Before launching into another lengthy assault on one of the Movement's ideological chess-pieces, I think it would be useful to develop some thoughts on political NoFap.
Is there such a thing as political NoFap? If there isn't, there should be, because there is such a thing as political porn. Democratic politics is a ritual form of civil war, and war engages thumotic desire - the lust for struggle, glory, victory, status, etc. - much as sex engages erotic desire. Erotic porn has its analogue in thumotic porn; and political porn is one of the worst forms of thumotic porn, for the most corrupting and enslaving illusions are those that best mimic real objects of desire. Buying a porn mag is not as wretched as paying for Skype chats with an e-thot; and playing the role of a king in a videogame is not as insane as thinking you are a king in real life.
Some dissidents have theorised that the sexual revolution is in a transitional stage. It seems to be moving from an initial free-for-all to a state of informal polygamy, which may lead to a future of debauchery for the few and masturbation for the many. Well, the political revolution started much earlier, and has already completed the analogous transition. Most power in a modern democracy, from top to bottom, is sucked up by an anarchic extended bureaucracy that defers to elected politicians only in theory.
The circus of politics and activism continues, and indeed the regime's legitimacy depends upon it. But it has become a contest for the scraps. Left-wing electoral wins expand the bureaucracy faster; right-wing ones apply the brake, though never to a stop. Grassroots activists can impose demands, as long as those demands serve as a screening force for bureaucratic interests. Activists who oppose those interests end up getting nowhere.
None of this sclerosis at the top, and subjection at the bottom, could be guessed from the rhetoric of the three warring political factions. Progressives, conservatives, and the alt-right (using this word in its broadest sense) are all drunk on the illusion that they are fighting over an open power centre. Progressives are the vanguard of the bureaucracy, enforcing its will in society, and scouting out little pockets of resistance to be crushed. This role would ordinarily win no laurels - but they see themselves as crusading heroes, and never want for volunteers. Conservatives are reduced to dragging their feet in the rearguard, but they always think they are marching to victory, and alt-righters accept an impossible position on the fringes because they imagine they can turn the tables. Each dog in this artificial fight is masturbating over the others, and distorting its perceptions of them, in order to avoid the recognition of power disparity that brings an end to real conflicts.
Note the one political grouping that doesn't follow this pattern: the one that actually wields power. The bureaucracy (or, should I say, 'civil service'), along with its academic and quangocratic extensions, adopts a language of pure pacific subservience. The old saying about the quiet ones may not apply to sex anymore, but it certainly applies to power.
If we close our eyes for a moment, and listen to the competing rhetoric of these factions, we might imagine their shared reality as a rather degenerate porno. The central drama is the violent ravishing of Society by her master, State. The progressive, or prog, appears from his rhetoric to be playing the role of a thumotic rubber-johnny: against social power he is all spikes and barbs, but against state power he is nothing but lubricated accommodation. The conservative is called a cuck, and his rhetoric shows the justice of this: he keeps up outraged commentary on every assault against Society, but refuses on principle to supplant State in his position of mastery over her. And as I've argued, the alt-right produces the rhetoric of a thot, aiming to egg Society on to rebellion and self-sufficiency (which only succeeds in bringing down hell upon the thot for her deliberate shit-testing).
In truth, the cuck and thot characters are hallucinations, imposed on State and Society by the political schizophrenia of democracy. The cuck - not really a legitimate husband - is an unnatural anti-State, who tries to woo Society away by adopting her own passivity. The thot is a corresponding anti-Society, which declares the independence of some or other social principle like race or capitalism, and schemes to oust or emasculate State. It is not difficult to understand, in the context of the metaphor, how the presence of these phantoms serves to prolong the action. Were they to disappear, State would soon lose his brutal appetite, and the prog would collapse into a pointless vestigial appendage. This would be divested of its position; State and Society would go back to some form of marital harmony; and the house of Western civilisation would be at peace.
At least, that's the theory. It makes more sense than trying to end the porno by hypocritically engaging in it, as conservatives and alt-righters are doing today. And yet, even a negative attempt to manipulate the outcome may be twisted into a new form of voyeurism. This is one of those situations in which achieving the desired result depends on "getting out of your own way". To end the porno, at least for yourself, all you need to do is to stop fapping to these political abstractions - by which I mean, stop identifying with them, and becoming unduly stimulated by their interactions. Unplug from the Matrix of masturbation at an individual level, and encourage others to do the same.
