WHERE IS OUR STANDARD?

by James Lawrence

I don't mean standard as in "moral standards", of course (everyone knows there's no point in looking for those nowadays). I mean standard in the military sense - the sort of standard that in Roman times took the form of the legionary eagle, carried into battle by each legion and defended to the death as a symbol of that legion's honour. We Westerners don't have one, and we do need one. Let me explain.

Over a decade ago, when I was first being radicalised by those wicked Russian Hitlers on the internet, I soon intuited that it was necessary to remove the moralist whore's paint from the Leftist project in order to defeat it politically. And as my family contained more than a few conservative baby boomers given to lots of Christian handwringing over the "morality" of letting immigrants into the country, I had plenty of occasions to cross rhetorical swords with them.

Many times I was able to establish that their pro-immigration "morality" was empty, as they themselves did not clamour to let strangers from the Third World onto their own property, and would surely react with horror if they appeared. From there, it was not hard to point out that those less fortunate Englishmen and women at the sharp end of diversity were experiencing something very close to such an invasion; and then to assert that the point of a national identity was to enable those in positions of comfort to extend their concern for their own living space to that of a wider community of people, with the understanding that they themselves may well be the invader's next target.

Faced with such a moral argument for national self-defence, the wannabe universalist should (logically speaking) either start practicing what he preaches and become a penniless wandering sage, or else remain at the door of his home and admit to being considerably less altruistic than a nationalist. However, while usually conceding the debate, my opponents had few qualms about choosing the rag of obscene selfishness over the mantle of nationalism. I would get a wry smile, an apathetic laugh, and a comment like "we'll be alright for a few more decades and I'll be dead by the time we're not" (and then I would have to make the same arguments all over again the next time).

Now, I do not think that such comments indicate a sincere desire to bequeath one's descendants a living hell. What it does indicate is a sort of learned helplessness, a desire to avoid confronting horrible truths and escape into a happyhappy mental world in which everything will turn out for the best, because the idea of taking action would be unthinkable. The moral excuse can be retained as an illusion of control, but it is not actually central to the behaviour, any more than the "morality" of rescuing black lesbian transgender puppies is really central to the Left's aggressive power-seeking and violent sadism.

As this sort of learned helplessness is, I think, the most common attitude among socially conservative Westerners (i.e. all of those Westerners who are not receiving power, money, status or privilege from the Cosmopolitan and Leftist rackets), it is important to try to understand its cause. Obviously the apathetic happyhappy attitude is more common in women than men, and more common in ageing comfortable Boomers than in disillusioned Millennials - which means that, to some extent, the West's greying demographics and culture of taking women seriously are muffling our resistance to dispossession like a toxic comfort blanket.

However, I believe that even these handicaps could be overcome were it not for our lack of a standard, which hampers any attempt on our part to organise a concerted response to aggression against our civilisation. As the neoreactionary blogger Spandrell often points out, human societies are organised around various Schelling points, which are vital for regulating and coordinating people and their actions in spite of their natural disparities. A military standard is one example of this: just make it a sacred custom to carry the Roman eagle into battle, and a serious dishonour on the whole legion to lose it to the enemy, and you have implanted in each legionary's mind a reason for fighting that does not involve any serious individual thought or interpersonal communication whatsoever. When we reflect on the fact that human beings are basically stupid towards the left hand of the bell curve, prone to narcissistic bickering towards the right, and at no time capable of perfect communication with each other, the reliance of social organisation on Schelling points becomes obvious.

Not as silly as they look?

Now, many Westerners of a conservative persuasion like to have a good laugh at the "primitive" and "hysterical" reaction of Muslims to any hint of an attack on the Prophet Mohammad or the Koran. Their capacity to become violently enraged over trivialities is contrasted with the "rationality" of Westerners, who are supposedly capable of assessing threats in a reasoned way and responding to them with the appropriate measure of force. But if we conceive of the figure of Mohammad - leaving all spiritual considerations aside - as a Schelling point, specifically a collective standard for Muslims, is this really so stupid and irrational? And is rational threat assessment really a better option?

While the rational interests of a Muslim community might be more or less complex, the standard of Mohammad and the Koran can always act as a simple and intelligible proxy for them: after all, this standard gains respect from others in proportion to the increase in Muslim power, and anyone who tries to push back against this will be drawn into attacking it sooner or later. Moreover, when the standard is attacked, every Muslim down to the very stupidest knows that he must retaliate with violent anger - and that everyone else on his side will do the same. No thinking is required of the dullards on the left of the bell curve; no deliberation is needed from the windbags on the right; and no communication with others is necessary to respond with the roar of an outraged community rather than the polite whimper of a dissident individual.

