Tag: philosophy

The Importance of Knowledge

I’ve occasionally made reference to intellectual accomplishment as being the combination of three factors, and equated it to the effective use of artillery. The metaphor is as follows:

  • Gun Caliber: Intelligence, as best approximated by IQ
  • Gun Laying: Wisdom, which allows one to effectively aim and focus one’s intelligence on a meaningful target with precision.
  • Ammunition: Knowledge and experience. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you are operating on the basis of false, incomplete, or outdated information.

Now, NN Taleb is a very smart guy. But like all very smart men, he is subject to the temptation to substitute his ability to think quickly on his feet and utilize logic to fill in the blanks of his actual knowledge. I used to be as prone as anyone else to occasionally bluff my way past my own ignorance, until one night in college, after one of my very smart friends was so inadvertently blown out of the water this way in public, that I vowed to never, ever do it again.

In fact, regular readers here will probably have noticed that I do the opposite; while I don’t play dumb, I quite often know a bit more about the topic being discussed than I usually advertise. Back when the evolutionists weren’t terrified of engaging with me, they used to warn each other that I was better read in the basics than they tended to assume.

Unfortunately, Taleb apparently never learned that lesson, which has thereby led to the comprehensive demolition of his hapless argument against IQ. Although I was asked numerous times to address that argument in detail, out of respect for an author that I admire as well as the obvious nature of its flaws, I contented myself with simply pointing out that his argument was false on its face, on the basis of its core assumptions. However, Heretical Insights showed no similar restraint in his point-by-point rebuttal.

Taleb starts off his attack on IQ on the grounds that it supposedly has a ‘low variance explained’ with various performances (which ones specifically he’s referring to, he doesn’t specify):

Psychometrics peddlers looking for suckers (military, large corporations) buying the “this is the best measure in psychology” argument when it is not even technically a measure — it explains at best between 2 and 13% of the performance in some tasks (those tasks that are similar to the test itself)

Taleb doesn’t provide any sources for where the 2-13% claim comes from, which is odd for someone who is so seemingly confident about his stance on IQ. Besides that, he makes a very basic mistake of misinterpreting anything that has a ‘low variance explained’ as being meaningless. The problem is that r2 is a flawed interpretation of effect size because it doesn’t tell us anything about the real world effect that one variable is expected to have on another variable. As an example, let’s assume that IQ explains ‘only’ 9% of the variance in income, so does it matter whether or not a one-point increase in IQ predicts a $10 increase in income or a $10,000 increase in income? Of course it does, and this is obvious to anyone who’s honest, but here lies the problem: r2 does not tell us how large the real-world effect is, because it expresses the effect size in a statistical sense, which is neat and all, but not in a real-world sense, so it’s not very meaningful. An r2 of 0.09 for IQ and income in the real-world means an r of 0.3, or that a 1 SD shift in IQ predicts a 0.3 SD shift in income, which is certainly not trivial.

So, in the real world, even things that only explain a small percentage of the variance can have large effects. Thus, a low variance explained is not valid grounds for dismissing the utility of IQ. But the truth is, we don’t even need to think that hard to find instances where a small variance explained has a large effect. Ryan Faulk gave more intuitive examples in one of his response videos which I will list here:

  • Mayonnaise only explains 5% of the variation in the tastiness of sandwiches. Therefore, hugely increasing mayonnaise levels will have no effect.
  • Salt explains little variation in steak tastes. Therefore, triple the salt!
  • In America, the proportion of people starving to death doesn’t explain much variation in health. Therefore, people don’t have to eat!
  • Stabbings explain little variation in physical health. Therefore, increased stabbings will be fine.
  • Oil production only explains around 5% of the variance in GDP per capita. Therefore, having 100 times more oil per capita won’t matter.
  • Ethnic diversity only explains 5% of the variance in GDP. Therefore, replacing Norwegians with Ethiopians won’t have any effect!

