Very well put. Fortunately, there is an answer. White men trying to forge careers for their own personal interests now have everything stacked against them. The same young men, setting out to earn their status, keep their wives and have enough money to rear children (the only things a man really needs) through leading a whole group of their own tribe, are going to have the gigantic advantage of our collective capability on their side.
As "surplus elites" go, there's no-one to match us once we get started!
The Boomers and older Gen Xers running Hollywood writing rooms in Savage's piece won't be there forever. Meanwhile, Netflix is buying Warners and the movie business may not support the local cinema. Change is around the corner and who knows what it looks like. It's not a solution for the dispossessed white man seeking career advancement and satisfaction today or tomorrow, but the system that ignored them is unsustainable.
I see a similar dysfunctional business model in the Magisterium playing out. The Boomer cardinals (and Francis during his pontificate) have certain goals for the Church that will be washed away when the younger, more trad priests take their place in the hierarchy. It's a matter of time.
Great article. Only thing I’d add is the woke argument was essentially a consequentialist one that being “to create an omelet (John Lennons Imagine of racial equity) you have to crack a few eggs (the careers of young white men) and to them it’s worth it. If we counter by simply playing the consequentialist game and saying hey discrimination isn’t worth it because it’s really mean to innocent white guys, we are still playing the game within their frame which is rigged from the start. This is inevitable when you accept consequentialism which flows naturally from materialism. Instead we need to reject the premises and rediscover the classical theist tradition (not just muh Bible told me so but actual natural law) and then virtue ethics and true justice will follow. This will allow us to say there will always be winners and losers (contra equity) but the winners have duties due to their status (contra equality of opportunity is the most important Jordan Peterson types). We should be looking to the parable of the talents as our model
In the small village, hope in the transcendent can held onto. The village always carries within it possibility, that it can sustain, that one day it will become more. This is possible because of the bonds between people. In a way, the inhabitants of the village may be closer to the world of the material, but the strength of his material connection ( to the world and his small tribe) makes more room for transcendental abstraction. Perhaps ironically, or conversely, a modern atomized individual, living in a mega city, is less connected to the material (to his people, or his world, he doesn't even know where his food comes from), but he lives more in a world of abstractions. His transcendental "slot" is full. Religion is meaningful and purposeful, but really, the village, the connection to the material comes first. You have to offer young men a conception, or path to material success, or connection. They are , after all, ( through no fault of their own) mostly materialist in their outlook. Build the villages sure, but if you want to know how to get young men into villages, wives. With a plot of land and wives they can begin to hope for a better future.
While your take on Jacob's article and the experiences of the younger generations is spot on, and I have great sympathy, the tribalizing of the generations (you have Xillenial as your identity?) makes me cringe every time I read articles like this. It's a distraction. These are ideological battles that all generations have been dealing with, with roots hundreds of years old. All generations have been attacked and poisoned ideologically in their own way, although they received different types of poison, depending on when God put us on this Earth. Read the lyrics to the Billy Joel song Allentown and it will give you a glimpse of what the white working man was dealing with in the good old days. He was attacked from two directions - first by taking his domestic jobs and sending them to foreign workers overseas (Boomers and X got the brunt of this, to use the generational tribal terms), causing the rust belt to rust. Then more recently a surge in taking the remaining domestic jobs and giving them to immigrants, women and minorities under the guise of DEI, with both of these situations having a long period of overlap, affecting everyone. The solution is for all of us, regardless of age, to step out of the progressive moral frame, assert our moral frame, and fight back. Tribalizing the generations and portraying them as competing and organized special interest groups causes unnecessary fragmentation for the one demographic (white men) that desperately needs some cohesion. The non-whites don't do this. I wish we could get past it, but fear we won't. The intergenerational dunking is just too much fun.
Fantastic article filled with incredible insight. I do wish you would include younger X and older millennials as somewhat generational compadres, as our experiences have considerable overlap, and our wisdom would be valuable to the Zs and Alphas emerging into these times of troubles.
