Counter-Currents
1,511 words
Escapism is one of the major issues plaguing young white men. Virtually all of them are gamers of some sort. If not a gamer, he typically immerses himself in board games, or else fantasy and science fiction novels and television series. The more disciplined and intelligent among us might use this as a springboard toward developing some useful skills. For example, a gamer might learn to build computers and code. A science fiction enthusiast might become interested in physics or technology, or develop some rudimentary technical skills. But these are few and far between. As with anything, most are passive and only a few end up becoming skilled, ambitious, and likely to achieve. This is exactly why a society needs to build institutions which offer guidance to youth and maintain social cohesion. Leave individuals on their own, and while a few will overcome obstacles and accomplish things, others will end up becoming obese and unable to leave their houses.
Meanwhile, young white women are still fully engaged in the real world, as they are more focused on people than things. Women also enjoy social power by default, by virtue of nothing more than being sexually desirable. While a substantial segment of young white men are holed up in their homes, wasting time consuming and escaping the harsh reality that is modernity, women are out in the world, matching up with future partners. When young white men with potential take themselves out of the game, it is no wonder that some women simply go for those men who are available (i.e., non-whites or liberals).
But make no mistake, video games are especially vicious. Men — young men in particular — are driven to build and achieve. Their sense of their own sexual and social esteem is based exclusively on their merits and achievements, and thus they have a powerful, inbuilt biological drive for it. Video games are designed to play into this drive. Game developers hire teams of psychologists to optimize this sense of false achievement in their products. The EXP bar has replaced the satisfaction one used to get from going out and shooting a goose, exploring a forest, or the pleasure of learning a practical skill, like woodworking or repairing things with your father (who is often absent, in any case).
As a teenager, I wasted several years playing video games. I was also quite a big fan of fantasy and science fiction — Lord of the Rings, Warhammer 40,000, and such. Personally, I deeply regret having wasted this time rather than having used it to learn more useful skills, although I probably wasn’t the worst example in this regard (the image of the obese young man perpetually sitting in front of his computer while drinking soft drinks and eating Cheetos springs to mind). In my case, I grew up both hunting geese and playing games, but the games began to take up more and more of my time, given that the sensations of achievement and reward are quicker and easier to attain in virtual reality. Minecraft in particular is like crack for ambitious young white men. It is perhaps the most masculine, Faustian game ever designed: You can remake the world in your image, through sheer willpower. To your dopamine receptors, building a house either in Minecraft or in reality feels the same, though one is made of bytes locked in computer chips and the other can house you and your family for generations to come.
But it’s not that I don’t understand the impulse to escape reality which many young men have. Partially, it’s the result of laziness, and partially due to their manipulation by immoral marketing departments. But above all, it stems from the need to escape to a more pleasant, sane world than the one we live in. I suspect that the increase in both video game and substance abuse have the same culprit: modernity. In the modern world, as a man you are expected to assume all the burdens and responsibilities of hard work, supporting society, being virtuous, and even to fight and die in a war if need be. But all the rewards for performing your duties have been stripped from you. As a white man, you are at the bottom of the social ladder. All social ills are your fault, and the fruits of your labors are often whittled away by taxation and inflation, which are then used to subsidize minorities and radical social causes opposed to you. And these days, you aren’t guaranteed a happy family life even if you work hard for it. Raising a family is expensive; only the middle class can afford to have children and raise them according to the Western standard, not to mention that women now hold all the power in relationships and in the legal system. Excuse my MGTOWesque outburst here, but it is true. What the MGTOW folks have to say about the breakdown of relations between the sexes is quite true.
Secondly, we live in a world that is profoundly unheroic. The dominant ideologies are neoliberalism, the ideology of merchants, and Cultural Marxism, the ideology of beggars. The biggest carrot the establishment has for men like you, in an attempt to counterbalance their assortment of increasingly heavy sticks, is to try to seduce you with the idea that if you become an efficient worker-drone, you might get lucky, earn six figures, and be able to retire at 55 with a big house and a boat. But few young men are inspired by the idea of a cushy 9 to 5 job with benefits. Even those of us who have the testosterone level of a preteen girl dream of slaying dragons — and even the profoundly unmasculine antifa do. Kill or be killed, the thrill of the fight, the thrill of hunting — this is what we long for. Modernity does not offer this. We evolved over millennia to be hunters and warriors, and these instincts cannot be quelled with a couple of generations of social engineering, as the Cultural Marxists believe. The closest you can get to true heroism in some Western countries these days is to enlist in the military and fight aimlessly in some remote corner of the world for the benefit of the globalist elites. But as a Dutchman, I can’t even do that. I could perhaps become a Dutch Marine and go to sea to sternly warn off some Somali pirates — because shooting them would merely get me court-martialed, of course.
