Counter-Currents
1,729 words
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Reading George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, I can’t shake a feeling that Orwell, while right about the various ways in which language is used and abused to limit and channel thought, was a little autistic. While I will concede that sometimes certain constructions are used out of cowardice, I remain convinced that there is indeed a semantic difference between not unattractive and beautiful and that this nuance escapes an excessively forthright and logical mind. But alas, Orwell is right. And as we can tell from the autobiographical Shooting an Elephant, his dysfunction was probably what made him capable of such insight.
Orwell was a dysfunctional man by the standards of his time, place, and position in the world. As a socialist writer in mid-century Britain, he should have been the toast of his former employers at the BBC. As a Spanish Civil War veteran, you’d expect the Reds either in Moscow or old London town to have at least taken care of him a little bit. As a repentant colonial policeman, you’d expect him to be feted by anti-colonialist fantasists from Delhi to Washington. But none of that transpired. He lived out his days in poverty and relative obscurity (certainly compared to his talent and insight). It was because he didn’t get it. Reading Orwell, and especially The Road to Wigan Pier, makes you realize that he really didn’t get that British or even Russian (or more precisely, Jewish) socialism was never about the workers or the poor. It was always about middle-class intellectuals resenting the upper class and large industrialists.
Orwell didn’t get it, and so he managed to fail at being a middle-class socialist writer in mid-century Britain. Not by historical standards, no. Very few of the grey, boring men who repeated the party line no matter what it was are remembered today, certainly none as well as George Orwell. But by any metric of a good life, Orwell failed, and maybe that’s what matters more than such lofty and useless postmortem achievements such as being remembered and revered throughout the centuries. The later works of Orwell burn with frustration, some of which is probably personal.
Listening to Greg Johnson interview Jim Goad, I hear one describe himself as autistic, the other as sociopathic. They’re probably wrong in the clinical sense, but is there some truth to it? And more importantly, could a measure of neurodivergence be a necessary prerequisite for getting involved in dissident politics? It’d certainly help. An autist cannot see society’s disapproval. A sociopath simply doesn’t care. People have remarked that the Dissident Right is full of Asperger Syndrome types, and an often bemoaned feature of dissident politics is the prevalence of sociopathic types, especially in leadership positions. But we may be getting ahead of ourselves.
Let’s start with a very simple proposition. Humans come in a large variety of neurotypes. There’s intelligence, and then there’s personality, which yields hundreds of possible variations of man no matter how you slice it. Human biodiversity might be politically important to racialists due to the stark biological differences between the races, which result in behavioral and civilizational differences, but on a deeper level, human biodiversity within race is far more fascinating, especially if you agree with Professor Ricardo Duchesne that white people have the highest degree of within-race neurodiversity and biodiversity. Lots of different types out there.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Graduate School with Heidegger here
These neurotypes did not come out of nowhere. They exist, and more importantly, persist throughout our history because they were adaptive on the individual and/or the group level of selection. Some could be overshoots of other neurotypes (autists vis a vis Aspergers), some may be proto-states of others. They’ve been with us for long enough that they’ve survived into modernity and if a particular neurotype has a name and a checklist, odds are it’s prevalent enough that it cannot be dismissed as a historical aberration, even though it may be in a sense aberrant.
Insofar as they’ve been with us for such a long time, the genes for these neurotypes have proven themselves sturdy and able to withstand the pressures of deep evolutionary time. So, why do we call some — hell, why do we call most — of them disorders? Why do we call them mental illnesses? If autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and sociopathy are sources of dysfunction, why have they survived this long?
The fact of the matter is that traditional society was far better at accommodating the neurodivergent than modern society. The socially anxious and mildly autistic would gladly welcome a return to rigorous traditional behavioral codes and structured social life. Can’t end up with no girl at the dance if the dance is a strictly controlled environment which depends more on making the proper inputs rather than the freewheeling atmosphere of the modern club which does violence to the senses. Not good with people? Why not till the land or deal with animals; you like structured activities, don’t you? Got a manic episode coming up? Good timing! We need that row of trees cut down. So, you’re a sociopath with no fear of the law? Well, buddy, you ought to know that if you indulge your evil inclinations, God will send you to Hell to burn for all eternity, and don’t think you can deceive Him.