I wish I knew the answer to how to address the challenges of modernity, though I fear there is no one size fits all approach..retreating from the empire to build something local seems the best course of action from what I can tell.
That said, as you observed in this essay, it is a spiritual problem, so ultimately, a spiritual solution is called for. Retreating to local enclaves to rebuild step by step falls into that category, in my humble opinion (like the Benedictines after the fall of Rome).
At the end of the day, as things stand, I see two choices for the west: Christ…or Fight Club. And I fear we are on the path to Project Mayhem…and the longer this current regime endures, the more likely is that outcome. And that is something no person of good will should desire.
Obviously October 2023 is partly why the elite is willing to air this, perhaps as a shot over the bows of activists warning them what will happen if they don't back off the elites' protected group.
Could it also be the case that the elite is worried about the crisis in competence that DIE has engendered? After all, who wants to go down in an aircraft piloted by a DIE hire?
“The purpose of any discourse in our post-discourse age is less to make an argument than to provide insight that points the way forward and inspires a sense of agency in an otherwise demoralized generation of young people.”
As a Zoomer this sentence resonates and shows the ugly future that lies ahead. There is no discourse, no “Conversation” to be had with your enemies; the frontlines are clear, the opposing groups demarcated. Every argument being made by our side will now be judged by its constructive qualities, every sober analysis of our modern troubles must - to some extent - simultaneously include a battle plan. It seems that the only audience left to be addressed will be those that we in German would call “koalitionsfähig”, able to form coalitions with. To identify these individuals varies from polity to polity. In Europe nations traditionally defined themselves through a blood and soil lense; it will be interesting to see how you Americans across the pond will resolve that question (will it be white - whatever that means, will it be Anglo-Saxon focused, will it be Christian etc.)
Arguments that don’t appeal to the potential in-group will be noise that at best can distract and at worst will disperse the coalition.
Meh. I said this very early on, quite literally within the first few comments on Jacob’s article in fact, but I don’t care for the desire to reframe this as “older white men” or “class conflict”. How much skepticism of female and minority enfranchisement is implied by these statements? In my opinion very little. We should call a spade a spade, this is just what “diverse” society looks like and the anti-meritocratic disenfranchisement of white males can be blamed far more on organic “class consciousness” amongst racial minorities and women and their own exercise of power than it can old white male puppetmasters who are still somehow defying all the rules against racist old white men. Though invariably I expect this WILL be the most popular framing for the time being, as society grapples with just how badly it dun fucked up in the last decade and a half.
I suppose the question is what framing advances the collective interest of young white men most effectively. We need liberal white men to defect. They need a narrative that provides the possibility. We also need the transition of power from older white men to younger white men because minorities and women will run organizations into the ground and evaporate that precious functionality. While the incompetence and malice that degrades our society is the result of empowering women and minorities, what we need is to provide a new power center that functions and can live unmolested. So far, attacking minorities and particularly women does not seem to work, and if we can transition even some of the existing boomer-dominated power structure to ourselves, that is better than none.
And believe me, I'm quite aware that the stupid and the neurotic are ultimately to blame for all dysfunction, but until they can somehow be excised from society through whatever deus ex machina, we must work around them.
Such a casual dismissal doesn’t work anymore. You know this already, too. Which further proves that you’re just a vessel of containment like so many other ‘dissident’ commentators. The bunch of you are so tiresome and weak.
A related problem is that a people without a home have no future. It seems most right-wing substackers had predominantly liberal upbringings. I certainly did, to an extreme degree. We are therefore culturally liberal, regardless of our political and religious beliefs. There's no escaping it. Our liberal upbringings are permanently imprinted on our personalities, mannerisms, and speech patterns. Born and raised church-going, gun-toting right-wingers can spot us from a mile away.