Individual actions require individual motives. So why do political NoFap? Well, let's look at the reasons why people do sexual NoFap. The main one is that porn addiction can cause a range of sexual dysfunctions - including impotence, lack of interest in sex, and perversions like bestiality. To understand how this, too, has its analogue in political porn, we must take a closer look at the concept of thumotic desire.
The most famous treatment is in Plato's Republic, which divides the mind or soul into three different principles. One of these is intellect or reason; a second is named as thumos; and the third corresponds to base desires including sex and appetite. The word thumos, which has no exact translation, embraces such concepts as pride, egotism, passion, ambition, ferocity, and so on.
So what do porn and fapping mean in the thumotic context? Well, the essence of masturbation to porn is a divorce between action and feeling. If every porn addict lost the ability to suspend disbelief - and had to inhabit, in full clarity, the squalid reality of what he is actually doing when he faps to porn - then the porn industry would lose its audience to NoFap overnight. (Masturbation would not necessarily disappear - but it would be a brusque and grotty procedure, like my voting for Boris Johnson in order to preserve Brexit.)
To demonstrate, let's use a factionally-neutral example. Say these words: "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." (Take them seriously, and put the porno metaphor out of your mind as you say them.) Now say these ones: "democracy is the best form of government, better than all the others that have been tried."
What's the difference? In terms of meaning, there isn't one. If democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others, then it is the best form of government and better than all the others. But the difference in feelings induced is very great. The second line makes you feel like a swivel-eyed Red Guard, clutching a textbook in an ideological brainwashing class as you loyally affirm the government you happened to be born under. The first makes you feel cynical and worldly-wise, leaning against a bar and taking a thoughtful drag as you loyally affirm the government you happened to be born under.
From our perspective, the second line is preferable, because the reality of obedience to a state religion is relatively clear. The first line contains a little stroke to the thumotic erection - what is colloquially called your 'spine'. Paradoxically, you feel it stiffening, even as you bend it to the will of power. As the metaphor would suggest, this is the road to a deeper and more permanent habit of servitude.
To apply this insight to each political faction, we must discern what it wants from thumos, and what it thinks it is getting from thumotic masturbation to political porn. Let's start with conservatives and alt-righters, a.k.a. cucks and thots.
These factions are pro-social, anti-state, and thus permanently on the defensive. Unlike the prog, who engages in politics to take power, they make war so that they may be left in peace. Defence against aggression requires the virtue of courage, and courage depends on thumos - which Plato compares to a lion enforcing wisdom in the face of adversity. In both cases, political porn absorbs and perverts this impetus for self-defence.
When you look at a democratic parliament, you should always imagine a vast multitude standing behind the left-wing faction: this is the bureaucracy. In truth, conservatism is a toy-opposition party, no less marginal to the state than the alt-right is marginal to society. As democracy's rearguard, conservatives act as their position would suggest: when they march forward, it is always in tandem with the rest of the state, but when they change direction they must always run away. However, if the pretence of an equal contest is to be maintained, conservatives must feel as if they are marching to victory even when they are just playing catch-up.
One of the early precursors to the manosphere, Daniel Amneus, wrote that conservatives in the '70s and '80s were influenced by something called the "Gilder Fallacy". Amneus argued that women are naturally savage (i.e. sexually unrestrained), and that men civilise both sexes by imposing marriage on women. George Gilder believed that men are the savages, and that they are civilised by women, whose virtuous biology naturally inclines them to marriage. Amneus's chad defence of patriarchy was soon memory-holed, but Gilder's virgin neo-Victorian mummy-worship is enshrined today as the conservative case for no-fault divorce. Never mind that Amneus's core argument - women would rather be free than married, ceteris paribus - is backed up by the fact that wives initiate the vast majority of divorces. Women are "naturally civilised", so if Venus of Walmart wants to throw her legal consort out of his house before he has even paid off the cost of the fertility-ritual, evidently he must be the one acting like a savage.