But back in dreary, grey modernity, the great tapestry of human neurodiversity is for the most part dysfunctional. In the world we’ve built for ourselves, the model citizen is one part consumer, one part button-pusher, and two parts ass-kisser — or in other words, the archetypal bugman. Too lively to sit in a chair and push buttons? Dysfunctional! Too autistic to understand that asses need to be kissed? Dysfunctional! Too much self-respect for ass-kissing? Downright dangerous! Won’t consume? Oy vey, call the men with the butterfly nets, we’ve got a certifiable madman on our hands!
Since you’re now certifiable, modernity will deploy its unofficial clergy who’ll use magical rituals and sacred ointments to make you function again. The shamans also make a killing on the ointments and on prescribing them to people because they show dangerous signs of divergence, especially children. What, little 8-year-old Timmy won’t sit still and listen to his shitlib teacher with the nails-on-a-chalkboard voice drone on about white privilege? Little Timmy wants to run around, play cops and robbers, build mud forts, climb trees, reenact historical battles, and throw rocks at shitlibs droning on about white privilege, as children have done since time immemorial? He must be crazy! Quick, pump him full of amphetamines before he does something — gasp — divergent!
Modern psychiatry and modern definitions of normal and abnormal are symptoms of civilizational decline in the Spenglerian sense. I suspect the endpoint of complete degeneration is a society consisting only of bugmen, presided over by psychiatrist-bugmen, where divergent mind states are controlled and attainable through drugs, both legal and illegal. Party drugs emulate mania. Weed emulates contemplative states attainable by yogis. Amphetamines emulate hyperfocus. Alcohol is the only one which is not an emulator, but rather an enhancer of personality — whatever you are, you become more of it under the influence of alcohol. It is also the most characteristically European drug. Other races can’t handle it, can’t indulge in it, don’t have our millennia-old love-hate relationship with it. This is why bugmen and the bourgeoisie dislike booze — it brings out their grey and boring selves to the fore.
Circling back to our own movement, is it any surprise that the Dissident Right is full of neurodivergents? After all, who is likeliest to revolt against the modern world than he for whom there is no place in the modern world? It’s certainly one of our biggest weaknesses. Mark Collett considered his Patriotic Alternative conference a success because of the absence of “that guy.” I listen to that speech and am glad for Mark and Patriotic Alternative, but can’t help feel a little put on the spot. I am in many ways “that guy,” with more dark triad traits than the average convict, with my mood swings, fondness for alcohol, and confrontational attitude. What if we’re a movement of guys like that? Even the smart ones — especially the smart ones? Not to say we can’t or shouldn’t put in an effort to behave ourselves. But it is who we are.
Assuming I am among fellow madmen, I bring good news and bad news. The good news is that modern psychiatry is wrong and you are not dysfunctional, merely built for better things and better times. Disentangle yourself from the web of modernity, and you will find your place in the world. While it may be small consolation while the state unleashes weaponized psychiatry on us, it’s good to know that we’re not really crazy. After all, we have social proof for our thing. We have each other. The bad news is that Foucault was only half-wrong when he said that power creates these categories — while it is indeed true that we’ve been made into this category of mentally ill by power, it remains true that we’re the men who for whatever reasons will not be normalized down to bugmen. That means that there’s something genuinely different about how our brains are wired, about how we’re put together. We won’t be able to bugmanize ourselves in order to fit into the modern world, not even to avoid punishment from power, or in attempts to infiltrate enemy institutions. There is a core essence to us which we cannot deny without destroying ourselves.
Part of our victory against modernity will be the expansion of the scope of functional neurotypes. The only way out is through.
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29 comments
Many great points…I have had many of these thoughts, since i left the US Army…I removed myself, from the Modern world, in a number of ways…How i think, what i did for a living…from the current power elite in USA, I am dysfunctional…when i retired 12 years ago, i moved to a remote location , in Montana…we have a small circle of people that think similar, and meet at the local bookstore…50 miles away…all are welcome to idea of racial thinking…..they were conservatives to start in life, but have connected the dots, that conservatives have conserved nothing….I have complete works of Orwell, and many biographies…
Hi;
Looking at meeting with similar minded people, located in the Great White North. Any way we can discuss?
Encouraging words for someone who could well very soon have their life turned inside out by a Prevent referral for Dissident thought and academic work – and from what I have seen of the documentation the first wave of their attack shall doubtless be the attempt to pathologise my thinking as a **Person of Autism**.
Better the madness of a man than the good health of an insect.
