Identity Hunger
Handle has an excellent post up on this, referencing Nydwracu, who has made a momentous project out of it. It’s huge, and old, and quite impossible to summarize persuasively. It’s also impossible to avoid, especially for the Outer Right.
Steve Sailer told a joke that I’m going to mangle. A monstrous alien invasion assails the earth, and people have to decide how to respond. The conservatives say, “What’s there to think about? We have to get together to defeat this thing.” Liberals respond: “Wait! They probably have good reasons to hate us. It must be something we’ve done. Until we work out what that is, we should prostrate ourselves before their grievances.” Finally the libertarians pipe up: “Do they believe in free markets?”
An obvious quibble arises with the libertarian punch-line: if only. Libertarians have predominantly demonstrated an enthusiasm for alien invasion that is totally detached from any market-oriented qualification. As their argument goes — the alien invasion is the free market. (We’ll need to return to this, indirectly.)
The appetite for identity seems to be hard-wired in the approximate manner of language, or religion. You have to have one (or several) but instinct doesn’t provide it ready made. That’s why identity corresponds to a hunger. It’s something people need, instinctively, with an intensity that is difficult to exaggerate. Symbolically-satiable needs are political rocket fuel.
Providing an expedient plug for the aching identity socket is as close to politics-in-a-nutshell as anything is going to get. At the core of every ideology is a determination of the model identity — sect, class, race, gender, sexual-orientation … — and mass implementation of this ‘consciousness’ is already consummate triumph. After psychological latching onto the relevant ‘thede’ takes place, nothing except tactics remains.
Reaction seeks to defend the dying thedes among its own people — which is already a suggestive repetition. Neoreaction goes meta, in a world in which the proscription of certain thedes almost wholly defines concerted enemy action. For one reasonable construction of the reactionary mainstream (*ahem*), this is already to have arrived at a natural stopping point. We want our thedes back. Despite the evident obstacles, or obstacle (the Cathedral) in its path, this approach plays into the grain of human nature, and thus tends — understandably — to scare those it wants to scare. If it begins to work, it will face a serious fight.
Outside in, whose mission is awkwardness, is determined to complicate things. Even the most resolute thedens will probably welcome the first appendix, which draws attention to the peculiar introduction of truly morbid punitive identifications. There’s no reason to think this is new — Nietzsche denounced Christianity for doing it — but it rises to unmistakable prominence during the decadence of modernity. Primary identifications, for select — targeted — groups, cease to be positive thedes, except insofar as these have become radically negativized. What ‘one’ is, primarily, if not shielded by credible victimage, is some postmodern variant of the sinner (racist, cisgendered, oppressor). Such is the hunger for identity, that even these toxic formations of imposed psychic auto-destruction are embraced, creating a species of cringing guilt-consumed sacrificial animals, penned within the contours of ‘our’ old thedes. Redemption is promised to those who most fully resign themselves to their own identitarian toxicity, who thus attain a perverse superiority over those insufficiently convinced of the need for salvation through self-abolition. “We really, really deserve to die” beats out a weak “We really deserve to die,” and anybody who still thinks that it’s OK to live is simply lost. (Only sinners are included in this arms-race, and the Cathedral tells us clearly who they are.)
An additional complication will be far less digestible, which is precisely why I would like to align it with the Outer Right. Perhaps escaping this structure of captivity cannot possibly take a reverse path, and a heading into dis-identifications, artificial identities, and identitarian short-circuits is ‘our’ real destiny. The identity-envy of the right — however deeply-rooted in an indisputable history of relentless Cathedralist aggression — cannot ever be anything but a weakness, given what we know about the political gradient of modern time. The fact it knows we want to be something, and what it is we want to be, is the alpha and omega of the Cathedral’s political competence. It knows what its enemies would be, if they could be what they want to be. It does not take a deep immersion in Sunzi to realize the strategic hopelessness of that situation.
I want the Cathedral to be obliterated by monsters, which it does not recognize, understand, or possess antibodies against. There is an idiosyncratic element to that, admittedly. I identify far more with the East India Company that the United Kingdom, with the hybrid Singlosphere than the British people, with clubs and cults than nations and creeds, with Yog Sothoth than my ancestral religion, and with Pythia than the Human Security System. I think true cosmopolitans — such as the adventurers of late 19th century Shanghai (both English and Chinese) — are superior to the populist rabble from which nationalism draws its recruits. That’s just me.