Sounds stupid, right? That’s because it is…

Overall, Taleb’s article was bad, really bad. For a guy who is so confident about his stance on IQ, it’s truly incredible that he made all the mistakes that he did. Taleb seems completely ideologically driven when it comes to the topic of IQ and is completely unwilling to even acknowledge all the compelling evidence in its favor. One of the things Taleb does is constantly insult advocates of IQ or call them names, quite childish for a man who’s supposed to be regarded highly and also quite telling of his attitude towards people who disagree with him. When all is said and done, it’s pretty clear that Taleb’s personal biases against IQ prevents him from seeing the overwhelming evidence that IQ is valid and useful. He thinks that the people who promote IQ are either racists/eugenicists or psychometric peddlers looking to get rich, it never even crosses his mind once that maybe the reason why people promote it is because it’s a good tool for making sense of the world around us. The words ‘racist’ and ‘eugenicist’ are nothing more than empty moral pejoratives used to instill fear against those who are able to think independently enough to not blindly obey our current institutional authorities or our modern sensibilities. Lots of things are eugenic Taleb, and if you’re so committed to fighting it, then the only thing that awaits Western civilization is ruin. It’s time to put this delusion to rest and acknowledge reality for what it is.

I don’t know what Taleb’s motivations might be for metaphorically sticking his hand into such an obvious woodchipper, nor am inclined to guess what they might be. But the important thing to remember is that no matter how smart you are, no matter how successful you might be, and no matter how astonishing your intellectual accomplishments, achievements, and original insights might be, nothing that you did in the past means that you are going to be right in the future.

Every appeal to human authority eventually fails in the face of objective reality, because reality is the ultimate authority short of the Creator God. And the more intelligent one is, the more intellectually accomplished one is, the more important it is to never lose sight of that.

DISCUSS ON SG

Never Go Hard with NPCs

No friendships survived. My own family barely talks to me now. I went hard on the vax- almost everyone I know took it so they all hate me.

This is the narcissistic mistake of the well-intentioned. Just as the Gamma who erroneously believes that the power and purity of his attraction to a woman will make him attractive to her, the informed assumes that those he tries to save, but fails to convince, will be grateful to him and appreciative of his efforts when they eventually realize that he was right all along.

This never happens. Humanity is an ungrateful species. The average individual is more likely to hate you for being right than appreciate you for caring enough for trying to save them. In fact, they are more likely to blame you for not trying hard enough, no matter how hard you actually tried, because your lack of success in saving them is sufficient proof of your lack of effort.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do your best to warn your friends and family of future dangers. It means that you should warn them once, twice at most, and be willing to answer any questions that they might have for you, but do no more than that.

Most people are incapable of learning, or changing their minds, on the basis of information. Accept that and accept them how they are and for what they are. As soon as it’s clear that they’re not going to listen to you, leave them to their fate and thereby preserve the relationship. Because, in the end, you can’t save anyone who doesn’t want to be saved.

If Jesus Christ can’t, you certainly won’t be able to.

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Our World Has Changed

John Carter explains why we’re going to have to change our mindset now that the latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended appears to have fallen and we are the hunters:

It isn’t only the left whose world has come undone, practically overnight. Our world, too, has changed irrevocably. For long, desperate years we have been as hunted animals in the wilderness, partisans hiding in the badlands of the Internet, launching culture jamming raids to harry the enemy at his points of weakness. We have become accustomed to our role as outsiders locked in permanent guerrilla war with the Regime. We’ve taken horrific casualties, yes – careers destroyed, lives ruined, in some cases even lives lost: millions of young men have died deaths of despair, and while only a few of them were direct combatants in the meme war, the civilian casualties must be counted towards the enemy’s grim toll.

Infuriating as the meme war could often be, there was also a sense of comradeship within the Society of Frens. When your account got banned, or your friend got doxxed, people would come together, offering solidarity, even helping out financially. We were all in this together, after all. More, the meme war was fun, and over the years we became expert in our trade. There’s a thrill to piling into the replies of a hapless libtard, a fierce joy in dismantling their pseudo-intellectual paramoralisms to the point that they ragequit the interaction by blocking you, a grim pleasure in taking some piece of hackneyed focus-grouped public relations slop and reformatting it into counter-propaganda that leverages the system’s own words and imagery against it, a quiet satisfaction in seeing the ideas germinated in your anonymous shitpoasts being laundered through the mouths of high-profile personalities.

By and large that’s over now. The legacy media is simply irrelevant to the public discourse now. The libs are mostly shocked into silence. Our hungry frogs are so starved for prey that they’re falling on squishy centrist conservatives, who stupidly stepped into the role vacated by the shitlibs when they fled X for the great hugbox in the (blue)sky. We’ve won. We’re not partisan raiders, but an occupying force. We aren’t being hunted, but are the hunters. We are not at war with the Regime, because we are the Regime. It will take time to adjust to this, and many will not adjust well.