Regards,
Ein Sophist / The Lamb
In many ways an interesting article from a talented writer, but Mr Jeelvy shows his unfamiliarity with George Orwell’s ideological position when he writes:
“As a Spanish Civil War veteran, you’d expect the Reds either in Moscow or old London town to have at least taken care of him a little bit. ”
Orwell fought in a Trotskyist militia aligned to the oxymoronically named POUM, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity, which the Moscow line Communists hated, and whose “splitist” members they killed in large numbers. Orwell wrote about the infighting on the red side of the Spanish Civil War at length in Homage to Catalonia.
His lifelong opposition to Stalinism made him strangely acceptable to British Conservatives of the Cold War era, but he remained at heart a follower of Trotsky till the end.
Not to mention, even stalinists weren’t safe. After the Spanish Civil War, Stalin conducted a great purge , that involved volunteer militants, GRU and INO NKVD operatives, who were engaged in the conflict as well as the military instructors.
Very true. Stalin was so paranoid that he had almost everyone who had been exposed to dissident left ideas in Spain murdered, just to be on the safe side. He killed far more Communists than our people ever did!
I can’t allow the irony to slip by…. An article about the virtues of weaponized autism, and the comment section is populated with detailed critiques of minutiae that only dyed-in-the-wool autistes would bother to elaborate on. Ha!
Yeah, I’m gonna have to admit that I didn’t know that, but it doesn’t invalidate the central point, in fact, it enhances it. Trotskyites definitely didn’t suffer in the West. Many of them came to power later on, when they became neoconservatives.
I should add that Jonathan Bowden made this point very well in his memorable talk about Orwell to the London Forum. Conservatives, he said (I paraphrase), who are very taken with Orwell, miss the point that 1984 no less than Homage to Catalonia, is a profoundly Trotskyist book. The Party is an amalgam of the cult of Stalin’s personality with elements of Catholicism (which Orwell disliked as much as Stalinism) translated to the secular sphere.
On the subject of dysfunction, I worry that on re-reading 1984 in my fifties, I find myself thinking that Winston was a wuss, O’Brien had dark charisma in abundance and Julia chose by far the lesser man!
While I admire Orwell’s English style and enjoy his writing, Orwell’s analysis of fascism is intellectually risible. He interprets it as no more than a bourgeois defence of class interests, which is grossly inadequate. So while a great writer, he was certainly not infallible.
I also wonder if there are more than a few people in the dissident world who were gifted children. I only belatedly realized that giftedness follows you into adulthood. Search for “gifted adults therapy” – there are all sorts of known difficulties with fitting in because of being wired differently. It’s not just about being smart: independent thinking, intensity, curiosity, questioning conventional wisdom, strong concern with morality, search for meaning and purpose, etc.
For me, it was not at all a case of being oblivious to what other people think or not caring, on the contrary I’ve always been very aware of and very sensitive to social disapproval which made it hard to have socially unacceptable views.
With my views on the race and intelligence issue or the Jewish Question, I’d ask myself “how did I get here?” Well, I got here by wanting to understand how the world works, doing my own research, and going where the truth leads.
Not what I expected, I was always such a nice guy and now I’ve become the two worst things you can possibly be in today’s society: a racist and an anti-semite! (not really of course, I don’t hate anyone, but I can’t believe the official B.S. that any concerns white people have about blacks and Jews are nothing more than irrational bigotry).
I’m not overtly weird, I blend in and pass for normal. But I feel very alienated from other intelligent, educated people who are just so brainwashed and confused by the media and academic propaganda. They can’t help it.
>If autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and sociopathy are sources of dysfunction, why have they survived this long?
Because they are highly polygenic. These are all extreme cases of otherwise adaptive personality types. They are likely brought about when an unlucky organism is having too many otherwise “good” genes clustered together so they manifest otherwise desirable traits to a pathologic degree.
Sometimes, a single copy of a gene or allele offers great benefit to an organism, but have it repeated, and it’s detrimental. For example, only one copy of the allele for sickle cell anemia greatly increases the black’s resistance to malaria, but have two copies and the black gets sickle cell. Since chances are that only one in four children within a family will have two copies of the allele, then it is still beneficial to carry the gene within the family, considering that malaria is a bigger threat than SCA.
