Counter-Currents
2,358 words
A man can learn a lot while visiting Sicily. He can learn that old Rome and Byzantium still live in some corners of the Mediterranean; he can learn that the strange, winding streets of a medieval town can feel more like home than the post-communist, Eastern European shithole he calls home; he can learn that he is powerless before authentic, ricotta-filled canolli and also that he sleeps on average four hours less than his wife, going to bed two hours after her and waking up two hours before her.
These hours require something to occupy the mind with which produces no noise. Given both the setting and the strange hours, your dear author elected to read the writings of the Baron Evola.
It’s never quite cold in Sicily, even when it rains. And yet, an unnatural chill can grip the heart when it understands that no matter how dark and unhappy the world is, it can get worse still.
First things first: The Baron accepted that the world is divided into three castes – those who rule (the warrior aristocrats, paladins, kshatriya), those who pray (priests, squishy wizards, Brahmin), and those who work (merchants, workers and peasants, the productive, those who in a fantasy setting would be running the item store, vayshya).
As with all triads, trios, and trinities, there’s a hidden fourth, that being the dalit caste. Dalits, of course, are difficult to figure out, but here’s a useful heuristic: if someone is part of what Marx termed the “lumpenproletariat” (thieves, whores, alcoholics, drug fiends, starving artists etc.), odds are that he is a dalit.
In our diversified west, we can also dump the vast majority of darker nonwhites into this group (bearing in mind that Not All Browns Are Like That, as will become important later). Whereas these people might be vayshya or brahmin among their own, they’ll register as dalit compared to white people. I’d also like the reader to keep in mind the following: most homosexuals and single mothers will also fall into this grouping of dalit, regardless of wealth.
The castes aren’t economic, social and aren’t even clearly related to biological parameters such as intelligence or beauty – but are rather spiritual. This will also become important later on. Generally speaking, if it “lives in the moment,” if it is driven by satisfaction of its physical urges, if it is hedonistic without being epicurean, if the sum total of its ambition can be summed up as “dick and gut satisfaction,” it’s a dalit.
An audience familiar with the writings of the good Baron will already know that primacy in the world has been taken from the warrior aristocrats, first by the priestly class, and then by the mercantile vayshya. After that, we expect the vayshyas to run the whole thing into the ground, which I suspect they can’t realistically do. No, vayshyas’ productive instincts are too strong — they cannot abide destruction, which is one of the reasons they have no stomach for war. Personally, I think that the most realistic picture of a vayshya endgame, a sort of merchant apocalypse, has been painted by the enigmatic Zero H.P. Lovecraft in his not-so-short short story “The Gig Economy.” You’ll never look at Elon Musk’s punchable mug the same way after reading it. But no, that’s not our fate, for the cycle is not complete until the vayshya themselves are overthrown by the dalit.
I suppose that’s for the best. Perpetual rule by vayshya sounds like a fate worse than death to me, as would the constant prayer and endless, talmudic arguments over arguments that’d characterize perpetual brahmin rule, as can be seen among the Jewish people whose brahmin caste ruled over them with an iron fist until the 19th century, whereupon these brutalized Jews with a grudge against all religiosity were unleashed on an unsuspecting West.
But there can be no perpetual rule by dalit for one simple reason — dalits have no conception of the future and eat through societies like termites. A dalit takeover of a civilization results in that civilization’s collapse, almost immediately, as the entire heretofore accumulated social might is disintegrated in an orgy of consumption (and not just in the material sense). Imagine a gang of gypsies taking over a once profitable business, or a female preacher taking over a church. Yep. You can shudder now.
It was late August when I realized this. I was smoking on the balcony, and the sun had just risen. I looked to the east and started thinking about Aleister Crowley, who had for three years lived in the same town where I was staying. I turned my gaze north and tried to spot the Aeolian islands — you can see them on clear days. And then it hit me. The moment when the tiger grows tired is the moment of a spiritual dalit takeover.
