Get Away From Politics

Firstly, QNUW Is Back.

And nothing has really changed. I’ll explain:

The platform transition that I had started work on in December fizzled out. I screwed up a few key things behind the scenes and had zero understanding or luck with the help desks involved in order to get it functional again. For a while, I thought I’d lost the whole site completely along with all of its content, but that turned out not to be the case. Needless to say, it was a stressful endeavor and one I have no wish to repeat any time soon.

That said, I do have a better idea of what I’m doing and at some point in the future, possibly quarter one of next year, I may in fact spring for that platform shift after all. In the meantime, QNUW remains QNUW right here where it already is.

Secondly, I have finished construction on a reasonably overpowered new computer. This means I should be able to start producing videos that are more than just simple readings of the posts on here, at least as time allows. Video content is where the audiences really are, for the most part, and I’ve known this since I started QNUW in 2015, but I’m simply not much of a video guy. The generally longer-form presentation of my posts, as well as their on-again, off-again rambling style doesn’t lend itself as well to video presentation, but we’ll see how it goes.

This new machine also means that I should be able to get streaming going again, though as to when, I’m not sure. My own schedule plays into this more than the sub-optimal quality of my previous computer, so I may decide to do streams first only once or twice a month on Saturdays. It depends a lot on you guys and whether you’d be interested in tuning in for them. Even if it’s only four or five people, I’d be game so long as I can carve out the time.

Politics

My personal life has also taken a bit of a shift. I have realized in the time I’ve spent away from QNUW these past couple of months that politics is a waste of time. There are political battles to fight, certainly—the recent upset with the state of New York permitting abortion right up to the minute of delivery in certain cases, as well as the Virginia governor’s comments back in February about a procedure that might as well be characterized as a post-birth abortion, are a few examples of battles that need to be fought until red in tooth and nail. But aside from specifically moral problems, the partisan politics of the modern order usually leave you with no realistic options that are both obtainable and good. As has been pointed out numerous times before, the Democrats are out of their minds when they aren’t promoting outright evil, and the Republicans are out of their minds when they aren’t outright lying about their competence while doing apparently nothing.

As I have been writing and reading over the past several years, my politics have obviously changed. My writing reflects that, as the standard off-beat talking points provided by political dissidents on the fringe of the mainline parties of the American landscape offer enough interesting ideas to mull over for only a handful of years. For some, politics remains nothing more than a power play, and indeed, the modern system can only be appropriately understood as a literal game in which the only object is to win.

But politics properly conceived—politics as we are told to believe is true—is a means of maintaining order. What the secularist mentality refuses to acknowledge is that there are only so many means of maintaining order, and none of them are particularly favorable to liberalism; as a result, politics is better recognized as the manner in which moral truths are implemented across society in a fallen world.

We’re told that governments exist to keep order, and that the post-Enlightenment style governments of Western democracies exist to preserve the freedoms enumerated by the individual liberties to life, travel and the pursuit of happiness. And we’re told this even as creeping government administrations and unaccountable bureaucracies wield more direct power over our properties, finances and lives than the most authoritarian, brutal kings could even fathom a mere three hundred years ago. Liberalism is a lie at its root, since it begins with faulty premises as to the nature of man, and from that, it extrapolates faulty morals by which he’s expected to operate. Any political system based on such wrongheaded ideas as trusting individual liberty while making appeals to some ‘fundamental goodness’ within a secular context will only ever be used as a cover to implement power-obsessed authoritarian regimes that cover for those at the top.

Politics, apparently, is supposed to be a system of social interactions guided by laws and informed by traditions: the practical side of where ethnicity and nation meet legality and conflict resolution. When the obvious lies of things like absolute egalitarianism and civic nationalism are torn away, and when the presumed dichotomies of collectivism against individualism are revealed as shams, the modern framework of political interaction gets a lot clearer and much more easily understood. Politics today is only a means of control. The fact that it’s little more than another public spectacle of entertainment should have made that crystal clear by now.

It goes without saying that this temporal game of partisanship and domination will continue until the end of the world. There isn’t any hope to be found inside the political apparatus. It’s not designed for hope. Its transmutation into a form of entertainment is an attempt to fill the hole left by religion in the modern spirit, since it changed politics from a practical means of solving problems in governance into an eschatological series of ideologies with their own varying inversions of the traditional moral, philosophical, and even metaphysical teachings that they were derived from. You can see this in how different the zeal is with those infected with the political virus; they can speak freely and passionately about their favorite sports teams or the latest movie they want to watch, but the vigor with which they will defend policies that they have no intention of ever using, or attacking the words and actions of a political personality whom they’ve never and will never meet, enters them into the realm of the extremist. Modern politics present the very lie that secularism claims religion is founded on, only repackaged and called something else: freedom, liberty, discourse, whatever.

This is really all just a manner of saying that the political systems that make the most sense—often now grouped under term integralism—aren’t merely pipe dreams that have no possible way of being instituted in the near future, they’re pipe dreams that will only be feasible after the system of modern governance has been swept away in its entirety. The worldview of the last four hundred years has been deliberately shaped with a revolutionary and anti-integralist framework in mind. And you can see various turning points in history being the catalyst for this collapse—the rise of nominalism in the middle ages, Luther’s revolt against the Church in the sixteenth century, the English Civil War, the rise of the Enlightenment, etc.–but there’s no real point in trying to trace it back to one individual event aside from as a matter of trivial interest. Understanding whatever the event was won’t make the reality of the situation any clearer, despite claims to the contrary, and worse still, the presence of such a turning point is irrelevant to begin with.