To give an example closer to our subject. I know two brothers. One is a schizophrenic, the other is remarkably intelligent, imaginative and intuitive. The non-pathologic one is still what most mental health professionals would call a “schizoid”, because he shares enough of his genes with his brother to get on the spectrum. However the intellectual prowess he received more than makes up for that.
But no, there is nothing adaptive, or “good”, or “normal” about being schizophrenic or an actual autist (asperger’s is barely seen as a morbidity by serious psychologists btw). These are the ones nature “sacrifices” in order to highly tune some desirable traits in a greater number of others.
I hope I made this clear enough. I just can’t remember the term geneticists use for the phenomenon and it’s been a long day. It doesn’t invalidate your general point, come to think of it.
Oh, and Orwell was well aware of how socialists think. I think it’s one of the conclusions in Wigan Pier.
Orwell was aware of how socialists think, but he didn’t get the point of socialism, which is we’ll pretend to give a shit about the workers and instead promulgate our own class interests as middle-class intelligentsia. He saw middle-class socialists as hypocrites who’d lost their way, not realizing that the fault was him for taking socialism at its word.
Proud non-scientist here. “neurotypes did not come out of nowhere. They exist, and more importantly, persist throughout our history because they were adaptive on the individual and/or the group level of selection.” Is that true? Doesn’t natural selection account for why things survive, not why they exist at all? Since you quote Lewis Carroll, Carroll also said that natural selection explains why there are no bread-and-butterflies (they were eaten) but not why there are butterflies. Each step in the development of visual apparatus needs to be non-fatal, of course, but they don’t provide any evolutionary advantage until the whole thing is in place.
“Alcohol. It is also the most characteristically European drug. Other races can’t handle it, can’t indulge in it, don’t have our millennia-old love-hate relationship with it. ”
Every time you take a drink, a Muslim cries. Cheers!
“That means that there’s something genuinely different about how our brains are wired, about how we’re put together.”
Why is the materialistic metaphor that our brain have ‘wiring’ which determines our behavior so pervasive? Would your point have been any less clear if you had simply said “there is something genuinely different about our behavior”? Whatever the causes of such differences, I am certain that the brain is only part of the story.
Drugs don’t have characteristically predictable behavior. For instance, not all amphetamines are alike, and they have very different effects on individuals.
Italians drink a lot of wine, but have a lower compulsive alcoholism rate than that of the Irish. (Italian bars are not packed when they lose a soccer match. As the saying goes, ‘if you curse the wine, the wine curses you’)
Then there are the glutamate antagonists. Clearning the minds of some, slowing that of others. The SSRI roulette has beneficial behavioral effects on some, and for others, a particular SSRI causes serious mental dysfunction. Dopamine agonists can take the form of re-uptake inhibitors, others fit the dopamine receptors. Some operate by both mechanisms.
A short half-life gabba transmitter can be a death sentence (for alcoholics and benzo addicts) where a long half-life may enhance cognitive function in some individuals.
And many people need spiritual transformation and building of character, where drugs offer only transient alleviation of symptoms.
“Empathy” is the main trait deficient in such persons. Should this deficiency be considered desirable? No.
It can be argued that pathological empathy has gotten the West into its present troubles. But “sane” empathy, which I believe encompasses the life-affirming human emotions of love for kith and kin and default segregation from the Outsider, is very much needed to be conserved within our genes. The right amount of empathy is culturally essential. A dearth of empathy leads to cultural atomism.
I lately see the Left using pity-party tactics to sell the public on accepting autistic and psychotic traits as “just another normal”. They do this to prop up their false “Blank Slate” and “infinite malleability” theories of man.
Very damaging to humanity. I do not want to see the genetic traits of autism, psychosis, Down’s Syndrome, or any other such maladies to become genetically propagated – which the social “normalization” of autism, mental retardation, and psychosis will do.
No worries. Very few dissidents will pass on their genes.
“[Alcohol] is also the most characteristically European drug. Other races can’t handle it, can’t indulge in it, don’t have our millennia-old love-hate relationship with it. This is why bugmen and the bourgeoisie dislike booze — it brings out their grey and boring selves to the fore.”
I guess I must be a bugman or bourgeoisie or not an authentic white man for not appreciating random acts of violence, nightly shouting matches between parents, getting woken up by feral screaming outside at 3 AM, drunk drivers murdering people, broken bottles on the streets, piss-stained walls, people passing out and getting raped etc.
