Carrot and Stick

If you want something to go your way, and you happen to be a member of a ruling elite, it seems prudent to use carrots as often as possible and present the stick as a mere deterrent. The state, the government, or whatever ruling apparatus that runs a people—in America’s case, the complicated intermingled mess of various international interests and federal types—aren’t parents, after all. Parents have to worry about spoiling children who, in general, are more pragmatic, astute, and selfish than your average taxpayer or ballot-caster.

Parents, for instance, can’t just hand out candy and video games to their kids every single time they do something right. Kids will sometimes do wrong, and for that, some sort of disciplinary measure is necessary. For another, it connects one dot—pleasing mom—with another: getting candy. That mom is pleased because her son did something good or correct is lost until the kid hits his primary school years—and even then, morality isn’t something that every kid comes to grasp as an objective notion until they’re almost teenagers. Even then, especially in our society, it’s not uncommon for adults to view it as a mere play of power.

Being a parent, then, is a constant process of training a child with both short and long term considerations. In the short term, the parent has to ensure that his child behaves, to put it simply. In the long term, he has to ensure that his child matures into a free agent capable of properly utilizing what freedom he has—a virtuous man pleasing to God, in other words.

The state, by contrast, has it a lot easier than this. The state can leave the sculpting of immature minds to the domain of parents and communities—or at least, it’s supposed to. The state has to maintain some general sense of order while managing some general sense of social mean with regard to virtue. Murder has to be outlawed not just because it causes disorder in a given society, but also because it’s morally abhorrent, for instance. But the state’s interest in guarding against murder begins with enforcing the law and ends with punishing any crimes according to it. Rehabilitation, reconditioning, therapy—these aren’t supposed to be the state’s job, and every time the state begins dabbling in these exercises, we see the implementation of liberal policies that eventually undermine the laws themselves and which bring more murderers into the society.

Perhaps this sounds familiar. Our elites certainly embrace positions that lead to destabilization and the erasure of social cohesion. They favor the sort of liberal policies that exacerbate the proliferation of hard drugs throughout the entire country and put guns—illegally, of course—back in the hands of felons. And they do everything they can to make sure guys with rap sheets a mile long have access to bail money for whenever they’re brought in next.

But our elites also believe in holding a big stick, as well as using it. Where they dote on the criminal underclass of our country, they’re more than happy to wield the stick against the classes of people who, for the most part, haven’t done anything illegal. They will go out of their way to unjustly imprison and brutalize political dissidents if said dissidents are small enough that they can get away with it. They’re bullies, put simply, but bullies with their hands on the kind of power that your average American can’t even fathom.

You know the targets of our elites’ ire. Maybe you’re one of them. You almost certainly live next to some of them. They’re the sorts of people who have been doxxed, tracked, and harassed by the FBI and justice system, who lost their jobs because they might have thought that going to a political rally in Washington, DC was still covered under the First Amendment. They’ve had accounts locked and files opened on them for uttering a few things on Facebook. January 6^th, a day that shall live in infamy, The Great Boomering of Capitol Hill—known more colloquially by our elites as a national tragedy worse than 9/11: the people who attended this are the people who get the stick, and it’s an ever-widening category. By now it includes various unfriendly attitudes about vaccinations.

There is a not-insignificant and growing subset of this group, however, that has pivoted on what ranks among the most important social issues of the past century: the sexual revolution, and more specifically, the widespread acceptance of pornography. The resistance against porn remains somewhat limited in the West, as even those liberals who turned corners on abortion or same-sex marriage, who recognize the evils of transgender ideology and the sinister implications of pushing it on children in public schools, often have failed yet to turn the same corner on pornography. A system of images engaged with by the consent of its users is harder to connect with the sort of social engineering that transgender ideology blatantly presents in elementary school curriculae, for one thing.

But it’s more than that. In America, and across the West, notions of free speech—and indeed, freedom itself—have become confused by hyper liberalized notions that equate vice with virtue. The notion that porn is an intrinsic evil of the same proportion as hard drugs simply escapes the modern liberal mind. Efforts to combat it naturally run aground into absurd, meaningless arguments over aesthetics, freedom, and government regulation. Pragmatic efforts never even get brought up, because the very notion of banning porn remains antithetical to the average American mind.

Pornography

This week, news broke that France is about to restrict access to pornography, in an effort to ensure that only users above the age of eighteen are able to view it. Like most other tangible victories on this front, it’s arguing from the wrong angle and limited in scope, but a victory is nonetheless a victory. Any moral means by which porn should be limited or removed from public life are ultimately good things to pursue, even if they don’t go far enough.

