KNOW, DO, SURVIVE: A RESPONSE TO SPENCER J. QUINN

by James Lawrence

Spencer J. Quinn at Counter-Currents has been reading my recent posts on White Nationalism and the Jewpill, and has found the experience more frustrating than enlightening. He complains that I am being too critical, promoting negativity and defeatism, and forcing the reader to slog through tens of thousands of words without offering any positive solutions.

All the same, Mr. Quinn is not nearly as hostile as most WNs that I have encountered, and welcomes my criticism to the extent that he sees it as constructive. This, no doubt, has to do with the metapolitical ethos of Counter-Currents, which is about thinking before you act. I've always shared this ethos, and I welcome constructive criticism as well. In this case, it has come at just the right time.

It may be helpful to clarify that these lengthy, negative, critical posts are an ongoing series, and that I'm not planning on labouring my point beyond the upcoming final post. They are unapologetically long on condemnation and short on solutions, because there is no point in trying to build anything up before you have finished levelling the ground. But I would imagine that most readers are fed up with my blackpilling by now, and this response to Quinn gives me a chance to lift the mood a bit, by answering the question of what is to be done.

Before we can answer that question, we must understand the present regime, and that means understanding democracy.

The best theorist of the democratic regime as it exists today is Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin tends to be dismissed by WNs for his 'mischling' heritage, but his diagnostical power analysis has been vindicated by the events of the last five years, and it would be extremely unwise to ignore or wilfully misunderstand him. Last year he wrote a typically longwinded "descriptive constitution of the modern regime", which we can modify, extend and present in a more intuitive form as follows:

 

The main amendment I have made to Yarvin's theory – other than to change the name of his Factory to the Manor, and lump his four political classes into a single category named the Arena – is to soften the hierarchy of the governing institutions, and present them as a triad of power centres controlled by a homogeneous scholar-elite, the Demos. Yarvin is no less correct when he refers to these people as a "clerical oligarchy", but the modern Chinese regime could also be called an oligarchy. The decentralised, massive, and crowd-minded nature of the Western 'oligarchy' – whose behaviour simply cannot be presented as rational without recourse to impossibly serpentine conspiracy theories – suggests that the best name for it may, unironically, be democracy.

The idea of demokratia was born in ancient Athens, where a minority of citizens ruled over a majority of slaves and foreigners by collectively controlling a triad of institutions. Other than the 'clerical' part, that sounds a lot more like our 'oligarchy' than the modern concept of 'representative democracy', based on occasional mass voting in elections. It is time to dismiss 'representative democracy' as a misnomer, and understand the modern liberal democratic regime as a type of direct and restricted nobles' democracy. To my knowledge this term has only ever been applied to the Polish commonwealth, which was ruled by a huge unstratified nobility making up 10-15% of the total population.

This leaves us with the problem of finding a new name for 'representative democracy', and my suggestion would be popularchy. If democracy means the power of the Demos, then popularchy means the sovereignty of the People. Power (cratos) refers here to constant, day-to-day control, like that enjoyed by the general of a campaigning army; whereas sovereignty (arche) refers to ultimate, legitimate authority, like that of the faraway king who has sent the general out on campaign. 

 

Popularchy is certainly not a thing of the past, as modern-day democracy has been superimposed upon it, and relies for legitimacy on the illusion of continuity. Moreover, in terms of power analysis a scholar-elite is functionally indistinguishable from a priesthood, and the priestly role of the Demos makes it crucially important that its members believe in popularchy. They cannot afford to act and talk like the old Polish nobility, who revelled in their own freedoms, and saw themselves as a separate tribe of Sarmatian warriors ruling over a justly subjugated peasantry.

But the separate identity is there. It expresses itself through a mask of hypocrisy, implicitly in the culture of oikophobia, more or less openly in debates about the threat to democracy from populism. And although there was always untruth in the notion that elected oligarchies (parliaments) and elected monarchs (presidents) represented the People, popular sovereignty threatens to degenerate into farce when it is entrusted to a nobles' democracy. The endless tax-funded food-fight of unaccountable journalists, unsackable bureaucrats, academic oracles, radical intellectuals, lobbyists, quangos, nominally-private corporations, etc. can be influenced by the People through only two of the four political classes in the Arena. These are politicians, who are neither obligated nor empowered to carry out their campaign promises; and activists, who are showered with patronage if they are pro-Demos and ignored or punished if they are not. 

