Counter-Currents
1,535 words
The news of the week is that Elon Musk has bought Twitter and is apparently returning free speech to the platform. For reasons I’ve made clear in last weekend’s Writers’ Bloc with Pox Populi, I remain skeptical of Musk’s intentions and how much benefit white identitarians can derive from this corporate takeover. But whatever my objections to Musk, and whatever counterarguments people can offer, there’s always one response I can count on: “At least he’s triggering the libs.” It is taken for granted in this movement and even beyond that “triggering the libs” is a positive thing. I will therefore once again act as the wet blanket of organized white identitarian politics and show that no, triggering the libs is not necessarily good.
At first glance, this is completely counterintuitive. How can throwing an enemy into complete psychological anguish be bad for the cause? Was it bad for the cause when liberals all over America and the world had their massive temper tantrum when Trump was elected President in 2016? Who can forget the androgynous thing screaming “Noooo!” at the heavens during Trump’s inauguration? It was perfect from a propaganda perspective: it energized us while demoralizing them. It told the story that we’re winning while they’re losing, simple as that. And it would be, if indeed that was what was taking place.
I am going to advance a bold thesis: I propose that Leftists benefit from being triggered, and in a sense enjoy it. I contend that Leftists gain energy by being triggered and become more focused, psychologically stronger, and indeed crave these psychological stimuli. I also contend that people on the Right don’t understand this because they expect Leftists to be psychologically similar to them. This is a natural, but false, assumption which is reinforced by unexamined egalitarian priors and the Rightist tendency to overestimate their own strength and unwillingness to consider the possibility they are themselves in dire straits.
In order to understand Leftist psychology, we must first have something to compare it to. Let’s see how the conservative person reacts to being in some way symbolically defeated or insulted. When the conservative witnesses his cause losing and being beaten back, he becomes depressed — not in the clinical sense, but in that he becomes less active politically; his political activity decreases in both frequency and intensity. This is because conservatism and the Right in general tend to be more realistic than the Left, meaning their activities and worldview are downstream from reality, and they like to think of themselves as the adults in the room. And when adults encounter a problem they cannot solve, they walk away and find ways to work around it. Thus a defeat leads to retreat, reorganization, and — if it is devastating enough — surrender. Consequently, conservatives will often bitterly cling to bizarre narratives such as QAnon even after they’ve been defeated, because to admit defeat is to dissipate conservative political energy. This often costs conservatives more in the long run, as clinging to such myths alienates those who can see through them and prevents failure analysis (by blocking the admission of failure).
By contrast, Leftist activities and worldviews are upstream from reality. By this I mean that the Left does not look at facts and then derive action plans from them, but rather have a vision for what the world ought to be and take steps to make material reality comport with that vision. They’re not the adults in the room and are in fact proud of being youthful idealists, often deriding the adult viewpoint as stodgy, uninspired, and defeated. Leftists do not expect reality to comport with their vision, and so when they suffer a defeat, or are made to believe that they’ve suffered a defeat, their instinct is to howl in moralistic outrage because reality dares defy their visionary will. This is usually followed by a massive mobilization of resources, both at the individual and organizational levels, towards beating reality (and conservatives) into submission.
Thus, the defeated Leftist is immediately galvanized to counterattack, plan the next attack, and watch vigilantly for future threats. Mirroring the defeated conservatives’ tendency to descend into fantastic narratives about imminent victory, Leftists who win tend to psych themselves up into believing that they’re really losing in the long term and that they are poor, starving partisans armed with sticks and eating tree bark, even if they are indeed hegemonic over every institution in the West.
You can buy Greg Hood’s Waking Up From the American Dream here.
This makes the Rightist assumption that “triggering the libs” is somehow a victory very dangerous. The Rightist assumes that the Leftist will react the same way as he does to a defeat, and that the skyward screams of a triggered Leftoid are an admission of weakness and a prelude to retreat. The Rightist assumes that the Leftists, having been defeated or made to believe they have been defeated, will become depressed, decrease their political activities, and give way to the rising Right. In fact what has happened is that the Rightist, in triggering the Leftist, has merely fuelled the Leftist’s paranoia, confirmed his delusions about being a powerless and persecuted warrior for truth and beauty, and reinvigorated him. Or, to put it in simpler terms, the Rightist smashes the hornets’ nest with a baseball bat and, seeing the hornets’ rage, assumes he has defeated them. When men are enraged, they make mistakes and are easier to defeat — but hornets aren’t men.
In American Extremist, Josh Neal argues that antisocial Leftist extremism has its roots in an inferiority complex and paranoid ideation. Low-level antifa goons base their activism on resentment driven by their inferiority complex and are thus triggered whenever this inferiority is made apparent to them, but the higher-ranking Leftists are a little different. It’s worth quoting from the book directly:
However, when we look up the social ladder, we find the AELs who graduate to the level of superiority complex. Succeeding in the realization of their fictional final goal, (though in today’s bioleninist world, it is less of a succession and more of a selection), they now wield their obvious social and vocational achievements like a broadsword, ready to be unsheathed at a moment’s notice. In classical Adlerian theory, this, too, may not be about the lording of success over the peasantry, but rather an ego defense to mask the deep wound of inferiority from which they never recovered.
