2,112 words
I recently had an epiphany about how White Nationalists might do a better job of creating a genuine vanguardist movement. Vanguardism, as I never tire of pointing out, is and must always be an elitist strategy. History is made by elites. Whites, however, are ruled by a Jewish and plutocratic elite that is at best indifferent to the future of our race and is at worst intentionally supporting policies that are leading to our simple biological extinction.
To save our race, White Nationalists must depose the existing elite and make white survival and flourishing the highest political priority. But to beat our enemies, our elite has to be better than their elite. White Nationalism will never win until our movement becomes an elite capable of giving our people a future again. And that is a tall order.
According to Patrick Le Brun, one principle of doing well in business is “Never be the smartest guy in the room.” The same is true of politics. If I were the smartest guy in White Nationalism, we would be doomed. Fortunately, from the start, I was privileged to meet people whom I genuinely admire as superior intellects, Kevin MacDonald and Phil Rushton among the very first. And in recent years, I have been very excited to meet more and more younger people who are frighteningly smart, many of them coming out of the “neoreactionary” blog sphere.
The great puzzle that I face is how to create an intellectual movement that attracts and sustains the interest of people who are much smarter than me. My IQ is 136, heavily tilted toward the verbal. That puts me in the 99th percentile for the general population but at the low end of the spectrum for really smart people. There are at least ten million white people who are smarter than me, and it would be nice to have more of them on our side.
Of course, the problem is not just to attract smarter people, but also people who are more creative, noble, honorable, and brave than average.
The Down Escalator
Now, let’s survey the various existing models for creating a vanguard, to see if they are likely to put our movement on an upward or a downward trajectory. Any organization in which, by default or design, the founder ends up the smartest guy in the room has to be judged a failure.
First, there is the guru/religion model, in which a teacher claims to have access to a body of wisdom which he dispenses to his students in a hierarchical course of study. This model never surpasses the founder. It only attracts people who are impressed by the founder’s knowledge and aura of wisdom. Superior people are put off.
It does not matter what doctrine the guru preaches, whether it be Traditionalist wisdom or Faustian self-transcendence. The National Alliance is an example of an organization that was ideologically committed to surpassing mankind but could not even surpass its founder, William Pierce.
(I discuss the appeal and limitations of this model in more detail in my essay “Metapolitics and Occult Warfare.”)
Second, there is the Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann/drill-instructor/polarization model, in which one subjects the moderate voices and polite websites where the White Nationalist movement abuts the Republican mainstream — American Renaissance, VDare, NPI, Radix, etc. — to relentless vulgar abuse in order to split off some of their followers, who will then gather at other websites and chat rooms to trade fantasies of ultraviolence.
Unfortunately, this strategy only attracts people who are inferior in intellect and self-confidence to the person issuing the harangues. Superior people are repulsed, and the founder ends up bickering in a chat room with grabastic pieces of amphibian shit. (Occasionally, though, things liven up when one of them goes on a killing spree.)
Third, there is the gentleman’s club/fraternity model, in which people at least try to dress like an elite. This model is the least problematic. It can provide a forum for back channel communication among the activists and writers. It can mentor young writers and activists. It can bring donors together with people who need money for promising initiatives. As a model, it is not inherently, constitutionally opposed to an upward trajectory.
But the one such group that I have direct experience of excluded from the start some of the most important people in the movement, people who were bigger than — and thus threatening to — the founders.
Furthermore, the frat model is a poor fit with the movement’s most creative people, who tend to have introverted personality types.
Finally, the more conservative a group is, the more likely its ethics are to be bourgeois rather than aristocratic and warrior-like. But the present system has been carefully calibrated to keep bourgeois men placidly working and consuming and playing it safe and smart until extinction. Only an aristocratic, warrior ethic that holds selfishness and safety in contempt has a chance of stopping white genocide. (For more on the difference between the warrior and bourgeois types, see my essay “The Moral Factor,” Part 1, Part 2.)
Classical vs. Bourgeois Virtues
Again, if by default or design, any organization ends up with its founder as the smartest guy in the room, it is doing something wrong. One reason this happens is because it is important for some individuals to always be the smartest in the room. In short, the purpose of too many groups is not really to save the white race, but merely to feed the narcissism of a “great leader.” This sort of narcissism is often entwined with a thoroughly bourgeois value system, forming a rope sturdy enough to hang any organization.
