PASSIVITY IS NOT AN OPTION

by James Lawrence

  

The political backlash by Western peoples against the ruling elite and the Left has met with nothing but defeat lately. First, Donald Trump decided to do some "artful dealing" by trading his populist and nationalist positions for acceptance by the corporate media and Deep State (and no, it hasn't worked). Then the French election showed us that a nationalist party with forty years of campaigning behind it, at a time of massive public discontent, could still lose to a hollow establishment-backed astroturf movement. Now we are seeing the people of Britain tone-policing each other even as they cower in fear of Muslim terrorists, while their political overlords have miraculously come up with yet another reason to stall for time on Brexit (not trying to be overly conspirational or anything, but...come on).

At times like this, the True Right tends to give way to bitter self-reproach over its own "naïvety", and opens its heart and mind to all sorts of non-engagement strategies (defined here as any political strategy that does not include attacking the enemy). The will to non-engagement manifests in traditional Christianity as the 'Benedict Option', in neoreaction as 'passivism', in anti-feminism as rejection of Men's Rights activism by the Game and MGTOW schools, and in ethnonationalism as the refrain that we should stop wasting time on politics and just crank out lots of white babies.

My intention here is to show that non-engagement strategies - with the possible exception of the Benedict Option for a tiny minority of monastic contemplatives - are illusory. However, I do not wish to play down the very real difficulties of political action by the True Right, and am prepared to concede most of the more sensible points made by the proponents of non-engagement. My belief is that these points can be integrated into a strategy of rejectionism, which mandates engagement with the enemy while avoiding the methods that have failed and compromised our cause in the past.

As neoreactionary passivism is the best-articulated non-engagement strategy, it makes sense to focus upon it here. The original source of the doctrine is Mencius Moldbug, but he's notoriously verbose and meandering, so I recommend taking a look at the following two articles from Social Matter: 'Right-Wing Activism Always Fails'  and 'How to Passivism' (be sure to read AntiDem's ripostes in the comments).These show passivism to be a collection of good, solid strategic points, overlaying a soft underbelly of extremely naïve and unworkable assumptions.

Here is some of the good sense. Don't assume, as a humble Deplorable, that you have the "right" to change society as the Brahmins do; street activism is not a means of attaining power but a victory dance for those who already have it. Don't bother trying to bring the masses round to your point of view; strengthen your ties of loyalty to your own group, your Männerbund. Don't compromise yourself by grubbing for votes within the present rigged and corrupted System; build parallel institutions to usurp power from that System as it crumbles under the weight of its own falsehoods.

So far, so good - this just looks like a more rigorous version of the metapolitical strategy adopted by much of the Alt-Right. But then we get to the soft underbelly of nonsense. The Left won't pay us much heed if we don't directly challenge them for power - as Moldbug himself found out, the expansionist messianism and petty sadism of our enemies makes this highly unlikely. The Left will allow us to beaver away quietly building more competent alternative institutions, as their own institutions crumble - no, they will try to steal the fruits of our hard work by shunting useless free-riding female and ethnic minority shills into our institutions, and taking ideological control of them. Power will magically drop in the lap of anyone who "becomes worthy" of it - those who compare such fantasies to the Chinese concept of the 'Mandate of Heaven' have obviously never heard of the saying 成王敗寇. We should concentrate on capturing small local institutions rather than national states - this may be a necessity, but I see little point in making a virtue of it, especially when control of the state grants the power to flood local polities with more obedient foreign peons.

In addition to the (admittedly understandable) desire to withdraw from the chaos of Western metapolitics into quietist sanctuaries and drinking clubs, I would suggest that passivism is underpinned by an unfortunate tendency in cerebral Westerners inclined to overthink things. Employing a little linguistic inventiveness, we can refer to this tendency as kantification - the universalising and totalising of concepts that ought to remain local, limited and pragmatic. For example, Western men have good reasons to oppose the Cosmopolitan managerial state, which expects them to pay for a patronage system upholding managerial rule and benefitting treacherous women and foreign minorities. But this opposition is rendered hopeless when it is kantified into libertarianism, a pipe-dream ideology that condemns all states as "stationary bandits", and offers only a fantasy of anarchy that terrifies the masses and dissatisfies the status yearnings of elites.

Similarly, the present need for us to play smart against the overwhelming power of the Left should not be kantified into the "steel rules" and Zen-like principles of passivism, which are at odds with the rough-and-ready methods by which Männerbunden and other traditional elites have actually gained power. The Right is not a quasi-mystical method for achieving power through the purity of no-hands jujitsu; it is a set of ideas, presently eclipsed by their sinister opposites, that formalise and sanctify power by binding it to social stability and the greater good. Gaining power for a counter-elite upholding Rightist ideals is merely a practical matter - and even if it must be done by building parallel institutions, as may well be the case, it would be unrealistic to pretend that this can be done without attacking the enemy or being attacked by them.

This is for people who are not 
concerned with achieving power.