Whenever the Right, or Trump, or Elon, or whoever else picks at their wound, it reminds the powerful Leftists of their deep-seated feelings of inferiority, activating their complexes and leading them to react in order to assuage their own psychological torment. This wouldn’t be problematic if these people didn’t wield real and substantial power which can most easily be employed toward frustrating the Right’s political ambitions, but the fact of the matter is that if anyone is in a position to destroy people’s lives and ruin livelihoods over a perceived insult, it’s the Western Left.
And now that we’ve established the psychological dispositions of Left and Right, I’ll add that this imbalance heavily favors the Left and is probably the reason why they’ve seized and maintained power in the West and elsewhere. Those soyboys, bugmen, and hysterical women who screech and throw tantrums when they don’t get their way have been consistently defeating the cool-headed macho men of the Right for at least the past 300 years. Pointing this out means that you usually get labeled a defeatist or accused of rooting for the Left.
Over time, my observations of the political Right in the West have led me to believe that it is filled to a great degree with political dilettantes who are obsessed with doing what feels good, i.e. inflicting psychic pain on the Left and proclaiming themselves superior to it, rather than doing the hard work necessary to win. This latter approach means building infrastructure, providing mutual assistance, creating an interpretational framework for the world, deriving an operational framework from the world while simultaneously deconstructing the enemy’s operational framework, recruiting, organizing, donating — y’know, the stuff that politics is made of. Indeed, the obsession with feeling superior to the Left is such that proclaiming the Left’s pathetic nature is now an essential part of in-group signaling for the online Right. Personally, I’m a bit tired of it. If a group has been consistently winning for 300 years, it is not a pathetic or weak group, no matter how little they resemble our archetypes of strength.
The Left’s state of perpetual aggravation means they have the boundless strength and stamina of fanatics to give to their cause. All of those activities which are the stuff political success is made of take effort, money, and will to bring into being. The Leftist will give and work his fingers to the bone for the cause because it is the only way to assuage his diseased psyche. We may call it maladjustment, dysfunction, pathetic, ressentiment, libtardation, Trudeau, or any other derisive nickname, but it is the Left’s greatest strength.
These are people so insane that they won’t be happy until they’ve completely eradicated all political opposition. (They won’t be happy even after that, but they don’t know it). If only we had that kind of strength. If only we were so insane.
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
Paywall Gift Subscriptions
If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:
- your payment
- the recipient’s name
- the recipient’s email address
- your name
- your email address
To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
19 comments
When politics is a blood sport (which it is) win, lose, or draw you have to be at the line of scrimmage every day. What the left understands and the right does not is what Mao (rightly) said: victory is the greatest illusion
Outrageous black ultraviolence and heart attack inducing ‘vaccines’ don’t trouble leftists in the slightest, they think this means it’s all going to plan. Somehow. The plan being to punish us, recalcitrant whites. Indeed, if only we were so insane.
If ‘the insane’ win, then they’re not ‘the insane’ anymore. They’re the winners.
Thus, the defeated Leftist is immediately galvanized to counterattack, plan the next attack, and watch vigilantly for future threats.
The thesis here, that triggering leftists is counterproductive, is refutable on first principles, and the above quote illustrates why.
First, the left is the enemy in a decreasingly limited war, alluded to by the language above.
The left is not energized by perceived threats to their convalescent egos, however motivated by it they may be; they are energized by turning potential energy kinetic, i.e. consuming food, combusting oil products etc. They are therefore not energized, suddenly procuring and using more energy stores, but are rather impelled to expend their existing finte energy.
The reasons for this energy expenditure are given above: in a word, war. But our wayward petty Napoleons are no great generals. On the contrary, they’re perennial f***ups who probably can’t drive to Starbucks without some wasteful sidetrack infringing.
Militarily, effectiveness can be thought of as the ability to convert kinetic energy into the attainment of tactical and strategic goals. This requires primary energy, tools of war and, most importantly, highly competent leadership vested with the expertise necessary to use those tools in a game-theoretically optimal way, such that waste and regret are minimized and chance of success maximized.
In war, there is a term for deliberately interrupting this process from the energy expenditure side: harassment. The purpose of harassment is to confuse the enemy and cause him to expend energy in an undirected or poorly directed way that will result in not furthering or actively undermining his objectives. To reduce his stores of potential energy through wasteful expense is to diminish his capacity to fight.
To even compare the modern left with an army is semantic torture and an insult to those who’ve served. A better analogy might be a gang of escaped convicts with no leader. Look at the record of such groups: What potential energy they can muster usually only serves to get themselves and, on rare occasions, their professional enemy — the police — killed.
Because the left is radically incompetent in carrying out all but the crudest tactics, like burning down buildings or mobbing the elderly, inducing them to expend energy only reduces their stores while simultaneously setting up a play that, allowed to run long enough, is guaranteed to produce atrocities — shooting at store owners, stomping helpless septuagenarians, burning down businesses, running over Michigan Ave shoppers in an SUV etc — that will further alienate them from the productive and the competent.