I once made a go of integrating myself into small and then mid-size conservative towns, and I can't say the project was a success, though I was considerably less conservative then than I am now. Regardless of how much I generally agree with their politics, there's a substantial cultural chasm between me and your average rural salt of the earth right-winger. I see these people as generally political allies, but they are simply not my tribe. So there is no physical space, no town, no city for left-to-rightists to congregate en masse and build IRL communities, in the way that the libtards have their cities and the rednecks (sorry, it's just the best descriptor for the point I'm trying to make here) have their small towns. We only have these virtual spaces where we can congregate around shared belief systems. So we inevitably end up atomized and "very online."
Certainly your Redwood Society project is a step in the right direction. I guess what I'm saying is we need a lot more of that kind of thing.
Fantastic essay - I wonder what do you think about the future of 'universalist' ideas. Obviously actual religions like Christianity will continue but is there a future for emotions like Universalism? It seems so ingrained in western thought as to be impossible to imagine it disappearing forever.
One effective option for the stoic was to, ah "Blutarsky that [expletive deleted]": agree and amplify.
Game theory, while off limits for a Christian man to employ against women for sexual access, may be justly used to oppose Longhouse Women.
Recruiting women as stalking horses to the cause is critical. We were always meant to be a team, after all. Positioning oneself as one who could somehow part of the victim substack works for both sexes: blutarsky-ing Allyship before the word was invented. I know one partner in resistance who played off as gay for a year until he consolidated his place.
We derailed the push for land acknowledgements, helped derail "hate speech is not free speech", and white supremacy / restitution successfully in our institution until the Covid panic, lockdowns, and Floyd psyops.
Had only modest success in keeping my corner clean of active LGBTQ+ activism. That was the hardest one since fornication, adultery and free love are baked into the assumptions. The sex-vices seem to be the ones men will throw over civilization for:
"On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death"
Though, I got dirty grey in the process. I'm too old for that game now.
Old Gen Y here.
Only made it in my career (university prof) because of a single repentant boomer gave me a chance.
Now trying my best to support younger men in my community. We must do better than the boomers.
Very well put. Fortunately, there is an answer. White men trying to forge careers for their own personal interests now have everything stacked against them. The same young men, setting out to earn their status, keep their wives and have enough money to rear children (the only things a man really needs) through leading a whole group of their own tribe, are going to have the gigantic advantage of our collective capability on their side.
As "surplus elites" go, there's no-one to match us once we get started!
The Boomers and older Gen Xers running Hollywood writing rooms in Savage's piece won't be there forever. Meanwhile, Netflix is buying Warners and the movie business may not support the local cinema. Change is around the corner and who knows what it looks like. It's not a solution for the dispossessed white man seeking career advancement and satisfaction today or tomorrow, but the system that ignored them is unsustainable.
I see a similar dysfunctional business model in the Magisterium playing out. The Boomer cardinals (and Francis during his pontificate) have certain goals for the Church that will be washed away when the younger, more trad priests take their place in the hierarchy. It's a matter of time.
Great article. Only thing I’d add is the woke argument was essentially a consequentialist one that being “to create an omelet (John Lennons Imagine of racial equity) you have to crack a few eggs (the careers of young white men) and to them it’s worth it. If we counter by simply playing the consequentialist game and saying hey discrimination isn’t worth it because it’s really mean to innocent white guys, we are still playing the game within their frame which is rigged from the start. This is inevitable when you accept consequentialism which flows naturally from materialism. Instead we need to reject the premises and rediscover the classical theist tradition (not just muh Bible told me so but actual natural law) and then virtue ethics and true justice will follow. This will allow us to say there will always be winners and losers (contra equity) but the winners have duties due to their status (contra equality of opportunity is the most important Jordan Peterson types). We should be looking to the parable of the talents as our model
In the small village, hope in the transcendent can held onto. The village always carries within it possibility, that it can sustain, that one day it will become more. This is possible because of the bonds between people. In a way, the inhabitants of the village may be closer to the world of the material, but the strength of his material connection ( to the world and his small tribe) makes more room for transcendental abstraction. Perhaps ironically, or conversely, a modern atomized individual, living in a mega city, is less connected to the material (to his people, or his world, he doesn't even know where his food comes from), but he lives more in a world of abstractions. His transcendental "slot" is full. Religion is meaningful and purposeful, but really, the village, the connection to the material comes first. You have to offer young men a conception, or path to material success, or connection. They are , after all, ( through no fault of their own) mostly materialist in their outlook. Build the villages sure, but if you want to know how to get young men into villages, wives. With a plot of land and wives they can begin to hope for a better future.