Does the West have anything comparable? The symbols of our own religion have been critiqued and profaned every which way since the Enlightenment; dunking the figure of Christ in piss could only make a relatively small splash, since it had already been brought so low. Our national flags, though still powerful in certain contexts, mostly denoted state-worship and were thus all too easy to co-opt once our enemies took control of the state. Right now we have precisely nothing in the way of a standard. Our modern rationalised anti-culture holds nothing sacred except happiness, comfort and productivity, and expects us to assess material threats objectively and respond to them with an appropriate economy of force, using the same habits of free thought and debate that corroded all of our sacred symbols in the first place.

Well, it doesn't work; the only result is endless disagreement and uncoordination. Are those immigrants really invading our lands, or improving our economy? Should we defend our people, or does sacrificing them constitute a defence of our values? Should we get irate over white girls cavorting with blacks, when they are just worthless sluts anyway? Are foreign neocon wars an outrageous waste of our blood and treasure, or are they protecting the inviolable First World luxuries of white conservative boomers?

It may seem strange and even a little 'regressive' to treat such debates as a problem - after all, we on the Alt-Right do not weaken our resolve by indulging in them - until we realise that we are talking about the rallying and coordination of a whole people, and not just an intelligent and attentive minority. Rational weighing up of pros and cons is no way to get soldiers to fight, and it is no way to induce a people to defend its interests. Better to keep it simple: "if the standard is besmirched, you attack with all your force, knowing that others will do likewise."

The hard task of uniting dullards and windbags.

When there is even the slightest disagreement over whether 'interests' are threatened, the expectation that others will react to a threat in the same way as oneself breaks down, leading to atomisation and thence to cowardice. The astonishing timidity of Westerners in the face of dispossession is easy to understand when you consider that we are an army without a standard, in which each individual legionary gets to decide how close to the front line he will march and how hard he will fight against the enemy. Nowhere are the malign consequences of this more evident than in conservative organisations. Who among their members wants to start a march to the far Right and face the existential crisis of Europe, when the result of this will be the Cuck Conga in which each participant is backstabbed by the person right behind him for the crime of "going too far"?

Of course, the fact that we have lost our own standard does not mean that we have all become calm rationalist individualists, too enlightened to rally as a group. We are still more than capable of mobbing together and attacking, but we can only do it under other people's standards (e.g. the Holocaust), or else in response to easily manipulated universalist emotional triggers ("beautiful babies"). We who long gorged on the hubris of challenging and questioning everything are now tasting the bitter irony of the nemesis - being led around by the noses like human cattle.

Don't expect me to end this little piece by unveiling a super-duper ready-made European standard of my own design. That would be to miss the point; such Schelling points can only grow to maturity through trial and error, and must be (to use Spandrell's blunt parlance) amply fertilised with a great deal of socially useful bullshit. I will venture a prediction, however: if the Alt-Right can spawn a reactionary counter-elite, which can in turn bestow a new standard on a wider section of the population, this standard may well be centred on some belief system concerning 'white blood'.

Is 'white blood' problematic? Of course. Many of our worst enemies are pure biological "Aryans"; some of the racially purest "Aryan" countries also display the worst cases of social degeneracy; and witch-hunts against people with small amounts of non-white blood would be truly stupid and disastrous. But 'white blood' is a standard-in-waiting, a relatively intelligible one, and right now we have nothing else. And if Europeans can somehow suspend their tendency to reduce everything to questions of comfort, happiness and productivity ("immigration is bad because blacks can't sustain First World living standards!"), perhaps 'white blood' can become a non-materialistic symbol of everything in Old Europe that we wish to defend in the face of Cosmopolitanism.

Obviously I can still see why many would object to such a standard. In this case, they are more than welcome to try to find something else, and subject it to the rigours of trial and error. I merely foretell.

Perhaps the biggest question lies here: "if Europeans can somehow suspend their tendency to reduce everything to questions of comfort and productivity". We have long lacked the ability to hallow anything, to place it above mere comfort and security and happiness, and defend it at our own inconvenience purely for the sake of its symbolic prestige. I suppose it can't hurt to practice at home: try to find or create a symbol that embodies what is good and true in our cause, and treat it as a hallowed object. Perhaps one day it will become a fragment of our new standard.