The true driving force in all of this is the bureaucracy's huge vested interest in divorce proceedings. Sooner or later, the rearguard of the state had to pack up its principles and carry them onwards; and Gilder's theory provided a roadmap for the necessary mental contortions. Conservatives could retreat from the enforcement of marriage on wives, because the female impetus to marriage was "natural". And they could fall back into line, by marching towards a new (and suitably defenceless) enemy, coincidentally the same husbands and fathers being targeted by the divorce racket. On this point, at least, conservatives have kept up a constant advance since the days of Gilder, adding more than a few strained baritones to the feminist hate-screech chorus:
Here we see a very common pattern in conservatism. To use Plato's metaphor, the thumos of a conservative is a lion habituated to become a monkey. To retain the perks of a pet, while keeping up appearances as a wild animal, this monkey must use slap-and-tickle on his master and vent his lion-nature on unprotected targets. He cannot touch the bureaucracy and its clients, but he can harass the poor; he politely protests anti-white hatred, but cracks down on the white reaction to it; etc. etc. To go back to my own metaphor, he deplores State's assault on Society, while secretly going along with it and thrilling to every moment. This hypocrisy is inculcated very deeply by political cuck porn, producing (as a norm) the personality traits of a petty, loudmouthed, bullying coward.
The alt-right misses the mark in a different way. As the rearguard of society, it is in a fighting position, and basically has the courage to fight. But its resistance must pass through another democratic institution, i.e. mass propaganda and activism - which, like conservative politics, is practically obsolete and survives only as a political porn channel. When you watch the Red Army victory parade of 1945, and see Zhukov and other generals marching through Moscow on horseback, do you suppose they won their military campaigns by cavalry charges? Now apply the same logic to the triumphal parades of leftist activism, which alt-righters imitate in the manner of a cargo cult.
When we hear the word thot in the dissident sphere, it's usually being employed by alt-righters against camgirls who parrot their talking points. But this word should be applied to the alt-right as a whole, because the talking points themselves are just as performative and titillating as the camgirls. The idea that you can fight the state by inhabiting the role of its scapegoats attracts a tiny minority of eccentric geniuses, and a far larger number of cranks and head-cases who want to claim exalted status without real virtue or effort. Only when namefagging and facefagging are seen as marks against one's status, as opposed to the gold standard of bona fides, will dissidents escape the leadership of people who ought rather to be in therapy.
These donkeys notwithstanding, most of the rank-and-file fash look pretty leonine to me. Unlike the cucks, their hearts are in the right place, because they care about winning and not about upholding some pharisaical moral justification for losing. But they are after an unattainable object - the defeat of the state by society - and they are locked into utterly self-defeating methods.
Reactionary young men - coordinated through the internet, traditionally-minded, and armed with enough personal courage to carve out boundaries against the privileges of the empowered - could burrow through the rotten structure of democratic society like so many termites. But political porn parasitises the minds of these termites like a cordyceps fungus. They are led to think burrowing means "doing nothing", and that "doing something" means lining up and marching in the open, for that is what their predators do. And they must march under a magnifying glass - the 'public eye' of a hostile media - for how are they to win if they are not magnified? Alas, this modus operandi always seems to serve the predators better than the termites. And it can get deathly hot under that glass...but this just means the termites need more courage. On with the march, boys! Pessimism is cowardice!
Au contraire. Having crashed from hubris to nemesis for the umpteenth time, the alt-right spends most of its energy flailing against the black pill: the apathy that screams to give up, the pessimism that crushes any attempt to restore morale, the suspicion that anyone trying to do anything at all is "muh controlled opposition". The idea that the Stuckment can go back to a Movement under these conditions is delusional. But what if the only way out is through? What if the apathy, the pessimism, and the paranoia all stem from the true perception that the alt-right is built to fail? The black pill, a pure negation of the democratic rightist cause, has become the strongest focal point in the dissident community. Either embrace it willingly, or be dragged to it kicking and screaming.
Does this mean political NoFap is a demoralisation psyop? YES. Friends don't let friends waste themselves on maladaptive addictions. But if you suspect that the remedy is just another poison, just ask yourself who really has a motive to poison you. Alt-right thot-leaders are dependent - for status, attention, donations, everything - on your willingness to consoom the bullshit fantasies they are selling you. They are users who had to start dealing, partly to support their addiction, partly because their criminal records forced them out of normal society. Maybe those of us who have enough Bitcoin could keep donating to them, on condition that they do no activism at all.
