Against Escapism

[1]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.