In 2009, my friendship with a minor but perennial fixture on the White Nationalist scene took a turn for the worse when he mentioned, quite casually, that one of my biggest flaws is not knowing how to “suck up.” “Suck up to you,” I translated in the privacy of my thoughts. He’d always had a neurotic need for attention. That was clear to everyone. But I never thought his need so desperate that he would voice it, much less be satisfied with the insincere praise that he was inviting. My initial reaction was pity. But he had lost all dignity, and my pity quickly soured into contempt.
“Sucking up” has an entirely pejorative tone. It means insincere flattery as a tool of social climbing. But sucking up is just one tool of unscrupulous ambition, along with slander, blackmail, and fraud. When sucking up fails, the others are not far behind.
In my book, these vices are worse than outright theft, assault, or even murder. An “honest” thief merely takes your property. A confidence trickster takes your property and undermines the trust that makes advanced civilization possible. I’d hang every one, from Bernie Madoff on down to the beggar who claims he just needs 50 cents for a bus ticket.
These vices flourish in a bourgeois society, in which financial success is the highest goal, which allows people to wallow in moral squalor with good conscience, as long as they end up “winners.”
Advanced, high-trust societies are also hierarchical societies. But hierarchy is one of the main causes of lying, because it is often the first resort of those desperate to retain or raise their status. As one rises in a hierarchy, it is simultaneously more important to have correct information and harder to obtain it, because suck ups will conceal bad news, cherry-pick data to confirm one’s prejudices, hail bad decisions, and just feed one’s ego.
This is why frankness in speaking the truth is one of the classical aristocratic virtues. This is why magnanimity — “bigness” of soul — is an important feature of leaders. Magnanimity flows from high and justified self-worth, self-esteem that is strong enough to hear the truth, even when it is bad news, even when it is not particularly flattering.
By contrast, the narcissist’s need for constant external affirmation, is an aspect of the classical vice of “pusillanimity” or “pettiness of soul.” One sign that your boss is a narcissist is that he cannot bear to be corrected and punishes people for bringing him bad news.
One sign of magnanimity is the ability to lose gracefully from time to time, since it demonstrates that an individual’s self-worth is not tied to victory in every little contest. (Losing gracefully all the time merely makes one a Republican.)
Pusillanimous people, by contrast, are “competitive.” They make contests of everything, even when you just want to relax with your friends. They always need to win — or be seen to win — because their self-worth depends upon constant external affirmation.
Although magnanimity involves frankness with peers and superiors, Aristotle also claims that magnanimity can license “irony” when dealing with inferiors, irony being a kind of lying. When an inferior makes an honest mistake, the magnanimous boss will downplay its seriousness. “Think nothing of it. These things happen all the time.” Magnanimous people don’t get angry about such things, because they have realistic expectations of human behavior. And they know that accurate information is both valuable and rare, thus they do everything they can to avoid giving incentives to their underlings to lie or conceal bad news.
The Upward Escalator
How then can we create a movement that can constantly surpass itself, that can constantly attract better and better people? We want a movement in which people are smarter, more creative, more noble, and more brave with each passing year. That is the only way we will raise up an elite that will beat the enemy’s elite.
First, a heresy: beware of leaders and the leadership principle. This flies in the face of the common sense of the movement. It even flies in the face of my own experience, for in the last 10+ years I have met many highly talented individuals who have done practically nothing for the cause because of the collapse of the National Alliance, which supplied them with leadership.
Of course we will need leaders eventually. Just as we will need followers eventually. But just as I think that populism is premature, I think we are not ready for leadership either.
Leaders only attract followers, and followers are generally inferior to leaders. Once a movement finds a leader, its tendency to surpass itself is capped off. Thus I would much rather wait until we have a far higher average before risking that. Instead of seeking followers, seek people you would like to follow. Believe me, when we need leaders, they will emerge. So in the meantime, let’s worry about becoming a group that a great man would want to lead. Because we are not there yet.
Second, we need to cultivate the classical virtues necessary for an ever-ascending movement. We need to value magnanimity. It takes a certain bigness and self-assuredness to seek out greater men than oneself. I am not paying myself a compliment here. I know that I would like to be such a person, that I need to be such a person.
We must shun petty-minded, narcissistic men who only want to be surrounded by flatterers and flunkies. If a man is vain, he is needy. If he is needy, he is weak. When weakness is wedded to ambition, intrigues and lies inevitably follow, and the social capital of a high trust society will be consumed as narcissists claw their way up on stage.
We need to cultivate an ethic that causes truth rather than flattery to be the lingua franca. We must be humble but frank with superiors, frank and collegial among peers, and gentle and ironic with inferiors.