If you'll forgive my leaping from Plato to Aristotle, we can place conservative and alt-right thumos on the two wrong ends of a golden mean. Cuck porn induces selective impotence, leading to cowardice; thot porn whips up a frenzied, masochistic fetishism, leading to recklessness. Recovering fappers, who want to bring their feelings back into line with their actions, could start by reflecting on what they want vs. what democracy says they should do to get it. For example, if the survival of a race demands democratic action, shouldn't all races be facing extinction except for those native to the West? After all, the West is the birthplace and heartland of democracy. (Hey, wait a minute...)
Anyway, now we come to the trickier case of progressives. In my porno metaphor, the prog plays a grotesque role as Leviathan's rubber-johnny. This is meant to suggest that he is no less a debased loser than the other two political porn stars. But unlike the thot and cuck - who must rely on illusions to draw fappers into their centres of gravity - the prog is winning as well as losing.
Alt-righters live in the antechamber of sanity, where they are harshly illuminated at best, and made to stand in the mud at worst. But progressives live in the boudoir of power, where all takes place in soft, dimmed light and behind a haze of perfume. Their terrorists are freedom fighters; their violence is direct action; their harassment and bullying is callout; their pogroms are social movements; their race-bias is affirmative action; and so on, and so on. Presumably, if they had a collective body, it would relieve itself in rearguard movements and polish the results by corrective action.
So why should they go on political NoFap? Conservatives and alt-righters can make this decision individually or collectively, but for progressives it is always an individual choice. Let's put it this way: would you accept or refuse a Faustian bargain? Or - to be more consistent with our theme - would you prefer a lifetime supply of exquisite, custom-made, high-quality porn? Or would you try to gain the objects of your desire in reality, despite knowing that you could only achieve them in a much more commonplace form?
This is, in fact, a binary choice, because any kind of porn addiction creates a real conflict between fapping and fucking. Given the choice, some inveterate coomers will always choose the porn, and some progressives will happily live a life of sanctified sadism. These, in my metaphor, correspond to the prog remnant that can be expected to cling to power until it is forcibly removed.
But let's leave these deaf-ears to their fun, and concentrate on those who are not yet beyond hope. Here's one progressive, apparently unique in no other respect than his honesty, confessing torment at the thought that his heroic fantasies contradict his reality:
Is there such a thing as political NoFap? If there isn't, there should be, because there is such a thing as political porn. Democratic politics is a ritual form of civil war, and war engages thumotic desire - the lust for struggle, glory, victory, status, etc. - much as sex engages erotic desire. Erotic porn has its analogue in thumotic porn; and political porn is one of the worst forms of thumotic porn, for the most corrupting and enslaving illusions are those that best mimic real objects of desire. Buying a porn mag is not as wretched as paying for Skype chats with an e-thot; and playing the role of a king in a videogame is not as insane as thinking you are a king in real life.
Some dissidents have theorised that the sexual revolution is in a transitional stage. It seems to be moving from an initial free-for-all to a state of informal polygamy, which may lead to a future of debauchery for the few and masturbation for the many. Well, the political revolution started much earlier, and has already completed the analogous transition. Most power in a modern democracy, from top to bottom, is sucked up by an anarchic extended bureaucracy that defers to elected politicians only in theory.
The circus of politics and activism continues, and indeed the regime's legitimacy depends upon it. But it has become a contest for the scraps. Left-wing electoral wins expand the bureaucracy faster; right-wing ones apply the brake, though never to a stop. Grassroots activists can impose demands, as long as those demands serve as a screening force for bureaucratic interests. Activists who oppose those interests end up getting nowhere.
None of this sclerosis at the top, and subjection at the bottom, could be guessed from the rhetoric of the three warring political factions. Progressives, conservatives, and the alt-right (using this word in its broadest sense) are all drunk on the illusion that they are fighting over an open power centre. Progressives are the vanguard of the bureaucracy, enforcing its will in society, and scouting out little pockets of resistance to be crushed. This role would ordinarily win no laurels - but they see themselves as crusading heroes, and never want for volunteers. Conservatives are reduced to dragging their feet in the rearguard, but they always think they are marching to victory, and alt-righters accept an impossible position on the fringes because they imagine they can turn the tables. Each dog in this artificial fight is masturbating over the others, and distorting its perceptions of them, in order to avoid the recognition of power disparity that brings an end to real conflicts.
Note the one political grouping that doesn't follow this pattern: the one that actually wields power. The bureaucracy (or, should I say, 'civil service'), along with its academic and quangocratic extensions, adopts a language of pure pacific subservience. The old saying about the quiet ones may not apply to sex anymore, but it certainly applies to power.
