The Weight

Conservation in the face of Conservatism's Futility

Casandra in “Zombie World”

From Nick Land on down, the symbolism of the “Zombie Apocalypse” looms large in dissident thought. The genre is a staple of Millennial and Gen-X culture. But sometimes I wonder if we have sufficiently examined the deeper political lessons found in the stories of desperate humans battling unending flesh-eating hordes.

For those less familiar, “Zombie Apocalypse” is a sub-genre of disaster movies, where humanity is confronted with a viral infection that transforms ordinary humans into soulless, witless, brain-eating monsters. Important in these films is the characterization of the “Z-virus" ("Zombie Virus") which can infect any human, who, once infected, loses all desire for self-preservation and purpose beyond spreading the zombie infection to other people. Unsurprisingly, the threat of the Zombies is in their numbers, which, due to the infection’s viral nature, grow exponentially. Subsequently, in films depicting such an outbreak, the human population of Earth is divided into three political camps.

1. “The Zombies” who are interested only in devouring flesh and spreading zombie-ism to others

2. “The Resistors” who are the people aware of the Zombie menace and who want to preserve the human race.

3. “The Skeptics” who are the leaders denying the existence of the "Zombie" oubreak and want to operate within the priorities of the pre-zombie status quo.

The political dynamic in these films plays out predictably. Our heroes, the resisters, must survive the initial outbreak, then after, convince the outside world, ruled by skeptics, that desperate action is needed to confront the outbreak before it consumes the world. Initially, this creates a rather frustrating political dialectic, with the skeptics impeding the necessary action to forestall a disaster that they don’t fully understand, in the name of a status-quo that can’t survive what’s coming.

I say “initial”, because there is often a distinct inflection point in the plot of Zombie films, that I call “the turn”, where the Zombie infection reaches critical mass, and breaks through all defenses humanity might muster. Before “the turn” Earth is largely a human place trying to contain a Zombie outbreak. After “the turn” Earth is a "Zombie World" with tiny cells of humans trying to overthrow, or outlast, its dominant zombie population.

As one might guess, after the turn, there are no non-insane skeptics. What humans remain are resistors. And any dialectic that persists among them is distinctly less political and more religious, with the survivors largely debating what moral principles are appropriate for the new more hostile world. Outside of moral contentions, and immediate concerns, most of the remaining human survivors are left trying to make sense of their lives in the “before times".

Was it all a pantomime and meaningless trivia? Was there something they could have done, or should have done before everything went to shit and they were left in a completely hand-to-mouth existence?

I find these post-hoc questions interesting because they are more complex than they would initially seem. For instance, what would someone do if transported back before the Apocalypse, to occupy the role of a Casandra. What could a person do differently knowing that "Zombie World" was inevitable?

Knowledge is power after, all, and before “the turn”, there is always the false hope that the Zombie outbreak might be turned back. No doubt without this futile pretense, our Casandra would be a more effective resistor against the coming Zombie horrors. But how exactly?

Perhaps she should refuse to lobby a doomed and disinterested government and instead go full survivalist mode? Tempting. But hard to justify rationally.

The problem is that, in a pre-"turn" world, the government is still the government, and any action it takes, however small, will overwhelm any one citizen's private effort.

Ok, Mr. President, maybe you think that all this mumbo jumbo about a zombie-virus is humbug, but if I can get you to approve a two million dollar outlay to explore this “Zombie Contingency” plan (maybe we can call it a training exercise?), I will have done more for the future of humanity than 10 years spent building my compound in Montana.

Under these circumstances, why not try to grab the bags when you can? It will involve a lot of conservative brown-nosing, but is it not worth it?

Perhaps our Casandra should stop trying to save her neighbors? You know, those blockheads who refuse to see the apocalypse even as masses of walking dead surround their house. Aren't there better things to do?