The most immediate reason for this has to do with the internal cohesion of our own side (specifically, of a prospective Männerbund dedicated to the cause). Rightists, in addition to being atomised Westerners like everyone else, are notoriously susceptible to petty egoism and "all-chiefs-no-Indians syndrome". The experience of regular hostile operations against an enemy who damns us all with the same brush can help to keep our own people relatively united; moreover, the dangers and discomforts of this battle serve to help carve out a natural hierarchy from the flat social landscape of the West, with low-level keyboard warriors forced to defer to those who are in the public eye and have more accomplishments to their name. This hierarchy does, admittedly, need refinement to prevent its being hacked by desperate losers and attention-whores; but it is preferable to the impossible task of trying to form a cohesive organisation on intellectual leadership alone. 

Moving onto externalities, we must be cognizant of the fact that other ethnic groups in the West are already playing the 'parallel institutions' game with enviable hands. The Muslim communities in Europe, with their closed neighbourhoods and informal sharia courts, are building such institutions; according to Viktor Ostrovsky, Jewish communities across the West are doing the same, with the State of Israel organising unknown numbers of sayanim ("helpers") and misgerot (paramilitary cells) among the diaspora. But it is only we - and I hope neoreactionary passivists are not naïve enough to think themselves exempt from this "we" - who are to tie our hands behind our backs and eschew certain opportunities for the sake of principle. This does not bode well for our vision of a Restoration ending up in power following a collapse of the present ruling elite.

To those who protest that such opportunities are denied to us anyway, I would reply that opportunities often come unexpectedly to those who take the all-important first step of showing up in force. When the Russian Tsarist government fell in 1917 and was replaced by a Provisional Government under the moderate-socalist Alexander Kerensky, a general named Lavr Kornilov threatened to march on Petrograd in a coup-d'etat, forcing Kerensky to enlist the help of his Bolshevik enemies in desperate preparations to defend the capital. The attack by Kornilov never materialised, but the Bolsheviks ended up armed thanks to Kerensky, whom they later rewarded with a lifelong relief from government duty. Would such an opportunity have dropped in the lap of the Bolsheviks had their political strategy been to not show up?

It would not be hard to continue presenting examples along these lines, but I will cut to the chase and present what I see as the strongest argument against non-engagement strategies in general, including but not limited to neoreactionary passivism.

Despite the emphasis on male camaraderie in the ideal of the Männerbund, it should be obvious that our efforts towards recapturing traditions and building institutions will all be in vain if we cannot transmit these to the next generation. As the buck rabbits in Watership Down put it, "no does means no kittens and in a few years no warren". But it is precisely over "does" and "kittens" that the managerial elite of the West asserts a highly effective and socially-pernicious claim to control, through the feminism and mass education rackets that work to sever them from their families. On this front, they have no intention of leaving anyone in peace: they assert the right to subvert our relations with our women and children on the basis of the messianic and expansionist doctrine of "universal human rights", whose flip side is universal domination by the Cosmopolitan managerial elite that is the sole guarantor of these "rights". 

So if you dare to serve the cause of the Right while married, your wife's bad feels may well become the instrument by which your enemies publicly humiliate you and confiscate your property. Devote your life to raising white children (the ethnonationalist version of "become worthy"), and you will soon end up meeting them on the other side of the barricades. As the traditional family structure - control and protection of women and children by husbands and fathers - is the basic building block of organic, hierarchical society, it is impossible for such a society to resurrect itself as a parallel structure as long as there is a permanent revolutionary threat hanging over the family.

On this issue of women and children, and particularly of women, we have truly been backed into a corner and left no choice but to fight. There is no non-engagement solution to the feminism problem - not personal "alphahood", not slut-shaming, not beta-shaming - because the crux of the problem stems from the destructive patronage relationship between women and the managerial state. There is no "war of the sexes", but only a situation in which an impersonal Emperor has declared every woman to be his de facto concubine: the high status of women in the West, their haughty behaviour towards men, the pressure on them to serve managerial interests by entering the workforce, their lack of loyalty to "husbands" reduced to semi-legitimised paramours from which the women can be repossessed on a whim, and so on, can all be derived from this essential fact.

Concubines without Emperors

To clarify this point, let us take a typical non-engagement argument from the manosphere: that men can and should try to change the promiscuous behaviour of Western women by "exerting proper leadership" over them in everyday life. As the data in Roderick Kaine's book Smart and SeXy make clear, it is not the business of men to do this except in the case of their own immediate relations: historically, it has been women who controlled each other's sexual behaviour (through their natural proclivities for social shaming, tittle-tattle, and petty cruelty wrapped in moralism), and a survey taken before the sexual revolution found that 92% of women disapproved of premarital sex compared to only 42% of men. The reason why women can no longer be relied upon to control each other is that they are now managerial concubines, no longer directly dependent on marriage, and thus no longer interested in ostracising sluts so as to drive up the price of sex for men. Smash the managerial patronage structure that allows the state to support women on requisitioned male wealth, and slut-shaming will come roaring back with a vengeance, probably with the bullying harridans of modern feminism first in line to condemn the dirty scabs and sing the praises of matrimony.