If we close our eyes for a moment, and listen to the competing rhetoric of these factions, we might imagine their shared reality as a rather degenerate porno. The central drama is the violent ravishing of Society by her master, State. The progressive, or prog, appears from his rhetoric to be playing the role of a thumotic rubber-johnny: against social power he is all spikes and barbs, but against state power he is nothing but lubricated accommodation. The conservative is called a cuck, and his rhetoric shows the justice of this: he keeps up outraged commentary on every assault against Society, but refuses on principle to supplant State in his position of mastery over her. And as I've argued, the alt-right produces the rhetoric of a thot, aiming to egg Society on to rebellion and self-sufficiency (which only succeeds in bringing down hell upon the thot for her deliberate shit-testing).
In truth, the cuck and thot characters are hallucinations, imposed on State and Society by the political schizophrenia of democracy. The cuck - not really a legitimate husband - is an unnatural anti-State, who tries to woo Society away by adopting her own passivity. The thot is a corresponding anti-Society, which declares the independence of some or other social principle like race or capitalism, and schemes to oust or emasculate State. It is not difficult to understand, in the context of the metaphor, how the presence of these phantoms serves to prolong the action. Were they to disappear, State would soon lose his brutal appetite, and the prog would collapse into a pointless vestigial appendage. This would be divested of its position; State and Society would go back to some form of marital harmony; and the house of Western civilisation would be at peace.
At least, that's the theory. It makes more sense than trying to end the porno by hypocritically engaging in it, as conservatives and alt-righters are doing today. And yet, even a negative attempt to manipulate the outcome may be twisted into a new form of voyeurism. This is one of those situations in which achieving the desired result depends on "getting out of your own way". To end the porno, at least for yourself, all you need to do is to stop fapping to these political abstractions - by which I mean, stop identifying with them, and becoming unduly stimulated by their interactions. Unplug from the Matrix of masturbation at an individual level, and encourage others to do the same.
Individual actions require individual motives. So why do political NoFap? Well, let's look at the reasons why people do sexual NoFap. The main one is that porn addiction can cause a range of sexual dysfunctions - including impotence, lack of interest in sex, and perversions like bestiality. To understand how this, too, has its analogue in political porn, we must take a closer look at the concept of thumotic desire.
The most famous treatment is in Plato's Republic, which divides the mind or soul into three different principles. One of these is intellect or reason; a second is named as thumos; and the third corresponds to base desires including sex and appetite. The word thumos, which has no exact translation, embraces such concepts as pride, egotism, passion, ambition, ferocity, and so on.
So what do porn and fapping mean in the thumotic context? Well, the essence of masturbation to porn is a divorce between action and feeling. If every porn addict lost the ability to suspend disbelief - and had to inhabit, in full clarity, the squalid reality of what he is actually doing when he faps to porn - then the porn industry would lose its audience to NoFap overnight. (Masturbation would not necessarily disappear - but it would be a brusque and grotty procedure, like my voting for Boris Johnson in order to preserve Brexit.)
To demonstrate, let's use a factionally-neutral example. Say these words: "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." (Take them seriously, and put the porno metaphor out of your mind as you say them.) Now say these ones: "democracy is the best form of government, better than all the others that have been tried."
What's the difference? In terms of meaning, there isn't one. If democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others, then it is the best form of government and better than all the others. But the difference in feelings induced is very great. The second line makes you feel like a swivel-eyed Red Guard, clutching a textbook in an ideological brainwashing class as you loyally affirm the government you happened to be born under. The first makes you feel cynical and worldly-wise, leaning against a bar and taking a thoughtful drag as you loyally affirm the government you happened to be born under.
 |
| "The worst form of government is democracy." |
To apply this insight to each political faction, we must discern what it wants from thumos, and what it thinks it is getting from thumotic masturbation to political porn. Let's start with conservatives and alt-righters, a.k.a. cucks and thots.
These factions are pro-social, anti-state, and thus permanently on the defensive. Unlike the prog, who engages in politics to take power, they make war so that they may be left in peace. Defence against aggression requires the virtue of courage, and courage depends on thumos - which Plato compares to a lion enforcing wisdom in the face of adversity. In both cases, political porn absorbs and perverts this impetus for self-defence.