Quick reminder: Riding the tiger refers to surviving modernity in the parlance of the Baron Evola. It consists in not allowing modernity to overwhelm one’s soul, while at the same time not fighting it directly, as it would tiger-like, maul the traditionalist. Only when the tiger is tired can action be taken, only then does a traditionalist stand a chance of victory. Until then, we ride the tiger.
Rule by dalit, I suspect, will be nasty, brutish, and short — a sort of South Africa writ large, though considerably more violent and global in scale. Bear in mind that rule by dalit signifies a change in the age of the world, from Dvapara Yuga to Kali Yuga, where the beggar steals the big stick of power from the merchant. The world’s various shitholes are themselves still in the third age, ruled by merchants. Their level of dysfunction and violence will likewise increase with the spiritual shift.
What will this shift look like?
Here we come to the idea that the ruling class is more or less already dalit, either directly, or through dalitization of sons of merchants. To start with, our meritocratic society has been systematically selecting for increasingly low-quality men to run the state. Although meritocracy allows for greater ability in the first generation, those first generation meritocrats find jobs in the establishment for their less bright children — and their children are less bright due to regression to the mean.
When we do away with aristocracy, we do away with bloodlines which have over the ages proven themselves consistently able to produce quality men. Even though an individual baron might be less bright than an individual commoner, that baron’s family consistently produces such men as can effectively govern, whereas genetic drift and regression to the mean prevent the commoners from consistently producing such men.
Add to this the resentment factor, in which highly intelligent people resent geniuses for being close enough to sniff what comes with genius, but unable to do it. Geniuses are systematically sabotaged whenever they are judged by their peers (however, an aristocratic system promotes genius — after all, the baron isn’t threatened and his rule is actually helped by the brilliant commoner, unlike the common provost of a university)”.
From a mathematical standpoint, imagine a bell curve graph of a trait called “ability to govern” moving through time. Due to resentment, its rightward drift is checked, and the graph has a strong leftward drift due to regression to the mean. The left tails, anything left of the bell curve’s tip, really, faces no punishment — nepotism persists, for what man would leave his children jobless, even if they really are entitled brats with the ability of half-peeled potatoes? Gradually, the curve moves so far to the left (towards low ability) that the brightest of the 4th generation are comparable to the average of the 1st. Henry Kissinger looks sane by comparison to contemporary globalists.
This, I believe, is borne out by our reality. The second and third echelon of government, the nefarious Deep State, what Mencius Moldbug called the Cathedral, the great corporations, Hollywood, the media, the universities . . . they’re run by dumbfucks. James Comey’s soyboy antics come to mind. This guy was Director of the FBI. You’d expect someone with gravel, rather than granola in his guts to hold that position.
And still the Kali Yuga is not upon us, still vayshyas run the show, at least spiritually speaking. And here we get into the ooga booga portion of this essay as we delve into what is both symbolic and determinant of the world spirit.
Spiritual power is in many ways, a function of actual power. Actual power is . . . well, the ability to make men who are alive no longer alive. While I don’t usually encourage people to watch stupid television shows, there’s a good scene in Game of Thrones where Queen Cersei (an aristocrat) cuts Lord Baelish (an upjumped merchant) down to size, with a practical demonstration that “power is power.”
Who commands the most actual, power-is-power in our world? The commander of the world’s most powerful military, of course. This brave guy:
As a friend of mine pointed out, this guy is a vayshya from his golden hair to his (probably) golden silk socks, if all the gold and other trappings of immense mercantile power didn’t tip you off. He is, however, the last hurrah of the vayshyas (and of America, which is a vayshya nation through and through), a merchant prince presiding over a government of paupers. Whoever follows will be a dyed in the wool dalit.
When I was workshopping this idea with my friends, they pointed out that Barack Obama could be considered a candidate for my President Dalit and that the Kali Yuga is already on. However, remember when I pointed out that not all browns are like that? Well, Barry O. ain’t like that. He is very middle-class, half white (though the son of a single mom with a dude’s name), and it’s telling that his father wasn’t an African-American, but rather a part of the Kenyan ruling class. Whatever he was (and my guess is vayshya), he wasn’t a dalit.
