Downtown Whitefield Maine and the Amish Question:

Whitefield is JUST far enough away from the coast to not benefit from the real tourist economy here. When the last family poultry farms and dairy farms collapsed towns like Whitefield collapsed with them. No baby boom kid wanted to be saddled with those farms. Bound for better!

And who could blame them. It was hard to ignore the world of collapse and failure they would be inheriting

At that time the coastal towns still had a sort of WASPY elite running on fumes. They had things to sell tho. Their federal mansions on the coast, antiques, a lifestyle brand that new money could buy. They had the ocean. Real estate and tourist economy. But not Whitefield

Whitefield was forced to sell cheap and to a different type of new money

The HIPPIES! We laugh at them now but there were hippies who were ideologically committed. They were rich and ashamed. They wanted to launder the shame of privilege by returning to the land. Some of them did! The still cleared land in towns like Whitefield were snatched up!

I went to school with their children. They had a sort of ambient exoticism, an urbane fog that clung to them from the world they had until recently inhabited. Subsistence farming as a hobby, subsistence farming without stakes. Biding time for their true inheritances to kick in

once their parents in Connecticut, New York kicked off. The lovely holding pattern of a trust fund generation

That money has been coming to them for the past 15, 20 years. The hippies have aged. They want an easier place to live. Maybe the inheritance isn’t going as far as they thought it would. They are still land rich and hell, the kids don’t want anything to do with this old place!

A WHOLE NEW type of money is coming to Whitefield now, THE AMISH!

The Amish are ideologically committed. They are not atomized, individual actors responding to civilizational malaise like the hippies. They are connected families, connected through marriage, buying connected land and lots of it. One of the back roads is all Amish now

Yoder saw mill. Yoder metal roof fabrication. They are clearing new land and connecting their embryonic family empires one to another. Their land looks pulverized and blasted in the winter. They are using it all

Their competition is profoundly weak. The locals are gone or are in trailer parks.

The elder millennial farm-y type is no threat. The thin gruel of their ideological commitments; sustainability, boutique agri-business, gentrifying the general store, does not have the heft needed to last. Their larp funded by suburban middle class money is not deep enough

And things are not half as cheap as they used to be

The Amish are a punctuation mark, an exclamation point. They are the end of the argument and that is why they will win here.

They are EXCLUSIVE, focused on GENERATIONAL CONTINUITY, and SELF AWARE. This represents an incredibly strong ideological foundation and is a powerful bulwark against the most corrosive elements of the modern world that we have inherited.

EXCLUSIVE, unconcerned with evangelism, unburdened by the need for converts. It is hard for us atomized subjects of modernity to keep our hearts from thrilling to the sight of horse and buggy on the road, to wonder how we would perform in that world. Could we hack it?

But the Amish do not care how we would perform because they are not offering. Their children will not know our children let alone marry them. They call us the English, their historical oppressors.

GENERATIONAL CONTINUITY means careful marriages. Strategic marriages encouraging heaps of children, connected lands, connected to their land. Their land is a family member and it is meant to work for generations.

SELF AWARENESS. The saleable larp. They sell our own fantasies about a simpler past back to us. They sell us quilts, they sell us ambiance. The sign for the town of Whitefield now has the silhouette of a horse and buggy on it. Whitefield is trying to cash in

using the face of their newly arrived colonizers. Colonizers that eschew conversion and are largely indifferent to us, colonizing land to put distance between us and them.

And who could blame them?

However you choose to describe the ENEMY: liberalism, capitalism, communism, tech oligarchy, pedo-elites, whatever your ideological commitments are, The true black pill is that this ENEMY is not going anywhere, it is not on its last legs but is ascendant.

You will need to start thinking generationally! It is not insane to think about marriage strategically despite how offensive this seems to the modern mind. This does not destroy love or romance.

The advice I give here but not irl because of the social consequences is find yourself someone with the most brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews you can. People whose family density is a weight in the town. Marry an army! Have as many kids as you can stand!

There is no white knight and until Merlin returns hand in hand with our Arthur there are no institutions that can resist the future. But this is not cause for weeping. This is the catalyst for mindful building, the church of the Good Neighbor. Deeper Love. Circles of Power