However, we would do well to remember that porn must be banned not on the grounds that it’s merely inappropriate for children, but on the grounds that it’s effectively a drug tailor made to destroy social cohesion. Its existence attacks public modesty, isolates the sexual act, and promotes the sins of fornication of sodomy to a degree unimagined by even the perverts of Weimar Berlin. To have it displayed and accessible alongside the rest of society degrades the whole. Its advocates dispute this, but its advocates are also in most cases its most chronic abusers. As such, it’s not possible, in an age of digital supremacy, to pretend like what goes on behind closed doors stays there; the habits and beliefs absorbed by porn addictions leak out into just about every aspect of social interaction. Relationships, dating, marriage, divorce: even how men and women view each other has been contorted by this generational standardization of pornographic media.

Worse still, if pornography addiction was surveyed the way crack is, it’d have already been labeled an epidemic years ago. Granted, it’d probably have been ignored, like the opioid crisis has been, but there’d be more attention on its negative affects. You’d have fewer people defending it on the grounds that it’s ‘free speech’, if only because no one defends the opioid crisis—now the Fentanyl epidemic—on the grounds that it’s a man’s right to choose whether to get high. Even many radicals who promote drug legalization recognize that this is a problem, so long as they’re at least confronted with the data. Pornography, on the other hand, remains treated as something that isn’t a big deal, and always by those who refuse to acknowledge it for what it is.

Modernity is nothing if not materialist, and where crack is a tangible and consumable material that physiologically alters its users, pornography offers its addicts a mere system of images. True, one’s physiology changes when it’s subjected to self-abuse. The memes here are more real than even some of their creators realize. But pornography itself is not the same kind of substance that heroin or Fentanyl is. True, too, there are materialist explanations to why it’s so harmful, but remember that in its broadest ideology, modernity considers most of these explanations to be points in pornography’s favor. Those that it doesn’t, such as the fact it’s a means of social engineering and political control, are ones still dismissed as conspiracies.

“How can things I look at be used to socially engineer me?” is a question as silly as “how can drinking all this soda every day make me fat?” They don’t think of it that way, though. Try to remember that your average modern’s intelligence isn’t here what’s deficient. It’s this fundamental, practical sense of materialism. He doesn’t believe that media exerts a power over our minds the way food exerts a power over our bodies. In the latter’s case, this power is referred to as nutritional value, and the consumption of better foods, any modern will admit, tends to result in a healthier body.

But there’s no commonly accepted and systematized account of how images relate to frames of mind or mentality. Although there’s probably a way to force some materialist explanation for pornography’s affect on the mind—and some cognitive and behavioral psychologists have certainly tried—the results are often so convoluted that they get lost on the more pragmatic layman. Talk to him about his soul, however, and in previous days, the system of images presented by pornography is self-evidently evil. Today’s modern man is alienated practically at birth from his own soul; you can see where the difficulty arises.

And why is this? Why would it be the case that images considered arousing today might spark revulsion or disgust from another person? What is it that compels so-called free speech absolutists to compare pornography with representations of nudity in classical art? What makes it so difficult for the average modern to call a spade a spade?

Answers to these questions are numerous, but usually all come down to the same issue: modern ideologues of aesthetics have done their utmost to shame beauty out of common understanding. Beauty, like truth and goodness, has come to be the mark of a bygone era. Its transcendent quality has been ridiculed and degraded by the professions who once had been tasked with keeping it safe. This has resulted in such inverted realities as a modern art market that exists purely as a money laundering scheme for the global elite to the construction of buildings so imposing and intimidating—and so badly made—that the simple act of viewing a modern city has become a demoralizing chore.

So we have laid before us a number of priorities: to change this faulty understanding of how media affects us, and to make it as difficult as possible to access pornography. The former is a long term goal which improves society incrementally and across multiple fronts. The latter is a stopgap measure to, if we’re being blunt, at least stem some of the hemorrhaging from the wounds inflicted by the sexual revolution. Banning porn won’t make it disappear overnight, but the more hoops that have to be jumped through, and the more legal restrictions piled onto its regulation—up to and including outright federal bans—will guarantee fewer people end up indulging in the stuff.

Digital Security & Privacy

France seems in the lead with regard to mounting a Western resistance to pornography, but little news has come out as to explain how they expect to do this. Unlike China and Russia, who simply issued nation-level blanket bans on the sites entirely, France claims to be more interested in limiting who can access the content rather than banning the content wholesale. This is a key difference, and it’s where it’s worth looking our anti-porn gift horse in the mouth.