Maybe, but not so fast. The neighbors are idiots. But every local idiot that our Casandra doesn’t save is one more mindless body gunning for her brain in Zombie World, one fewer local ally with which she shares a pre-existing relationship beyond just being human.

So doesn't it kind of make sense to save them, despite their obstinacy?

There is irony here. Despite her foreknowledge of the impending disaster, our Casandra is trapped in a mode of conservatism despite conservatism’s manifest futility. She must attempt to save who she can with the full knowledge that most of her efforts will fail, she has to plea for scraps from a government she knows is doomed, and fight for a micro-cosmic order, even though the macro-cosmic order slides into oblivion around her.

And this is going to require a lot of ridiculous conversations. Remember, no one else can see the emergence of “Zombie World” on the horizon, and therefore their minds will be the mode of the status quo, right up to the very end. A realization that will come slowly through the stages of grief.

First denial: Zombies really? How silly? How could that even be possible in the modern world?

Then Anger: This is someone else’s fault! China? The republicans? Those damn corporations? We need to lobby for justice!

Then bargaining: Certainly, if the zombie problem gets really bad. An immune response will kick in! The higher-ups will get involved! The government will get out their big guns! Maybe we will even benefit from this state of affairs.

Then, finally, nihilistic despair: The Zombie outbreak is unstoppable so what's even the point of surviving, we might as well just eat drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!

During this terminal stage, our Casandra will have to hear explanations about “the future being inevitable” (which she knows) being put forward as a reason to NOT prepare for its eventuality.

But this is all to be expected. Whether it is denial, anger, bargaining, or despair, these are seductive lines of thought, even to someone who knows they are false. Each is a reason to slide back into the comforting mode of learned helplessness. They are objections against difficult action itself.

But the objections are meaningless when looked at soberly. The turn towards “Zombie World” is coming whether you accept it or not. None of your modern comforts or privileges are going to make it through the eye of the needle, and even if you decide to nobly "go down with the ship" your sacrifice is anything but noble since your death will fuel the fire that the remaining survivors will have to fight.

Because, inevitably the weight of the world will bear down on those who remain and their ability to rely on the safeguards of civilization will evaporate.

A different tragic dimension to the Zombie horror film.

The Tragic Tale of Shakshuka-Girl

I know that I am not the only one, feeling like we are suck in a state of preliminary apocalypse. So many unavoidable problems metastasizing in front of our eyes, with cascading consequences stretching into the future. Out-of-control immigration, decaying infrastructure, birth rate collapse, economic instability, and decaying government competence.

Each impending apocalypse is built by human hands, and preventable as such. But no solution will be countenanced by the government, entertained in public discourse, or even seriously talked about.

Among these looming disasters, the one most prominent in my own mind is the modern dynamic between the sexes: declining marriage and family formation, gender ideology, trans-children, pornography, incels, social isolation and general loneliness. In political discourse, these appear as distinct issues in our ongoing culture war. But at heart, these problems comprise a single process where systems designed to produce married families invested in the new generation are replaced by systems that produce broken embittered individuals invested in politically supporting the regime. 

Many people miss the critical importance of the “sex issues” when it comes to the broader political conflict of our time. It is not just one issue among many. Lefties don’t just prefer sexual libertinism. They are produced by it and produce it in turn. It is a critical piece of the progressive life cycle, a machine with no off-ramp.

For three generations America has fed its children into the maw of this machine, and out the other end has poured narcissistic adults divested in the survival of their own society and gene-line, looking for someone else to blame. The men and women of the new sexual ethic are the perfect clients of the managerial state and ideal hosts of the progressive mind-virus. After all, what would be better revenge on the world than spreading the lifestyle that made your own existence a chaotic mess? Misery does love company.

In this way, the post-revolution sexual dynamic is a perfect candidate for our age’s own Z-virus, an endless source of new mindless regime zombies with little care for self-preservation beyond the destruction of their enemies. This phenomenon needs to be arrested at all levels, because nothing lasting can begin in a space where men and women are waging a brutal political war against each other, not unless you want to breed grievances instead of children.

