The Kek Wars, Part Two: In the Shadow of the Cathedral

John Michael Greer writes:

In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we talked about the way that America’s managerial aristocracy and its broad penumbra of lackeys and hangers-on retreated into a self-referential bubble to avoid noticing the consequences of their preferred policies. As they did so, those policies—the metastatic growth of government regulation that strangled small businesses and transferred power and wealth to huge corporations and federal bureaucracies, the trade policies that forced working class wages and benefits down below subsistence levels, and the tacit policy of encouraging unlimited illegal immigration that created a vast labor pool of noncitizens who had no rights and thus could be exploited with impunity—drove tens of millions of Americans into destitution and misery. Now it’s time to start exploring how the blowback to those policies took shape.

Part of that blowback came from within the working classes that took the brunt of the policies just named, and part of it came from other sectors of society that were shut out of the benefits of the bipartisan policy consensus and forced to carry a disproportionate share of the costs. Another element of it, though, unfolded from a policy that elites always embrace sooner or later: the habit of making sure that the educational system produces more people trained for managerial tasks than existing institutions can absorb.

Why should elites do this? For them, at least in the short term, the advantages are obvious. If you’re going to entrust the running of society to a hierarchy of flunkeys who are allowed to rise up from the underprivileged masses but are never quite allowed to join the overprivileged elite—and this, of course, is the normal condition of a complex society—you need to enforce rigid loyalty to the system and the ideas it considers acceptable. The most effective way to this is to set candidates for flunkeyhood against each other in a savage competition that most will lose.

As your prospective flunkeys climb over one another, kicking and clawing their way toward a sharply limited number of positions of wealth and influence, any weakness becomes a weapon in the hands of rivals. You thus can count on getting the best, the brightest, and—above all—those who have sedulously erased from their minds any tendency to think any thought not preapproved by the conventional wisdom. Your candidates will be earnest, idealistic, committed, ambitious, if that’s what you want them to be; ask them to be something else and you’ll get that, too, because under the smiling and well-groomed facade you’ve got a bunch of panicked conformists whose one stark terror is that they will somehow fail to please their masters.

It’s the losers in that competition who matter here, though. There are always some of them, and in modern America there are a lot of them: young men and women who got shoved aside in the stampede for those positions of wealth and influence, and didn’t even get the various consolation prizes our society offers the more successful end of the also-rans. They’re the ones who for one reason or another—lack of money, lack of talent, lack of desire—didn’t take all the right classes, do all the right extracurricular activities, pass all the right tests, think all the right thoughts, and so fell by the wayside.

Not all of the losers in question live in their moms’ basements and spend their days playing video games, but a significant number do. In today’s America, remember, jobs are scarce, rents have been artificially inflated to an absurd degree, and what used to be the normal trajectory toward an independent adult life has been slammed shut for a very large number of young people. So those who have been shut out, the educated failures, gather online, play video games, and frequent online forums such as “the chans”—websites such as 4chan and 8chan—where posts are anonymous, the rules that govern acceptable discourse no longer apply, and the more offensive to the privileged an idea is, the better it goes over.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on The Kek Wars, Part Two: In the Shadow of the Cathedral

The Kek Wars, Part One: Aristocracy and its Discontents

John Michael Greer writes:

Magic is the politics of the excluded. It’s also, in an inversion of a kind typical in such situations, the politics of the excluders. We’ll get to the latter point later in this essay; for now, let’s explore the way that magic becomes the default option for those denied access to the political process.

When most people have at least a little influence on day to day politics, and have some chance of getting their needs heard and their grievances addressed, they tend to neglect magic. This is true even if their influence is limited and others have a great deal more than they do. For example, the golden age of African-American folk magic was between 1900 and 1945—the period when Jim Crow laws were most savagely enforced across the American South, and various devices were used to deny African-Americans the civil rights they had theoretically been granted after the Civil War—and built on magical traditions developed by African-Americans during the era of slavery. In those eras when African-Americans had some access to political power—between 1865 and 1900, in the wake of Reconstruction, and from 1945 on, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement—their interest in magic waned.

This makes perfect sense if you understand magic the way that operative mages do. (Operative mages? Those are people who actually practice magic, as opposed to speculative mages, who just theorize about it.) In the words of the great twentieth century mage Dion Fortune, magic is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will. If you are denied access to any other source of power, you can still exercise power over your own consciousness; what’s more, if you do that and get good at it, you’ll find that some of the techniques you use to shape your own thoughts and feelings will also shape the thoughts and feelings of others, with our without their consent or knowledge. Magic thus becomes the logical fallback option for those who are denied any other way of pursuing their goals or seeking redress for their grievances.