 

It would thus seem that the Arena is not a bulwark of popular sovereignty, but a sort of debased mix of Athenian assembly, Roman races and mediaeval carnival, in which the Demos sorts out its differences by playing at ritual civil wars with armies of ballot-wielding serfs. In truth, though, it is much worse, because the Demos is deadly serious about squaring its democracy with the circle of popularchy.

 

It does so by doubling down on popularchy, and trumping it within its own frame of reference. What used to be a political decision-making system is now inflated into a universal, messianic religion of legitimacy, in which the locus of sovereignty to be 'represented' now belongs to the huge inchoate mass of dalits (non-Westerners controlled by US imperial power). And just in case anyone should suspect that this is a bid to turn the People into an oracle that cannot think, act, or speak in one voice, those groups inside the West that are taken to 'represent' the lowest human denominator are weaponised as mamluks and set against the populist kulaks. This is Biological Leninism: the not-so-ritual war of minorities, wimmin, degenerates, etc. in alliance with the Demos against the white, male, populist minority vote.

It is in this context that Quinn should understand my 'defeatism' – by which I assume he means primarily my call for an anti-voting movement. 

 

Yes, #NoVote involves giving up on representation through elections, much as #NoNutNovember involves giving up on sex with imaginary girlfriends. What it does not involve is giving up on victory, because it is only in the context of elections and popularchy that the kulaks are condemned to defeat. We are like prisoners locked in a dungeon, who could puzzle out a way to escape, but have been promised our freedom on condition that we win a rigged card game and are endlessly distracted into playing it.

"How do you do, fellow mortal foes of the government?"

The first step to anti-voting is the realisation that conservatives can't win and won't win. Cons are the minority faction of the Demos, subordinate to the prog majority faction. They survive by mobilising the kulaks in support of their own agenda, which involves keeping the old rules of the Arena, and representing the interests of the Castle and Manor within the Demos. The system contains enough sticks and carrots to make sure that things stay this way, and that sincere conservative politicians and radical kulak activists are kept at arm's length. The reaction of most cons to Trump's successful Sailer Strategy should have banished the illusion that they are trying to 'win' in the sense assumed by the average mark.

 

This is not to deny the ability of cons to push back against the progs. What I deny is that the resulting stop-start cultural revolution is in the long-term interests of dissidents and kulaks. Given enough time, even the greatest conservative Ws turn out to be Ls, because their commitment to liberal democracy constrains them to strike the king without ever being able to kill him. In my country, cons smashed the white working-class support base of the Left, only for the next prog government to rebuild it with non-white immigrants; and America is suffering an ongoing black terror over an incident that the Cathedral would have ignored under a prog presidency. 

Now that the latest bout of Demos mass-hysteria has tipped the West into economic decline, the kulaks can be expected to rise up, i.e. become voters, activists and paypigs for populist ceremonial archons who will only serve as lightning-rods for blame. It is the responsibility of dissidents to wise up, and promote the opposite strategy of starving the con party to death. This would hand visible accountability to the prog party, who are the deputies of the Demos, and encourage more and more of the People to become permanently alienated from the regime. And if prog activists should take the opportunity to turn up the cultural revolution, and subject average whites to the sort of witch-hunting already suffered by dissidents, then this will do more to redpill them than any amount of our agitprop. It is the delusion of the People that they can say more or less what they think that keeps them from thinking all that they cannot say.

 

White Nationalists are usually willing to ride this train of thought until they come up against the spectre of unlimited dalit immigration. But in the long run, it is only the ritual civil war against the con party that guarantees the prog party's interest in importing dalits as votebanks – and, in turn, generates kulak demand for the con party protection racket. Since this war is basically a trough-fight for our money between the Castle and Manor in opposition to the Cathedral and Bureau, we the plebs should declare it to be an irrelevant quarrel of nobs and walk away from the Arena. And if we were to do so suddenly, in sufficient numbers – for example, if all those who voted for Blormpf in the US and Blorris in the UK vowed never to vote again, or to just ignore the cons and vote prog because voting is a bad joke – then we could expect to make elections irrelevant again, crash the political price of votes, and render the entire parasitic votebank class ultimately useless to the state.

But let's not whitewash this pill, for in the short term, it is certainly likely that these incentives will not yet be felt and that things will get worse before they get better. What I am suggesting is a plan to crash the democratic bus to a stop – on the understanding that it is ultimately headed over the edge of a cliff – by knocking out the conservative co-driver who keeps his progressive fellow-hijacker from veering too far leftward. 