So a young man these days spends his time slaying virtual dragons. As a result, even into adulthood, many of us remain little boys. Given that we are punished for every attempt at being assertive, since we carry the original sin of being white and heterosexual; given that we are faced with few prospects for social advancement, unless one is already born into the upper classes; and given that our marriage prospects are typically confined to those women that we neglected when we were young men, but who were unable to find anyone else to take them — it’s no wonder that many of us eventually move from games to drugs.
Things are never hopeless, however. You can kick your video game addiction, assert yourself, and learn real skills. Pick up a barbell rather than a gaming controller. Explore the woods around your town sometime and witness the true beauty of nature, rather than a poor imitation on a screen. And then, swing your axe into the root of all our social ills. The more responsible among us have relinquished video games and found real dragons to slay: Marxism, globalism, feminism. But you have to stop wasting time by escaping into fictional worlds. The real world doesn’t go away, even when you’re ignoring it, and it will swallow you up if you aren’t careful. Face reality, don’t flee it. Just like white flight, where you will still eventually wind up becoming a minority no matter how many times you move, escaping into fantasy is just a temporary refuge from your real problems. The world will drag you out of your fantasy world eventually and confront you with your own personal failures, as well as those of society — which are in large part caused by irresponsible men not taking the burden upon themselves to reform it.
Ernst Jünger wrote a small book entitled Über den Schmerz (On Pain). In it, he theorizes that everything in the world comes with a price in pain. You pay it in the present, accepting a bit of pain now to avoid yet more pain in the future. If instead, you choose comfort in the present and defer the pain, eventually you will have to pay an excruciating cost in pain — which may well kill you. To present a starker analogy: You work the land and save for winter, undergoing a little pain and sweat every day, or else you keep kicking the can down the road until winter hits and you die of starvation and hypothermia.
The world belongs to those who are willing to make sacrifices in the present for future glory.
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14 comments
I’ll speak for myself: I work a relatively physically demanding job pushing 50 hours per week. Twice per week after work I run 5 miles outside and on the weekends I lift weights and shoot guns. With my limited vacation time I hike and camp in the mountains alone. I play video games after work. If I tried to read, I would fall asleep. Believe me, I tried. At least it’s beneficial that these guys are cutting (((cable))) and playing video games instead. Video games aren’t going anywhere, but we should manage how much time we devote to them. Escapism can come in many forms from comics, sci-fi novels to sportsball.
I like to put blame on the public school system for taking the trades out of schools and encouraging people to go to college regardless if they have the motivation, ability to pay and mental capacity.
White women in their twenties are concerned with higher education, pursuing careers and endless travel… travel is escapism for the white woman. The amount of online dating profiles that I view where a white woman says traveling is her #1 priority makes me sick.
Video games, comic books, fantasy, and sci-fi are perfectly fine for children, but adult men should realize there is a time to put these behind them (and only maybe enjoy them on the rare occasion for some nostalgia). There is a whole beautiful world out there to experience, we shouldn’t allow our enemies to ruin it for us.
Ouch!
Ironically the people I know personally who regularly go climbing, hill walking and getting into the great outdoors are almost the most deeply blue-pilled, normiecuck shitlibs.
Nature is nice, but being in it is not the cure-all that tradnats seem to imagine it is.
My experience has been the same and I have had to hold myself back from groaning out loud when they talk about taking care of the environment in the same breath as defending mass immigration and African aid policies.
The reference to “On Pain” by Jünger is welcome, but his brief essay from the same period titled “On Danger” is actually even more prescient and relevant to the point at hand. I was reminded of a particular quote from said piece:
“Thus do figures become possible who scarcely dare to speak their own superior language, whether that of the poet, who compares himself to the albatross, whose powerful wings are nothing more than the object of a tedious curiosity in a foreign and windless environment, or that of the born warrior, who appears to be a ne’er-do-well because the life of a shopkeeper fills him with disgust. Countless examples could show how in an era of great security any profitable life will depart for the distances symbolized by strange lands, intoxication, or death.”
