Multimodal Ethics

2,482 words

There’s no love lost between me and Jordan Peterson. I have contempt for him and his kind that I don’t really feel for outright enemies of the Dissident Right. He is a deceiver and a speaker of half-truths who doesn’t even have the decency or chutzpah to craft a lurid lie. He’ll dip his toe in the good stuff, then run in fear of establishment heat coming down on him in earnest. He’ll equivocate between Leftist evil and Rightist responses to evil, claiming that he seeks an equilibrium between chaos and order without explaining how chaos can possibly be good. He’ll have you be a Churchian as opposed to Christian, and emphasize the liberal version of the message of Christ – the one where loving your neighbor actually means loving someone you’ve never met, living halfway across the world, and loving means inviting him into your home, giving him everything you own, and serving up your daughter to be his concubine. Indeed, dear readers, if you and I were sojourning in a beer hall at the cool of day, then I would forcefully slam my half-full tankard to the table and, with the certitude of the inebriated, laconically proclaim, “Fuck ‘im!”

And yet, so many young men follow this snake with an amphibian’s voice. We have to ask ourselves why anyone – and especially those young men who would usually caucus with the Dissident Right – followed this man during 2016 and 2017. His support base has thankfully been purged of earnest Rightists who are now, if not with us, then at least not actively working against us. If he managed to gather a large following of otherwise reasonable men, then there could possibly a molecule of truth in his snake oil, a molecule which should be isolated, studied, and if possible reintroduced to the market in a Dissident Right product. Remember: “If it exists, it is reasonable,” as Hegel put it, which means that there’s a reason to and for it. What are all those boys looking for?

First, let’s have a look at who those boys are. By Peterson’s own words in the Introduction to 12 Rules for Life, they are “the low status lobster.” We can call them – with the bluntness characteristic of the radical Right – simply losers. That’s a loaded term if there ever was one, so it bears recapitulating what “loser” really means, what it meant historically, and what it means today.

A loser, I’d wager, is not someone who tries and loses (fails), but who shows a consistent pattern of not winning, be it from constant loss or a lack of trying with no sign of improvement; i.e., no antifragility to defeat. Personally, I’ve a long litany of failures and unvictories behind me, but each loss makes me tougher, meaner, and hurts less than the previous one. A guy who gets beaten down time and time again only to get up bigger and badder is not a loser, even if he consistently loses. A loser, rather, would seem to be someone who gets weaker with every defeat – who loses heart, courage, vim, and vigor every time the blows land upon him. And God be praised, the blows do land, each more terrible than the last. I guess the difference between a loser and a not-loser is how one leaves the arena in defeat: whimpering like a whipped cur or with spiteful defiance, vowing vengeance between gritted and broken teeth.

These whipped curs of history have crawled out of the arena and have retreated to their unclean rooms to play video games and jack off to porn. They’ve essentially cut themselves off from life and are no longer in the running to win, or even trying to play. However, the desire to play and win cannot be fully whipped out of them; deep in the heart of the overweight neckbeard covered in cheetos and his own semen lies a risen ape, Man the Killer, Man the Destroyer. A loser is permanently locked out by societal forces, away from the human reproductive cycle. Even if it only comes out as a base lust, this yearning for continuation of the genetic line is an overpowering impulse, and a realization, conscious or otherwise, that one will in all likelihood not be allowed to reproduce leads to a dangerous reaction. Stewing in resentment and loneliness, our bottom lobster might resort to that old favorite of the downtrodden with nothing to lose: violence. Careful with that van, Alek.

Violence – glorious, murderous violence – is the incel’s Hail Mary pass. I’d be willing to wager good money that there’s a long line of nubile women outside of Alek Minassian’s cell. While this is not a call for violent behavior in any sense, my friendship with the truth behooves me to say that women find violence sexy, and acting like you’re capable of violence around women will get you laid.

Now, a word to the wise: Whereas societies of the past would have had fewer losers, losers exist in every age. They’ve been multiplying in recent times because our societies are increasingly zero sum, and Pareto optimization is shifting to the individual level, but losers have been around for a long time, and the longer your timescale, the more people fall into this general category of people who lose. We are all, without exception, descendants of the aristocracy. The proles of yore have left very little in the way of descendants, even though they had children. Their children had sickly offspring who died before having children of their own. Millions of genetic lines of descent were cut short, and these people had no possible way of knowing. In a sense, their lives were in vain, and their place in life was taken by the son of an aristocrat. For reasons of biological reality, there is really no way to change this, outside of our present period of dysgenic fertility, when the least noble and least intelligent people have lots of children while society’s elite languishes childless. Ironically, many of today’s incels would probably have been much closer to the elite in a more patriarchal society. Spencer J. Quinn’s nebbish is a good example of someone who is high status in a patriarchal society, but who probably would have been incel in our rapidly africanizing sexual market.

I got in a wee bit of hot water with my friends who are well-versed in Russian literature when I suggested that Dostoevsky is the Jordan Peterson of the nineteenth century, because the message contained in Crime and Punishment is “take your lumps,” even if it means your sister has to be more or less sold to an odious man for money; even if it means that you, a clever young man, have to live in a dingy apartment; and even if it means that the best woman you can access is the alcoholic’s daughter who moonlights as a prostitute. Put your faith in God, says Dostoevsky, and bow your head before the cruel and pernicious world that wants you to marry Sonya Marmeladova, a used-up whore, and that protects moneylenders and parasites. The very idea fills me with visceral disgust not at all dampened by the novel’s immoderate length and Dostoevsky’s constipated style. A striving young man should be an Aryan aristocrat: He fights when wronged, he fights for his birthright, he fights for prestige. If we listen to Dylan Thomas, who said that an old man should “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” a young man denied children should rage ten times as much, and burn the world to the ground out of spite and vengeance if necessary.