We need to avoid people who are pretentious, because they cannot spot superiors; who suck up to the people they recognize as superior; who back-bite among their peers; and who tyrannize over people they think beneath themselves. Again, such people inject false information and ulterior agendas into all interactions, depleting the social capital of high trust civilization.
So how do we organize this upward intellectual and moral trajectory? I want to end with one more heresy: beware of organizations. One cannot have organizations without leaders, and I already explained my reservations about them. But there is an alternative model to the hierarchical organization, namely the non-hierarchical network. (I go into some detail about the limits of hierarchies and the need for such networks in my “Metapolitics and Occult Warfare,” Part 4.)
This means that we start where we are right now — namely situated in a web of virtual and real-world networks — and we must think about how to build them up and make them better. What changes can we make, right now, in our interactions with other White Nationalists to set our movement, and our race, back on the upward path?
52 comments
Good Piece.Indeed.
”But there is an alternative model to the hierarchical organization, namely the non-hierarchical network.”
Yes.Agreed. Thats why with whatever creativity that I have I drafted two ideas, namley ;
‘OOWN ‘ (Occidental Organica Net/working) and Futureguild
Brilliant article. Essential reading, thanks. And for, ” (Losing gracefully all the time merely makes one a Republican.)” you deserve a reward.
Great article. But just out of curiosity, Dr. Johnson, how did you go about determining your IQ score? Did you take a test?
Yes, I took a test when I was 20 or 21.
But there is an alternative model to the hierarchical organization, namely the non-hierarchical network.
There are some excellent studies available on this front. For example:
“Networks and Netwars” and “The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico”
by David Ronfeldt & John Arquilla, published by the RAND corporation.
These need to be assimilated, discussed and practiced by WN.
Thank you. I will look into these.
I don’t think Pierce should have done it this-a-way.
I’m reading your latest screed about how to properly form a New Right.
Well as someone who knows how the Old Right did it, especially William Pierce, let me tell you how maybe to not do it.
First, you don’t need to write a novel with plenty of violence and action but without much in the way of character development in which every WN vantard out there thinks that it might be him — and acts upon it, sorta like Bob Matthews did with ‘The Turner Diaries.”
Then when violent whigger tards do something violent, yet successful, like knocking off an armored car, don’t have them visit you at your farm or hovel and give you 400 thousand in unmarked 1984 Order ZOGbux, or around a million-some in 2015 ZOGbux today.
The next day don’t take a gunny sack or two full of the Franklins to the county seat and pay off the mortgage on your hillside farm or village hovel. Or announce that you are no longer running a mere farm but now opening up a “compound” and not just that but an “Elohim Shitty for CreaTards” and a “Skrule of Cosmotology” as a tax writeoff because you can’t declare to the IRS that you are running on stolen ZOGbux even though everyone in the bowel Movement knows better.
Then never, now that you are running a Skrule of Cosmotology and an Elohim Shitty for CreaTards, you will attract some bowel-Movement meercats, especially some low-grade fluffers and skanks pretending that they is “Special” as in “Special Edjewmacation”. Set up a “record store” for shitty bowel-Movement garage bands and write something which sounds really really smart that Movement Tards will eat up like hungry dogs eating newborn calf-shit, which looks like, and possibly tastes like — to hungry dogs at least — like butterscotch pudding.
Make sure that you don’t die of pancreatic cancer or drown yourself in a toilet bow[e]l and spend only some of the increased ZOGbux on Eastern European volga-vulva, finding yourself to set as a Second Vantard jews Nutwerk a Sephardic jewboy who isn’t likely to cum down with Crohns/jew ass-GAIDS. Save up most of the in-cum-cum-min’ ZOGbux and put it in mason jars and make sure that only you and some Fatt Parrot as your chosen suck-cessor knows where the mason jars are buried. Remember, that the New Right is different from the Old Right only in that you haven’t found your Bob Matthews — yet.
Tell yourself again and again that this time it will be different. And maybe this time it will. Not likely, but maybe. No need to be the smartest guy in the room any more than you have to outrun the grizzly bear. All you need to do is to be smarter — and faster — than the other bowel Movement tards you allow around you as ‘Special Meercats”. They are like “Special Snowflakes” but Meercats.
Or you can break the cycle by understanding that in this time and place nothing much and certainly nothing which will likely last can be built with the human and social material available, but rather given that everything is falling apart, how to survive much like what little bit of Roman civilization survived amidst the wandering barbarians rushing in to get their small piece of the spoils.