There are three conceivable ways that this could end up, and none are very nice in the short term. One: the democratic state disintegrates into an anarchic free-for-all, which hardly seems likely given its high degree of centralisation (by way of comparison, note that ten years of revolutionary chaos played out in utter poverty did not cause the modern Chinese state to collapse). Two: taking up the strategy of Yarvin, dissidents build an anti-democracy party and win a popular mandate to establish a dictatorship, which peacefully disenfranchises the Demos at the price of buying it off on the public purse. Three (and this one seems most likely to me): the state muddles along for a while, grows ever more chaotic, sclerotic and incompetent, and finally devolves into a tyranny that proceeds to restore order by violently disenfranchising the Demos.

Herein lies the blackpill: a choice between anarchy or tyranny, which may well be the only natural conclusions to democracy (although there's always foreign conquest as well). Yarvin does his best to make a case for tyranny as inherently rational and benevolent, but we can suspect that it will just as likely be paranoid and arbitrary. All the same, any dissident who regards the prospect of tyranny with abject terror is still deceived by the supposed common identity of the Demos and the People. 

 

The truth is that the People already live under the collective tyranny of the Demos. Democratic freedom, properly understood, is simply the freedom of bureaucrats, politicians, academics, journos, activists, and other parasites to wield power over the People without any higher oversight. Popular liberties (those that are not mere licences for degeneracy) can be divided into two types: 1) legacies of pre-democratic Western culture that have not yet been chipped away, and 2) prerogatives to take part in the revolutionary culture war that chips away at pre-democratic Western culture. 

 

The kulaks thus have no stake in democratic freedom, because a tyrannical individual or cabal is usually less burdensome to its subjects than a tyrannical multitude. They do benefit from type-1 popular liberties, but would expect to keep most of them under any reasonable despot. And they are burdened by type-2 popular liberties, because the electoral and activist rackets are rigged against them, and only serve to justify their subjection to the whims of mamluks in their jobs, the streets and even their homes. Thus, while the Demos and mamluks might be terrified of tyranny, all kulaks who are not themselves activists ought to greet it with indifference.

The Demos are comically fearful of tyranny,
which would inevitably target their freedoms,
and have drummed this fear into the People.

And dissidents, who see further, should be able to discern silver linings in the raincloud. When a revolutionary ideology collapses into despotism, the state tends to fall back on social conservatism and ethno-cultural patriotism for legitimacy (e.g. in France under Napoleon, Russia after Stalin, China under Deng). It also stands to reason that tyrants, unlike democrats, find it hard to pass their arbitrary power down through the generations. They sit under a Sword of Damocles, and eventually must try to set up a stable, legitimate order based on regular delegation of power. So the muck and ashes of tyranny, which are all that can be born out of democracy, may become fertile ground for more ideal visions of the state.

Bear in mind, I'm not saying any of this is good, much less ideal. If you have a better idea to pull the West out of this shitshow, then I'm all ears. But it has to be based on reality.

 

In a comment to Quinn's post, Greg Johnson takes aim at my supposed "insistence that power is never conquered from below or from outside". Well, if I believed that, then I would have to disbelieve every conquest and revolution in history. My conviction that the Demos must be conquered from above does not come from neoabsolutist dogma (salutary as this is, as a corrective to democratic dogma), but is based on common sense and an ethos of not running away from realities that might cause us to feel unhappy.

 

Firstly, the modern democratic empire is based on a huge thalassocratic island-continent, which has very little to worry about from external threats (or, by extension, secessionist states, which will be isolated from outside support unless American WNs can persuade the Russians to buy back Alaska). Secondly, that state has just snatched an election from its kulaks in broad daylight, and seems to be suffering no immediate consequences other than a few chants of "Let's Go Brandon". The idea that populists can overthrow this monstrosity if they just persuade the People to get angrier is simply delusional. And don't even get me started on 'collapsism' – between the hope of German NSs that their encircled pariah state would last a thousand years, and the cope of American WNs that their thalassocratic island-continent empire will barely scrape through the next decade, I can hardly tell which one was tragedy and which one is farce.

