Sunday, October 11, 2020

Keys To The Zeitgeist: The Cathedral, Bioleninism & Anarcho-Tyranny

For a variety of reasons, the usual ways of understanding politics have become inadequate to the task. This is true for culture as well, the shopworn trope of Andrew Breitbart "politics is downstream from culture" notwithstanding. Conservatives pretended to understand what that meant but the way in which they deployed it, undergirded by their actions or lack thereof, demonstrably showed that they didn't. Even that original insight no longer applies completely because culture now has become indistinguishable from politics

Instead, far from the useless Left/Right divide, or the meaningless accusations of "socialism is bad!," several terms exist that provide, in my view, a far greater understanding of the times through which we're living. Without them, previous ways of thinking and understanding leave us still adrift, unable to articulate what is going on. And if you can't adequately describe what is going on, you'll never be able to answer, as Lenin once put it, what is to be done?

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I've written previously about the Cathedral and have tried to mainstream it, somewhat, through my Twitter account. I'm a Twitter guy, Facebook being of the devil, where I only post memes and run away, or links to my columns here, which go unread & unengaged with. Q.E.D. and all that.

The Cathedral was a concept invented by Mencius Moldbug, real name Curtis Yarvin, in 2008. It's a simple but revealing idea which, once understood, changes forever the way in which you look at things. He defined it this way:

"The great power center . . . . is the Cathedral. The Cathedral has two parts: the accredited universities and the established press. The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It’s as simple as a punch in the mouth."

He recently elaborated upon it:

"The Cathedral is information: truth, philosophy, ethics, narrative, art and intelligence.

Its inner circle, the Brain and the Voice, includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

The importance of the Cathedral is defined by its monopoly on legitimacy. A school which is not the School is not educating. A voice which is not the Voice is not informing. A brain which is not the Brain is not thinking. There is nothing legitimate about miseducation, disinformation or unreason.

Prestigious information passes from Brain to Voice, and Voice to Conversation. This process is subtle enough, and its product is of high enough quality, for the Conversation to believe it is actually making up its own mind—from filtered inputs. The Conversation—all of legitimate public opinion—always admires the System. It thinks of this as a completely voluntary and spontaneous critical assessment.

And the Conversation, which is the discourse of the upper social class, is always the discourse of fashion. For the nobility (rich or broke), fashionable ideas are de rigueur. Against the middle social class (rich, doing okay or broke), they are political attacks. Épater la bourgeoisie is the official sport of every nobility. It is the role of the weak to accept these attacks, internalize them, and use them to loyally flagellate themselves.

The arrows of fashion rain down constantly from every direction. The kulaks cannot resist them for long and will surrender to the nobility’s latest definition of cool; not soon enough to be cool themselves; soon enough for this victory over themselves to be expected and taken for granted, and some new demand for further coolness launched.

And hell will freeze helium before the kulaks convince the nobles of anything at all. Even the truth will have a rough time if the kulaks somehow get hold of it first.

This may seem like a brutal process—but frankly, isn’t the nobility usually right? Aren’t nobles just cooler, better people? They certainly have higher IQs. The best of them are in the Cathedral. The rest at least hold Cathedral ranks. Surrender, chuds."

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Bioleninism is our next stop in this brief tour of how best to understand the Zeitgeist.  The Warden Post describes it this way and it's as good a definition as any other. You're certainly left in no doubt:

Developed by Spandrell (alias, Bloody Shovel) it takes the basic Leninist model of building a Party to rule the state out of the dregs of society, and shifts this to the realm of biology, wrong-think biology in particular, building the party out of people who are permanent losers within the social order. Naturally, this refers to the non-white, non-heterosexual, non-viable forms of life we’re forced to prostrate ourselves to as the living saints of the religion of diversity. This is for the very simple reason that those with zero status in a sane society stake their entire lives on accumulating social capital through the Party and will revert back to that position of zero status if the party ever loses power, thus ensuring their undying loyalty towards the party and undying enmity towards those who aren’t lacking in status – whether we’re talking about the ne’er do wells of old Russia or the degenerate and swarthy masses of the modern West. In other words, Bioleninism is a system through which the governing Globohomo powers ensure that those most problematic of peons – white, Christian, heterosexual men (and the women married to them) will always be outvoted (and therefore expropriated, disenfranchised and ultimately eliminated) by the aforementioned non-viable life forms.

You only have to look at the makeup of the Minneapolis City Council to see Bioleninism in action. In fact, most of Minnesota politics on the Left is a grand exercise in it. The lower the I.Q., the more unaccomplished, the freakier the freak, the more exalted they become by the powers pulling the strings and setting the stage. This was the attempted new normal long before the Wuhan virus.

By contrast, loving your straight wife or straight husband, including the miracles which proceed from perfect sexual complementariness, children, is to be abjured, preferably mocked and belittled outright. 

You can find Spandrell's three part essay here.

Other commentators have noted that a singular feature of Bioleninism is the assault on the middle from the top and the bottom. The uppermost & the lowermost are in a kind of war against that middle, in order for the top to rule more effectively because they can and do easily manipulate the bottom strata of society. The losers, the very targets, are the middle class, normies. To date it's been wildly successful because those who fight against it don't fundamentally understand what the "it" is. 

We're awash in Bioleninsim because the Cathedral promotes it incessantly. Hand, meet glove.

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Finally, the concept of anarcho-tyranny is played out daily in 2020 and while the incidents of it--strange, baffling, flat out wrong--are everywhere, too few understand the screenplay of this movie.

ParallelOptics has a depressingly accurate description of what it is:

"An amoral system of asymmetric law enforcement

Administered through a bureaucratic labyrinth of selective rule application

Under Anarchotyranny the ruling class aims to control its subjects so that they cannot coordinate / oppose the Regime 

This constitutes the tyrannical aspect

Instead of controlling the ‘real’ criminals / reining in the Regime’s own de facto paramilitary forces

This causes distributed anarchy

Meanwhile the law is interpreted and enforced selectively / asymmetrically depending on what is perceived to be in the interests of the Regime

Anarchotyranny is a demonic Hegelian synthesis 

The Regime tyrannically / oppressively regulates citizens lives yet refuses to enforce fundamental protective law 

Violent riots are incited by the Regime

While self-defence is effectively criminalised

Real criminals evade justice as long as they are ideologically aligned with power

While law abiding citizens are cast as criminals for protecting what belongs to them."

If you want a concrete, recent example of anarcho-tyranny, just think of the McCloskeys, the Saint Louis couple being legally persecuted by Soros prosecutors simply for defending themselves and their home with lawful firearms. If people don't wake up, this will eventually be their fate in some fashion or another. Because it's designed to be their fate. 

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Together these three concepts explain the current times in far greater depth than any other. My brief explanation of them can be seen as a black pill, certainly, but I prefer to see it as something else: a way out. Because if you don't understand what is happening and why, you have no ability to find ways with which to extract yourself, your family, your culture and your country from it. The future, in other words, is closed off if you don't know the "what, why or how" of what's happening.

Once you do, however, everything changes because clarity brings insight. And insight allows previously obscured courses of conduct to become visible. What might initially be thought of as a black pill is actually a red pill. The nice thing I like about red pills is that they frequently lead to white ones.