Conventional efforts to exclude minors from porn access come in only a handful of varieties. The simplest is an age verification window—which simply asks the user to lie about the year in which he was born. A second level authentication could be used to limit some of this, such as requiring user logins, verified email addresses, or some other method of linking the digital space with the tangible world. Or, of course, they could go old school with the same approach that online tobacco distributors use: a photocopy of a state-issued ID linked to a user account. While the last seems the most invasive, in reality it’s a little less unsettling than the trend in de-anonymizing the internet via data tracking.

The data tracking trend began with the advent of social media in the tail end of the 00s, but it’s greatly accelerated in the last half-decade. Facebook may not have the same monolithic presence today that it did four or five years ago, but it remains the dominant social platform online—not that it matters much, as most if not all social media platforms, even the ones which claim to be anti-Woke, encourage and reward those who self-dox and post under their real world identities. This is where the trouble starts, really.

In years past, data tracking was used as a means to reap advertising revenue. The easier it became to track users’ web activities, the easier it became to build general portfolios of a given user’s interests, and the easier it was to sell this information to people who wanted to get their products into these users’ hands. And, of course, as the barriers to access the internet steadily dropped, and as more people spent more time in fewer and fewer parts of the internet—social media, retail, and streaming services, at this point—the easier it became to track information. The leaps and bounds made in smarter algorithms and machine learning tech certainly helped, as well.

It’s perfectly in line with cosmic irony—or providential amusement, perhaps—to see the unmasking of internet use come at the same time that frivolous masks are demanded of us in the real world. Even if the latter turns out to be a poorly-orchestrated fad, the former is something that seems inevitable, given how things are going. It will be possible to remain anonymous online only in limited degrees; by now, based on our cyber footprints alone, anyone dedicated enough, or with access to enough resources, can dox just about anyone else. It’s obviously bad to do, but to pretend like this isn’t true is just reckless.

Anonymity online, for all but the most rightfully paranoid, is turning out to be more of a fluke of the new internet rather. The future of internet use means a complete bifurcation between the users who limit themselves to sites like Youtube or Facebook, and those who use TOR clients. Everything else in the middle, from independently hosted blogs to image boards to small business retailers, seem poised to be shunned into darkweb territory. Regime interests push toward solidifying a technocratic stranglehold on casual internet users. That trend isn’t likely to cease.

This vision of the internet future is a little more comprehensive than it may first sound. Look out for experts in the coming years talking about revolutions in certifications and cyber security, warning people against going to sites lacking some new form of user authentication or authorization. Independent informational sites like blogs or the like will steadily transition their content to more centralized places like Medium or Substack, as it will get harder to maintain the fees associated with having these certificates. Lacking the certification will mean taking a serious hit to search engine optimization. Anyone who’s run a website knows that this is already the least interesting and at times, most labor intensive and tedious part of putting one’s hobby on the internet. We should expect that to get worse.

Those content creators that don’t feel like migrating to centralized, approved web services will do their best to operate in parallel systems. Video makers will cling to BitChute, Odysee, Rumble, et cetera. Writers will keep using the various hosting providers already around, and some new ones might even spring up. But the big search engines are going to stop crawling their data with any regularity. Small and independent retail will suffer the same fate. It will get much harder to grow an audience. Even those content creators who go public, so to speak, who give up on trying to maintain anonymity: if they don’t opt into using the Approved Services, or if their content is simply rejected by those services, they’ll be dropped into the dustbins.

But perhaps I’m digressing here. The feasibility (or lack thereof) of parallel platforms to challenge regime control is a large topic that’s only partly related to what we’re getting at here. What does this have to do with pornography or France’s effort to ban it?

Well, let’s consider this vision of the future again. If you’re something of a normie who uses the internet so casually that you barely even notice the disappearance of independent media, then you’re the type of internet user who probably only uses about five or six websites in the first place. Consider also, as an image, how the front pages of every streaming service, smartphone, game console, and now, even AAA video game looks. A static or dynamic background of some kind with large, seemingly friendly buttons full of recommendations.

They all look the same for a reason: carefully tailored algorithms helpfully present you with your next available option. The machine already knows what sites you want to browse and has selected them for you. It’s used your previous browsing habits, aided by its constant input, to produce these recommendations. Most people online rarely deviate from the Facebook-Amazon-Google-Youtube-Twitter-Reddit sphere as it is. Imagine opening up your internet browser and seeing a front page like that. Some of us probably already do. And now imagine a PornHub icon listed alongside the others. Maybe it already is.