 

But let's leave all this aside, because I've harped on it umpteen times before, and none of it gets us much closer to answering Quinn. All that I've said so far is that a general collapse of faith in democracy would produce the most favourable conditions for dissident victory. But at this point we are still in the realm of negativity, because these conditions alone cannot possibly guarantee us anything. What, in positive terms, should dissidents actually do? 

Establishing the Dissident Minimum

Let's start with the most basic common experience of dissidents: 'waking up', 'awakening', 'becoming redpilled', or whatever you want to call it. 

 

In WN, 'awakening' tends to be seen as a onetime threshold-crossing event (e.g. "I awakened to my racial interests after living in the ghetto/reading Salter and MacDonald/watching the Zimmerman trial.") Nowadays, 'redpilling' is understood more as a laundry-list of talking points to be internalised (e.g. "the redpill on women is that they are [hypergamous/deceitful/out to take your money]"). This thinking gives rise to stubborn, calcified egoism in those who believe they are 'awake', but are in fact still 'asleep'; and it allows 'redpills' to be opposed to each other, a contest in which the arbiter of truth tends to be "which one is more taboo?"

What the last five years has shown is that the Dissident Right is a lot more deluded than it thinks. Most of it does not stand outside the mainstream as the 'awakened' stand outside a dream, or as the 'redpilled' stand outside the Matrix. Rather, it stands on the fringes outside the centre of the Arena, where actual truth-tellers are thrown into a general dumping ground with heretical cultists and failed journo-activists. 

 

This can be observed from the fact that dissident thought-trends track the signalling-spirals of the Western cultural revolution, just as the arse-end of a snake follows its head. For example, vantardists and lamestreamers merely choose to believe what is more or less unacceptable within the mainstream narrative, and the current 'depopulation' crackpottery is just the flip side of Cathedral hysteria over olds and fats dying of Covid. And although Quinn rightly takes me to task for mixing the chaff of WN with the wheat, and giving undue weight to comment-thread cranks who call me a Mossad spy, the rate at which so many 'dissidents' resort to outright lies and fantasies is very relevant here. Those who shriek "Jew" or "shill" on the fringe are no more truthful or principled than those shrieking "Nazi" or "racist" at the centre; the former are just losers, while the latter happen to be winners; so within that frame of reference, why would anyone in his right mind want to be a dissident?

The first step to a true dissident movement is to go back to the basics: 'awakening', 'redpilling', or whatever. Like meditation, this is not something that you do once and get enlightened; you have to keep doing it until you get good at it. Like the Zen koan, it is about tuning into a new way of seeing and thinking, so you cannot just memorise the right answer and expect to 'get it'. And there are more ways to do it wrong than right, but most worthwhile things are like that. Properly understood, it is a full-time intellectual discipline, which we can call the antilarp.

 

The antilarp is about dispensing with lies and living in true reality. The first reality of which it takes account is its adversary, the Larp. Born centuries ago, when Renaissance humanists started larping as ancient Romans, the Larp has grown into the consensus delusion of Western society and accumulated all the lore of popularchy and democracy. Those who larp to it also possess the power to enforce its rules by violence – but that's okay, because like Jünger's anarch or Stirner's egoist, the antilarper need not show any external sign of his inner practice.

 

What is that practice? It basically consists in divorcing the religious authority of the Larp from the political power structure of Western society. The key point is that any attempt to argue or reason with the Larp, or manipulate it to saner and more favourable ends, can only mean entering its 'frame' and playing by its rules. Instead, the antilarper seeks to inhabit his reality and leave the larpers to theirs – just like anyone who happens to stroll through a park where people are larping or furfagging. So if the antilarper sees that blacks are allowed to insult and menace whites but the converse is not true, then he can pick up that fragment of reality and slot it into his world-picture, but all the larpsplaining about historical reparation may as well be in Quenya.

This not as easy as it sounds, because consensus is the normal litmus test of perception. If you think you see something abnormal, you will turn to those around you for corroborating testimony, and if they deny it you must consider the possibility that you are abnormal. Those who fail to do so risk falling into paranoia, solipsism and fantasy. But it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you; and how, exactly, are you to get to the truth by asking those around you to corroborate your view on this, or this, or this? If you persist in asking too many questions – is it not the blacks who live on the labour of the whites? the voters who 'represent' the politicians? the taxpayers who are the 'civil servants' of the bureaucrats? – you will be lucky to escape with a whole skin.

