2020 Year in Review: Wandering Above the Abyssal Fog

Now I’m going to warn you right off the bat, this is going to be a “silver lining on a dark cloud” kind of post. Normally I make a concerted effort to focus on the positive, because my innate disposition is to do the opposite: to identify all the problems that are likely to come up if we don’t do something about them. Past experience has taught me that focusing on the negative is unwise because a) it upsets most people, and b) the bulk of people whom it doesn’t upset are the sort of Negative Nellies who like to wallow in misery and bring everyone else down. Come to think of it, this is why mechanics in the airplane industries have safety checklists – the inability of most people to apply depressive realism where appropriate, while maintaining the gumption to fight past overwhelming odds (I personally speculate that most professional gamblers and day traders score high on the “Depression” metric of Neuroticism in the Big Five – otherwise they’d lose all their money through monkey optimism).

So with that warning out of the way, let’s dive in.

The Culmination of Decoherence

2020 ought to stand out as a hallmark year where everything shifted. Lockdowns, facemasks, Karens, riots, even Christmas and New Year’s Eve cancelled – what happened to the world of 2019 when things were relatively normal? But when I look back it doesn’t really stand apart. Sure, a number of significant events took place this year – it’s like remembering where you were during 9/11, except four or five of them all crammed together – but in my mind, this is just part of the unravelling that started in late 2015.

Let’s go back to 2012, and Obama’s second term. Back then we had all these nascent movements developing (reminiscent of the 1930s, when you had not just the Brown Shirts and the Red Shirts that people learn about today, but the Green Shirts, and the Black Shirts, and multiple other ideological movements which arose, attempting to address the economic collapse of 1929; the Commies and Nazis were just the ones who rose to national dominance). We had the manosphere, the libertarians the neoreactionaries, the paelocons, the ethno-nationalists, the religious traditionalists – all these groups who, despite their diversity of background (all of them infected with and guilty of modernism to some degree) were nonetheless looking at the great social experiment which was underway and seeing its inevitable disaster. Marriages falling apart, forced diversity tearing apart communities, birth rates plummeting as abortions increased, multinationals undermining national sovereignty, the destruction of industry, the erosion of political freedoms, the abandonment of political narrative – on and on. The experiment was spiralling out of control.

I mark 2012 as the significant year because this was when – at least for me – it became clear that the political system was fundamentally broken. Bush had been a disaster, passing the PATRIOT Act and starting multiple land wars in Asia. Barrack Obama – despite being a terrible Democrat of questionable parentage – at least during his first term offered an inspirational message, a new society that would care for the individual, not the corporation, and an end to racial grievances and divisions in America. By the end of his first term it was pretty clear that he was just another Bush, and yet he won the re-election.

It was during this time that the various groups coalesced into the Alternative Right. All of them were saying “We need to get our feet back onto the ground, political experiments are running away with us, and the GOP is an utter failure!” – and 2020 proves them all right. Eventually this culminated in the election of Donald Trump – a populist former-democrat, who said he’d bring industry, secure borders, an end to corruption, and prosperity back to America – and this was when the alliance fell apart.

Charlottesville was the beginning of the end; 2020 was where it flat lined.

Monkey See, Monkey Do: Emulating Movie Characters

Back in February of 2018 there was an interesting post which showed up on /pol/. In it the OP claimed that his company had been hired by the CIA to do research on evolutionary neural-processing in mammals, as part of the MKUltra program, or one of its child programs. What they concluded was that “Monkey see, monkey do,” wasn’t just a cute aphorism, it’s a fundamental circuit the mammalian brain (and if you believe Jordan Peterson, it’s rooted as far back as the lobster brain). What it boils down to is that life is so incredibly complex that making a rational analysis of risk factors is essentially impossible. What we do as a social species is watch one another to see what sort of behaviours our fellow humans get up to. When we see somebody who’s at the top of the pack – the Alpha Male, or the Hero in a story – we instinctively start to mimic their behaviours. After all, if they’re at the top of the pack they must be doing something right.

