Essayists From The United States

"At that moment, I do now truly believe, the deed was done, in the sense that the decision of the will is the true essence of the act."

"Social morality requires a shared matrix of communal reality to which to relate thought and deed, and the illusion of an objective ethical esthetic requires at the very least the conviction that objective reality is more than a contradiction in terms."

"I could not deny that my spirit was amorally attracted to this ultimate temptation as my conscience was morally repelled by it."

"Was not the arbitrary distinction between illusion and reality the ultimate illusion itself?"

"For truth be told, I was tormented by perceptions and their corollary temptation which from a social definition rendered me unsane, though from a more absolute viewpoint what I might be said to have been suffering from was an excess of insight."

"Does something truly speak to me from beyond the void, or is it merely my own desire?"

"Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution’s less self-tortured forms."

"“In fifteen billion years did spirit out of less than dust evolve,” he said. “In fifteen billion more will not this universe of stars to less than dust return? Whence did it come? What is there when it is gone?”"

"“If the path exists for spirit to transcend this sorry scheme of things entire, vraiment, it must exist for all.” Or for none at all, I thought, but deigned not to voice."

"Flaming torches arching from hand to hand, the silken rolling of flesh on flesh, tautened wire vibrating to the human word, ideogrammatic gestures of fear, love, and rage, the mathematical grace of bodies moving through space—all seemed revealed as shadows on the void, the pauvre panoply of man’s attempt to transcend the universe of space and time through the transmaterial purity of abstract form. Yet beyond this noble dance of human art, the highest expression of our spirit’s striving to transcend the realm of time and form, lay that which could not be encompassed by the artifice of man. From nothing are we born, to nothing do we go; the universe we know is but the void looped back upon itself, and form is but illusion’s final veil. We touch that which lies beyond only in those fleeting rare moments when the reality of form dissolves—through molecule and charge, the perfection of the meditative trance, orgasmic ego-loss, transcendent peaks of art, mayhap the instant of our death. Vraiment, is not the history of man from pigments smeared on the walls of caves to our present starflung age, our sciences and arts, our religions and our philosophies, our cultures and our noble dreams, our heroics and our darkest deeds, but the dance of spirit round this central void, the striving to transcend, and the deadly fear of same?"

"True civilization consists precisely of conventions, rituals, and modes of oblique communication whereby the chaos within and the void without may be expressed and contained within the harmonious consensus of shared social objectivity, thus maintaining our bubble of crafted reality, the necessary illusion."

"Beneath all this gaiety and baroque complexity lay the simple and so carefully denied: beyond the thin metal surrounding us was the endless humorless void. Hollow rings the laughter of orphans in the night."

"The saddest day of your life isn't when you decide to sell out. The saddest day of your life is when you decide to sell out and nobody wants to buy."

"Any attempt at willful ignorance would now be futile or worse; the only talisman against excessive knowledge that might have puissance would be more knowledge."

"Even now, I cannot decide whether I was foolish dupe or noble and tragic lover. Or whether the two are one and the same."

"To become aware of a controlling process is to transcend the determinism of that process."

"Thus human culture has been as much a product of the process of natural selection as the human species. We are not merely clockwork oranges, the clockwork itself, the social programming which determines our “repertoires of behavior,” how we respond to the world around us, is itself the product of a blind deterministic process."

"The carrot is mightier than the stick."

"“Genius such as yours is a genetic gift.” “So I have heard from my parents.”"

"The appreciation of the connoisseur is the highest pleasure of the artiste."

"For all his faults, Yarvin is an engaging writer with a very dry sense of humor, bringing the pompousness of a Silicon Valley know-it-all to abstruse eighteenth-century European political thought."

"I am not a neoreactionary, but sometimes I think Mencius Moldbug is the greatest living political thinker."

"Mencius Moldbug's style is indirect, florid, and allusive, but […] he's essential reading."

"Moldbug is the most articulate and compelling reactionary I've ever read […]"

"Moldbug is good medicine for genuine progressives, who more than most have an obligation to think through their beliefs. It's strong and possibly toxic medicine, but having your thought congeal into mindless ideology is even more toxic."

"I regard Mencius Moldbug as one of the most important thinkers of our time […]"

"[H]is writing seems designed to leave a reader guessing as to whether he's really serious or executing the most brilliantly satirical long-term troll-job in the history of the Internet."

"If you taught chemistry at a university, you taught chemistry at a university which had a chief diversity officer, a department of African-American Studies, etc, etc. You knew what these people were. You knew what these people did. At least, you knew that whatever it was, it was not scholarship. You said nothing. What kind of servant of truth are you, sir? You served not truth, but the Party. Sign the form, sir."

"Because dependency is another name for power. The relationship between dependent and provider is the relationship between client and patron. Which is the relationship between parent and child. Which also happens to be the relationship between master and slave. There’s a reason Aristotle devotes the first book of the Politics to this sort of kitchen government. Modern Americans have enormous difficulty in grasping hierarchical social structures. We grew up steeped in "applied Christianity" pretty much the way the Hitler Youth grew up steeped in Hitler. The suggesting that slavery could ever be or have been, as Aristotle suggests, natural and healthy, is like suggesting to the Hitler Youth that it might be cool to make some Jewish friends. Their idea of Jews is straight out of Jud Süß. Our idea of slavery is straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If you want an accurate perspective of the past, a propaganda novel is probably not the best place to start. [...] We think of the master-slave relationship as usually sick and twisted, and invariably adversarial. Parent-child relationships can be all three. But they are not normally so. If history (not to mention evolutionary biology) proves anything, it proves that humans fit into dominance-submission structures almost as easily as they fit into the nuclear family."