So antilarping requires attention to reality, like mindfulness, and occasional group practice, like boxing. I would say that it also requires the corroborating testimony of the  'democracy of the dead', who speak through all the social and political concepts bequeathed to us by those cultures that existed before or outside the Larp. Although these cultures may have been wrong about some things, and even larping in their own way, we must assume that they adequately understood the human social domain and could not all have been larping on the same points. If a basic social concept – e.g. 'king', 'wife', 'criminal', etc. – can be shown to be perennial across human cultures, then it takes precedence over concepts that originated solely in modern Western culture.

 

So the antilarper can accept the genuinely new discovery of genes; but he must dismiss the social reductionism of Dawkins, Salter, etc., in which human volition melts into the background and the genes compete against each other, as a larp. Take another look at our Moldbuggian theory of democracy, and you can see that it passes this test. However advanced or degenerate it may be, modern Western society is still a variant on perennial themes, with a ruling priesthood (the Demos), a subaltern warrior-class (the Castle) and a set of economic strata (the Manor and the People).

 

At this point we can see how the antilarp leads to the blackpill.

According to Daniélou's Virtue, Success, Pleasure, Liberation,
the shudras were the only Hindus allowed to booze, divorce
and eat freely – i.e. they had modern popular 'freedom'.

When you are still larping, you can believe in any number of bleak and terrible things like white genocide or the depopulation agenda, but none of it can touch the core of your persona as a free citizen fighting for the future of democracy. Antilarping, by contrast, involves renouncing all of that, and constantly inhabiting the place allotted to you by the actual power structure. For most of us, that means inhabiting the reality of being kulaks, and the kulaks under democracy are basically its servile caste – what former ages would call serfs, thralls, shudras, etc.

 

At first this may not be obvious. It is not just obscured by the mysticism of popularchy, but also genuinely ameliorated by the fabulous wealth of the modern world. But the essence of serfdom is not poverty, but a combination of low status, dependence, subjection to arbitrary authority, and (most importantly) obligation to support the rest of society by one's labour. We could say that the natural position of the kulaks is analogous to that of premodern peasants; but to the extent that they are over-regulated by the Demos, forced to support an idle underclass of mamluk wards, subjected to the arbitrary whims of mamluk clients (an inversion of saner societies in which free commoners might casually discipline ruffians), insecure in property ownership, beholden to Manor creditors and employers, etc., we can say that they are servilised. 

 

And the normality of this servilisation is what we dissidents talk around in endless debates about social atomisation, the weakness of parents and husbands, the increasing de facto whoredom of most women and uselessness of most men, the irrelevance of virtue ethics to both sexes, and (last but not least) the inability or unwillingness of most whites to rise up in revolt despite humiliating provocations and overwhelming numbers. All of these things would be abnormal in the world of 18th-century minor gentry that forms the default backdrop of the Larp. But they are all to be expected in a servile caste.

So yes – gloomy stuff. But just as the root of all evil according to the Bible was not money but the love of money, so the root of all depressive faggotry on the Dissident Right is not the blackpill but the fear of the blackpill. Once he stops artificially boosting his morale against the gravity of his real situation, the antilarper has no more need to live upon the emotional yo-yo of cope and mope. He need no longer believe, for example, that whites are defective 'individualists' incapable of competing against more 'collectivist' peoples; only that the majority of whites have been reduced to serviles, and that their survival instincts are working just fine, as the history of servile revolts is a pretty grim one. Whenever democracy asks him "why are you hitting yourself?", the antilarper need never dignify it with an answer.

The antilarp can be practiced by anyone, and  requires no motive beyond the desire to live in truth. But if a critical mass of dissidents took it seriously, it might become the embryo of a shared culture, living flesh to the bare bones of our mostly-white, mostly-male, mostly-kulak group identity. The need to practice it secretly would also tend to induce inner detachment, and stimulate the formation of real-life groups in which antilarpers could speak freely to each other – in contrast to the online virtual world dominated by egoistic, delusive, argumentative larpers. It is not the shared culture that we want (most of us would prefer another larp) but it is the one that we need.

The Tripartite Restorationist Strategy

 

Let's imagine that we have such a critical mass of antilarping dissidents. What should this community do? It should try to become a worthy alternative regime in embryo.