I have been discussing this issue for the last 7 years, with anyone who will listen. In truth, I find the conversation fascinating because it is so simple. We know what the problem is, and there is only one realistic solution. The sexual revolution was a failure and to survive, we must return to a more monogamous, more family-focused social order.

Still, people resist. The observation sounds simplistic, backwards-looking, and quaint. But there are many more scoff than there are viable arguments against it.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle!

Things like that just aren't going to work for modern people!

Don't we have any different ideas?

It's obvious people want "new ideas" to fix the crisis in dating and mating. The thing is there aren't any. We have been at this project for almost 60 years, and we've tried it all. How long before we can admit that there is no better solution than restraint and monogamy? There are a few select ways that human males and females have evolved to raise high-investment offspring together. And the universe doesn't owe us some innovative new idea where we can eat our sexual libertine cake and have our virgin waifu on the side.

Does that mean we must "RETVN" to Ozzie and Harriet? Not exactly. But the future of human civilization, if it has one, is going to look a lot more like Ozzie and Harriet than any crackpot idea you hear from Feminists, pagans, MGTOW, or the Nietzschean right-wing.

These conclusions have been blindingly obvious for a decade, along with their implied prescriptions. We need to start developing more sustainable attitudes towards sex and family formation. But no one wants to follow through. Sex sells, restraint doesn't. So even people who know the system is broken will jump in loops to to avoid the obvious implications. And so, instead of doing what needs to be done, we return to the same "War Between the Sexes" that has been a national pass time for the last half-century.

It's men's fault! It's women's fault! It’s society’s fault!

We all know the routine.

After all, in a broken system there is never a shortage of bad actors. Everyone has been done dirty at one point by a counterparty who should have known better. And in the light of these "lived experiences" it's not hard to convince yourself that the other gender is to blame.

But it takes two to tango, two to "defect" in the gender version of "The Prisoners Dilemma" that we have played out across the 20th century. The cooperative equilibrium between men and women is broken, and pointing a finger doesn't provide a real solution to our problems.

Recently, one of these flare-ups in the sex-wars illustrated its characteristic futility. Appearing as a TikTok video reaction on Matt Walsh's Twitter. Soon, a broader discussion began surrounding the perennial issue of unmarried women, what are sometimes called a "femcels".

Though, for context, I should probably let the original TikTok video tell its own story.

@pmdpodGiving birth to a shakshuka today. #singleinyour30s #livingalonevlog #childlessbychoice #childlessmillennial

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Now, what to say about this clip?

On one hand, it covers all the greatest hits of AWFL femcel life: the narcissistic cope, the self-congratulation, the implicit insecurity and defensiveness. Who needs a husband or a fulfilling family life when you can organize your weekends around binge-drinking, pop-culture, watching marathon reality TV shows about housewives, and cooking exotic cuisine, usually reserved for family events. I am already salivating over that Shakshuka!

It's hard not to feel the implicit sadness in the life of a woman triumphantly proclaiming the joys of a life without love or family as she organizes her day around imbibing its facsimiles through pop-culture. But it's import to understand this clip is not singular. Instead this TikTok video is part of a larger genre of feminists on social media affirming their own bad decisions in distinctly political ways.

Is this healthy? Almost certainly not.

Pre-1960s, any normal community would have stigmatized these opinions for promoting selfishness and perpetual adolescence. Nevertheless, post-2020, the video's triumphant anti-natalism is a genre in itself, preached not by rebels, but by a typically conflict-averse population newly embittered and ascendant: middle-aged single women.

And, as those who have experienced modern urban politics know, the rise of organized, politicized, and unhappy middle-aged single women is indeed a grim portent. For hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, even one scorned by her own choices. And a new generation of spinster millennials will bury what remains of the West in back-biting, recriminations, and bad policy choices. Forget the “Zombie Apocalypse”, if we don't solve our femcel problem, civilization itself will be drowned in a sea of tears and unconsumed Shakshuka.