The problem which crops up is two-fold. The first part of the problem is that we don’t know which behaviour to emulate. Is it their ambition? Their sense of humour? Their hairstyle? Their wit? Trying to figure out which behaviour is the important one brings you back to square one – trying to manufacture a rational analysis of reality fast enough and accurate enough that you can implement it before circumstances shift. So – instead of emulating the one behaviour which is actually successful, we emulate all of them, even their funny walk and facial ticks. The Queen puts her fork on the left-hand side of her plate (because she’s left-handed), but hey, she’s the Queen, why don’t the rest of us start inverting our cutlery as well? Ironically enough this becomes a self-enforcing reality, so that eventually only uncivilized proles who are too stupid to understand fashion are putting their forks and knives where they’re easy to reach.

This first problem has led to the occasional peacock’s tail throughout history – the Tulip Bubble, women shaving their foreheads, bouts of religious iconoclasm, hair bands in the 80s – but on its own, this first problem is more of an annoyance than a civilizational threat.

The second problem is a new: the feedback loop of a media culture. The ‘Heroes’ of today’s culture are entirely manufactured, and yet we emulate them nonetheless.

Video: “Superheroes without special effects look super silly” and yet this is who you aspire to be.

Hollywood is nothing but smoke-and-mirrors. Nothing that we see is directly tied to reality – it’s fiction built upon fiction built upon fiction, and yet our monkey brains attempt to emulate it. Tony Stark is a super-genius playboy who castrates himself to prove that he’s a real man. Neo becomes The One through his inability to show up to work on time. Hip Hop artists are financially successful because they throw their money in the air at clubs. Your brain might be able to figure out that holograms and Terminators are fictional (though given the number conspiracy theories running rampant these days, even that is questionable) but it’s not able to separate the behavioral quirks of the main character from their apparent place at the top of the social hierarchy. If Movie Hero mouths off the cops, chances are that you’re going to do the same.

I doubt you’ll have the same results, however.

Now many of you are probably asking – what do I think of this poster on /pol/? Was he legit? Is the CIA still researching MKUltra and using Hollywood to reprogram the population? My personal opinion is: probably not. I think he was larping – wrapping up a cold, hard fact about neurobiology in a Cloak and Dagger narrative, so that we’d all remember it. But his point remains valid. Whether or not the CIA was involved, or if this is just an accidental feedback loop created by the nature of movies themselves, the result is the same. We’re mimicking the behaviour patterns of fake people designed to titillate us, rather than actual people who are worth emulating.

It’s the equivalent of taking diet advice from a candy bar company.

Find the Villain, and Signal your Virtue

In the same way that food is meant to nourish, narrative is meant to explain living. So even the worst narrative will have some truth in it, just as even the worst junk food will stop you from starving. But it’s not going to give you everything that you need.

A core part of the Hero’s Journey is the confrontation with, and resurrection of the father. The Hero goes to the underworld, the place that evil lives – the dead structures of the patriarchy left to him by his ancestors. There he confronts villainy, but also finds the villain within himself. Through this dark self-knowledge he’s able to create the Elixir, and bring it back to civilization, no longer an innocent youth full of piss and vinegar, but a mature man who knows that the cycle never ends. The young and naïve adventurer from the beginning becomes the wise old sage for the next iteration of the cycle.

This is a painful realization – that the evil which you confront in the world exists within you as well, and that the real victory is not the conquering of external foes, but the conquering of the self – but it’s the true narrative.

Do you think teenagers want to hear this?

Modern movies remove the redemption arc. No longer is Darth Vader a character whom Luke must redeem to redeem himself – instead the villain is irredeemable, and the hero is incorruptible. There is nothing but righteousness in lashing out at the patriarchy, and instead of revivifying the old order, the heroes establish a new reality based upon rule-free friendship. They’re a motley crew with no standards of behaviour, but their friendship is all that matters.