If it is to succeed, it must become more than a blob of angry serfs relying on the leadership of democratic politicians and activists. There are two ruling classes that would seem to be highly perennial, and required to head up every independent power structure from a small kingdom to a whole civilisation. These are the wise men who hold religious authority and the strong men who wield political power – what are variously called sages and princes, priests and knights, oratores and bellatores, brahmins and kshatriyas, etc. Having rejected the existing regime, our dissident community must produce – or else convert – men worthy to play these roles in a new one.

Here we cross treacherous ground, in which our antilarp could easily sink into yet another right-wing spinoff of the Larp. "I'm no servile, I identify as a level 99 kshatriya wolf-spirit" – yeah, no. Keep in mind that I am speaking of virtual identities, effective only within the dissident community, which would not override anyone's actual position in the democratic class system. To better avoid all pretension and larpiness, I will speak not of priests and princes, etc., but of knowers and doers. 

Knowers and doers are not just 'the relatively intellectual' as opposed to 'the relatively practical', and are neither journalists (*hawwk*) nor activists (*spit*). The life paths of the two types must be completely different – internally, because their motives and virtues are not the same, and externally because the knowers must stand outside the existing state and the doers must penetrate within it. Only by leading some sort of elaborate, polynymous double life could one man hope to play both roles effectively.

Knowers fall into several categories – deep thinkers and shallow commentators, data-gatherers, poets and artists, religious practitioners, etc. – but they all share the primary objective of discovering and expressing the truth. High intelligence is preferred, but not needed, because their ranks might include anyone who chooses to dispense with standard-issue taqiyyah and take the Brad Blanton approach to the antilarp. This does not mean that knowers cannot hide their identities – and secrecy may be the better option for maintaining detachment from democracy – but namefagging makes sense for certain types of knowers, whereas for everyone else it is just a foolish shot to the foot.

 

The trade-off for this liberating honesty and integrity is that knowers must renounce power – and in the case of this class alone, the purges and ostracisms employed by the regime work entirely to the dissident advantage. To reuse a metaphor from Yarvin, dissident knowers should not be in the Cathedral, using their truths to sweeten the sewage of lies and larpsplaining; they should be independently brewing the finest intellectual wine available to humanity, which would be turned into foul sewage by the slightest 'pragmatic' compromise with the Larp. 

Doers divide into three main groups: leaders, followers and fighters. In order to be anything other than larpers under the current power structure, all three of these types must stand within the regime – and I would guess that this means the leaders should become prog party politicians in the Arena, the followers (i.e. those in subordinate positions who carry out the leaders' agenda) should burrow into a few core institutions of the Bureau, and the fighters should join the Castle as soldiers and police. This is not a Gramscian long march, but a short march into the key governing institutions that will one day be needed to abolish all the others. It could be accomplished with no marching at all, in the event that the Cathedral goes full-retard and dissident knowers manage to convert some of the ruling elite.

 

Either way, doers must be devoted to active, subtle, and extreme taqiyyah, and more like Machiavelli's prince than the typical larper's idea of a warrior – not just the leaders and movers, but also the fighters to a degree, for the regime has its ways of purging idealists. Doers are not idealists but pragmatists, mainly interested in taking power, keeping order, and imposing justice (in that order). If, for example, they must take over the prog party under the banner of socialism in order to do this, they will.

 

The classic model of the alliance between knowers and doers was described by Yarvin, in his posts on the Antiversity and the Restoration. He almost goes over the top with the hardheadedness – presenting the doers as ruthless profiteers, and the knowers as the world's most accurate fact-check – but this basic outline of the relations and motivations holds true. When the knowers have established their religious authority, and the doers are ready to take political power, their alliance works like the king and queen on a chessboard. The doer does everything – launching the restoration, abolishing enemy institutions, restoring order, etc. – and the knower does almost nothing, but if the knower ceased to exist then the doer would not even be in the game. Without an alternative locus of intellectual authority outside the state religion, doers collapse into a disunited mass of power-grabbers and order-keepers, and any wealthy nobles' democracy has a wide enough trough to accommodate such people.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves – and anyway, there are other pieces on the board. Knowing and doing are extreme, elitist developments of the antilarp, and should not be expected of the vast majority of serviles in the dissident community. These can follow a third path – that of the traditional commoners, laboratores, vaishyas, etc. Under democracy and tyranny, their main objective should be to weather the storm, but they could expect to become the productive, conservative 'yeomanry' of an ideal successor state based on a strong centre and a pyramidal delegation of power.

Antilarping is compatible with other rejectionist movements
against delusional addictions – porn, gaming, TV, etc. – but
most dissident internet ranting belongs on that list as well.