Periods in which magic becomes popular, then, are periods when more people than usual are excluded from whatever mechanisms their societies provide for seeking redress of grievances. It’s important to realize that this isn’t a way of talking about familiar dichotomies such as democracy vs. autocracy. Competent dictators make sure that the people they rule have a variety of channels for making their needs and wants known, and quite often go out of their way to see to it that needs and wants that don’t threaten the regime are promptly met.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on The Kek Wars, Part One: Aristocracy and its Discontents

The Kek Wars, Part Three: Triumph of the Frog God

John Michael Greer writes:

4chan and all its offspring are venues for anonymous unmoderated talk, places where anything goes—the more offensive to the conventional wisdom, the better. Long before Trump announced his candidacy, the chans were already having a significant impact on internet culture. Most of my readers will know, for example, what a lolcat is; 4chan invented lolcats. One of the subdivisions of 4chan and many of its offshoots is /pol/, short for “politically incorrect,” and that’s one of the places where the young and disgruntled gathered to talk about the things you can’t talk about in the workplace or the academy these days.

That’s a phenomenon that deserves a quick note here. One of the lessons of the history of morals is that the more stridently you repress something, the more desperately people want to do it. In Victorian England, when sex was utterly unmentionable in polite company, the streets of London swarmed with prostitutes and brothels thrived, so that people could do in private what they wouldn’t dream of talking about in public. The drug abuse epidemic in the US today, similarly, is almost entirely a product of the much-ballyhooed War On Drugs—countries that treat drug addiction as an ordinary medical issue, not a subject for moral grandstanding, have much lower rates of drug use.

Recent crusades against “hate speech” have had exactly the same effect in today’s America. Those who attend university classes or work in white-collar jobs know that their every word is scrutinized by jealous rivals ready to use accusations of sexism, racism, or the like as a weapon in the competition for status. Most people, forced into so stifling an environment, will end up desperately longing for a place where they can take a deep breath and say absolutely anything, no matter how offensive. The chans were among the internet venues that offered them that freedom. Posts on the chans are anonymous, so there was no risk of reprisal, and the culture of the chans (and especially of /pol/) tended to applaud extreme statements, so they became a magnet for the people we discussed in last week’s post: those who for one reason or another lost out in the struggle to become flunkeys of the established order of society, who were locked out of what had been the normal trajectory of adult independence by plunging wages and soaring rents, and who were incensed by the smug superiority of a system that assumed that it had all the answers.

It’s become pretty much de rigueur to denounce the chans as racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic. Is there racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism in /pol/ and its many equivalents? You bet, but that’s far from the whole story. A venue that allows people to say anything anonymously is going to field whatever kinds of speech are most loudly forbidden. What was going on in the chans was considerably broader than those categories suggest: every value, every bias, every presupposition of the cultural mainstream was being shouted down with maximum glee. That’s what you get in outsider culture.

Posted in Alt Right | Comments Off on The Kek Wars, Part Three: Triumph of the Frog God

Why Did The Jewish Community Switch Swides On Affirmative Action?

Jacob Scheer writes: “The explanation put forward by this article is that Jews have become America’s WASPs. They back the current system of affirmative action because it protects their self-interest as a group with outsize political and social influence. As leaders in the political arena, Jews have an image to maintain as upholders of liberal values like diversity, racial equality, and affirmative action. At the same time, Jewish overrepresentation within the Ivy League can be attributed in part to the opaque admissions programs that at once benefit certain minorities like African-Americans, but hurt other such as Asians. Many find this reminiscent of the numerus clausus that barred Jews from entering these same institutions just a century ago. With racial identity politics more poignant now than at any point since the civil rights era, the Jewish community’s opinions on affirmative action will be under scrutiny.”

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* My perennial favourite is the sex disparity in incarceration rates. Is there a clearer example of “disparate impact” in America than that just 5% of prisoners are women? Or how about that despite being 15% of the population, woman over 50 are only 0.01% of arrests? Surely elderly women must be getting away with all sorts of gang-related violence.

Posted in Affirmative Action, Jews | Comments Off on Why Did The Jewish Community Switch Swides On Affirmative Action?

I Miss Oregon

More. More.

Posted in Oregon | Comments Off on I Miss Oregon