I challenge you to find a popular modern film which doesn’t embrace this candy-coated narrative.

I think a personal story is the best way to illustrate how this childish demonization destroyed “the movement” before it began. Back in 2015 I was caught between two major sub-groups in the Alternative Right. On the one side, you had the urban, educated, and wealthy PUA/manosphere. On the other you had the working class, rural, and Christian good ole’ boys of the nationalist circles. Both groups supported the same policies, they wanted to see the same outcomes, but bad blood was developing between them.

The flashpoint for all of this was Roosh V. Now I understand that he’s a controversial figure, and I’m certainly not saying that you need to agree with everything he says (I sure as hell don’t), but what initiated this conflict was something wholly idiotic.

This was around the time when the police cover-up of Asian (Arab) grooming in Great Britain was becoming widely known. The nationalist circles did the arithmetic and concluded that 1. Arabs are raping our women, and 2. Roosh is Arab, and 3. Roosh wrote books on how to get girls into bed, and 4. Roosh mostly did this in Western countries, ergo 5. Roosh is exactly the same as a grooming gang raping underage girls. “Us good, them bad!” I made the mistake of trying to explain this to a friend who was a prominent blogger at the time. He’d spent 20 minutes ranting at me about how Roosh was a dindu rapist. When I said, “Okay, now you’re going to hear me speak…” he hung up the phone, and it was five minutes before I realized I was speaking to a dead line.

Incidentally, this scene was recreated in Star Wars: The Last Jedi when Poe Dameron mouths off General Hux, because that’s what an Alpha Male does, according to Hollywood. I’m pretty sure nothing like this ever happened with General Patton.

I’ve got no interest in defending Roosh – he can defend himself. But when two groups who are pursuing the same goals are utterly incapable of coordinating because the movies taught them to be snarky idiots… stick a fork in her, she’s done.

Of course, this problem of snarky, self-righteous movie heroes isn’t unique to the right; the left is just as bad. A popular meme going around is that it’s sexist to not sleep with trans girls – as if sexual preference is arrived at out of a desire for villainy. And the internecine fighting on the left between – well, between everyone – is no different than that on the right. The difference in 2012 was that the left had been harnessed by the narrative structures of democrat organizations (which are equally as fake as Hollywood – Barrack Obama was just as fictitious as Captain Planet, it’s nothing but makeup, special effects, and curated soundbites) – the important thing about 2015 was that this was the year when somebody figured out how to harness the right.

It culminated in the election of Donald Trump, and the day after his inauguration the right began to tear itself apart.

Identity Politics is a Race to the Bottom

Since the election of Donald Trump, we’ve seen splintering on both sides of the political divide. People who are desperate to hold on to their Hollywood theory of villainy as an absolute statement discover that such things are fundamentally myopic. What was once Christians vs Feminists, becomes Catholics vs Protestants, and TERFs vs Trans. Then we get Novus Ordo vs Trad, and eventually Trad vs Trad. This is the inevitable fate of identity politics, because it incorrectly assigns a monolithic identity to groups when all groups are fuzzy at the edges. To quote Peterson, what Western Civilization realized was that the foundational group identity which needs to be respected above all else is the individual.

Let’s explore this mathematically for a second. Let’s suppose that meaningful categories all have 7 major groups within them. 7 religions, 7 races, 7 sexualities, 7 continents, what have you. That will do well enough for bar-napkin math. How many intersections of these groups do we need before we exceed the population of Earth?7¹ = 7

7² = 77
7³ = 539
7⁴ = 41,503
7⁵ = 3,195,731
7⁶ = 246,071,287
7⁷ = 18,947,489,099

In other words, if you were to only classify people by religion, race, sexuality, continent, income bracket, education level, and physical health, you’d wind up with more categories than you have people on the planet. And those categories are far too basic, they’re wholly insufficient for defining somebody as a person. Turns out you can be unique in a planet of 7 billion.