Now, I am not saying that we must wait for a Restoration or a collapse of the state before trying to recreate traditional parallel structures and transmit them to the next generation. As the passivists suggest, we should start at the present moment in full acceptance of the risks involved, and do our best to create small-scale structures insulated as far as possible from the influence of the state and the Left. But if the logical next step between this and full Restoration is to capture entire communities for our cause, surely this will require a combative attitude that is very different from the passivist desire to lie low and beaver away in the shadows. Imagine, if you will: what would it take to create a town or city in which people give succour to our Männerbunden, do not cooperate with the agents of the state, shame and ostracise women who call in the gendarmes against their husbands, and tune the media out when it starts wolf-crying about Russian Hitlers?

The answer is that the constructive parallelism of a Rightist counter-elite must go hand in hand with some sort of negative anti-state and anti-progressivist outreach to the masses. I am all for creating elitist cabals, but since the information society provides them with no shadows in which to hide anymore, the next safest place for them can only be inside a large and rebellious white population radicalised on a necessarily cruder ideological basis. (A question for advocates of political Zen: if an obscure cabal is subjected to legal financial rape or has its members thrown into prison on trumped-up charges, does it make a sound?) Although we cannot necessarily expect to convert the masses to specific Rightist ideals, we can at least convince large swathes of them that the present system is a fraud designed to rob them blind, and this in itself will create a receptivity to alternatives while snarling up the communications and reflexes of the enemy system.

This is the strategy of rejectionism, which is what we get when we un-kantify both popular anti-elitism and passivist parallelism. Those who are worthy to lead, reject the progressivist order by building a positive alternative; those who are suited to follow, reject it by becoming distrustful, rebellious and de-integrated from the system of managerial discipline and Pepsi Rebellion™. But none of this will come about without a fight.

On the subject of how to conduct such an asymmetrical fight, a limited and un-kantified 'passivism' can yield us a good many sensible suggestions, some of which we can briefly explore. 

For one thing, I do not understand why Rightists still insist on attempting serious answers to hostile questions from our enemies along the lines of "so what will you do with [insert x leftist coalition group here] if you get into power?" If, as we have seen, the enemy are willing and able to completely block us out of official power, surely answering such questions is a form of LARPing for which our people pay a steep price in trumped-up charges? If our enemies want to monopolise power, we should hand them all of the moral opprobrium that goes with it; so in response to such questions as these, we should truthfully say that our sole intention is to defend the traditionally-minded European people subjected to the arbitrary violence of Cosmopolitan power, and fire back some questions of our own regarding their plans for the polities that they are ruining and dispossessing.

Another point well made by the passivists concerns the ultimate futility of vote-whoring (a.k.a. "politics"), which is inherently demotist and self-compromising, as well as being perhaps the single greatest predictor of unworthiness for leadership. But even if our plan is to create a parallel structure to eventually receive power, there is no reason why we should take a Puritan attitude towards making pragmatic use of vote-whores, especially where immigration policy is concerned. The loose online idea-confederation of the Alt-Right is already independent from the comings and goings of the political boudoir, and lost nothing but a few residual illusions by promoting its own message through the convenient aperture of Donald Trump. With regard to real-life organisation, we can perhaps learn from the example of certain religious congregations, which hold their hierarchical internal structures separate from the vote-whores employed on their behalf.

This brings us neatly to another good idea, which is that we must first become worthy of power in order to achieve it. I take the point that a life spent yelling through megaphones is a poor crucible for worthiness, which is why I agree that we should concentrate on building positive structures and not yoke ourselves unduly to the pseudo-career of activism. Yet what could be more incongruous than harking back to Männerbunden and aristocracy, and talking about "becoming worthy" - and yet refusing to lift a finger, for fear of incurring risk, against the monsters of injustice and disorder stamping about one's very hearth and home? This is a delicate topic to broach, as I do not wish to romanticise the persecutions suffered by people on our side, and I despise the bravado-contests between those who throw themselves in the progressivist meatgrinder for the sake of instant glory. But permit me to say that, if there is still a faint echo of the knightly caste in the West, surely it inheres in those sincere individuals who fight for our cause against overwhelming odds, and live in their everyday lives the thought experiment described by Plato's Socrates as a test of justice:

"Therefore I say that in the perfectly unjust man we must assume the most perfect injustice; there is to be no deduction, but we must allow him, while doing the most unjust acts, to have acquired the greatest reputation for justice. ... And at his side let us place the just man in his nobleness and simplicity, wishing ... to be and not to seem good. There must be no seeming, for if he seem to be just he will be honoured and rewarded, and then we shall not know whether he is just for the sake of justice or for the sake of honours and rewards; therefore, let him be clothed in justice only, and have no other covering; and he must be imagined in a state of life the opposite of the former. Let him be the best of men, and let him be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the proof; and we shall see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences."