitated by global politics. We need to be able to act collectively as a species.

However, none of these observations change the fact that our species comprises many peoples, not just one people. And to the extent that it is homogenized and loses its diversity, it becomes more brittle, less substantial, and more vulnerable to extinction.

Preserving these diverse properties both in location and in peoplehood is a very challenging task. Ultimately, I don’t think it can be accomplished without one final piece of the puzzle: an ultimate spiritual appeal.

I do think that what rules over all human considerations is a concept of holiness only accessible through faith. And this core understanding of faith has to be a central property in our organizing efforts.

For some, this might seem ridiculous, considering I have already spoken at length about a core religious division that exists inside of many right-wing organizations. To be sure, we have theological differences. And theological differences DO matter. However, as someone who has spent FAR too much of his life debating the finer points of Christian and Atheist apologetics, I often wonder if focusing on these theological differences is really what this specific historical moment is calling on us to do.

Rather, it seems that the real spiritual division that I see when I look into the world is the division between the sincere believers and the cynical consumeristic bugmen. To take the next step, we have to understand what it means to fight for the true spiritual things against the all-consuming, anti-religious, and deracinating forces of modernity, eventually coming to concordance about the specifics of theology after we discover what really matters through experience.

It is the spirit of divine order that binds good men to their word and to their other core loyalties. It is the ever-lasting pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty that calls us to our ultimate sense of morality. And neither truth, goodness, nor beauty has a zip code, nor are they the purview of one people, even if different people might experience these realities in radically different ways.

Here is where I think we return to our task. In addition to just doing the ordinary things we have already discussed, seeking to thrive in economic and family life, building and expanding our organizations and leadership, and expanding our ability to produce great art and reliable analysis, we have to seek to embody these concepts from the old world.

The old strong gods of faith, blood, and soil are reawakening in this new political era, and we must be their heralds.

We have to be the post-modern answer to the modern bugman. We have to be the men who can exist as fully territorialized creatures inside a radically deracinated modernity and beat modern people at their own game. We have to be bound to a place and a people because it is only in these contexts that I think we can be both truly loyal and truly responsible.

And it will take just this type of loyalty and responsibility to make a better world for our species.

We must, in all of our endeavors, express a universal and timeless spirit to demonstrate how very different things can work together and be united to a greater truth without losing their particular qualities.

And in all our activities, this unifying spirit can create a basis for trust, for the making and keeping of promises, for loyalty, and the aspiration to build that one necessary thing to achieve any lasting change: brotherhood.