Introduction
Hello, welcome back to DEEP SOCKS, the political self help guide to generate deeper, probing, questioning thought that will tow you right out of the shallowland swamps and into the nice world of rewarding thought.
This season, we are, if you are a returning reader, examining SHALLOW WINTER, the frozen terrain of left right and center in shallowland. This month, we focus on the right, the slow-burning embers left over from the collapse of actually-existing fascism and monarchies in the 20th century. This week we have examined the media space of the right wing, using media theory, examining first the figure of the right wing personality in the new age of secondary orality, the drive to be a hero, and the matching drive to be an anonymous prophet. In the previous essay we examined the media laws of the different media of right wing discourse, identifying the media tetrads that govern and structure the relationships of these personalities and the “New Right,” or more properly, the most current New Right.
What have we been building?
In media theory, the concept of the anti-environment exposes the relationship between figure and ground, between foreground and background—it is a technology, technique, or art-object that exists outside of the environment, and is capable of reflexive criticism of the world that it exists in.
So what sort of anti-environment have we constructed through our examination of the New Right? What is the end-result of this less phobic, less paranoid examination of the new right achieving? When you center the new right, as a gestalt, and focus directly towards and past it, switching our perception of what is in front and what is behind, you come across what the New Right is responding to.
A barren, empty wasteland.
Welcome to Mars
Mars is cold. It is very brown, rusty brown. The air is exceedingly thin. It’s very much like hell. And this is a common intuition that people have today—that they live in hell. That escaping to this place that is much like hell, but not, would be a fine idea. Elon Musk thinks so, and he invented electric cars and banks or something.
America is cold. It is rusty. The air is quite thin, and people show acute signs of hypoxic psychosis. There’s a whole belt of rust, where there once were many happy people. The fentanyl crisis is at a point where it seems like a deliberate culling. Surely the lives of citizens must have some more value than what we get told by our government’s actions, no? It wasn’t long ago when videos of New York City’s subway system flooding popped up on the Internet. Poor people wading through filthy muck, rats everywhere, and on top of all that it was flooded. In Shanghai, if the subway tunnels flood, the government has the good sense to suppress the videos! It’s offensive to people’s dignity to live in a world where such a thing is a fact. Organized looting of stores in San Francisco, people being made to carry their valuables in nondescript paper bags. And these are the cities will all of the billionaires.
When you look at other cities, you have to ask how they make do with smaller tax bases and no real hope of doing much. Sure many are proud of their small town, but for the little people, you must wonder, where did America go? It was once, famously, a nation of clubs. Now it is famously a nation of morbidly obese depressives. Too lame for fascism, too book-shy for socialism.
When you name it, it becomes itself
This sounds hyperbolic, of course—but it is far from being untrue. The thing that becomes clear when you look seriously at the Deep Right is that they are in touch with a layer of reality that truly does exist! It is very, very palpable. It is the core complaint of the left, the thing that people online imagine a Marxist or ‘socialist’ revolution will fix for them. “The capitalist hellscape,” “late stage capitalism,” “a decadent bourgeois society,” “clown world.” But these are lonely people, talking online, probably to not too many people. If they’re talking with anyone at all, and not musing to the thing in their hands and hoping it will reward them with some sense of belonging to a tribe again.
It is a void. It is a barrens, the hollow that ate the heart of the republic. It is not some inevitable end product of the profit system—the Gilded Age didn’t have these problems, and it wasn’t because they were poorer. It is the very real problem that the nation has lost all sense of vitality and purpose, its media structure exists to abolish history and time and instead glue your sense to an eternal, systematically governed present.
Cognitive breakthroughs from the strangest places
The situation grows worse by the day. When you look at the situation objectively, things could certainly be worse. There’s no famine, roads exist, workers are cooperative for the most part, and in spite of the general state of unhealth, many Americans are happy enough to work themselves to death. These are enviable conditions at a macro level. For example, the Chinese being willing to commit broad, ethnic and social suicide through intensive factory labor is the deep secret of their success. Their hatred for life and themselves enables them to savor power, for now, through the deliberate and systematic diminishment of their nation’s spirit and future.
And any person interested in politics must be asking themselves how can I get a slice of that sweet sweet power. Why in the world is a country like China, which hates beauty and loves nothing, doing so well? Surely what we’ve offshored to them is not SO important, surely America’s success is not derived from its developed technosphere, but rather, its people?
If this is so, and it possibly is so, then we must wonder, why has the human material declined so very palpably? It is not simply misgovernment, but the failure of the government to evolve with the times. It’s often said that modern problems require modern solutions. An 18th century constitution has engineered, quite effectively, a political and economic stalemate between two corrupt, ineffectual parties, governed by some of the dumbest, most transparently criminal people in history to have ever attempted the feat of running a republic.
And it is the republic that is the problem.
Standing in a big stage
It seems empty. The blackness is all you can see. The first thing you’d do is try to put up some props. Even Dogtown had props. Why be so attached to the stage, the hollow set dressings. They’re barely sufficient to obscure the void behind you!
It is consciousness of this background, the ‘business as usual, politics as usual,’ the respect for institutions that have been underperforming since the coup against Nixon in 73, that generates the sense of urgency.
The Late Republic
Rome was once a kingdom. Then, it was a republic. And then, it was something much more. An empire. Perhaps declaring one of the consuls a deity was an escalation that made the invention of empire inevitable. And as all men wish to be gods, so the Roman model is quite inspiring to Westerners. They did, after all, unite Europe, quite durably, for millennia. The Roman Empire only fell when the Ottomans came, and even then, Mehmed II styled himself Caesar of the Romans. It was not until America’s great conquest of Europe, first through debt in 1918 and then through brutal force in 1945, that Europe could be said to have been united again under an imperial master.