What isn’t just me, is what the Cathedral knows how to beat. That, I strongly suspect, at least in the large majority of cases, is you.
Is there any conclusion to this? Because I still want what I want.
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admin Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 1:13 am
The conclusion has hyper-intelligent feral nanotech foaming out of the sewers.
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Yes. That’s the problem. It’s called the Right Singularity.
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Posted on September 25th, 2013 at 6:36 pm | QuoteGood point. But how many true cosmopolitans share your motivations? “Technocommercial singularity and space colonization” as real motivations, not just things that would be kind of cool. I suspect that few people in any group are so strongly future oriented.
If true cosmopolitans are primarily motivated by status and power, like most people, then it will be a long time before they feel any need to turn against the Cathedral, because they are (correct me if I’m wrong) more insulated from the decline than say residents of South London. And to the extent that they are elites of a sort, the Cathedral can (and will) buy them off with status and money for a long time after significant segments of the rabble have lost faith in the system.
At some point it seems like you’ll still need to find a rabble somewhere and offer them something they can’t get from the Cathedral.
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James A. Donald Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 2:49 am
The rabble don’t matter. They never mattered. They were always just mascots.
The contest has always been elite versus elite, and the Company elite with which Outside in identifies got the short end of the stick.
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That’s just me.
No, you are not alone.
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admin Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 12:13 am
I enjoyed that (couldn’t help noticing the tentacle shortage though).
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That’s a hard pill to swallow, but I think I’ve finally gotten it down recently, and it’s made it easier for me to embrace my inner nomad.
Granted, it’s easy for me to give up Anglo-Saxon civilization because I’m only half Anglo-Saxon. And I’ve grown up in an environment in which the aliens have already landed and made themselves quite comfortable. Outside of a few whitopias, L.A. is well under 50% white. The town in which I most recently lived was 30% white. So, before I was reactionary, I already knew that my ‘white identity’ was a fire to be kept secret and safe, illuminating the outer dark in small, tentative circles lest the darkness find it and snuff it out for good.
In this situation, you learn to ‘practice everyday life’ (a la de Certeau) from a reactionary perspective. You light your ideological fire where you can, when you can, hoping that others like you will do the same, and if people who think like me are doing it, too, and our ideology is worth a damn, then we’ll come through all right.
Anglo-Saxons at least have the surety that their civilization will not be forgotten. Britain and, more broadly, Western Europe has left its mark on world history. Perhaps we are in the process of collectively retiring from history because we already won and don’t think we can do much better than we already did.
The question for us and our children is—if our ‘thede’ is to be an historical thing, then where can we find a new home? Where will be accepted? Where will we find ideological kin, if not ancestral kin?
Like our host, I’m drawn Eastward.
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Thales Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 12:47 am
Anglos are the new jews.
(Speaking of thedes, you’re in the area, too? We should have a meet-and-greet (aka a pretense to drink). If I’d known MM was going to be at BIL 2013, I’d have suggested it then…)
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James A. Donald Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 3:17 am
And just as Jews have not adjusted to no longer being in exile, Anglos have not yet adjusted to exile.
But exile is, as we saw with Jews, psychologically harmful. It becomes a mental disability.
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admin Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 11:58 am
The Chinese diaspora (fully exiled, with the death penalty for returnees until the late Qing) seem to have successfully avoided going insane.
Scharlach Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 7:17 pm
@Thales
I didn’t know you are an Angelino. Shoot me an email and we can arrange a meeting.
scharlach@hushmail.com
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Thos Ward Reply:
September 27th, 2013 at 11:50 am
I’ll be out that way in November and would love to meet up with either or both of you @scharlach and @thales. I’m at thosward@hushmail.com
I choose to believe, “No, not me.” At any rate, the Cathedral is beating itself.
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Posted on September 26th, 2013 at 4:35 am | QuoteYou make it sound like the East India Company wasn’t easily crushed by the Cathedral, and it’s legacy transformed into a massively harmful charity program for inbred hindus.
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admin Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 2:35 pm
We’re all identifying with things that were “easily crushed by the Cathedral” — it helps us to remember why we’re annoyed. But I take the point, 18th and 19th century commercial structures aren’t going to save us just because they’re vastly superior to what we’ve seen since. I’m mostly using the East India Company as a stepping stone out of the nationalist trap. We most likely don’t even have names for the most effective successor arrangements to the state-slaved corporate model — if we did, they’d already be under Cathedral assault.