Really, I thought the right understood the need for solutions to this problem, if not for society generally, than for our own communities which, believe it or not, still need healthy and happy women. But for some reason the Shakshuka-girl tore the putative right to pieces.

After the initial disapprobation against Shakshuka girl, the right-side of Twitter descended into rank red-pill rage against women generally with seemingly no bottom. 

This is how women ruin civilization!

This is the true nature of the modern female! Nothing but narcissism and entitlement!

If this is what young men, have to deal with, do you blame then for being incels? It's not fair!

Subsequently, a backlash was quick to follow from the more "post-left" female side of the sphere.

Is it right to blame women for the sorry state of sexual culture?

Aren’t we turning a blind eye to pernicious male behavior? Isn’t the real problem educating young men?

Shouldn't we examine broader systematic explanations? Is this really fair?

Again. Fair? I can't even believe people are still thinking like this in 2023.

First, I have some questions for the red-pillers, looking to spike their football on "The Woman Question". What is the actual point of complaining loudly about women or explaining to the world "how hard it is to be a man"? Did we all miss the last 10 years and the failure of the “Men’s Rights” movement? What do you think this is going to accomplish? Or are you just here to "enjoy the decline" of our civilization, presumably by sperging out online? And if you are taking the high road to build responsible solutions, how is this advanced by joining an online dogpile?

Likewise, I might ask what to make of the post-feminist backlash. It has been obvious, for a while, that this group has wanted to draw a bright line between themselves and the hard right by making a villain out of Matt Walsh. However, Are we really supposed to believe that the religious conservatives only hold one sex accountable? Is this even what Matt Walsh does? Are the right-wingers who complain about female misbehavior really the late-comers to this battle, only now looking to advance a shadow sexist agenda under the noses of the ever-vigilant feminists? Remind me again who saw where these emancipatory sexual attitudes were going when they came on the scene 60 years ago?

It seems like both sides are talking around the essential point, even when these complaints are technically correct.

Take for instance Mary Harringtons's recent article “Against Matt Walshism", where the author attempts to refocus the debate on women to its systematic root causes in economics and technology.

Ok, I agree, the system is the problem. It's true, historically. The sexual revolution had a technological origin, as well as managerial enablers. Birth control changed the game, and pathological relations between the sexes were encouraged by a managerial bureaucracy that benefited from broken families and women entering the workplace en masse.

But then how useful is this origin story of the sexual revolution for those of us who are trying to survive its grim reality? This information does about as much for us as “Zombie World” survivalists learning that the Z-virus was created in a government funded lab, rather than through cross-species transfer from a zombie pangolin purchased at an undead wet market. 

Nice to know I guess. But not very useful. 

Because even if the point of origin had some active role in perpetuating the crisis, under present circumstances "shutting the process down" is out of the question. The facility is now surrounded by rank after rank of post-sexual-revolution zombies who aren't about to let your small political movement waltz in and "turn the clock back" on their gloriously emancipatory zombie revolution.

The only way we get the kind of "systematic change" Mary Harrington talks about, is either in the total democratic political ascendancy of scary right-wingers like Matt Walsh, or in the emergence of a radically non-democratic sovereign who can completely destroy our liberal secular government and religion, root and branch. Are either of these situations acceptable to Harrington? Because no one who believes in the spiritual necessity of individual emancipation is ever going to turn the spigot off on the economic and social conditions that permit our modern sexual free-for-all.

The Weight

I would expect that few people who constantly talk about the “systematic” origin of our modern problems have much stomach for what would be required to create a large systematic solution. And speaking practically, for people who would be more open to such radical change, we are still a generation away from something like this even being possible. And so, in most conceivable scenarios, we are stuck with the hard problem of getting through the bottleneck, dealing with fixing the problem in microcosm for the purpose of outlasting the modern age.