I’m not Waylon Jennings, but I don’t think Pierce should have done it this a-way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNpLSaCirj8
Hail Victory!!!
Pastor Martin Luther Dzerzhinsky Lindstedt
Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations of Missouri
http://whitenationalist.org/forum
Say it with bongos, Rev.!
Ronfeldt and Arquilla’s RAND publications are listed respectively at:
http://www.rand.org/about/people/r/ronfeldt_david.html#publications
and
http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/a/arquilla_john.html
Many but not all of them can be downloaded as PDF files.
It seems to me that more effort should be given to targeted ultra-rich Gentiles, billionaires, and those with hundreds of millions. Getting one of those guys on the side of WN’s does more good than 1,000,000 “normals.” No major change will happen unless one of those guys uses their money to buy or create a mass media organ to promote WN.
Oddly enough, rich people give far less as a portion of what they can afford than middle class and working class people.
By and large, the rich of the western world presently are a semiticised lot – whether liberal or conservative. Their interest in preserving the current order runs deep. The current order itself is not just un-Aryan but vehemently anti-Aryan.
The wildcard in all this is genetic engineering. Whites should prepare and invest in this, for it’s not a matter of IF, but WHEN.
The result of genetic engineering is extremely unpredictable. Within 30-40 years, and I believe the odds of this happening are over 90%, doctors in some parts of the world (it will probably begin in China) will give parents the option to have “genius” babies and reduce the risk of disease/handicap. Other countries will have to provide this to their citizens unless they want to be dominated economically, in tech and militarily. Selecting for phenotype will come next along with personality traits. Genetic engineering might be more the norm than the exception withing 50-75 years in many countries as non-elite parents use the technology for their children too.
The world will really start to feel the impact of the genetically modified people 20-30 years after they are born, so this would be about 2075. Most of the readers of this blog won’t be around anymore, but it’s not that far off; Whites won’t be extinct in 60 years but their will be more racial hybrids, unfortunately, if current trends continue. If whites harness genetic engineering we can elongate our survival, but in the near long run the competition will be mostly between Asians, Whites, and Israelites, who will be the first users of this technology.
I’m interested in other people’s thoughts on this matter. Opine?
“I’d hang every one, from Bernie Madoff on down to the beggar who claims he just needs 50 cents for a bus ticket.”
I think that way of thinking is simply crazy.
No, it is realistic: crimes against property are far less destructive against advanced, high-trust society than confidence crimes that undermine social trust and thus civilization itself.
The normal masses would never support those sorts of mass executions for dishonesty, particularly against poor beggars who tend to have mental health problems and low IQ. The only exception would be high treason. Sales people and politicians lie all the time, in either big ways or small, or mislead through omission, and by your reasoning they would all be executed. The fact is EVERYONE has been dishonest at some point in their lives, surely up to up to if not exceeding the dishonesty of the poor beggar looking for fifty cents.
My basic point is that lying while committing a crime should merit more severe punishment, because it actually causes more damage. If you genuinely needed 50 cents for a bus ticket home, you might be more likely to get help if people who tell the same story to con people into supporting their drug habits were removed from the streets.
That’s completely different from advocating executions for lying, even non-treasonous lies, which is what you suggested in your post.
I did not make myself clear.
First of all, *why* is it bad to be the smartest guy in the room? Just because some guy says so? I think it’s good to be the smartest guy in the room! Psychologists used to think that the differences over 130 weren’t as important to success, etc, as personality traits (like, once you made it past that threshold), but that was disproved some years back, that every bit helps. It’s hard to have an IQ that’s too high, it would be like having too much money.
Secondly, people tend to think that their IQ is a given number, like written in stone. But you will get different IQs, depending on the test you take. In my interview with Jensen (who was the world’s foremost authority), he seemed to think that the test you can do the best on measures your true IQ. So in your case, Greg, you should take the Miller Analogies Test. I’ll bet you score higher than 136.
It is best not to be the smartest person in the room, because if you have access to smarter people, you can do better in life. The same is true of other dimensions of superiority: creativity, courage, etc. The idea is that we thrive if we can access and mobilize the best possible people, and unless we are the best, then that means seeking out people who are our superiors.
I’d estimate your IQ is 140-145.
Now, I consider myself a midwit. I was born to be what I am so there’s no shame for me to write that. My IQ, I’d hope, is 120-125.
With that said, I’ve certainly benefited from my intellectual superiors at outposts like this one.