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This reminds me of white liberals who deny that whites are their “people” because they just feel so darn accepting of everyone else. They ignore that “everyone else” isn’t accepting of them. Like those two white liberal reporters that got out of their car to confront a black mob for throwing rocks at them, and got beat up for it. If you’re white, your people are other whites, whether you like it or not. Just look at the way people segregate in prisons. It’s not by “thedes”, for fuck’s sake.
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fotrkd Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 1:32 pm
I don’t think admin is in prison (yet).
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admin Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 2:37 pm
Isn’t it exactly by thedes?
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So what is it, are we defending a lost outpost or do we have a long march with an ever-shifting horizon ahead of us?
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admin Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 3:44 pm
Sneering at the Alamo would be absurd, but if there’s nothing but Alamos, we’re screwed.
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James A. Donald Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 7:47 pm
Talking of lost outposts, an interesting event is under way in Australia.
As you know, it is illegal for white nations to remain white. Australia is one of the whitest remaining, due to a flood of colored immigration into Europe. Therefore boat people have a legal right to sail to Australia and collect welfare indefinitely under international law. Ninety five percent of such arrivals remain permanently on welfare.
Australia has a navy and some marines, who don’t care much about international law. The government’s current plan is that when they catch some boat people sailing from some nearby third world hell hole, the navy will tow them back to the third world hell hole and confiscate their boat. (The navy reliably obeys Australian government orders. The welfare bureaucracy reliably obeys the Cathedral and ignores the Australian government.)
Which plan is, of course, illegal under international law.
The Australian government has all the hard power it needs. Its navy is allied with Pentagon, thus has no enemies that could overcome it. Physically, no one can stop them from dumping unwanted people back on neighbors.
Despite a Cathedral campaign of extraordinary intensity, the voters and the government want to control who is allowed to come to Australia.
The Cathedral is applying soft power within Australia, and from outside Australia, from a position of military weakness, being unloved not only by Russia and China, but also by the Pentagon. It is a classic pope versus monarch conflict. Will the saints win?
The Australian government has announced it will comply with international law, and will refrain from offending its neighbors. It has also announced it will continue with a plan that clearly violates international law, whiteness being illegal, which plan offends its neighbors, offense being most loudly articulated by Cathedral trained academics resident in neighboring countries.
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Amplifying my prior comment:
There is nothing per se wrong with the analysis in this post, but that it treats the identity hunger as a free form hunger that can equally well be attached to any object. While communities are always to some extent imagined, there are biological and historical and cultural reasons why people have the identities they do. So while it may be true that the identities we have aren’t useful weapons, telling us to pick others is bootless. You can’t go to war with the enemies of human nature by abandoning human nature.
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admin Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 11:19 pm
There’s a difficult diagnonal line to pursue that acknowledges the truth of what you say here, but also recognizes that people have a (constrained) capability for self-cultivation that has to be intelligently exploited in order for anything to prosper — including escape programs.
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Lesser Bull Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 11:25 pm
Perhaps.
Intelligent identity engineering is additive and reinterpretative not (warning: hideous neologism) replacitive.
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admin Reply:
September 26th, 2013 at 11:39 pm
Sometimes it can be genuinely innovative. Cultural synthesis, for instance, is an alchemical, experimental process. Very often it fails, but sometimes it works astoundingly well. A history of human civilizational advance that stresses successful syntheses is not risible, and the last great example (Anglo-Chinese Pacific Rim Authoritarian Commercialism — key hubs Hong Kong and Singapore) is accepted by many NRs as the closeest thing the world has to an attractive social model. This attraction makes anti-cosmopolitan thedism an inadequate basis for a consistent NR perspective.
All innovations draw on a tradition, but we have an abundance of traditions to draw upon, and there is room for some strategic selectivity in respect to those we invest, or cultivate.
What isn’t just me, is what the Cathedral knows how to beat. That, I strongly suspect, at least in the large majority of cases, is you.
I’d be interested to know how you define this, because to the casual onlooker the difference may be hard to spot.
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admin Reply:
September 27th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
Which difference?
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WTF is this Anglos are a minority, exiled, new jews?
