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Much like the Gulf War, Trump's presidency never happened. Yes, there were soldiers in Kuwait, and there was a man named Donald Trump in the white house, but there was never a war, and there was never a presidency.
Trumpism was a bubble, and on Wednesday, it popped. In 2016, it felt like the beginning of a new American nationalism. Without Trump, that "movement" dies. Will those embers merely fade, or can the fire be rekindled?
If you want to transform the world, or your country, you cannot fuel your movement on discontent, nor on reasonableness. No, transformation can only be built on a foundation of extravagant hope
Gold toilets aside, Trump never had extravagance, in fact he had no content at all. He was the first fully post-modern president; what he did was so filtered through media that there's no effective difference between what happened and what the media says happened
We projected our dreams onto Donald Trump. A successful mass movement requires belief in an infallible leader or an irresistible doctrine. There is no mass movement without a little delusion (we call it a little delusion) "Reasonable" people can't effect big change
In 2015 the woke gay negrolatry religion had gone vertical. Stopping a mass movement is achieved by replacing it with another. A religious movement can be stopped by promoting a social or nationalist movement. We tried, and failed.
Hoffer says a social movement can only succeed if it satisfies our passion for self-renunciation. Woke gives you something to renounce (your whiteness, your privilege, your genitals.) Trumpism fumbled around for self-overcoming, but never found it.
Most people want to feel virtuous, and they also detect that not everything is alright. To solve this problem, they look for a theory of sin, and generate feelings of virtue by renouncing their sinning self https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1229944826856005632
How does the simulation of virtue become actual? It happens when the rules that make us feel righteous are also good for us at fractal scales: individual, family, tribe, nation. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1346114922623733761
The point of social authority is to make defecting more expensive than cooperating EVEN in single iterations of mixed motive games, by punishing defectors harshly
Woke is evil but feels virtuous, because it tells us that self-destruction is righteous. Destroy your country, it is a vehicle of oppression. Destroy your family, it gives you unfair privileges. This is the cheesecake of moral instincts
But for all that, Woke is deeply American. In fact it's the most American thing in the world. Always has been. What the woke want more than anything is to have no master.
When I speak of "leftism", this is what I mean: the cult of no master. Or as Nietzsche put it, "No shepherd, and one herd." Liberalism, leftism, communism, whatever you want to call it, they are all the same spirit. "No one above me"
This definition poses some problems for people who believe that Stalin was a "leftist", for example. I don't care. My definition is good. Leftism is rule by committee, by council. It's diffusion of responsibility. Rightism is rule by individuals, concentration of accountability
When leftism fails, which it always does, there is no one to blame. No one to depose. This makes it hard to cut down, like a hydra. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1030442959009763329
But anyway, the idea of "no masters" does not constitute freedom. As DH Lawrence says, it is, rather, the reverse: a hopeless sort of constraint. It's never freedom til you find something you positively want to be
You will only feel free when you are living in a homeland, when you are obeying a deep, inward voice, when you are doing what your deepest self likes.
Free men are unconscious of freedom. Shouting "no master" is a rattling of chains, always was.
A little more Lawrence: The real American day hasn't begun yet. Or at least, not yet sunrise. So far it has been the false dawn. That is, in the progressive American consciousness there has been the one dominant desire, to do away with the old thing. Do away with masters
If that's true, if the American dawn is to come, then Hoffer identifies one more ingredient needed to relaunch our counter-movement: boredom, most of all, boredom with our own selves
Boredom is a catalyst, it's a precious resource.
What do you fear, horrorist, deep in your heart?
I fear that we are insufficiently bored, and that we never will be again.
What do you fear, horrorist, deep in your heart?
I fear that we are insufficiently bored, and that we never will be again.
As the criminally underrated @egg_report has remarked, the culture war is an augmented reality clicker game. The video game is the ascendant media modality of the 21st century, and we relate to everything through it. I hate KB but I have to admit this resonates:
And what's the defining characteristic of a video game? It simulates *achievement*, just as wokism simulates mutually beneficial cooperation and the news simulates information. Everything is a video game now, even real life, and it robs us of boredom.
The "clear pill" is supposed to be a renunciation of news and political emotion. This fails because reasonableness is not how you launch a mass movement, which is the only thing that can replace a mass movement https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1047844437596897280
Can we find the boredom necessary for a New American Dawn, in our world of infinite idiot circuses, of video games, of scientifically optimized fractal compulsion factories?
Can we renounce the most American thing in the world, the desire for masterlessness, the desire for "no one above me"? Trump never understood the need to renounce liberalism, never could have.
And it's become obvious that the "next Trump" won't arise on social media. He may have been a false dawn, but he was our Don, and he was elected because "The enemy's gate was down". https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1333501448122982410
Without massive censorship, we the people will talk ourselves into fascism as a matter of gravity. But that loophole has been closed, and there will be no mass movement without mass communication. inb4 urbit, it is elitist by design.
There is no such thing as a neutral communication platform. Ultimately, the mods control the discourse, and Trump won by accident because the mods were asleep, which is why he got tired of winning.
We mistook a sunset for a sunrise, and now comes the darkness. The real American Dawn can only come if we can find a way to communicate freely, with the voices of our deepest selves.