This respect for the individual cuts both ways. Something you respect is also something you fear – it’s not about putting the individual on a pedestal, it’s about pointing out that individuals are dangerous when they get out of line!

The enemy is not them – the enemy is us!

Who are You without your Story?

If there’s one thing that 2020 has proven, it’s that cogito ergo sum is a load of crap. The human condition is to remain tethered between pain and meaning, and if we’re very careful we can reach down and sometimes touch something that feels like an objective, causal reality, though nobody really knows. But admitting this is frightening. It’s better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven; and as awful as it is to be enslaved by tyranny, being adrift above the infinite abyss is even worse.

In 2020 identity politics hit their foom point of infinite regress so we had to invent a new enemy: an invisible, largely non-existent virus. The monoliths shattered, leaving your average individual clinging to the bars of their old cage, trying to hold them together as they sank below the surface. The virus is caused by Globalism. The virus is caused by Racism. The virus is caused by Churches. The virus is caused by Disobedience to God.

The cage is caused by fear.

2020 ripped our identity away from us – it stole our stories. Our jobs, or political vendettas, our hopes for the future, all of it was thrown into the abyssal sea. And it turns out that we don’t have an identity without a story – pain of failure, and hope for success. Without it we are a psychotic ball of nothing. The enlightenment was wrong.

The question becomes whether you are the author of your own story, or a character in somebody else’s. What will you do if Daddy Trump doesn’t save the Union? What if Christ doesn’t make his Second Coming? What if UN_Women doesn’t fulfil their promise of a PhD in every vagina? Whose story will you join then?

Will you be able to wake up, and put together the pieces of a true narrative authored by yourself, created by God? Or will you cling to the shattered pieces of ideological constructs, wailing and gnashing your teeth as you sink into hell?

I’ve lost a lot of friends over the past – well, the past several years. They wanted the comfort of being characters in somebody else’s story, even if that story was a tragedy – because hey, at least it was something. As for myself, I’ve been ripping off the pieces of that one-size-fits-all narrative, and exposing the soft, red skin to the bracing, icy air. It’s been painful – I’ve had my own bouts of insanity – but I didn’t balk when the abyss stared into me. I stared back into it. And it blinked!

A lot of people noted, especially during the first half of 2020, that the false left-right divide was crumbling, only to have the status quo snap it back into another left-right narrative. I believe there were two things going on here. The first, as I noted above, was the splintering of identity politics into decoherence – initially nobody was able to figure out whether shutting down the border was a right-wing or a left-wing position, and the waffling by politicians was rather amusing in retrospect. The second reason the left-right divide has been falling apart is because people like me – and, I hope, you – were seeing the whole damned thing for the poorly-crafted cage it always was. Most people have devolved to neurotic zombies, but every once in a while – when I’m out in the wild – in the distance I see another person.

This, then, is the silver lining I promised you: some of us are waking up from the nightmare. Most of us aren’t – most people are tying their bonds even tighter and throwing away the key – but some of us are accepting freedom.

As the old saying goes, when the tide goes out, you find out who’s not wearing pants. And when the societal narrative collapses, you find out who’s living heroically, and who’s clinging to scraps and figments created by Hollywood. People you’ve known your whole life – it turns out that they were just playing out a role. They were only your friend because they shared an externally constructed narrative reality with you, and now that the narrative’s gone, they hate you. It’s painful. But at least now we’re able to separate the wheat from the chaff, those who are climbing towards the peak – and those who are wandering around in circles.

2021 is going to be a challenging year on all fronts. But if you lean into the challenge – if you find the worst part of it, and go there – that’s where you’ll find your grail.

Or at least, that’s what all the old stories say.

Maybe we’re all just tilting at windmills. But if we are, we might as well make it a valorous fight. God bless, and best of luck with 2021. I’ll see you all on the other side.