There was a Taliban soldier who, after the fall of Kabul, lamented that he missed the good old days of sleeping under the stars with his brothers in arms, playing a lethal game of hide and seek with the US military. Hard and uncomfortable as that was, in retrospect it had been a lot more fun than sitting in an air-conditioned office dealing with the administrative minutiae of parking regulations.

That’s us, now, and we haven’t really come to terms with it. The enemy has collapsed. Decades of preference falsification have come apart, as they always do, in a preference cascade – people admitting that they don’t actually believe the things they pretended to believe because everyone else was pretending to believe them and they didn’t realize everyone was pretending, only now they do know, so they’re saying what they really believed all along, and so is everyone else. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes moment, a Fall of the Berlin Wall moment. The invulnerability conferred by the appearance of monolithic consensus has been cracked; the illusion having been dispelled, the spell is impossible to cast again. They’re done.

We’ll be dealing with the fallout for many years to come. There are so many secrets to be revealed, so many ugly little scandals to be uncovered, such a depth and variety of mendacious little conspiracies and corrupt petty grifts that have permeated our society at every level, paralyzing it so it could be parasitized. Clearing out the organizational, financial, cultural, and psychological wreckage will take decades. These people have been running their sick social engineering experiments for generations; we’ve all grown up in their MKULTRA world, and have no real idea just how fake and gay our kayfabe Truman Show society really is. But I think we’re going to find out, and it’s going to shock a lot of people – both those who, though ‘redpilled’, didn’t really know just how bad it really was, but especially those who, because bluepilled, had no idea that their entire identity is a psyop. People’s minds are going to shatter from that; many will never come back (how do you come back from surgically trooning yourself, or worse, your child?), and we’ll be carrying that burden of walking wounded for the rest of our lives.

And, here’s the annoying thing: it is you, yes, you, the person reading this right now, the rightist dissident that set himself against the powers of the Earth when the risk of doing so was greatest, who is responsible for doing all of this. Or at least whatever your small part in it is. You’re not on the outside looking in anymore: you’re the Regime, now. For years we’ve contented ourselves by pointing out the injustice, incompetence, and inefficiency of the demented ruling class and its army of flying rainbow butt monkeys. Mere critique is no longer enough. The worldsoul has heard us, and it has decided to give us exactly what we said we wanted: power. We have said for years that we know better than the fools in charge. Now we’re the fools in charge. We’ve talked the talk, now we have to walk the walk. It is put up or shut up time.

It’s not over, though. It’s not even close to over. I’m still banned from YouTube, from X, and from Blusky. Unauthorized is still recovering from last year. There are still no shortage of people, even so-called “conservatives” who conspicuously disdain to work with us even when it makes obvious sense for them to do so. We have a reliable crowdfunding site now, or rather, a reliable and friendly crowdfunding site now. We even have what is rapidly becoming the leading news site in cultural entertainment with Fandom Pulse, and refugees from the Great Comics Collapse of 2024 are contacting Arkhaven on a regular basis; we’re already beginning to work with former DC and Marvel illustrators. We have a working bindery. The Legend has a movie coming out next month and there is a very good chance it is going to hit the top spot on the box office.

But speaking only for myself and our teams, we’re not going to get complacent and cruise. We fought too hard and too long to forget the lessons that we learned while struggling to financially survive to take the foot off the gas or remove our protective armor.

Don’t relax. Don’t let up. Don’t give any quarter, because they never gave any to us. It’s easy to be frosty when being frosty is necessary for survival, it’s not so easy when the sun is shining, the champagne is flowing, and the beach is beckoning. So stay frosty, don’t hesitate to say things, take advantage of this reprieve to become even stronger, ignore the charlatans who were never part of the parade who will seek to jump to the front of it, and don’t ever forget the frens who stood by you when no one else would.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Game was Always Fake

I’ve been telling everyone for decades that what passes for success in Clown World was fake. I knew it for an absolute fact because I saw nobodies, mediocrities, and charlatans becoming stars, celebrities, and millionaires by having one situation after another handed to them for no rational reason that anyone could explain, except occasionally by ethnic nepotism. But even that explanation didn’t, and couldn’t account for much of the fake success.

But now, with the tip of the iceberg that is USAID exposed, we know why and how these talentless mediocrities, from Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, became “successful”, as /pol/ explains.

I think the biggest takeaway from all this should be for those who’ve been economically and emotionally struggling, particularly white men. The problem isn’t your skills, your looks, your charisma, etc., it’s that you’ve been “competing” in a completely fake illusion world where every enterprise from games to journalism to industry to art museums is getting unlimited money (stolen from you) from the government faucet. And it wasn’t even a faucet, it’s a firehose. Everything from video games to the decor at Pizza Hut was rigged.