The gradual transmogrification took only a couple centuries, beginning with a civilization so founded upon the moral and metaphysical revelations present in the Church that they were completely taken for granted by nearly every member of society. A few short hundred years later, and the West has spread to every corner of the world, trades in money that isn’t backed by anything, believes men are capable of marrying other men, considers sodomy an act of love, and considers the mutilation of bodies under the guise of gender dismorphia something so foundational to human rights that children should be allowed to do it. Where once infant mortality rate was high enough that contraception, much less abortion, would have been completely unthinkable even had it existed, now we see entire organizations dedicated to encouraging women murder their own offspring and feel pride and confidence in doing so. You could try to make the case that it’s complacency prompted by modern conveniences which has made this change possible, but the problem is deeper than a fundamentally technological one. Advances in technology don’t revolutionize how people view murder or self-effacement. It can make these actions easier, but it the system of thought doesn’t begin that way.

So where to go from here?

Accelerationism Follies

Some insist on accelerating the decline so we can get it over with, pulling the band-aid off quickly so it doesn’t hurt for as long, or something. They look forward to the 2020 election with Andrew Yang in mind as a meme candidate, fully aware that he has no chance whatsoever of even making it past the primaries. Where Trump at least had money and influence on his side a few years ago, Yang has podcasts and Reddit, neither of which are influential enough forces to beat the machine that is the Democratic National Committee. You’d have thought that every card-carrying Democrat voter in the country would have learned this lesson in 2016, after the DNC fiasco robbed an elderly crook from a fair vote, but apparently they didn’t. All the more reason to have absolutely no faith in democracy as a concept: no, people don’t learn their lessons, and yes, they are predominantly driven to vote by their passions. Plato was right.

The logic goes something like this: we know the system is screwed anyway, and we know it’s headed for collapse, so why don’t we support a guy whose pie-in-the-sky notions of universal basic income will tank the country harder than the rest of the candidates while at the same time land some free money in our pockets in the mean time? This logic seems fine enough for teenagers, because the only ones gullible enough to believe crap like this can’t possibly be old enough to remember the last election. Remember the wall we were supposed to get? The crackdown on immigration? The beginnings of a shift in policy that would, at the very least, halt the boulder of demographic decline America? Remember how Trump abandoned most of his base and has actively ignored the platform that got him elected while using the Mueller investigation and Israel as embarrassing distractions? That’s what would happen to your $1k/month Yangbucks if he ever had the chance.

But let’s say the purpose was purely to accelerate the collapse of the system, and not about the government bucks. This too, I think, is naive, regardless of the candidate in question. The collapse doesn’t need acceleration; it’s already happening quickly enough as it is. Efforts devoted to bringing the system down should be instead put toward preparing the way for a better system to replace it—but I don’t mean this in a political or even in a social sense.

If tomorrow you woke up and the dollar was worthless, congress had been dissolved, the police state vanquished, and the courts were all gone, what you’re going to find is the strong local communities are the ones who make it out of the anarchy to rebuild. Alexis de Tocqueville mentioned the strength of the American locality—that in fact, it formed the bedrock of the American system—back in the early nineteenth century. But America hasn’t had that kind of strong, overt local cohesion for at least two generations now, and that’s a conservative estimate. In fact, the sort of cohesion Tocqueville observed has been alien to the American system since at least the end of the Second World War.

So for the contemporary modern, caught in the machinery of all this, where can you even begin? Your own communities are poisoned by poor planning, gerrymandered redistricting, a toxic public education system, and the incestuous marriage of individualism secluding neighbors from one another and demographic change turning neighbors into foreign persons that may not even speak your own language. What can you begin to bring into being when you’re threatened with staunch differences in experience, background, age, and even culture?

You start at home. You start with square one. You start with yourself.

The Religious Dimension

Self reflection isn’t going to do it. Self-improvement isn’t going to do it. Losing weight, eating right, being proactive, and going to the gym aren’t going to do it, either. All of these things are helpful, and for some, they’re good places to start. But you don’t win the game simply by having made the first move. It’s not enough to recognize the existence of God or to align your behavior into some vaguely secular form of Christian-inspired ethics. It’s not enough to be good to your neighbor and establish a functional home. In the past, it probably was, but that was when things weren’t as dire as they are today.

Sappy motivational posters all have sayings like “be the change you want to see in the world.” Although fundamentally wrongheaded in its approach—since it’s still speaking exteriorly—the words on their surface carry a shred of truth. Those who truly want a virtuous, sensible society, a holy society, must first at least begin to transform themselves into virtuous, sensible, holy people. No amount of political posturing can make up for the cultivation of temperance and humility. No amount of community activism can make up for penance. No amount of news reading can make up for time spent in contemplative meditation and prayer.

Always remember that political activism is a meme. The only activism that matters is fundamentally spiritual. Remember what is most important, and what the long line of reactionary thinkers have all argued, from Donoso Cortez to de Maistre to Bossuet—all the way back to St. Augustine: politics isn’t downstream from culture, it’s downstream from theology. The present culture war is a holy war, and its a war whose cultural manifestations are merely reflections of the war waged against sin that takes place in the soul of every human person. And the enemy is evil itself: the Devil and the legions of Hell, those that have rejected God and His grace. There is no sitting on the sidelines here. If you are not willing to serve God, then you have already aligned yourself against Him. But it’s not too late; you can always repent before you die. It’s all spiritual. And by the way, if you believe that I speak metaphorically, that somehow all of this is figurative language that refers to things I don’t like or whatever, you’re mistaken.

Political battles work to secure the present. That’s good and sometimes it’s worth fighting them. But the present isn’t the reason we were born. Contextualize the politics within the broader scope of eternity, because your soul’s eternal future is what is and has always been on the line.

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