Perhaps, we could look at small progressive steps we could be taking to shelter in place, and make ourselves more immune to modernity’s ravages? Small solutions are achievable, and they actually do some manifest good.

To use our previous example, what is a potential, localized, solution to the femcel problem? What actually has worked? The best solution that I have heard yet is something like a more focused effort on getting women married and encouraging stable family situations, at least in the individual communities we occupy. Back in the day, we used to call this "arranged marriage, or post-1960 "setting people up".

Is this LARP? Depends on what you mean. It's definitely not ready to be implemented on a large scale, not least because power opposes it. However, there are small-scale successes. I know a few women who have privately endeavored to become match-makers with some moderate results. I met my own wife on a Catholic match-making site. And there even have been a few people who have met fiancés at our national conferences and at local basket-weaving events.

These are pretty small victories. But there is something here. How could you expand these modest accomplishments to a larger scale? There are barriers certainly, but do we really understand the parameters that are holding us back from further success? Could the obstacles be overcome or avoided? What would it take?

These are hard questions, but productive ones. Because we are slowly trouble-shooting the obstacles that hold people back from building more robust communities.

But trouble-shooting doesn't fit into the internet model of clout generation. It's too messy and uncertain. It relies on feedback from real-life experience and hence, can't really cause drama or go viral. And it's not hard to disrupt this productive but boring discourse, even under the guise of being more serious, more intellectual, or more radically right-wing. For instance, one might encounter the following objections.

Do these reformist ideas "SOLVE the problem"? No? Then that's just futile wank!

This sounds like the same conservative moralizing! We all know conservatism is not going to save the overall system!

We need a larger discussion of how to solve the problem once and for all!

Fair points. But what should we be talking about in place of these smaller solutions? The general theory of decline is always popular. Not least because it allows people to intellectualize the question of historical blame. Complaints about managerialism can easily segway into complaints about the Ford Foundation, into more lurid complaints about the kind of people who run the Ford Foundation. It leads to some pretty funny hashtags on Twitter, but, short of billionaires taking independent legal action, I am not sure what it accomplishes.

And if all of that's too theoretical, there is always the neo-Nietzschean story about how we can fix the post-sexual revolution degeneracy by participating in it, just in a more "based" way. It's around this time in the conversation that Andrew Tate is wheeled out as an example of a "right-wing" success story. He's rich. He owns a harem. He pisses off feminists. Maybe he is the equivalent of a modern warlord? Perhaps he is a good example of how polygamy can solve our problems without appealing to cucked conservative platitudes that we all have heard a thousand times?

But these speculations are all transparently ridiculous.

None of the hard red-pill "polygamy" ideas remotely pass the laugh test once considered outside of memes on Twitter. You aren't a Viking warlord. You aren't even an ex-MMA pickup artist. And all of these modern calls to follow post-Christian sexual norms online just fuel the crisis that they ostensibly exist to stop. It's more than just trying to "enjoy the decline" and using modern degeneracy for your own selfish ends. The actions proposed actively hurt any attempt to survive the trials of modernity in the long run, creating more enemies, alienating friends, and making further moral statements seem futile, self-serving, and hypocritical.

The idea of becoming a degenerate to fight degeneracy would be roughly equivalent to trying to join the Zombies in the “Zombie Apocalypse” so you can be on the “winning side of things”. It doesn't matter how well you spread the Z-virus for your fellow zombies during the conflict, we all know whose brains they are going to be eating once the dust settles. And in the meantime, whatever human survivors remain aren't going to look at you as an ally.

But this is the state of the modern online right. It's tragic. We encounter an opportunity for the hard right and the post-left to think constructively about the future, and we exchange it for another opportunity to denounce each other.

I know people will say that this split was always coming, but in what plausible future scenario would these camps have interests that were not aligned? To me, it seems obvious that, in the long term, we will be fighting together anyway.