When you look at a democratic parliament, you should always imagine a vast multitude standing behind the left-wing faction: this is the bureaucracy. In truth, conservatism is a toy-opposition party, no less marginal to the state than the alt-right is marginal to society. As democracy's rearguard, conservatives act as their position would suggest: when they march forward, it is always in tandem with the rest of the state, but when they change direction they must always run away. However, if the pretence of an equal contest is to be maintained, conservatives must feel as if they are marching to victory even when they are just playing catch-up.
One of the early precursors to the manosphere, Daniel Amneus, wrote that conservatives in the '70s and '80s were influenced by something called the "Gilder Fallacy". Amneus argued that women are naturally savage (i.e. sexually unrestrained), and that men civilise both sexes by imposing marriage on women. George Gilder believed that men are the savages, and that they are civilised by women, whose virtuous biology naturally inclines them to marriage. Amneus's chad defence of patriarchy was soon memory-holed, but Gilder's virgin neo-Victorian mummy-worship is enshrined today as the conservative case for no-fault divorce. Never mind that Amneus's core argument - women would rather be free than married, ceteris paribus - is backed up by the fact that wives initiate the vast majority of divorces. Women are "naturally civilised", so if Venus of Walmart wants to throw her legal consort out of his house before he has even paid off the cost of the fertility-ritual, evidently he must be the one acting like a savage.
The true driving force in all of this is the bureaucracy's huge vested interest in divorce proceedings. Sooner or later, the rearguard of the state had to pack up its principles and carry them onwards; and Gilder's theory provided a roadmap for the necessary mental contortions. Conservatives could retreat from the enforcement of marriage on wives, because the female impetus to marriage was "natural". And they could fall back into line, by marching towards a new (and suitably defenceless) enemy, coincidentally the same husbands and fathers being targeted by the divorce racket. On this point, at least, conservatives have kept up a constant advance since the days of Gilder, adding more than a few strained baritones to the feminist hate-screech chorus:
Here we see a very common pattern in conservatism. To use Plato's metaphor, the thumos of a conservative is a lion habituated to become a monkey. To retain the perks of a pet, while keeping up appearances as a wild animal, this monkey must use slap-and-tickle on his master and vent his lion-nature on unprotected targets. He cannot touch the bureaucracy and its clients, but he can harass the poor; he politely protests anti-white hatred, but cracks down on the white reaction to it; etc. etc. To go back to my own metaphor, he deplores State's assault on Society, while secretly going along with it and thrilling to every moment. This hypocrisy is inculcated very deeply by political cuck porn, producing (as a norm) the personality traits of a petty, loudmouthed, bullying coward.
The alt-right misses the mark in a different way. As the rearguard of society, it is in a fighting position, and basically has the courage to fight. But its resistance must pass through another democratic institution, i.e. mass propaganda and activism - which, like conservative politics, is practically obsolete and survives only as a political porn channel. When you watch the Red Army victory parade of 1945, and see Zhukov and other generals marching through Moscow on horseback, do you suppose they won their military campaigns by cavalry charges? Now apply the same logic to the triumphal parades of leftist activism, which alt-righters imitate in the manner of a cargo cult.
When we hear the word thot in the dissident sphere, it's usually being employed by alt-righters against camgirls who parrot their talking points. But this word should be applied to the alt-right as a whole, because the talking points themselves are just as performative and titillating as the camgirls. The idea that you can fight the state by inhabiting the role of its scapegoats attracts a tiny minority of eccentric geniuses, and a far larger number of cranks and head-cases who want to claim exalted status without real virtue or effort. Only when namefagging and facefagging are seen as marks against one's status, as opposed to the gold standard of bona fides, will dissidents escape the leadership of people who ought rather to be in therapy.
These donkeys notwithstanding, most of the rank-and-file fash look pretty leonine to me. Unlike the cucks, their hearts are in the right place, because they care about winning and not about upholding some pharisaical moral justification for losing. But they are after an unattainable object - the defeat of the state by society - and they are locked into utterly self-defeating methods.