Well, I don’t know what to say to claims like that. I appreciate it, of course, but I think the objective test is probably a better standard to go by.
In this context, what Balthasar Gracian wrote in The Art of Worldly Wisdom is pertinent:
“Keep auxiliary wits around you. It is a privilege of the powerful to surround themselves with the champions of intellect who protect them from the dangers of every ignorance, who untangle them from the snarls of every difficulty. It is a rare greatness to know how to make use of the wise; it far exceeds the barbarous taste of Tigranes, who delighted in enslaving kings as his servants. It is a novel kind of supremacy — the best that life can offer — to use skill to make as servants of those who by nature are our masters. It is a great thing to know, little to live; there is no real life without knowledge. There is remarkable cleverness in studying without effort, in getting much by means of many, and through them all to become wise. Afterwards, you speak in the council of chambers on behalf of many, and since as many sages speak through your mouth as were consulted beforehand you thus obtain the fame of an oracle by others’ efforts. Such auxiliary wits distil the best books and serve up the quintessence of wisdom. He that cannot have sages for service should have them as his friends.”
Sounds like the Peter Principle in action:
In a hierarchy, an employee will rise to his level of incompetence.
“Service Industries File, Case No. 3:
E. Tinker was exceptionally zealous and intelligent as an apprentice at G. Reece Auto Repair Inc., and soon rose to journeyman mechanic. In this job he showed outstanding ability in diagnosing obscure faults…He was promoted to foreman of the repair shop.
But here his love of things mechanical and his perfectionism become liabilities. …He will not let a job go until he is fully satisfied with it. He meddles constantly He is seldom to be found at his desk. …As a result the shop is always overcrowded with work, always in a muddle, and delivery times are often missed. …” *
*Peter Principle, Lawrence J. Peter © 1969, p. 5
E. Tinker has been transformed from a competent mechanic to an incompetent foreman.
For reasons unknown, organizations judge fitness for a new task by assessing their ability at an old one which is unrelated.
The reader can apply this principle himself to the late Wm. Pierce and the Nat’l. Alliance.
Mr. Peter also explains why an aristocracy is more likely to place competent individuals than a democracy:
An aristocracy has a barrier beyond which many cannot pass, and who therefore are barred from being promoted to their level of incompetence.
Regards,
Greg South
Loved the republican quote, I agree with everything in this article. I’m currently a student so I don’t know what I can really do as I don’t have much time. So I just share articles around and try to educate friends on these matters.
That is a good start.
Just a reminder: Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, had an IQ of 125.
Interesting
Link?
James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA and Nobel Prize winner, has an IQ of only 120.
Scientific genius clearly has other elements than just IQ.
OK, thanks, I think I understand now. It’s like playing tennis with someone who’s a little bit better than you are — this is what everybody strives for because it’s challenging and it improves your game, whereas if you play with people who aren’t as good, it doesn’t. Also, it’s good if you don’t think you know everything! If you accept that other people are experts in their fields.
Congratulations on your relatively high IQ. It is quite obvious that your Emotional Intelligence is low.
How very clever of you.
What is a good, relatively authoritative IQ test?
I’m not too sure about this smartest guy in the room thing. Should we find people that are more intelligent than us, then that man is making a mistake in not leaving our company.
Re: Feynman, Ron Unz mentioned this recently on a Sailer comment thread. Unz theorized that Feynman was possibly the smartest man of the past 100 years and that Feynman’s self reported IQ of 125 was an intentional joke – it could not possibly be accurate.
In that thread it was also pointed out that Feynman’s sister, who had taken the same test, claimed to have sneaked a look at her brother’s file, which showed him at 123. Even if she was telling the truth I would be wary of putting too much emphasis on a single data point, mostly for reasons of test motivation or mental state. Probably like most people, when I first became aware of the whole IQ debate I was very curious to find where I stood. I’ve scored as high as the mid-140s and as lows as the low-120s, and the biggest difference has been my mood or determination to do well. It’s entirely plausible that someone as brilliant as Feynman felt he had little to prove and simply went through the motions.
That said, it’s a pity this thread has focused so much on the value of smarts rather than the topics of leadership, cooperation and organization. Racialism has been incomparably more lacking in these areas than in smarts.
Yes, I ended with questions on how each of us as individuals might relate to others in our network in a manner that improves interactions, attracts better people, and generally creates positive rather than negative momentum.
Where do the beautiful cover images for these articles come from?
The world wide web.