Couldn’t find a job? Literally not your fault.
Couldn’t get into college? Literally not your fault.
Couldn’t get a business of the ground? Literally not your fault.
Couldn’t find a girl with values? Literally not your fault.
Couldn’t get a youtube channel to take off? Literally not your fault.

To all the anons reading this, it isn’t your fault. It really was everyone and everything else. You’re not crazy. You’re doing fine. The deck wasn’t just stacked against you, the whole game was fake.

The God-Emperor 2.0 is giving us the great gift of exposing the fraud, and in doing so, we may, for the first time in decades, have the opportunity of a more-or-less-level playing field. So it’s time for us to work even hard and up our games. Remember this? This was the actual site traffic comparison from 2009 to 2021 of one celebrity author upon whom media attention and million-dollar book contracts was lavished (red) and an author who was actively suppressed and deplatformed on every side (blue). And this is what it looks like when the competition is fair, and there isn’t a series of government-funded thumbs on the scale.

Buckle up and get down to business. The winning has barely started.

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These are Not Our Principles

But they do make for a good point from which to begin contemplating them. From Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Steve Jobs.

Markkula would become a father figure to Jobs… “Mike really took me under his wing,” Jobs recalled. “His values were much aligned with mine. He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”

Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

It’s not for us to say, but I think we’re doing reasonably well on all three scores. The biggest failure, I think, is impute, with regards to which we very much need to improve our Internet store game. And, obviously, we need to reduce our release times, but we’re already focused on that.

The only way to improve is to contemplate one’s failings.

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The Pointlessness of Posturing

Either a number of people associated with Baen Books are less dialed-in to what is happening on the business side than they believe themselves to be or they desperately need lessons in some of the basics of public relations.

  • PR 101: Never deny anything that you know someone else can prove.
  • PR 102: Never get into a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.

Larry Correia posted a long-winded rant both on his blog and on X regarding the piece, opening with the personal attack, “So I hear certain people are trying to stir up outrage clicks spreading dumb rumors about some publishers again.”

Our article, however, does not contain any speculation, only a reporting of facts that have been verified and direct commentary from several Baen Books authors and employees, as previously noted.

Correia did, however, elaborate that he intends to diversify his book portfolio from Baen Books even further in the coming years. He said, “Here, I’ll even add to the freak out, I’m also going to be doing some pure indy stuff in the future too. Why? Because I can, and I want to see what happens when I do. It has been a long time since I’ve experimented in that, the market has changed a ton since then, and has a lot of potential. I like making money. Me doing an indy project might make money. Go figure.”

Many of Correia’s fans reacted to his rant, voicing support for the author and making odd comments mocking his “career-ending,” responding to everything he said but not any of the information in Fandom Pulse’s article, as Correia obfuscated as to what the topic was at hand.

Former Sad Puppy Sarah A. Hoyt, who was dropped from Baen due to her poor sales and is not an American, replied with a bizarre comment, “Yeah. People asked, so I actually read the idiocy. It’s all a thinly veiled tissue of hallucinations…. Having been the subject of such ‘reporting’ before, I’m not even amused.” It’s unclear what she’s talking about.

It doesn’t take a genius to observe that Baen Books is unlikely to survive the loss of Larry Correia to both a) another publisher and b) going independent. Perhaps some of the people quoted don’t know this, but Baen is 25 percent owned by Tor Books and has a very limited number of distribution slots through its distribution partner. As with most mainstream publishers, it is heavily dependent upon its bestselling author or two propping up the rest of its authors.

This is the problem that Tor Books faces as well. The reason John Scalzi was given a massive lead author contract was because Tor needed to replace Brandon Sanderson, the late Robert Jordan, and the game tie-in business that it lost, unfortunately for Tor and Scalzi, he has been unable to do so. He still sells, he just doesn’t sell well enough.

The fact that Larry Correia walked means that Baen Books couldn’t afford the right of first refusal to his new series, which is hardly surprising. I told Larry back in 2015 that he should go independent and I’ve expected to see him do so ever since Brandon Sanderson demonstrated how high the ceiling can be for an independent author. The fact that he was willing to prop up Baen for nearly ten years longer than he probably should have from a financial perspective is testimony to his loyalty and gratitude to his longtime publisher.