Let’s call that Option A for now. Whenever possible, young men seek a way out which doesn’t involve burning the world to the ground, simply because in order to burn the world down, a young man must embrace his true self as a vector of naked power, a creature capable of violence which offends the better angels of our nature. He will take any way out; anything to avoid staring down the blood-stained gullet of Gnon. Clean your room, Logos is Rising, WWG1WGA, we have completed the Enlightenment . . . all to escape from this most terrifying realization that there are no such things as rights, only Will that is to be imposed, violently, upon the world and its population, and that the best we can do is contain this monstrous force at the top of society and turn it outwards.

Jordan B. Peterson is addressing this need in young men, to give them a reason not to burn society to the ground, to sell them a story that will make them satisfied with their shit job, their crappy apartments, and the fact that they’ll never do better than some used up Sonya Marmeladova. And as societies get wickeder, so will the Raskolnikovs increase in stature and relative worth. In the middle of the nineteenth century, they were angsty and punchable laws students with delusions of Nietzschean grandeur. Today, their sweat and finance keep various e-girls well-heeled and bathing in money. Thus, greater and greater heaps of bullshit will have to be shoveled inside these young minds. Peterson sells them a bill of good about order and chaos, about not becoming a tyrant and being satisfied with mediocrity. If we could just excise the cuckery and gnosticism from Peterson’s philosophy, it’d actually make a good screed for that segment of the population whose upper reaches of potential achievement barely scrape the mediocre. Your proverbial low status lobster.

The absence of the calls for striving in Peterson’s philosophy has been pounced upon by Vox Day, who is Peterson’s greatest critic, and who’ll tell you to reach for the stars. The problem is that Vox himself will tell the low status males (whom he calls gammas for reasons best left unaddressed) that the first step toward improving their lot in life is to accept that they’ll never, ever be alpha males.

Why is this relevant? Here’s the thing, friends: The Dissident Right is in many ways a rowdy and unruly coalition of the malcontented. The three major pillars are ethnonationalists standing athwart the erasure of their nations, masculinists standing athwart the erosion of their masculinity, and Human Biodiversity (HBD) researchers standing athwart the official dogma of our age, with nothing but their bell curve charts in hand. Heartiste had to be nuked from orbit because he was all three, though he began as a pick-up artist. Furthermore, Heartiste had a deep understanding of Game based on human psychology. Contrast that to Roosh V, whom I suspect merely figured out a few heuristics for getting laid and seems to have recoiled in terror from his own (and women’s) true nature. No, Heartiste was a truth-seeker. After he found an answer to “twf no gf,” a deep answer to “twf no gf,” he found himself on a path to answer “twf no friends” and “twf no nation.” He took that fateful step.

Since we are the coalition of the malcontents, we will inevitably attract low status followers. A commenter on one of my earlier posts which dealt with the disutility of labor accused me of spreading “vulgar Marxism.” To be fair, that article is loaded with all the smarminess I could muster specifically in order to offend bourgeois sensibilities, such as would be held by someone who seriously uses the word “vulgar” – but then, I have to admit that to a low-IQ, thuggish man, my diatribe against working would seem like an invitation to lounge, drink, and screw, when it is in fact an invitation for the aristocratic young man to read, work out, debate, practice martial arts and weapons training, hunt, fish, hike, engage in learned discourse with good and intelligent company so that he may rise above the savage and closer to God, and after all that is done, lounge, drink, and screw. It would therefore follow that an alternative version of that article should be written for those without the wit and wherewithal to understand that “work stinks” does not mean “do nothing.”

For that purpose, I suggest constructing an ethical system which will have multiple modes, multiple archetypes of perfection to aspire towards, and multiple ways of living – something similar to what was proposed by Plato in his Republic, but adapted to our modern age. First, we must take into account our unique historical position, as dissidents from the orthodoxy of a dying empire, and secondly, we must have a vision for the world that is yet to come – the nations which will come after, when we win. This multi-modal ethical system will have to encompass us all, turn out the bad eggs, include the good ones, parse between the useful and useless, absorb the useful, and eject the useless. It must put a man to the test and see if he is to have a function: subject competing philosophical systems to scrutiny and absorb from them what is useful, as well as their adherents, if they can be used. Above all, it should avoid situations where members of the various modal groups find themselves fighting each other, and should therefore have a mediating universal value. Personally, I’d prefer if this universal value were survival, but if I’m being completely honest, I do not think that the vastness of human experience will allow me or any one man much control over such a system. Rather, I think that each of the multiple modes of ethics will be developed independently, and that their adherents will find themselves forging a universal out of necessity, when the coalition forms in earnest.

Until that day, I shall keep on contributing in whatever way I can to an ethics for my own tiny niche, but with a new task: Do not interfere in the creation and developments of allied modes of ethics. For example, ethnonationalists should not begrudge the HBD crowd their absence of teleology, nor should they get all autistically trad while the pick-up artists are busy plying their trade. Likewise, if you see someone exhorting men of average IQ to curb their ambition, do not wail and gnash your teeth about him being a contemptible prophet of mediocrity, as I unwisely painted Dostoevsky and as Vox hypocritically described Peterson. Rather, understand that dogs cannot be expected to have the ethics of a lion. Whereas the god of lions will reward dominance, victory in battle, and proclaiming that work stinks while your many wives bring you food, the god of dogs will reward fetching sticks, holding in your poop until you’re outside, and barking at outsiders. Both gods, however, are subordinate to Gnon, the impossibly ancient principle of survival. In the abyssal cosmological-level analysis, yes, we all ultimately pray to him. But here in Middle Earth, the world is full of lions, dogs, and many other animals, and each has his god to serve and a role to play.