While your take on Jacob's article and the experiences of the younger generations is spot on, and I have great sympathy, the tribalizing of the generations (you have Xillenial as your identity?) makes me cringe every time I read articles like this. It's a distraction. These are ideological battles that all generations have been dealing with, with roots hundreds of years old. All generations have been attacked and poisoned ideologically in their own way, although they received different types of poison, depending on when God put us on this Earth. Read the lyrics to the Billy Joel song Allentown and it will give you a glimpse of what the white working man was dealing with in the good old days. He was attacked from two directions - first by taking his domestic jobs and sending them to foreign workers overseas (Boomers and X got the brunt of this, to use the generational tribal terms), causing the rust belt to rust. Then more recently a surge in taking the remaining domestic jobs and giving them to immigrants, women and minorities under the guise of DEI, with both of these situations having a long period of overlap, affecting everyone. The solution is for all of us, regardless of age, to step out of the progressive moral frame, assert our moral frame, and fight back. Tribalizing the generations and portraying them as competing and organized special interest groups causes unnecessary fragmentation for the one demographic (white men) that desperately needs some cohesion. The non-whites don't do this. I wish we could get past it, but fear we won't. The intergenerational dunking is just too much fun.
Fantastic article filled with incredible insight. I do wish you would include younger X and older millennials as somewhat generational compadres, as our experiences have considerable overlap, and our wisdom would be valuable to the Zs and Alphas emerging into these times of troubles.
I wish I knew the answer to how to address the challenges of modernity, though I fear there is no one size fits all approach..retreating from the empire to build something local seems the best course of action from what I can tell.
That said, as you observed in this essay, it is a spiritual problem, so ultimately, a spiritual solution is called for. Retreating to local enclaves to rebuild step by step falls into that category, in my humble opinion (like the Benedictines after the fall of Rome).
At the end of the day, as things stand, I see two choices for the west: Christ…or Fight Club. And I fear we are on the path to Project Mayhem…and the longer this current regime endures, the more likely is that outcome. And that is something no person of good will should desire.
Obviously October 2023 is partly why the elite is willing to air this, perhaps as a shot over the bows of activists warning them what will happen if they don't back off the elites' protected group.
Could it also be the case that the elite is worried about the crisis in competence that DIE has engendered? After all, who wants to go down in an aircraft piloted by a DIE hire?
“The purpose of any discourse in our post-discourse age is less to make an argument than to provide insight that points the way forward and inspires a sense of agency in an otherwise demoralized generation of young people.”
As a Zoomer this sentence resonates and shows the ugly future that lies ahead. There is no discourse, no “Conversation” to be had with your enemies; the frontlines are clear, the opposing groups demarcated. Every argument being made by our side will now be judged by its constructive qualities, every sober analysis of our modern troubles must - to some extent - simultaneously include a battle plan. It seems that the only audience left to be addressed will be those that we in German would call “koalitionsfähig”, able to form coalitions with. To identify these individuals varies from polity to polity. In Europe nations traditionally defined themselves through a blood and soil lense; it will be interesting to see how you Americans across the pond will resolve that question (will it be white - whatever that means, will it be Anglo-Saxon focused, will it be Christian etc.)
Arguments that don’t appeal to the potential in-group will be noise that at best can distract and at worst will disperse the coalition.
Thanks for the great read!