But Baen has been circling the drain for years anyhow, because its business practices are out of date. It ignored the authors it should have been courting – including Nick Cole, Jason Anspach, John C. Wright, JDA, and myself, among others – while also ignoring the advent of crowdfunding and the negative impact of Kindle Unlimited. And now its window of opportunity has closed.

People can preen and posture all they like, but what will be will be. And it’s both foolish and futile to get one’s panties in a bunch over educated observers simply noting what has happened, what is happening, and what is likely to happen. Let bygones be bygones and make hay while the sun is shining; just yesterday one of my more vehement past critics and I achieved mutual understanding on a potential future project with excellent prospects for both of us; whether we follow through on it or not, the mere fact of our discussion is a testimony to the professional approach to these things.

I may not be fond of John Scalzi, just to give one example, but if the man ever decides he wants to do a deluxe edition of Old Man’s War in leather, I’ll not only agree to work with him, I’ll guarantee him that we will make him a higher-quality and more attractive edition than Easton or Folio Society will give him. Because an important part of being professional is learning how to set aside one’s personal predilections.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Intrinsically Uncompetitive Society

The cost of having your society run by nepotistic foreign socio-cultural parasites is the inevitable loss of competitiveness.

It is not surprising really. I am an innovative psychology. You can see how I synthesize stuff here, bringing together Google Streetview and surveillance camera footage, and reveal the surveillance in America as few could. Politics and biology, psychology, I come up with interesting stuff. And when I was just a young lad, I was identified by US Domestic intelligence’s grade school monitoring units as innovative, and their response was to supply me with massive amounts of pornography to try and make me a degenerate. When that was ineffective, they decided to flood in the kids of agents, acting as kid spies to try and beat me down. When that failed, they rolled out honeypots. And when I proved resistant to it all, I believe they rolled out an early version of the Havana Weapon to degrade my health physically.

I do not think I am unique in that regard. I even think there was another kid, maybe brighter than me, and certainly more disciplined and dedicated to academics, who they also beamed into chronic illness to try and clip his wings as well. I would assume that has been going on across the nation, with every young kid who showed an innovative potential, for the last thirty to forty years, as domestic intelligence has tried to make sure nobody could rise too high in society, and maybe oppose it. My guess is, given the granularity of the surveillance, if you ever have a child with real potential, the single biggest threat they will ever face in life will be US domestic intelligence, because the American Stasi will find them, it will view them as a threat, and it will try to destroy them using all the most advanced tools of the CIA. It is just how it works in America now.

As a result, at present, the only chance America has to compete lies with the rubes and imbeciles of the insecure surveillance, and there just are not enough innovators there to keep up with nations like China.

After six decades of fake science, fake literature, fake art, fake genuises, fake 115-average IQs, the financialization of the economy, and the moral and intellectual degradation of the workforce, it is absolutely no surprise that the USA is losing on every side to its global rivals in China and Russia. The fetishization of frauds from Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, combined with the suppression and sidelining of the genuine American creative class, has been sufficient to render the USA a global also-ran.

Someone once asked: “Where is America’s Wang Hunin?” Wang, arguably the most observant individual of the 20th Century, rose from a complete nobody who wasn’t even a member of the Chinese Communist Party to the CCP’s chief ideologist solely on the basis of the merit of his prescient observations. Someone else answered: “Living in Europe making comic books.” And while I’m not the equal of Wang Hunin, who saw things 20 years before I did despite being only 13 years older than me, the difference between the way he was embraced and elevated by the Chinese political elite versus the way I was explicitly banished from even the editorial pages at the age of 23 by the US political elite is telling.

The irony is that I’ve been treated with far more respect by the Chinese and Russian state medias than by the ostensibly private medias in the USA and Europe. Pravda used to occasionally run the very syndicated Universal Press column that the newspapers in the USA refused to touch, back when I was warning everyone about the coming financial crisis in 2002. Note that I’m not at all bitter. I caught enough of a glimpse into the US political elite at a young age that I wanted nothing to do with it and I’m quite content with having been sidelined. I like what I’m doing and I harbor zero desire to get involved with The Great Game. But that doesn’t change the effect the sidelining of me and others more talented than me have inevitably had for the last six decades.

So now we have corrupt second-generation mediocrities like Donald Kagan and complete frauds like Elon Musk establishing US geopolitical strategies instead of anyone setting them in the national interests of the American people. As long as we do, China’s triumph is absolutely 100-percent certain no matter what economic or demographic vagaries it might be facing. It’s like seeing one NFL team building a historic staff with Ron Wolf at GM, Bill Belichick as head coach and Andy Reid as the offensive coordinator and the other being run by the historically awful combination of GM Matt Millen, head coach Marty Mornhinweg, and the immortal Brad Childress not calling plays as the offensive coordinator.