Reactionary young men - coordinated through the internet, traditionally-minded, and armed with enough personal courage to carve out boundaries against the privileges of the empowered - could burrow through the rotten structure of democratic society like so many termites. But political porn parasitises the minds of these termites like a cordyceps fungus. They are led to think burrowing means "doing nothing", and that "doing something" means lining up and marching in the open, for that is what their predators do. And they must march under a magnifying glass - the 'public eye' of a hostile media - for how are they to win if they are not magnified? Alas, this modus operandi always seems to serve the predators better than the termites. And it can get deathly hot under that glass...but this just means the termites need more courage. On with the march, boys! Pessimism is cowardice!
 |
| "But I wanted to doooo something..." |
Does this mean political NoFap is a demoralisation psyop? YES. Friends don't let friends waste themselves on maladaptive addictions. But if you suspect that the remedy is just another poison, just ask yourself who really has a motive to poison you. Alt-right thot-leaders are dependent - for status, attention, donations, everything - on your willingness to consoom the bullshit fantasies they are selling you. They are users who had to start dealing, partly to support their addiction, partly because their criminal records forced them out of normal society. Maybe those of us who have enough Bitcoin could keep donating to them, on condition that they do no activism at all.
If you'll forgive my leaping from Plato to Aristotle, we can place conservative and alt-right thumos on the two wrong ends of a golden mean. Cuck porn induces selective impotence, leading to cowardice; thot porn whips up a frenzied, masochistic fetishism, leading to recklessness. Recovering fappers, who want to bring their feelings back into line with their actions, could start by reflecting on what they want vs. what democracy says they should do to get it. For example, if the survival of a race demands democratic action, shouldn't all races be facing extinction except for those native to the West? After all, the West is the birthplace and heartland of democracy. (Hey, wait a minute...)
Anyway, now we come to the trickier case of progressives. In my porno metaphor, the prog plays a grotesque role as Leviathan's rubber-johnny. This is meant to suggest that he is no less a debased loser than the other two political porn stars. But unlike the thot and cuck - who must rely on illusions to draw fappers into their centres of gravity - the prog is winning as well as losing.
Alt-righters live in the antechamber of sanity, where they are harshly illuminated at best, and made to stand in the mud at worst. But progressives live in the boudoir of power, where all takes place in soft, dimmed light and behind a haze of perfume. Their terrorists are freedom fighters; their violence is direct action; their harassment and bullying is callout; their pogroms are social movements; their race-bias is affirmative action; and so on, and so on. Presumably, if they had a collective body, it would relieve itself in rearguard movements and polish the results by corrective action.
So why should they go on political NoFap? Conservatives and alt-righters can make this decision individually or collectively, but for progressives it is always an individual choice. Let's put it this way: would you accept or refuse a Faustian bargain? Or - to be more consistent with our theme - would you prefer a lifetime supply of exquisite, custom-made, high-quality porn? Or would you try to gain the objects of your desire in reality, despite knowing that you could only achieve them in a much more commonplace form?
This is, in fact, a binary choice, because any kind of porn addiction creates a real conflict between fapping and fucking. Given the choice, some inveterate coomers will always choose the porn, and some progressives will happily live a life of sanctified sadism. These, in my metaphor, correspond to the prog remnant that can be expected to cling to power until it is forcibly removed.
But let's leave these deaf-ears to their fun, and concentrate on those who are not yet beyond hope. Here's one progressive, apparently unique in no other respect than his honesty, confessing torment at the thought that his heroic fantasies contradict his reality:
I’m furious and upset. I feel trapped in my rage. All these impulses I’ve tried to tame over the years —
Because the aggressive, brash, self-righteous feelings polluted everything from my activism to my romantic life —
I’m being provoked by these fucking assholes, these men, and I want to lash out, punch back, but I don’t think that’s what we need right now, what anyone needs right now —
Isn’t that just the same patronizing, hyper-masculine bullshit that lets these fucking Nazis think they have the right to make others feel so terrible, to threaten, kill? I mean, I don’t want to replicate that. That’s the master’s tools, right?
Also, I’m scared. I mean, what if one of them brings a gun? Just one assault rifle. I saw a civilian carrying an assault rifle in Arizona. Scared the shit out of me. So I feel doubly trapped. I don’t want to do what’s selfishly best for me — beating the shit out of one of these guys [note the assumption that I could] — and I also don’t want to die. So in that way, I also feel like, and it’s the only word that makes sense to me here, a pussy.
I mean, after Trump was elected, I thought I might be fighting a totalitarian regime that would be locking up activists and journalists. And perhaps it seems hyperbolic, but I kept thinking: If it came to it, would I be willing to die for a cause? The way some non-Jews hid Jews during WWII; would I have that courage? Or at the end of the day, am I too afraid, selfish, weak? Not a real man.