Well at least have a Masada!!
Here’s a racial map of the US. If by Anglo we can safely say white, no we’re not. Each Blue dot is Anglo.
http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html
Here’s some more links for the surrender now, surrender today, surrender tomorrow, surrender forever.
http://www.costco.com/U-by-Kotex-Sleek-Tampons,-FREE-Sample.product.100038054.html
http://www.costco.com/Kleenex-Facial-Tissue-Pop-Up-Dispenser-2-Ply-White-48ct-KIM-21606-CT.product.11512301.html
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admin Reply:
September 27th, 2013 at 5:09 pm
So that map shows us the population that let things get to the state they’re in now?
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VXXC Reply:
September 28th, 2013 at 10:50 am
Yes, it does. Valid point.
They lack any leadership that doesn’t betray them. But yes, they got had.
Remember however it’s the pinnacle of Trust Culture. My people leave doors unlocked, chop your own wood, take your own homemade pies, leave $5 each in the can. Not imbecillic or insane.
Their problem of course is they bought the Catherdral’s shit about letting everyone in.
NO. NO. NO. Certain cultures have cheating the counter-party as measure of the man. Of course certain cultures also consider Saturday Night Mayhem and Murder to be acceptable within bounds. We understood those cultures and acted accordingly.
Then our leadership utterly betrayed us. The New Deal was pro-majority.
The Great Society is Anti-Majority.
However as the Cathedral has so, so many positions for the Intelligenisia, and no positions for people who don’t play ball….my people lack Tribunes.
I think they’ve figured out they’ve been had, so that’s ..er..a step forward.
[I was about to say progress, but that word’s ruined too, isn’t it?]
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[…] categorization is the astrology of politics, in the sense that it panders to insatiable identity hunger. This post still holds the daily traffic record here, which is probably not entirely due to […]
Posted on August 19th, 2014 at 1:49 pm | QuoteSome priests in the Cathedral might be privy to the fact that Outside In’s goals are just as evil as that of old-school Rx: http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/ken-macleod-socialism-and-transhumanism/
The horror of “global” Identity collapsing on itself, while NRx/Rx Identities blossom in all kinds of monstrous ways, is deliciously freaky (and too terrifying for them to handle). On a personal note, I lived as an expat in a third world sing-song country some time ago. All my RedState theden-homies were like, “The third world is so scary America is the best how can you do that you’re not a Prog what’s wrong with you.” (When I tell them I wouldn’t mind returning at times, this line plays a variant feedback loop: I might leave ’cause I can’t stand ProgUSG. “Why how we’re the best”, etc.). My own view: Western Prog cities are fun to visit, but no place to settle (as they’re filled with too many fucking Progs) for us evil backwards types in the country and small towns . I’ve visited several third world Asian & Latin American cities and towns, many of which seemed similar to A.A.Price’s “Traditional cities” concept. They had natural/organic cultures, high trust, local customs and identities developed over time & not (yet) infected by the Proghivemind. My experience of these places was that they were both more conservative, traditional AND libertarian (free) than many places in the US/West. (Like my RedState peeps, they also want to be left the fuck alone). Thus because it’s heretical to say so, I admire these places for the beautiful monsters they are. Hopefully they’ll help devour the Cathedral’s corpse in total darkness (after it blinds itself with its own dogmatic blade of PC-bullshit).
Pan-archy–localized & decentralized resistance movements/(sub)cultures to the ProgEmpire–will help out here & is entirely commensurable with patchwork. Another related thought: if NRx wants AAA, maybe it should cheer for the thugs in Ferguson & STL who, after all, are at this point simply fighting the militarized police forces of my enemy: Progressive USG. (Of course, the poor QuickMart & other victims of rioting exemplify the unintended consequences of AAA strategies.) As Nothingface said, “There is no better weapon at the neoreactionary’s disposal (short of a military coup) than to allow the Gods to wreak havoc on a doomed civilization.” But when it comes time for reeducation camps & death squads to disappear all the counterrevolutionaries…well, when does AAA stop being a coherent strategy? Was it ever one? Personally, as a “Nietzschean anarchist” (or something) I’m a fan of it. But then, I’m also a nihilistic degenerate sonuvabitch. (Thank you for the intriguing blog post today, Nick Land.)
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Posted on August 19th, 2014 at 6:12 pm | Quote