The truth always and inevitably wins out over time because the longer the parasitical pretenders have influence in a society, the further from objective reality their policies will reliably guide it. It’s not an accident that everything across the West from AI to zoology has become fake and gay, because convergence toward entropy is the objective. The latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended will fall again, because it celebrates falsehood and worships evil.

DISCUSS ON SG

We are the Elendilans

Contemplations on the Tree of Woe contemplates the possibility that JRR Tolkien is the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of our Aenean Age.

The defining conflict of Elendil’s era, the Second Age of Middle Earth, is fought by the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. The Last Alliance is a coalition of the remnants of great powers, united in the aftermath of Númenor’s fall to resist the rising darkness of Sauron. After decades of brutal struggle, The Last Alliance of Elves and Men achieves its purpose: Sauron is defeated and the One Ring is taken from him. Yet the victory is bittersweet. Elendil falls in battle and his sword Narsil shattered. His son Isildur chooses to keep rather destroy the One Ring, ensuring that the seeds of future conflict are sown. The Elves, diminished by their sacrifice, begin their long retreat into the West, and the kingdoms of Men, though triumphant, are fractured and weakened. Thus begins the Third Age.

Tolkien’s Third Age is marked by many moments of heroism and beauty, but even at its height it is a shadow of the glorious Second Age. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, the Elves have faded, Númenor has become a memory, Arnor has been conquered, and Gondor has been reduced to a pale reflection of its former strength.

If what was true of Middle-Earth is true of our own era, then what lies ahead is neither the dawn of a golden age or the night of a dark age, but rather a long twilight—an era where the remnants of greatness, having averted or avoided total annihilation, nevertheless must struggle to resist an ever-encroaching darkness at great cost. The civilization, while noble, will bear terrible scars from this struggle. Its grandeur will be tempered by humility and its ambitions will be limited by necessity.

I thus finish this essay with an unsettled heart. Tolkien, I am convinced, is truly a cultural mythmaker as influential as Goethe; and Elendil, I am certain, is a hero cut from the same cloth as Aeneas.

But Aeneas’s cloth is the purple cloak worn to an emperor’s coronation; and Elendil’s cloth is the shroud worn to a king’s funeral. Rome was greater than Troy, but neither Arnor nor Gondor was as great as Númenor. Thus an Elendilian Age would not be as bright as an Aenean Age. Its destiny would be somewhere between the inspiring future of my original essay and the hellish future anticipated by my essay’s critics.

Yet this ought be no cause for despair. If the Aenean spirit or Tolkien’s northern courage means anything, it means that the fight must be fought regardless of the likelihood of success. And Tolkien’s myths remind us that even in decline, there is beauty, heroism, and meaning. The Elendilian Age, if it were to come, might not shine as brightly as the Faustian, or even the Aenean; but it would still carry forward the light of what came before. And in the end, that light—however faint—will be enough to illuminate the path for those who follow.

When one reads a book like Brideshead Revisited, one can’t help but be struck by the way its elegaic melancholy almost perfectly expresses the mood of the end of the American empire. Evelyn Waugh was writing at, and about, the end of the British Empire, which is why the emotional tone of his literary work is so familiar to the modern American reader. The Tree of Woe is, in my opinion, to observe that we are at the end of one age and entering into a new one; whether it is as dark and challenging as he anticipates is yet to be determined, but on the basis of the panopoly of known facts, certainly appears to be correct.

Read the whole thing there. It’s well worth it. And remember that the light of Christian civilization will survive so long as at least one of us possesses the courage to stand against the rising Dark.

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All “Success” is Manufactured

Indeed. What are the odds? And looking at them, what are the chances that they aren’t related in some way? Once you grasp the basic concept of its reality, the outlines of Clown World become clearer and clearer over time. It’s a club, you’re not in it, and more importantly, if you value your immortal soul, you do not want to be in it or even have anything to do with it.

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The Litany Against Retardery

Some may find this philosophical mantra to be useful as they are subjected to a non-stop stream of retardery from the Non-Player Characters in their lives mindlessly regurgitating their mainstream programming.

THE LITANY AGAINST RETARDERY

I do not hear.

Retardery is the cosmic background noise.

Retardery is the mind-morass that inspires neural disintegration.

I will face the retardery.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone it will leave no trace behind.

Where the retardery has passed there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

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