I enjoy the artwork too. As a simple request, if you know the name of the painting, could you save the file under that name so that by hovering over the image with one’s cursor the name pops up? Some of the images are saved under the name of the artwork and I’m able to look them up, but others are not.
If I know the name of the work and its author, I try to provide it.
I Wonder if there is any proof that the movements that have won today were created or is run by the people with the highest iq, i doubt that alot. And if we think about massmovements of the past, there is nothing to suggest that Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini were the greatest minds of their times. But they were men of action, they were cunning and definately smart wether they had high iq or not, i think the author is confusing these two. In an interview with the guy with the highest iq in Sweden he said his only plan in life is to live on online poker and party all of his life, maybe thats smart on some level, but i doubt that any political movement will win him over. Why not try to win over men of action who are clever, creative and cunning, just like our opponents? However my iq is only 126 so maybe my thoughts arent that interesting?
I don’t just talk about intelligence, but other dimensions of excellence as well. The point is that our movement needs to think very carefully about how to attract better and better people on all dimensions of excellence, something we are signally failing to do. Counter-examples about dissolute geniuses are beside the point.
I agree. There is an X factor that can’t be created or predicted in great leaders. It can be honed if possessed of course. Same thing with any kind of creativity: it can’t be taught or tested. The “test” is to actually create something.
good words. my tip is skim read some stuff on 4th gen warfare and apply it to cultural conflict – also bear in mind too much damage may have been done already so split activity between guerrilla cultural warfare and ark building.
I have gone out and distributed Pro-white literature myself. There are many people who are sympathetic. The reactions can be very interesting. Of course it’s not something easy to do and definitely put me out of my comfort zone. It’s very easy to talk amongst friends, but to successfully communicate our ideas to strangers is not an easy task.
What we need to cultivate is the ability to present ourselves in a way that is appealing. This does not limit itself to what we say and how we say it. The more accomplished and successful we are the more weight our words carry. In small ways I have experienced this first hand, where someone found out I was a white nationalist but instead of their view of me changing, I saw that their opinion of white nationalism became more positive. This is the kind of thing we need.
Pursuing the elite at the expense of appealing to more humble folk may not be the most winning strategy.
The best and brightest usually are very aware that they’re the best and brightest, and they tend to take full advantage of their gifts. They tend to be individualistic and use their gifts to first get what’s best for them. A nascent, underground group organized around some of the most vilified ideas in the culture isn’t much to offer such people.
So who is going to want to sign up for this struggle? Well, probably people who have already lost something, or who are soon to lose something. Like most movements that start out at some extreme corner of the spectrum – those with nothing to lose. C-C’s “worse is better” argument would predict that societal crisis would pull down some elites into the arms of pro-white dissidence, but I wouldn’t count on it – the only group that has been prospering of late has been the elite.
Not sure what to tell you except to sift among the average folk for the gems and build a movement from them. The elite aren’t interested in these kinds of start-ups. Show them a viable product and maybe you’ll get some on board. They’re kind of like women in an odd way… status over substance….
By “elite” I mean the best people, not just the current ruling class. I think I make it very clear that we need to replace our current elite, and that requires that we create a new one that can effectively challenge them for power and replace them.
I was speaking about the best people in general as well. Almost by definition such people are more likely than most to have a vested interest in the status quo.
What you’re really looking for are elites who for whatever reason aren’t successful, or who are willing to give up their success for sort of an unproven “lost cause” kind of project. Such dudes are out there I suppose – but it’s a lot smaller pot than “all elites” and certainly much smaller than normal folks who are currently getting their asses handed to them by the system.
Good article, but it deals mainly with the top leadership of a movement. Leadership needs to be developed at all levels. We need squad leaders and platoon leaders — cadre, in other words. Example: I have some ideas about how to use weblogs to undermine some of the leftist ideas that are presented to us as “news” by the mainstream media. By posting on my own site instead of a Dissident Right comment thread I bring my critique to people not currently part of the Dissident Right. Plus I put in a few appropriate links to major sites. So far, this is “leaderless resistance.” But if I had a few followers, and by “followers,” I mean people who follow me (@1069rhythm) on twitter, I could amplify my efforts, share some practical ideas, etc.
This is Comanche-style leadership. The “peace chief” provides daily leadership for the tribe. A “war chief” is anyone who can get a few others to go out on a raid. It’s a good concept — we need the kind of high-level leadership discussed in the article, but we also need squad-leader, war-chief types who can do some fundamental, on-the-ground organizing, or, at the very least, get a few people to participate in coordinated keyboard projects.
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