Michelle Obama behaved like a dalit in many ways, but after taking a closer look at her background, I think I can safely claim that she’s vayshya, and the weird behaviors were the result of entering middle age with a husband who in all probability did not satisfy her . . . needs. Nevertheless, Barry had strong dalit tendencies. Maybe he could be considered a liminal being, a transitional phase between vayshya and dalit.
No, I think that President Dalit is yet to come, and I think that he, or she, will be elected in the year 2024.
For a while, I believed that President Dalit was going to be a Democrat, in all likelihood, Alexandria di Occasio-Cortez or some other brown thot “democratic socialist,” and then . . . this happened:
This episode, and several subsequent comments from Kanye, made me think of a dreadful possibility. The Man Who Makes Us Call Him Ye, clad in MAGA hat, enters the GOP primaries, sweeps every state, and wins the presidency, riding a coalition white conservatives dying to prove their anti-racism and tribal blacks looking to boot invasive Hispangieros from black spaces. It’s like Jared Taylor’s idea of a black-white coalition to combat Hispanic invasion . . . in fact it’s exactly like that, gone horribly right.
Assuming the marriage lasts, America will have a first lady with a sex tape, notable for having attempted to “break the internet” with her ass, the adopted daughter of a stunning and brave tranny.
And let’s not get into the metaphysics of Kanye himself. As Scott Adams would put it, he’s a “wizard,” insofar as he’s a master of self-promotion in the Trumpian mold. Problem is, Trump has actually built things. Kanye’s accomplishments are . . . eh . . . crap music. If Yeezie deigns to put on a suit, he’d be an empty suit.
It’d be a merry Dalit presidency, and all the “I’m not racist” crowd will hail it as a victory for conservatism, indeed for MAGA, to have this confused ghetto rat elected to the Presidency.
I suspect things will go to shit shortly after that.
What can we expect from this development?
Well, I guess the US will be over as a global hegemon — the implications of which I’ve covered elsewhere. This will lead to the liquidation of some things propped up by US military might which ought not exist. The US itself will likely fragment along ethnic lines and descend into low-level civil war, or possibly high-voltage civil war. Who knows? Kanye’s ego might not take kindly to a California in open rebellion, declaring Reconquista. The nukes might fly towards L.A.
Ultimately, it will be chaos, which is why I hesitate to predict too far into the future. Luckily, this will be the time to attempt to defeat the now tired tiger. This is the good Baron’s “completion” to which we are to ride. For those of us who belong to nations dispossessed and disenfranchised by US military and diplomatic bullying, it will probably mean reassertion of our peoples’ independence, dignity, and national will, as well as a purge of domestic traitors and hostile minorities.
For those nations hardest-hit by the chaos, we might see a resurgence of a warrior elite which restores order… either that, or China moves in and imposes their order — which I strongly suspect. China is a vayshya nation, lacking a warrior aristocracy. I’ve never really feared the possibility of Han overlords for this reason. They’re not warriors and never will be. We’re likelier to get occupied by Zulus. Whoever restores order, it will be a warrior aristocracy, however. Hopefully (and probably) a white warrior aristocracy.
Whatever ultimately happens, this world is due for a change. Things have to get drastically worse before they get notably better. And the better of tomorrow will not be the better of yesterday. International travel and commerce will probably collapse, as will the many comforts of today. That being said, if I am right, and I’ve no reason to believe otherwise, I’d like to present the universe this humble request: to place my feet where once the Baron’s noble ancestors trod, that I am allowed to once again see a Sicilian sunrise before I die.
11 comments
Yes, but we mustn’t appraise Trump by what he IS, but rather by the damage he might do to the therapeutic egalitarian left. Nothing so cheers me as the way those people hate him.
Great article.
Although I myself am not a Neo-reactionary, I must admit that NRXers always have the best sociopath-political analyses.
‘This episode, and several subsequent comments from Kanye, made me think of a dreadful possibility.’
It is very well attested that Kanye is unlikebale in person and despite his outside persona does not have much personal charisma. abodyfuards, former freinds and assistants have all testified that he is terribly insecure and is mostly mean to members of the public.