Here, I don't want to downplay the importance of determining allies and enemies in the culture war. Boundaries have to be laid down somewhere. It's a complicated question. So much so, that I recently wrote a rather lengthy post discussing the concerns in full.

However, I probably didn't spend enough time emphasizing the most important metric that I use to recognize friends who I can count on; the question of whether a person is actually interested in improving the conditions for communities where they live.

After all, that's what matters isn't it? Survival, both in body and in soul.

Is it too much to ask people to behave like they care about the goodness for which they advocate? I would like to think this minimally involves not commending behavior that manifestly makes our situation worse. Conscious self-sabotage betrays a lack of confidence and conviction.

This type of self-destructive behavior would include using drama to explode alliances and ruin friendships, creating liabilities and enemies where none existed before, and pouring gasoline on existing fires in the name of "accelerationism" or some misguided understanding of "fairness".

All of this is over-socialized LARP based on the infantile assurance that the world as it is will never change and politics is just a game inside that indestructible reality. But things are going to change, for the worse, rather quickly, and those who want to navigate the new reality are going to have to pick up the messes that we are making for ourselves today. As people say, you are either part of the solution or part of the problem, another body in the post-liberal Zombie apocalypse that’s cresting on our horizon. 

These days, I am often reminded of the classic folk-rock ballad, Robbie Robertson's "The Weight". In typical fashion for songs of the era, the cryptic lyrics tell the story of an unnamed narrator arriving in a town called Nazareth, desperately seeking salvation both physical and spiritual. Nevertheless, of the many people he encounters on the road into town, none offer the pilgrim help, and instead only unload their own unwanted responsibilities onto his shoulders. By the end of the song, the narrator is still struggling under the weight of his original burdens, as well as those of every person he met on the road to Nazareth.

The song makes more sense as a feeling than a story. But I wasn't surprised to learn later that Robertson took inspiration for the song's lyrics from the famous ex-Catholic surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel, who commonly explored themes of futility in his films, not least the ostensibly futile task of becoming a saint.

That is the nature of the sinful world, isn't it? The more you try to fix its problems, the more people load onto your back. I certainly hear a lot of people complaining about these types of situations in 2023. It isn’t easy to take responsibility for things anymore. But in many ways, it's the only worthwhile endeavor.

People don't like real work, hard conversations, real humility, and real reconciliation. But if we want actual solutions to our problems, as they exist, we have to be ready to pursue the hard things and undertake the heavy lifts that are in no way fun.

Does that mean becoming a saint? That's a difficult question. I fall well short of anything approaching sainthood. But I don't think there is any other option for people of our era, who find themselves in the role of Casandra, looking forward to a post-abundance post-liberal tyranny.

If we can't attempt to play the role of the saint, we must at least try to think more like one; to look towards securing what is good first, and to let what doesn't matter slide away.

"Sainthood" is a rather religious way of putting the problem. But we could alternatively view the process as a practical and necessary psychological accommodation to a changing world, a transition in perspective from fighting for political victories inside a thick civilizational order, to fighting for civilization itself under conditions of chaos.

This transition is the meaning of “the turn” in Zombie films, which we encounter now in our own civilizational crisis. We talk about things going to pot, but if you can’t see the reality of the world that comes after everything falls apart, you are still in the mode of “politics”, where claiming power is identical to having it, and shifting its requisite responsibility is a savvy move. And this center cannot long hold under the conditions we are observing daily.

Regardless of the fact that the larger battle is lost, we must press on with the smaller fight for what we find in front of us. Despite the fact that the weight is too heavy for any man to carry, we still have to lift what we can, because we care about the world and the souls in it, because we want something better, and because we understand that the old way of blaming others to preserve our pride just isn't going to work anymore.

Because what remains after the temporal order has passed, is a simple reality. The things we claim to possess are really meaningless, much less the burdens we can hand off to others. The only thing that really matters for the future, the only things we can truly call our own, is the weight we carry.