All, it seems, we can do is simply distract ourselves with positive activities rather than negative ones. That is what it comes down to. Any vague hope that this current societal system will be defeated seems to have disappeared. Good advice and all above, but what can it do but delay the inevitable? We’ve all been gym-going, outdooring, reading, learning, etc., for years. Most of us are damn near perfected; so now what? If this continues, and it will, we’ll all going into, or return to, escapism.
As for Deep North’s comment about white girls and ‘travel,’ LOL! So true. They just go to places to take selfies and collect passport stamps. Their travel has no purpose, they don’t learn anything profound from it, they don’t know anything about the people/places/things they see and take selfies in front of. Some die along the way. In the end, they make themselves too “interesting” for the dull boys back home and thus price themselves out of the market.
This is why I love CC so much. One of the best things I have read this year. I agree on literally everything. I lost so much respect for men I used to socialize with because of their childish addiction and obsession to all kinds of computer games. They themselves deny it of course, “I don´t play that much!” But today they are nothing but faces in the crowd that I try to avoid. Everytime I hear full grown men talk about video games/computer games and silly TV shows I lose my respect for them.
The computer game phenomena is like a plague, same with the unmanly and zombifying I-phone/smart phone addiction. I see couples in restaurants, whole family’s, children, gang of friends and just everyone just sitting totally absorbed by the fact that some liked their post about having ketchup on their pasta and so on.
The computer for me in only for political knowledge, spiritual wisdom, communication with like minded and intelligent people, European music and good and informative video clips and good classical movies with good messages and aestheticism.
I don´t care if someone play just a couple of hours per day or spend most of their waking hours doing so. It is pathological, liberal, unmanly and weak.
” Liberalism is an escape from hardness into softness, from masculinity into femininity, from History into herd-grazing, from reality into herbivorous dreams, from Destiny into Happiness”.
” Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This “pre-adulthood” has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it’s time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn’t bring out the best in men.
(…)
“Guys talk about ‘Star Wars’ like it’s not a movie made for people half their age; a guy’s idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends…. They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home.”
This is why we need to sweep Whites up into the endeavour of retaking and rebuilding our civilisation. Fighting for the Golden Age is its own reward.
You seem blackpilled into spreading defeatism on behalf of the enemy.
With a sound mind and body, life is rewarding in and of itself.
I would also add: delete your alt-right sock social media accounts.
I literally wasted years associating with the most depressing and demotivating people in the world— the /pol/ & TRS crowds, on online forums.
These days, I keep up with the small handful of legit people I’ve met during my literal years in the alt-right scene, and listen to Carolyn Emerick’s “Volklore” podcast’s— not explicitly political ones that I know I’m going to agree with anyway. What would be the point?
“Personally, I deeply regret wasting my time reading the Lord of the Rings.” I quit reading the article right there. This is a man who has lost his imagination, and appreciation for literature. I’m sure he has a few great points, but the writer seems to have a superiority complex over anyone who enjoys a little light entertainment.
That is not what I said, although it may seem implied. I regret wasting time with video games and such. Not reading LOTR.
Also yes, in a sense I am opposed to pretty much all fiction in the current day. These are war times and there is no room for fiction and fantasy. People have to have their faces pushed into the glass of harsh reality. Stop fleeing reality.
I kicked my videogame addiction and decided to pursue more analogue avenues instead a few years ago. Perhaps my social ineptitude is showing but I now realize how difficult it is to connect with other people because everyone’s obsessing over their smartphones and playing videogames themselves or leading some sort of digitized life that I am trying my best to stay away from.
Have to say that when I was young, the lack of a father figure in my life held me back far more than a videogaming addiction ever did. The videogaming allowed me to step into a world where -my- values mattered when no one else bothered to help me explore them.
I think, however, that since then, the gaming industry has made a rather profound change in that rather than making videogames for gamers by gamers unscrupulous parties purposely hook young minds onto their videogames by introducing many paid-for features and gambling elements. There’s no story to be found to help explore new ideas in many games, just dopamine fixes on demand.
…Books I recommend on the subject of “Ludology.” Games can teach this generation about analytic philosophy, “language games,” and how modernity is like a game.
1. Richard Garfield – Characteristics of Games
2. Lewis Pulsipher – Game Design
3. Jesper Juul – Half Real.
4. Chris Crawford – The Art of Interactivity
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