Cant tell if you were joking or not
Negligible inaccuracies aside, the neglect of codominance as a factor represents a glaring, and fatal, omission in the analysis.
You see, the overlapping inclusion in each caste is also governed by a bell curve; on the left side you have exclusives, people that are solely priests, warriors, dalits, and on the other, co- or tri- dominance inclusion, where people are both priests AND warriors, both rulers and prayers.
The thing is- whenever codominance finds its way into the trappings of power, systems occur which are very robust in their effects, for better or for worse. We’ve seen the codominance of the aristocratic prayers in the pharaohs of Egypt, the emperors of Rome, the emperors of China and Japan even the English kings, forged societal systems that lasted for several millennia in the most extreme cases. Another such codominance are the communists, a combination of priests and dalits, a combination of which might have ended the world (and has proven much harder to disappear given academic infiltration)
You see, the merchants will not be defeated by the dalits, because they were already defeated by the insidiously growing class since the 1980s of a new codominant hybrid- the merchant priest (or rather, antipriest, but we should not digress). By this I mean the rise of the STEM majors, science zealots turned entrepreneurs. It use to be that the isolated cases like Edison (from which General Electric spawned) or Daimler Benz were holding just a piece of the economy. Now you have Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook… the list is endless, and these are becoming the largest companies and slowly, the bulk of economic activity. And these people have the power to shatter or forge the swords used by people like Cersei… Or Trump.
Change is coming, but not the one you think. They will drag the tiger out the back, shoot it in the head, skin it, and use the skin to make everything from boots to blankets. They will devour the meat and fill the bellies of the dalits. The sacrifice at the feet of the golden calf will be nothing less than traditional virtues. Make no mistake, it will be a more prosperous life. The question is whether it will be worth living.
A fate worse than death indeed.
Care to share the password to the Gig Economy story with us?
My apologies. I seem to have linked to the protected version. Here’s a free one.
https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/the-gig-economy-2/
“…as would the constant prayer and endless, talmudic arguments over arguments that’d characterize perpetual brahmin rule, as can be seen among the Jewish people whose brahmin caste ruled over them with an iron fist until the 19th century…”
My longstanding understanding is that Jews are a group mostly of vayshyas (with a few sadistic dalits thrown in), who all prefer to think of themselves as brahmins. (The entire kshatriya class is conspicuously absent from Jewry.) Jewish thought overwhelmingly tends to be opportunistic, and even most Jewish “intellectuals” hold contempt for the idea of wisdom for its own sake.
At any rate, good article.
This is not to invoke Gregoire Canlorbe as an authority, but he made this interesting remark over at Am Ren:
“The civilizational manifestation of the Old Testament, the Talmud, or Kabbalah is not cosmopolitanism, let alone bourgeois materialism. It is the sovereign nation, homogeneous in terms of race, and aristocratic-warlike in terms of values.”
Unless I am mistaken, aristocratic-warlike = Kshatriya
Is Netanyahu a Kshatriya?
(As a side note, Canlorbe’s claim that “cosmopolitanism runs counter to the sacred texts of Judaism” is consistent with the thesis advanced by Yoram Hazony)
See https://www.amren.com/features/2018/09/anti-racism-the-trojan-horse-for-the-great-replacement/
“When we do away with aristocracy, we do away with bloodlines which have over the ages proven themselves consistently able to produce quality men.”
This is pure speculation. I assume what is meant, is that there was a long period of relative political stability under a group of aristocratic families and that this political stability is due to the unique genetic make up of these families. But history cant prove this. It could just as well be that these families lived in an environment which was condusive to their desire to hold on to power. An environment where a more hierachical structure of society was not questioned and people accepted moral absolutes.
If they really were “consistently producing quality men”, then why are their living descendants mostly known as people who appear in gossip mags/ owners of land which they inherited? I’m sure the “quality man” genes should be driving them into some venture which allowed them to live out their potential as great leaders/administrators/warriors/ etc..