But though America is an empire, it is a republic. An imperial republic is simply a vicious, wicked, hypocritical republic, with a deep and unspeakable sin against its own better nature and beliefs lying at its heart. There is not yet an emperor.
The New Right certainly aspires to such a figure, and whatever method he may use of attaining power, if it’s Yarvin’s Metal Gear Solid 4 borrowed plot, if it’s some ridiculous man like Trump or some other, less funny man, the goal is to remove the barrier separating America from truly being an empire of liberty—its attachment to its history as a republic.
The Uniqueness of this Insight
It is a grounding thing, to see the void. Many people feel humbled looking up into the blackness, or orangeness, depending on your location, of the night sky. You feel yourself aching for connection, for meaning. Looking for points of light. Hoping to find, and impressed when you do find, patterns amongst the lights.
Seeing the barren wasteland of American political and social life is very much the same. As above, so below, right? What’s odd is that this sudden break with the idea and form of the American republic as such is more or less foreign to many Americans. Their propagandization is thorough and complete, surely, but what is it about the New Right that has given it the unique opportunity to see and build politics around the wasting emptiness around them?
Iconoclasm
When you start seeing clownworld, you hear the sound of honking. And you can’t take clowns seriously. There’s a reason so many who take the redpill go on to take the blackpill, and become complete nihilists. It even happened in the Matrix—if Joey Pants would betray Larry Fishburne, it stands to reason that people with worse options committed suicide. Zion probably had a fentanyl problem too. But whichever you take, requires a fundamental reassessment of intellectual life around you.
Cognitive breakthroughs like becoming post-republican, post-pluralist, post-academy, post-ethics and post-institutional-consensus offer extreme freedom of thought. You’re free to start demanding a return of the Spartan system. Perhaps our lack of virtue is because we do not kill helots for fun, or expose the weak infants among us? You’re free from Marx! You’re free from Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, you’re free from World War 2.
This is the radical freedom of iconoclasm, and it is the most easily compromised ‘state of nature’ for the political skeptic, since politics and its object, power, center rather unashamedly around icons. The first thing a king, president, or prime minister does is sit for their portrait, and upon leaving office, in America the president goes about planning and building his temple. Clinton built his ‘presidential library’ in the finest image of Arkansas he knew, a very large trailer down by the river. Obama’s is a desecration of Frederick Law Olmstead’s fantastic work in Chicago’s Jackson Park. Bush’s temple is quite ugly, and much less remarkable. This focus around icons is extremely attractive to the human mind—in the Bible, it took thorough punishments to get the Hebrews to forsake graven images of Baal, even after acquiring direct, experiential proof of Yahweh’s might and immanence.
The desperate attraction of icons
It is strange to see Yarvin called a prophet, even ironically. Hero worship, the rallying around an icon, offers both a path to transcendence, and also a magnetic, and easily exploitable trap for the New Right. It is historically one of the most dangerous elements of the right wing, for its own fortunes and others. When you have heroic leaders, it is all too easy to be foiled by their death. In the medieval era, kingdoms were often extinguished in a few strokes by killing the monarch, his issue, and his competent siblings—look at the Hohenstaufens. There’s no black Muslim movement because of Louis Farrakhan taking out his more noble rival, Malcolm X. And cooptation is an equally grave threat—the SPD in Germany traces its lineage back to Marx, and they have certainly failed to lead a worker’s revolution. When you have heroic leaders, it is equally easy to become their slave. The far right has often followed its heroes off of very real cliffs—there’s no particular need to remind people of this fact. Heroes are mythological figures, and rarely wise or well mannered men. Achilles was not in charge, nor should he have been in charge. Hell, Agamemnon had no business leading the Achaeans either should you bring wisdom into the matter.
Perhaps you don’t see the neoreactionaries, this bunch of white guys getting their drink and fuck on at a political action conference as the Achaeans getting their ships together, preparing to sacrifice Iphigenia at Aulis to turn the winds back in their favor. Nor do we—not yet, at least. Metaphors share with prophecy and its cousin mathematical models the problem of tailoring to get results. You ask, what are they after? If they don’t want the government we’ve got, how the hell are they going to make a new one?
Probably the same way any group of highly educated and well-funded men have done in the past, through some sort of coup or sneaky administrative move, or maybe they’ll go for the long march strategy that put boomer leftists in socially-conservative positions at the upper reaches of academia and the bureaucracy, the same strategy that let the Federalist society become one of the dominant forces in American jurisprudence. Truly, the way they go about it is irrelevant.
For people who don’t want the world they’re offering, which will surely be different from what they offer and worse than what they promise (they are revolutionaries after all), you have to ask yourself: how did they get all this ‘new idea’ energy and feeling? If it makes a journalist from Der Spiegel do a spit-take, you’re definitely onto something.
Imagine you’re a fish
There’s no need to rehash the ‘do the fish know they’re swimming’ parable or koan or whatever it is. It’s an interesting thought. But ask yourself, if you are an interested leftist, an improbably motivated centrist, why them? It’s because they saw the water. They have the stink of some greater wisdom about the world, and require no desperate appeals to a Bible full of failed prophecies and economics no one, not even communists in power, believe in. There is no magic of dialectical materialism, no magic of markets, and no progressive/Whig history to get bound up in. From the perspective of ideas qua ideas, this looks like a freshly unwrapped present.
Again, imagine you’re a fish. How can you see the water?
Media theory offers a tempting answer, and if you’ve read any neoreactionary expositions of society and the government today you’ve seen the method in action. They constructed an anti-environment, an object which made the environment apparent. The Cathedral, the working model of the actual government—these were media objects that cast the reality of the situation in stark focus.
They saw the water because they built a terrarium in the ocean.