Of course, he's still frantically popping those blue pills. He thinks his "aggressive, brash, self-righteous feelings" are a response to alt-right provocation, when really it is the other way around. He wonders whether he could have stood up to the Nazis has he been born in another time and place - when, given the Kristallnacht spirit cultivated by progressivism, he should be wondering how assiduously he would have victimised their targets. More importantly, he assumes thumos itself is the problem, not thumotic porn. He thinks the answer must lie in more theory, more self-denial, less of the hero and more of the saint. He is on a fool's errand: questing to find something in progressivism that is not vile, artificial, pornographic swill.
In the course of the latest holy pogrom, we've seen a lot of progressives acting all saintly and repentant, e.g. by kneeling before blacks for the original sin of being white. But again, remember the divorce between action and feeling. Contra white nationalism, mere biological race is not an important part of any normal person's identity. What matters is religion, beliefs and folkways, one's own actions and those of one's ingroup. (And let's not forget that in any political order divided into first- and second-class citizens, the former have a vested interest in disavowing common heritage with the latter.)
Progressive repentance has not been forthcoming on the murder of Cannon Hinnant. Indeed, the lights have been dimmed down to darkness; the stench of perfume is overpowering; but the stain of innocent blood still stands upon those sanctimonious kneelers. If whiteness is a sin, and blacks choose to grant forgiveness, surely they can always opt for punishment instead. And the latter choice becomes likely when official pravda is instructing them to overcome guilt towards murdered whites, and embrace their own politically-stimulated wrath as a justified response to white sin.
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| "Nothing to see here." |
But progressives cannot admit the need for true repentance - the type that penetrates beyond their epidermis, or at most their genitalia - any more than they can stand up to evils when power is not on their side. Deep down they know that righteousness and courage are hard, whereas self-righteousness and heroic LARPing are easy. So if you get more social accolades for fapping than for fucking, why even allow yourself to start doubting the reality of the pretty images on the screen? Do you really want to find out how many of your virtues are fictions, and how much of your power is not really your own? Progressives get the black pill too. But why should they take it?
Why indeed? So far, we've used Plato's Republic purely as a reference for the concept of thumos. But the wider argument of the book is framed as a response to this very question. Plato constructs a thought experiment, in which a just man receives all the blame from society and an unjust man gets all the praise, and asks why justice should be worth pursuing anyway. His answer is that an internal good, i.e. the proper ordering of one's soul, demands the pursuit of virtue regardless of external fame and fortune. And all virtues, not just courage, are enforced internally by thumos, so the distortion of this by any sort of fantasy can only hobble the quest for virtue.
Let's also remember that virtue for Plato means the same thing as excellence. Plato tells us to actualise our virtues and excellences if we can, and accept subordination to more virtuous and excellent people if we cannot. But the modern production requirements of thumotic latex demand the exact opposite for progressives. They must actualise their worst and weakest aspects, and subordinate themselves to even worse and weaker people. This, as far as I can see, does not produce internal satisfaction, but rather a diseased oscillation between the lows of mental illness and the highs of self-righteous anger.
The external rewards of progressive allegiance are very real. But anyone who wishes to retain them, while seeking personal excellence at the same time, must increasingly be a hypocrite. This is no bad thing, as hypocrisy in progressives is a tribute paid by virtue to vice. And if you pay this tribute today, it may well be unwise to declare non-payment tomorrow. You would be assailed by all sorts of sticks and carrots, before you are sufficiently advanced to distinguish them from the voice of conscience and the rewards of the righteous. Instead, why not prepare for independence by reducing the tribute? Secede in soul before you do so in body. Go through the motions of fapping, but slip something wholesome between the pages of the porn mag. Of course, once they have dumped their own porn, ex-conservatives and ex-alt-righters can do this too.
The more people walk away in disgust, the sooner the great democratic porno will come to an end. Of course, those peddling access to that porno have every reason to stand in the way of this spiritual exodus. They will say that present-day events,
which do not differ in kind from past events, will change the game
and turn political fapping back into fucking again. "Different things
will happen tomorrow, if only you do the same things today" - behold the wheedling whisper of an evil habit! Root it out. Resist the
urge. Stay strong.
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