The Struggle is Real

[1]

Detail, Henry Arthur McArdle, Dawn at the Alamo, 1905.

2,144 words

Say what you want about white nationalists, they play life on the highest difficulty.

— Some leftoid on twitter dot com

If you read Leftist and conservative treatments of why people join terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda or ISIS, you see a lot of hand-wringing about poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunity, et cetera. If you look at what the CCP leadership say about the young Uyghur Muslims turning to radical Islam, you’ll notice the same screed about lack of opportunity, superstition, and poverty, only in Marxist rather than liberal packaging. Finally, while White Nationalism and the broader Dissident Right are not criminal or terrorist groups, you’ll notice that the authorities, conservatives, Leftists, centrists, et al assume the same about us: we believe what we believe because of poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunity. Oh sure, they give us a negative moral valence — lack of education becomes “ignorance” and poverty and lack of opportunity signify that we’re “losers,” but it’s the same thing. If only we weren’t stupid, poor, uneducated, unsuccessful with women, etc., we’d join the rest of the world in the glorious multiculti gender-nonbinary fuckpile. 

However, a review of the membership of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Uyghur radical groups, and the Dissident Right reveal the upper and upper-middle classes of their respective societies. People who were born with every privilege, who had access to the best education, and who would have wanted for nothing, if not for their seemingly irrational foray into politics inimical to the ruling regime. The radical must be crazy to throw away an opportunity to coast his way to high positions in society, all for what? For an Ummah that is becoming as degenerate as the infidel West? For a people that won’t fight to save themselves?

What do you give the man who has everything, or at least every comfort? Why, you give him want. You give him suffering. You take his comforts away and you punch him in the face. You drag him through the street covered in shit and blood and you call him a racist. You give him what he has never tasted: struggle. 

Man, especially upper-class man, is a creature that craves struggle. Struggle is one of the few things that give life meaning. Conscientious and dutiful man has to defend his own existence before the harsh judgment of his own conscience. I think of all the food, water, heat, and clothing which have gone towards my upkeep, all the labor, all the ingenuity. What is the point of all this? Why do I live? Why not avoid the indignities of old age and put a bullet in my head before I reach the dreaded age of thirty? The answer is so simple that it stupefies most people: the cause. 

I shudder to think what I’d be like without the cause. Probably an alcoholic by now, or maybe on harder drugs, maybe dead. On the other hand, I might be more comfortable, with nothing but the feeling of absolute meaninglessness and dread haunting me during the day. When we think of existential dread, we usually associate it with rainy days or inclement weather, but there’s no feeling quite like cold alienation under the scorching Mediterranean sun, when there’s no respite even in the shade and all the foul smells of a modern city are amplified. Many people who knew me from the period of my education discuss me with the hushed tones usually reserved for a dying man. They say that I threw my life away. That is one way of looking at it. Another way would be to say that I’m the only one of my old friends genuinely living. 

The life of the White Nationalist is anything but boring, especially if you’re open about your commitment to white identitarianism. It’s certainly very fun at parties. Due to corona restrictions, I’ve not had many chances to test it out, but announcing myself as a racist YouTuber and content creator has garnered some very interesting moments. Because the government insists upon treating us like criminals, keeping your communications secure and your organizations free of infiltrators occupies a great percentage of your mental and physical resources. You’ve got to learn to read and judge people by their body language, their facial expressions, their behavior, and ultimately, their physiognomy. The sensation of being surrounded by enemies is hugely diverting from those old existential fears. So, it stands to reason that those who crave struggle would flock to our banner, right? 

Wrong. 

The West is so far removed from real struggle that a decadent Westerner can very easily deceive himself into believing that his fantasies of struggle are genuine struggle. Hence, Leftists, blacks, environmentalists, and Antifa who genuinely believe themselves to be fighting the system, all while financed by and protected by that very same system. 

But wait, there’s more! 

[2]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Here’s the Thing here. [3]

Say you’re not crazy enough to hallucinate imaginary white supremacists in the government. Why not take The Purple Pill [4]™? Experience all the positive sensations of struggle from the safety of the Overton window. 

So, it’s not about struggle, is it? Our society is structured in such a way that your will to struggle can be satisfied without threat to the system or even to yourself. All you really have to do is say a few magic words and let the vast human capacity for self-deception do the rest. You’ll be fighting phantoms and apparitions in no time. You might even have a few wounds on you to prove that the struggle is real. That you inflicted those wounds on yourself in your mad struggle against phantoms is irrelevant — if your pain is real, the struggle is real. 

If it’s not about struggle, what is it about? What possesses otherwise rational, educated young men with prospects and options to join the Dissident Right? The option of the surrogate struggle is better than the real thing. What gives? 

