Worse is Better

1,274 words

Translations: French ^[2], German ^[3], Spanish ^[4]

It sounds like Newspeak. White Nationalists and other radicals often pepper their political discussions with the sentence “Worse is better.” But what do they mean?

The phrase is deceptively short and categorical, which tempts one to think it is offered as a universal law. But if one treats it that way, it is child’s play to “refute” it with a counter-example or two. After all, worse almost always is . . . worse.

“Worse is better” is not a universal or categorical claim. Its meaning entirely depends on context, and removing it from that context turns it into nonsense, thus doing so is a form of sophistry, a way of winning an easy victory in argument.

If a Republican says “Worse is better,” he usually means, “Worse for the Democrats is better for the Republicans.” If a Democrat says it, he usually means, “Worse for the Republicans is better for the Democracts.” A hallmark of primitive thinking—to which “modern” people feel so superior, by virtue of their birth (the most democratic form of snobbery!)—is that the king is responsible for the crops. If the crops are blighted, the king must die. The same thinking reigns today. The president is responsible for the economy. If the economy is bad, the president must be replaced—with a president of the opposite party.

Within a two party system, “Worse is better” functions to create a blank check on power for whatever party holds it. If a party were installed in power based on its platform and promises, they might actually feel pressured to act on them. But if a party is elected simply because they are not the other party, then they enjoy power not on their own merits, but on the demerits of their opponents, which means they can pretty much do anything as long as they seem sufficiently unlike the other party.

And of course, we White Nationalists know that none of the system parties are really that different. They are just heads of the same hydra, sockpuppets of the same octopus, masks of the same alien oligarchy. (And I don’t mean Kang and Kodos ^[5].) So the two party system feeds on its own failures, rotating the front men while continually accumulating power.

When a White Nationalist takes a step back from the system and says “Worse is better,” what does he mean? He usually means one of three things.

(1) “The worse for the system as a whole, the better for white people in the long run.” Why? Because White Nationalists believe that we will never have a White Republic by working within the current system. But since we do not have the power to destroy the system outright, we need it to destroy itself. Thus, whatever drives the system toward a breakdown—economic depression, corruption, apathy, cynicism, mass chimp outs, fiat currency, etc.—is better for the long term interests of whites than maintaining the present system.

(2) “The worse white dispossession is today, the better for white people in the long run.” Why? Because whites are being done to death slowly—with demographic trends that unfold over decades—so that most of us will not even notice what is happening until it is too late. How does one boil a frog without him jumping out of the pot? Increase the heat slowly, so that when he realizes he is being boiled, it is too late. Thus, “worse is better” in this context means: The acceleration of white dispossession will raise white racial consciousness.

This, of course, is risky. If the process accelerates too quickly—to The Camp of the Saints ^[6] levels—we might be swamped anyway, even if we do regain our racial consciousness. My great fear is that the system will collapse too soon, and White Nationalists will not be in a position to have a say about what comes next. But even this is less risky than allowing our dispossession to unfold slowly.

The most advantageous form of white dispossession to accelerate is on the symbolic plane, which shapes consciousness while leaving us materially able to fight when we are so inclined. As I have argued elsewhere ^[7], the election of Barack Obama was symbolically very good for white racial consciousness, because now our president no longer looks like us. Obama’s election has also made Blacks far more uppity, greedy, and reckless. This summer’s flash mobs are a reflection of this, and they are highly educational on the symbolic plane without incurring debilitating real world costs.

(3) “The worse the American economy today, the better for white people in the long run.” Americans are narcotized with prosperity and individualism. These drugs allow us to make our separate peaces with the system that is destroying us. In spite of a lot of patriotic bluster about fighting for freedom, Americans don’t fight for our freedom. We run away for our freedom. We move one more exit down the interstate to another subdivision for our freedom.

As long as Americans have the money, we will insulate ourselves and our loved ones from social decay and racial dispossession—letting the dark masses cull the weaker and poorer among us. But the predators will work their way up the economic ladder eventually, and when they come for the upper middle class, there won’t be enough white people left to band together to resist them.

Economic hardship also increases racial conflict and thus increases racial consciousness. Thus the worse the economy gets for white Americans today, the faster we will gain racial consciousness and the sooner we will stand up for ourselves. This is why I believe that Ron Paul-like figures, who promise to put the economy on firmer footing while maintaining race replacement, are far greater enemies of whites than Barack Obama, who looks like he might destroy the dollar in only one term.

* * *

Many people find the “worse is better” notion morally objectionable because it is all mean and vanguardy. And in truth cyberspace is full of creeps who revel in visions of hated liberals and “SWPLs” being murdered by black mobs so they can cackle and say “I told you so.” Their Schadenfreude and wounded vanity are palpable. Our movement is plagued with people who are kooks and haters first. They come to White Nationalism because they believe the enemy propaganda about us and think they have found a home.

But true White Nationalists do not rejoice in the idea that “worse is better.” We wish that it were not so. We wish we lived in a world in which worse is always worse. We wish that our people had heeded the warnings about the follies of racial egalitarianism and non-white immigration from farsighted whites of generations past like Lothrop Stoddard. But, sadly, few ever heard the warnings, and most of those ignored them.

The ultimate premise of “worse is better” is the old “pathema, mathema” (suffer and learn) principle: Most people do not learn from intellectual warnings, which are abstract and universal, but through experience, which is concrete and individual. Good parents of course want to spare their children unnecessary suffering. So they warn them about hazards. But still, many children learn only through painful experiences.

White Nationalists, like good parents, have tried to spare our people from the tribulations to come. But our race is a sleepwalker approaching a precipice. Now we have only a choice of horrors: catastrophe’s rude awakening or extinction’s eternal sleep.

Note: This piece was prompted by Alex Kurtagic’s piece, “Worse is Worse, Unless there’s Better ^[8],” but it went off in its own direction, so it is not really a response to it.