Meh. I said this very early on, quite literally within the first few comments on Jacob’s article in fact, but I don’t care for the desire to reframe this as “older white men” or “class conflict”. How much skepticism of female and minority enfranchisement is implied by these statements? In my opinion very little. We should call a spade a spade, this is just what “diverse” society looks like and the anti-meritocratic disenfranchisement of white males can be blamed far more on organic “class consciousness” amongst racial minorities and women and their own exercise of power than it can old white male puppetmasters who are still somehow defying all the rules against racist old white men. Though invariably I expect this WILL be the most popular framing for the time being, as society grapples with just how badly it dun fucked up in the last decade and a half.
I suppose the question is what framing advances the collective interest of young white men most effectively. We need liberal white men to defect. They need a narrative that provides the possibility. We also need the transition of power from older white men to younger white men because minorities and women will run organizations into the ground and evaporate that precious functionality. While the incompetence and malice that degrades our society is the result of empowering women and minorities, what we need is to provide a new power center that functions and can live unmolested. So far, attacking minorities and particularly women does not seem to work, and if we can transition even some of the existing boomer-dominated power structure to ourselves, that is better than none.
And believe me, I'm quite aware that the stupid and the neurotic are ultimately to blame for all dysfunction, but until they can somehow be excised from society through whatever deus ex machina, we must work around them.
Who funds Compact?
(Look it up yourself, people; Dave already knows, of course).
And why do Jews (Savage, in this case) always seem to be in charge of the discourse?
What’s going on here?
Powerful groups are powerful. News at 11.
Such a casual dismissal doesn’t work anymore. You know this already, too. Which further proves that you’re just a vessel of containment like so many other ‘dissident’ commentators. The bunch of you are so tiresome and weak.
Dude. I am not stopping you from doing anything.
What you fail to understand is that I am doing something. You just don’t recognise it yet.
Godspeed then.
A related problem is that a people without a home have no future. It seems most right-wing substackers had predominantly liberal upbringings. I certainly did, to an extreme degree. We are therefore culturally liberal, regardless of our political and religious beliefs. There's no escaping it. Our liberal upbringings are permanently imprinted on our personalities, mannerisms, and speech patterns. Born and raised church-going, gun-toting right-wingers can spot us from a mile away.
I once made a go of integrating myself into small and then mid-size conservative towns, and I can't say the project was a success, though I was considerably less conservative then than I am now. Regardless of how much I generally agree with their politics, there's a substantial cultural chasm between me and your average rural salt of the earth right-winger. I see these people as generally political allies, but they are simply not my tribe. So there is no physical space, no town, no city for left-to-rightists to congregate en masse and build IRL communities, in the way that the libtards have their cities and the rednecks (sorry, it's just the best descriptor for the point I'm trying to make here) have their small towns. We only have these virtual spaces where we can congregate around shared belief systems. So we inevitably end up atomized and "very online."
Certainly your Redwood Society project is a step in the right direction. I guess what I'm saying is we need a lot more of that kind of thing.
Fantastic essay - I wonder what do you think about the future of 'universalist' ideas. Obviously actual religions like Christianity will continue but is there a future for emotions like Universalism? It seems so ingrained in western thought as to be impossible to imagine it disappearing forever.
See my recent essay on this - https://creativespecies.substack.com/p/the-closed-and-the-open-society
One effective option for the stoic was to, ah "Blutarsky that [expletive deleted]": agree and amplify.
Game theory, while off limits for a Christian man to employ against women for sexual access, may be justly used to oppose Longhouse Women.
Recruiting women as stalking horses to the cause is critical. We were always meant to be a team, after all. Positioning oneself as one who could somehow part of the victim substack works for both sexes: blutarsky-ing Allyship before the word was invented. I know one partner in resistance who played off as gay for a year until he consolidated his place.
We derailed the push for land acknowledgements, helped derail "hate speech is not free speech", and white supremacy / restitution successfully in our institution until the Covid panic, lockdowns, and Floyd psyops.
Had only modest success in keeping my corner clean of active LGBTQ+ activism. That was the hardest one since fornication, adultery and free love are baked into the assumptions. The sex-vices seem to be the ones men will throw over civilization for:
"On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death"
Though, I got dirty grey in the process. I'm too old for that game now.