We can thus call them survivors – a word that denotes not just bare existence, but more literally 'living over', i.e. living well, living on through one's children and outliving democracy. In their relations with the regime, survivors should plot a middle course between the radical honesty of the knowers and the strategic deception of the doers. On the one hand, they need to practice enough taqiyyah to avoid being pinned down as targets for specific thoughtcrimes. On the other, most of them can afford to adopt an open attitude of unbelief, indifference, contempt and ridicule towards voting, activism, progs, cons and democracy. This sort of passive, negative energy is extremely difficult to punish – are they going to start witch-hunting people for lack of enthusiasm? – and yet, as we've seen, it serves the crucial end of devaluing mamluk votes and political support. 

Most of the positive energy of survivors should be directed to pragmatic questions: how to make money inside and outside the Manor, how to find a partner and start a family, how to get around the state's claims to patronage of your wife and ownership of your children, how to live as freely and independently as possible, how to form co-operative groups, how to spot and avoid feds, activists and loons, how to defend against mamluks, how to deal with the Castle and Bureau, how to support the knowers and doers where needed, how to make provisions for self-sufficiency, etc. etc. etc. Clearly, surviving hardly requires less energy than knowing or doing, and it certainly requires every ounce of energy currently being wasted by ordinary dissidents on futile political larps.

 

Survivors might also rally the kulaks to play a supporting role in a future dissident takeover – and since the kulaks maintain much of the regime's infrastructure, the effects of collective action might be devastating. But just as the doers will require the intellectual authority of the knowers in order to act coherently, the survivors will require the patronage and direction of the doers if they are to do any good. For example, just imagine a trucker strike in support of a regime change by dissident doers, as opposed to the same thing in support of some useless legal act or electoral archon like Bleurmph. The former might decisively tip the balance against the regime; whereas the latter would just cause a few weeks of chaos, after which the state would eventually restore order, and turn the haulage industry into a public operation staffed entirely by dalits and overseen by the Bureau and Castle. So the kulaks wouldn't get their groceries, and more importantly, they would have shot one of the few bolts in their quiver.

Maybe a lot of this comes across as quite banal and redundant – yes, larping bad, survival good, tripartition of classes, very trad and Aryan – so let me clarify how I think White Nationalism tends to get it wrong. 

WN makes a fatal compromise with the Larp on a crucial point: it supposes that all castes or classes are, or at least should be, homogeneous in ideology and interests as long as they belong to the same race. This is what leads it to the misjudgement that the only real problem with the Demos is that it is more disproportionately Jewish than the People. More importantly, WN applies this to the dissident community as well – so under its frame of reference, the dissident can be neither knower, nor doer, nor survivor, but must be a jack of all these trades and a master of none. 

If this 'jack' – which we can read as a backronym, journo-activist-citizen – happens to be a knower by nature, then he must tell only those truths that are useful and morale-boosting for politics, and he must forge crude propagandistic allegory in place of true art, poetry, etc. If he has the foothold in the state required to be a doer, he cannot expand his position by making a pragmatic use of ideologies, but must instead hamper it (or, more likely, throw it away entirely) by becoming a true believer in the White Nationalist ideology. And that ideology is basically a tribalist fertility cult – which ought to have direct relevance to survivors, but cannot satisfy the impetus towards universal truths in the knowers, and cannot attract doers because it offers them a losing hand in the struggle for power. To top it all off, survivor-type 'jacks' who convert to WN must turn away from the business of surviving – marriage, procreation, quiet and low-level group-formation, etc. – and laboriously build up ritual war machines that either get smashed by the progs or commandeered by the cons.

 

Note the frequent use of the word must in the last paragraph. This represents the grim, calcified willpower of racial duty – we must do this, we must believe that, etc. – in the name of which the WN jack ignores his 'blackpilled' doubts, and traipses back to democratic politics to try another roll of the dice, whilst telling himself (like any addict) that he will be able to dispense with the whole disgusting game once he has got his satisfaction from it. By contrast, the operative words in the tripartite dissident vision are can and should, as the knowers, doers and survivors are generally left to follow their inclinations to excellence as long as they avoid self-defeating traps. In extremis, we could imagine the three groups operating in their own spheres without any mutual communications, united by nothing more than a shared rejection of the Larp.