How is any of this some Stuff White People Like that I’m supposed to be proud of? Get the fuck out of here with that shit. Drunks are degenerates that should be executed. Why should I be inconvinienced or threatened because of your vain need to signal to everyone that you’re a colorful and exciting guy because you like to drink? Fuck you. I will beat you to death, which your stupid alcohol-addled brain will be unable to do anything about. Maybe you should express your overwhelming white man individuality with Ikea furniture instead.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
I have to agree with this guy despite the colorful language. I don’t think alcohol is in any way profoundly European nor ‘white’. If anything, it is a blemish on our culture and a gateway to spousal abuse and road rage incidents more often than not.
I thought the writer of the article was being sarcastic or at the very least ironic when he wrote that paragraph but perhaps I misunderstood and we are seeing glorification of alcoholism instead here? Disturbing.
My God, white ninja. I certainly didn’t see that last paragraph coming.
Ironically, you seem to have the reading comprehension of a drunk.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Perhaps psychological outliers are early adopters. Of course we can’t just be a movement of outliers, we need to speak to the mob.
There’s nothing to say that the neurodiversity among whites hasn’t been actively selected for for the last 50 years; biologically, socially and politically to try to exclude us and embrace NPCs effectively, or what I call white zombies. I would say it has.
I’m not sure about the Aspergers thing on the Right. Sure there are a few people like that I see, but most public people don’t come across like that. Most public people I see on the Right, come across as cognizant, sensitive to reality and concerned.
I also believe many of these terms about mental illness and so on are heavily overused even by people who should know better, to the point they are becoming part of everyday language and are starting to lose their real meaning.
And while there has been an over, and sometimes politicized categorization of different conditions some these are real things with real impacts on lives and have a distinct clinical basis. People start to use these terms on themselves to look cool and different sadly, when they don’t really have them.
But I would like to say, there is a real biolenninism going on right now, and it’s not just about artificially elevating diversity. I believe there is a genetic biolenninism happening to whites. We are facing a potential army of white zombies down the road and I don’t see great answers to this problem at the moment.
We can speculate about why this is; maladaptive breeding tendencies with parents, all kinds of subtle environmental influences, bisphenol A, video games, we joke about soy etc, but the truth is we are living in a modern age none of us are really adapted for anyway, and if things continue the soy genes will become the favored genes and whites will be reduced to passive white zombies/NPCs.
I do not believe the increase of autism spectrum disorders for example will favor white nationalism, it will favor ZOG.
This article touches on a book I just read, “Virtue Signaling: Essays on Darwinian Politics and Free Speech.” by Geoffrey Miller. He mentions in this book how university speech codes inhibit students who fall on the autism disorders spectrum. These vague policies disrupt the learning of many of these gifted students, who are oblivious or apathetic about political correct behavior, policies, and speech. He even has an essay on foreign students who arrive at U.S. universities’ who are unaware of them as well. He even strongly suggests in the book that their are differences between men, women, and racial groups. He states that the most interesting of thought and how the brain functions is within racial groups, mainly whites. For what it’s worth, he got in trouble with his university for fat shaming and had to undergo sensitivity training.
I listened to Mr. Collett’s speech, and it did rub me the wrong way. I like him — he usually delivers good lectures, and I enjoy listening to his channel. But this particular commentary was something of a miss. I’m willing to entertain the idea that the Dissident Right attracts a higher number of socially awkward individuals; however, nearly every group or movement comprised of more persons than the number of guests gathered around the average Thanksgiving table will have somebody(ies) who is “different.” I can’t agree with making some feel unwelcome in order to make some others with delicate sensibilities more “comfortable.” “That Guy” is mostly harmless. As my grandmother always says, “quit being so melodramatic.”
All unpopular causes have more than their fair share of folks who seem to be a quarter turn out. These slightly-off people are the ones who make these crusades possible. They are sticking their noses out because they just don’t grasp that they shouldn’t say or do certain things – as this article points out early on. Everyone else needs to have courage to get involved (you’re scared but you do it anyway).
No, it is not good in the overall sense to be mentally abnormal, i.e., can’t read the signs, but if it plays a part in making difficuilt undertakings doable, well, we have to live with that. Mildly abnormal people have, maybe, evolved because so many well-behaved humans are cowards. And the universe doesn’t like cowards (people who deliberately look the other way), so all these socalled divergents appear.
See, I summed it up (I think). In fewer than 150 words.
“It’s no sign of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Krishnamurti
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