A lot of our guys are former libertarians. Now, there are two big reasons for that. Firstly, libertarianism is about as close as you can get to the genuine Right without leaving the liberal paradigm. The second reason is the existence of transitional figures like Hans-Hermann Hoppe who have one foot in liberalism and one beyond the pale of liberal thinking. By exploring the thinking of these figures, libertarians cross over to the Dissident Right. But the deeper reason is that libertarianism is an example of a purple pill, a half-truth that gives you a semblance of struggle from the safety of the Overton window. It was also by far the best struggle surrogate on the market until the emergence of the alt-lite. There is a type of man who develops a tolerance for the purple pill after taking it for very long, one who comes to realize that struggle surrogate isn’t real struggle. As Tony Soprano would put it, if you can’t lose, what’s the point? 

This is not to imply that conservatives, libertarians, or other practitioners of surrogate struggle can’t lose. They just have a reserve option: bend the knee, or flee the battlefield, and they’ll usually survive the clash with the system. The nature of the Dissident Right means that for us, there will be no quarter given, no mercy when the steamroller of the progressive Left comes for us, even if we do beg for mercy. It’s probably got something to do with the Jew thing [5]

So, the will to struggle is actually a will to death, because only the risk of death can affirm that yes, we are engaged in real struggle and only that can sate the great yearning. Problems solved, right? We are the movement that looks death in the eyes and doesn’t blink. With men like that, how can we lose? 

Wrong again. 

Imagine you’re a White Nationalist activist. You have a show on the internet where you discuss our issues. It’s going okay. You’re developing a small following. You hear from a friend that there’s a group of young guys who are your fans in another town. You’re elated and start talking to them over the internet. They seem okay, maybe a little on the rowdy side, but they’re young, it’s expected of them. You arrange an event in that town, ostensibly as part of a political maneuver, but in fact it’s because you want to meet those guys. You’re expecting a group of Ernst Jüngers to greet you. 

You find a bunch of weirdos who can’t stop talking about starting a revolution. 

One of them vibes like an actual schizophrenic. No, these guys aren’t agents, you double and triple checked them. You tell them that armed insurgency isn’t the path forward and furthermore, directly antagonizing policemen and soldiers will do damage to our cause. Their faces suddenly change — they declare you a cuck, a softie. They demand you call for a violent uprising on your show; otherwise, you’re a cuck. They feel so betrayed that they start an online campaign against you that lasts to this very day. Gradually you realize that these guys aren’t LARPers, or even stupid. These guys do not seek struggle, nor victory. They seek self-destruction. And as time goes by, you start seeing in yourself that same demonic will to self-destruction, and start wondering if your entire engagement with dissident politics isn’t just a long, dramatic, and roundabout suicide-by-cop. “No, it can’t be, I live for the struggle,” you say, and then you remember that you’re often suicidal and that you often have fantasies of dying heroically in struggle against the enemy. 

Maybe it’s the old Mishima thing Andrew Joyce [6] observed. He focuses too much on the homosexual aspect (although anyone who has read Confessions of a Mask cannot deny that Mishima seems sexually excited at the prospect of his own destruction), but what I’m more interested in is the yearning for self-destruction exhibited by many Dissident Rightists in a non-sexual sense. For many, being hated and hounded by the system is precisely what attracts them to the Dissident Right. They want to be Nazis precisely because the current morality deems it morally justified to punch, persecute, deplatform, fire, and ultimately kill Nazis. There’s a little bit of the sociopathic urge to be notorious and feared at play, but far stronger is the will to self-destruction. This will to self-destruction exists because it is the ultimate act of independence and self-actualization in the egotistic and thanatophobic modern world where a long life is the ultimate good. But this self-destruction cannot take the form of your bog-standard suicide, because suicide is destigmatized and excused and suicides are pitied. No, the destruction of the self must come at the tail end of a grand epic of self-denial so that the self may be actualized. 

When I wrote my essay on the Jew thing, I opined that the anti- and counter-Semitism of the Dissident Right have kept us safe from Jewish infiltration and subversion, though we’ve yet to come up with a solution to the retard and psycho questions. I believe that this article can help resolve the psycho question. There’s no shame in loving the struggle, but the struggle must not be self-serving. It must not be driven by the ego. There has to be genuine self-denial, including denial of the urge to glorious and epic self-destruction that seems to fuel so much of our thing. Many claim to be ready to die. Instead, I ask you, are you ready to become an old man? Are you prepared to live for the cause? Are you prepared to foreswear your fantasy of the last stand? Are you prepared to win, even if the cost is gradual and Fabian wearing down of the enemy while denying him open combat? 

Now, I understand that the urge to die is not merely pathological, but representative of honor culture that still survives in fits and starts among Europeans, more often in the Dissident Right than in other places. But we must understand that there is a sin of excess corresponding to the virtues of honor and selflessness, which is the urge to self-destruction. So, to help us solve the psycho problem, start with yourself and purge yourself of this sin. Run through those questions. To give the right answers to the questions posed is to be a genuine warrior for good rather than a narcissist seeking glorious self-destruction. 

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