"I don't think the conversion of Southern slaves into Southern sharecroppers made anyone much freer, because it created few practical options for the people involved. Before, you were an agricultural laborer who worked on the same farm for your entire life; after, ditto."

"For quite some time in America it's been illegal to employ racists, sexists and fascists, and mandatory to employ a precisely calibrated percentage of women, workers and peasants. Because America is a free country and that's what freedom means."

"Here is yet another (idea for good government): restrict voting to homeowners. Note that this was widely practiced in Anglo-American history, and for very good reason."

"While the civil-liberties geek of 2013 is a pathetic and even hilarious figure, it's not at all true that his passion has never gone requited. Actually, in its bureaucratic form, "civil liberties" helps keep the streets of San Francisco covered with turds and shambling zombies."

"It's a reality of modern American life that race confers privilege. As a reactionary, how can I possibly object? A society without hereditary privilege is like a cheeseburger without cheese."

"If there is a germ of useful provocation in Moldbug’s posts—a glimmer of a productive idea that could be the basis of a discussion—those germs are more than vitiated by his sprawling, associative, and bombastically categorical writing."

"America has only one problem: America is a communist country… Alas, this beautiful, simple, horrifying reality is simply too difficult for most Americans to grasp, let alone do something about. If you tell an American of any political persuasion that his is a communist country, the poor fscker (sic) will simply laugh in your face… If you love your American, don't let him get away with it! Don't let him wallow in his denial! Hit him straight in the teeth with a fast overhand right. "Of course America is a communist country," you can say. "You just have to translate. For workers and peasants, read blacks and Hispanics.""

"A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies."

"I date the Fourth Republic and the Progressive period to 1933. We can read this story in two ways. We can read it as the coming of modern, scientific government in the United States. Or we can read it as the transfer of power from political democracy to the American university system — which, just for the sake of a catchy catchword, I like to call the Cathedral."

"Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or "human" right. And it has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue."

"In fact, we know exactly what Washington's policies twenty years from now will be. They will certainly have nothing to do with "politics." They will be implementations of the ideas now taught at Harvard, Yale and Berkeley."

"Not only does Moldbug know such iron fists would rule best, allow emigration, not cheat their investors, and never ever accept manipulator payola, he apparently knows this deductively, as a noble philosopher, not like data-addicted corrupt pansy social scientists. And he has no interest in improvements in the status quo below his philosopher-deduced-best pinnacle. What more can one say to such a person?"

"The American, being human, being descended from a long line of chimpanzees and their still more foul hominid spawn, craves status, importance, meaning, in a word: power. But power is hard, oh so hard, to come by in his whip-broken, fixed and empty life of pleasant boredom. The solution? Oh, solution there is none, for power does not grow on trees. Power is here in America, as everywhere; power in America is locked up tight as Katrina van den Heuvel's ass. It's open to someone, perhaps, but not to him."

"Competing branches of the US government still engage in Third World proxy wars, in which the Defense Department and its political allies and satellites (the Republican Party, the arms and energy industry, Israel) face off against the State Department and its allies and satellites (the Democratic Party, the NGOs and universities, Europe, Palestine). The true nature of these conflicts, which would end instantly if the US was under unitary leadership, or even if both American factions could agree to cut off all "aid" to all their foreign satellites, is admitted by no one. It is considered entirely normal that the US often arms, and always talks with, both sides of these bizarre, incurable pseudo-wars."

"One interesting case of an ideal shared by both the 1930s Nazis and the 2007 Progressives is the Environment. Nazi environmentalism was definitely a different thing from ours, but the family resemblance is clear, and although environmentalism was hardly the most important part of the Nazi program it perhaps provides a window into their worldview… Is it so impossible to imagine Environmentalism being used as the basis for mass murder?"

"Most progressives are socially normal human beings, who in any political environment, would just be choosing the largest, best-appointed bandwagon for their personal conveyance. In Nazi Germany they would be Nazis, in Russia they would be Bolsheviks, in the kingdom of Louis XIV they would be all for Louis XIV. This is one of the many reasons there is no need to guillotine them."

"It is not at all surprising that progressives hate corporations and the profit system. It is a natural consequence of the antipathy to order, the anarchism, the lust for entropic destruction, which is the foundation of their creed."

"Perhaps the easiest way for a modern American or European to understand Nazism is to understand that a good Brown thought about preserving the Deutsche Volk in exactly the same way that today's Greens think about preserving the Environment."

"On a historical timescale, the practical effect of the sovereignty of the press is just to play yet another whack-a-mole game of quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchdog? In the end, this chain must logically terminate in a dog you just… trust. Sovereignty is conserved."

"Who is the sovereign? Not a who but a what. The sovereign is the story. Of course, there is no story without a storyteller. There are a lot of storytellers. Professionals, even. They make a good living and they’re all quite replaceable. I actually have great sympathy for the professional. In a bureaucratic oligarchy like ours, the professional both rules and is ruled. At the top, there is no one on top of him. Yet he cannot change his mind. He would simply be replaced. There are always younger, more eager professionals. Sovereignty is conserved; it is always humans who rule; and yet, it seems that no one rules."

"Cannot we marvel at what the Third Reich achieved, with the knowledge that it was run by a maniac? In the hands of a non-maniac, what might it have done? In the hands of an Augustus, for instance? Well, somewhere in Germany in 1933, there might have been an Augustus or two. Or even three. But Germany in 1933 was a democracy. And that democracy elected not Augustus, not Frederick the Great, not even Kaiser Bill. It elected — Wait. Who did it elect? Gee. I've forgotten already. I hate these migraines. An Austrian, I think. A sergeant? A private first-class? Someone like that. A man of the people, that's for sure. History is so confusing."