The way in which these groups work also affirms the traditional hierarchy of knower -> doer -> survivor,  albeit only in embryo. Initially, the knowers reject the state's religious authority and build up an alternative source of truth; then the doers, following this, smash the old regime and pull the state more into line with that truth; and finally, having thrust down the unproductive mamluks whose votes and activism are now obsolete, the doers raise up the survivors and kulaks as a new class of free commoners. 

 

By contrast, the order of rank in the soul of the WN jack is inverted – he must know so that he may do so that he may survive – and in the group macrocosm, this is enforced by the dependence of thinkers and activists on a mass of donors, who all too often want edgy thumotic porn instead of truth. Having the survivors on top may seem innocuous enough (at least if you're a pleb, as I am); but I would argue that this sort of inversion feeds into the degeneracy of democratic-popularchist society (which, among other things, turns criminals into objects of worship), and that dissidents should be trying to correct it instead of conforming to it.

 

In a comment to his article, Quinn asks "why a supra-racial alternative to the universal state religion of liberal democracy best serves white interests". I know what he means (and I hope what I've said has made it a bit clearer), but note how his wording throws us right back into the frame of the Larp. If you want the knowers to come up with a new state religion that serves the people – and this is a Great White Hope at Counter-Currents and elsewhere in WN – then you can only expect them to work with variants of popularchy and democracy, and these are the very cancers that are killing us. One has to trust that once they have been excised, the people of Greater Europe will be able to get on with the business of reproducing and defending themselves – just as their ancestors did when they humbly served the religion of Christ, and as their ancestors did when they propitiated the pagan gods. If they should require the life-support machine of a church entirely devoted to praising procreation, xenophobia, and genetic interests, then that ought to tell you that they are still very sick indeed.

Quinn objects that non-whites in the West are very much devoted to cults of racial identity, and that this seems to work out fine for them. Indeed it does – but this is the very essence of cargo-cult thinking, the confusion of the landing strip with the airport. Above all of those self-interested, particularist identity cults (yes, all of them) stands the higher authority of the Demos, whose members go out of their way to efface themselves as 'civil servants', 'political representatives', 'objective scholars', etc. If they started proclaiming their own freedoms and interests to be the sole reason-for-being of the state, their authority would soon crumble. And they do not, in fact, act selfishly; they think they are serving the one true religion of popularchy.

And they are probably right! 

 

In the comment that I mentioned earlier, Greg Johnson says that "every parasitic elite claims that it really is acting for the good of the people" and that all we need to do is to "hold elites to their own professed standards", which are "universally acknowledged, outside of NRx nerddom". Sorry to get nerdy on you with numbers and all that jazz, but the majority of people in the world controlled by US imperial power aren't white, and sex ratios in Western countries almost all skew female. So by subjecting ordinary white males to the pincer attack of feminism and immigration, and crashing white population percentages through low fertility and demographic displacement, the Demos is up to the old popularchist trick of "acting for the good of the people". What we need is a reframing of its behaviour as unjust, evil and even satanic – and we will not get it from a minoritarian popularchy based on racial narcissism and subjective genetic interests. 

 

All that WNs in the imperial heartland can do on the basis of such a religion is to advocate secession, or else white reconquest plus total ethnic cleansing. And historically, the former strategy led to the tragedy of the Confederacy, while something like the latter one led the Germans to turn most of the Eastern peoples against them during their war against the Soviet Union. One wonders if the implicit objective is not so much to 'preserve the white race' as to preserve a white race that practices popularchy and electoral politics. By contrast, our envisaged knowers and doers would be no less able to run a large empire with a millet system than a small national state (or, God help us, a small Jewish-style diaspora). And this is in line with the strategic flexibility of modern survivors, most of whom are no longer bound to the land, and can ride away like premodern steppe nomads in order to frustrate aggressors.

But no-one at Counter-Currents has to agree with me on this. They can keep refining the fools' gold of minoritarian popularchy, and other WNs can keep trying to set it up in the brittle athanor of a secessionist national border. But we've had roughly sixty years of failure out of this modus operandi so far – and, most recently, the death spiral of the Alt-Right after White Nationalists took charge of it and decided to repeat Rockwell's folly. So maybe it's time to try something new?

If nothing else, perhaps all these demoralising tirades of mine will stimulate a bit of thought on that. I hope so – because do you know what my idea of 'defeatism' is? Doing the same thing over and over, and being defeated, while expecting a different result.