So now put these pieces together. Anonymity online is going away. Tech companies are consolidating. The old internet, in terms of its seeming size and scope, is being cordoned off, fenced up, and sold to big developers. How is pornography to be managed under such a system? You already know the answer, by now. It’ll be welcomed into it, the way the regime always normalizes things. Parental controls will be presented as an ostensible barrier to the ‘wrong’ people viewing explicit material. And a lot of parents will believe this, as a lot of parents, we know from studies, are abusers of the material themselves.

Bypassing anonymity won’t be possible; the internet will be viewed as a utility, anyway. You might have a screen name for the sake of nostalgia or prudence, but it’ll be indexed to a real-ID that’s tracked by any number of government, corporate, and financial interests. These services will not only know how old you are, but what your credit rating is, what school you went to, your medical history, and even your driving record the moment you go online. It’ll know more. That sort of data, for a lot of people, has already been collected. It’s probably already been indexed. And all without ever getting a chip in you.

Modern sensibility says that knowing a thing makes it easier to control. There’s some truth to this, but modern sensibility also tends to misunderstand what the term “knowing” entails. It’s much easier to combat pornography’s direct affects when one is aware of what it is but has never indulged in an addiction to it. Viewing it attacks and harms the part of a man’s soul that appreciates beauty. That’s too important a thing to risk, as the more that is degraded, the harder it is for that man to make adequate aesthetical judgments.

But modern sensibility will pitch it more like this: get pornography more recognized, more normalized, more accepted, because once we do that, it’ll be easier to ensure that children aren’t exposed to it. Remember the liberalizing tendencies mentioned earlier? The ones that result in the exact opposite of what they’re enacted to combat? The sort of regulations placed on pornography that appeal to only blocking certain people from accessing it will lead inevitably to this sort of mentality.

Conclusion

This could all be baseless pessimism. Who knows? France, at least, has historically meant what it said when it started doing something against the grain. On the other hand, France is also famous for having its leading intellectuals being notorious perverts who petitioned to get the age of consent lowered. They can sometimes be a little hard to get a bead on.

It’s possible that these restrictions are the first steps in a broader project that starts targeting other aspects of the problem. Unfortunately, even if this is the case, it still comes across as a misguided effort that will yield a more normalized attitude toward pornography than already exists. The most effective means of eradicating porn, at least in the short term, is to leverage the concerns of more average moderns—underage access, human trafficking, anonymity resulting in child exploitation, etc.—against the payment processors who keep the sites running. This has proven effective in the past, and there’s little reason to think it won’t still work in the future, but it’s not enough to deliver a death blow. Silicon Valley is still there to bail it out.

So now we should return to the carrot and the stick. Restricting porn seems like a good carrot. Maybe it is. Maybe certain interests within the powers that be are looking to throw the rest of us a bone. “Look, we hear you and we get it, it’s time to make some concessions on this whole pornography thing.” There could be a genuine interest in trying to steady a heaving ship, too; unrestrained access to pornography is undoubtedly one of the chief causes of the sorts of neuroses that affect even our ruling and managerial classes. Noticing what’s happening these days and mentioning offhand that about half of the people you encounter are insane is no longer hyperbole. With this in mind, it’s not inconceivable that certain minds at the top are trying to pump the brakes on this whole sexual revolution thing.

On the other hand, it seems more likely that their version of ‘pumping the brakes’ means normalizing a more sanitary version of pornography—returning the filth’s material to the sort of thing one used to find in adult magazines and the backrooms of video rental stores. But in those days, such business had direct connections to the mob; their reputations were sullied by an open acknowledgment that it was dirty material. Our ruling elite, however, have more money and greater interest in seeing this sort of thing done above board, and they have the means of making it happen. Regulating porn might seem to them like a carrot that they’re offering in good faith, even as they implement measures to make porn more accessible and more socially acceptable than ever before.

Far from a carrot, this is just a stick that’s been painted orange. And the worst part is the state of so-called conservative movement here. This is why our long term goal is important. Many people on the right will champion these restrictions, not because they’re willing to see a victory where they can, but because they agree with the fundamental premises of the regulations. Many people on the right still do not recognize pornography for the unacceptable evil that it is. Many are still aesthetically dead. This has to change, because until it does, the best we can hope for is a porn industry reduced slightly in size and yet broadened in general appeal—which in some ways, might end up being worse than our present situation.

---

Self Promotional Blurbs:

Subscribe to our mailing list:

Email address:

Leave this field empty if you’re human:

Want to support our work? Consider buying us a few beers or, better yet, becoming a monthly subscriber at Ko-Fi. $5 or $10 a month grants access to exclusive content.