Whereas if you accept that the political stability they presided over was more down to a condusive environment, then their current role as d-list celebrities and their willingness to stay in this role makes much more sense. They are just doing what they have always been doing; filling the role they were born into. They used to be expected to run the country, now they are just expected to smile vacuously at the camera and answer some surface level questions about their uninteresting personal lives. I expect running the country was a lot harder.
Other good points of attack on the argument of the inherent genetic superiority of the aristocracies would be to point to numerous historical examples where they behaved very un-“quality man”-ish, because they were abusing their subjects, because they were bad at administration or because they caused pointless strife out of vanity.
Another good criticism of this point would be to point out that the period of history which distingushes europeans from the rest of the world, which allowed us to dominate the planet culturally and the fallout which we are still riding today, the renaissance, was kickstarted by a family of merchants.
This brings us to another good criticism which speaks against an inherent genetic superiority of the aristocracy, which is that the aristocracy is often toppeled by commoners like Cromwell or Napoleon.
Hapsburg chromosome counts also speak against deifying the specific bloodline as the agent of good government.
The better argument would be to say that as a basis of government, hereditary aristocarcy is more condusive to good, stable governement, than most other forms we can think of. It encourages more long term planning on the side of the governor and thus leads to more stability and security for the governed. If you contrast this with an elected, non-hereditary governor, we see that he has much more incentive to increase his personal wealth during his time in office, because unlike his power, he can pass this wealth on to his descendants.
Or you could go the route of arguing that it’s the most “natural” or stable form of government because we observe it across many cultures across a large time span.
An essay with some interesting points, though a little too flippant in both tone and language.
Some corrections regarding Evola. He did not consider the warrior caste to be the highest, and that its rule – though preferable to modern conditions – was already a degenerate form. More significantly he would have disagreed with the notion that spiritual power was a ‘function of physical power’. On the contrary he would have regarded the complete opposite, that true physical or political power must ultimately be a product of spiritual strength- spiritual to him meaning something far more vital and intense than anything most people can today bring themselves to feel.
Dude, of course it’s the Kali Yuga. First, while it is true that thae Indo-European tradition has a tripartite caste function, the Hindu variant divides the third function into two castes – vaisya (capitalist) and shudra (worker). The idea behind the cycle of the ages and the slow degeneration through time is that the next lowest caste will predominate, moving from the brahmins during the golden age down through the shudra in the Age of Kali. The dalit is not part of the caste system and exists in a pariah status.
Certainly, the vaisya does seem to be in charge, and in most practial aspects it is. So how does this square with the notion that the present age is indeed the Kali Yuga? It’s because the shudra cannot actually take political power. At the time of Evola’s writing, it seemed reasonable to think that the advance of communism would fulfill the historical role of the shudra, but the system’s failure is simply indicative of the shudra’s inability to rule. Thus, capitalism and the rule of the vaisya must continue until the end of the cycle. It is written in the sacred text:
“In Kali Yuga, wealth alone will be considered the sign of a man’s good birth….”
The reign of money certainly seems to be consistent with the times we live in, and one in which the vaisya still holds the reigns. It is also remarked that the relations between the sexes will deteriorate, lust will replace love, the sacred will be profaned, those entrusted with priestly (scholarly) duties will be fakes, atheism will become commonplace…
And yet we do see the shudra rising up in his own way. This can be seen in the rising tide of color, the rebellion of the victim, the triumph of the bitterness of all sorts of degenerate and debased human populations. The style and outlook of the shudra has become ubiquitous among all classes. Hip-hop is fashionable, as are ripped jeans. The shudra and the vaisya exist in alliance in denigrating the strong and healthy. The brahmin survives by prostituting himself; he uses his tdalents to uphold this ugly system. The kshatriya is despised and repressed, though he may still find a role as an enforcer of the status quo by gaining employment in one the system’s bodies of organized violence.
One criticism I have of Evola is his misunderstanding of the brahmin; he takes too much from Nietzsche and the idea of the “sickly priest” in my opinion. But that’s another discussion.
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