Triggering leftists, therefore, undermines their ability to fight future battles through resource waste and through the production of alienating outrages against normal life that are the invariable product of the typical uncontrolled demolition found throughout their limited playbook.
It remains to be seen how Musk will respond to the extraordinary financial, social and regulatory pressures by which he is about to be confronted, but I am not optimistic. Having your wealth be dependent on one or more publicly traded companies gives a lot of people leverage over you. Riches alone do not guarantee freedom of action, nor immunity from intimidation/retaliation. Being in an elite position does not necessarily grant you impunity to act against the interests of other elites.
Then again, I am somewhat of a natural pessimist, so maybe my assessment is too blackpilled.
I tend to agree that the left are highly animated by their resentful dopamine driven moralizing crusades. If you give them ‘the new Hitler’ in whatever tenuous form that is, they will respond to it.
Which means as they are outwardly triggered they will further coalesce and reinforce their institutional power behind the scenes and try to stop this ‘new evil’. ‘Never again’. Just like we saw with Trump in the last election, and in doing so actually extend their political power and reach.
I don’t know if that power is limitless though. It may have its limits.
Triggering the left is not sufficient as a goal, their power actually has to be curtailed and oppressed. And that’s the dirty work no one really wants to do. But demonstrating the failure of their ideas to more normie/centrist types might form a part of that.
In Musk’s case we don’t really understand his true reasons for what he’s done. To say he’s spent billions of dollars just so people can comment that trannies aren’t actually women probably isn’t the case.
But if he does have some even casual interest in more open speech he may find he’s walked into something that’s actually comes with a lot of pain attached to it. We’ll see.
It’s hard to tell to what extent meme “triggering” makes leftists close their ranks. Given that they prefer to operate from echo chambers and “safe spaces” makes me doubt the level on influence internet poking has on those fanatics. Islamists are a good case in point: they targeted that libertine rag “Charlie Hebdo” not because it particularlry irked them among other trash, but because it sent a strong signal to others (as Hebdo had a recognized reputation for blaspheming widely). Liberal electoral victories also don’t slow down their advancement which proves that their Devil doesn’t have to be tangible in order to galvanize them.
I’d argue that the broader Right is more susceptible to this kind of harassment since they can’t help but improvise spicy retorts and memes to provide backlash (and get their dopamine hit). It could be explained by inherently reactionary nature of the Right as default mode for a typical milquetoast right-winger is political passivity. Macho posturing, porno-right, cuckservatism: all of them are psychologically dependent on the Left. Either for recognition (cuckservatism) or scorn (macho and porno-right).
Finally, the image of monolithic leftist front is largely an illusion, ironically often supported by rightists. Like all radical movements, the Left is inherently prone to sectarianism (fueled by their neurotic disposition). Delusions of underdog grandeur aside, the mounting internal contradictions of their ideology forces them to constantly march onwards at increasing pace before the reality and factional disputes (like TERF) overwhelm them. Throwing saucy memes at this bioleninist coalition is a waste of time because most of them don’t even bother to register them for more than few minutes. The witch-hunter yearns for a bigger prey than some anonymous turd-flinger on social media. Cancellation, tearing down monuments and forcing public figures to repent gives a much better dopamine hit than railing against some generic “shitlord” on Twitter.
You make a lot of good points here, but I have one question.
What the hell is the “porno-right”?
What the hell is the “porno-right”?
That’s how Polish right-wing dissidents describe the “conservatives” and right-wing libertarians who defend pornography and/or promotion of their views by scantily-clad women (bonus points if with guns). Consider it an equivalent of american “tits and gunz” conservatives.
I think it’s cool that Musk is virtue signaling with his fortune on behalf of free speech, I still regard Twitter as an enemy tool of war regardless of who owns it. Only Donald Trump could weaponize their toy against them and we all saw how that turned out. Scorched earth.
When the pricetag carries 10 figures, that ain’t virtue signalling.
As Yeats put it, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
The Left has benefitted from passionate intensity and the lack of an equal and opposite passionate intensity on the Right, largely I think due to the modern Right’s bourgeois values, anti-intellectualism, and desire to accommodate neurotic and pushy people.
However, it seems plausible to me that psychological intensity has psychological costs, which means that prolonged triggering should be exhausting, not energizing. Which means that if we keep triggering these people, we will start breaking their spirits, moving from the weaker to the stronger over time. And one metric of victory is breaking the spirits of one’s enemies, since that means that you have not just checked their present behaviors but squelched their future behaviors as well.
Triggering the libs is also educational. This is perhaps Trump’s greatest victory, and he won it the day he announced his candidacy. At this point, fewer and fewer people believe that the Left is willing to subordinate itself to liberal norms. They regard liberalism simply as a tool against the classical liberal Right: tolerance for me but not for thee. The mask of sanity has been dropped. The illusion of civility has been destroyed. There’s increasingly little excuse for thinking that we can live with these people and every reason to want to live without them. Unfortunately, our political elites are disproportionately composed of traitors and well-meaning people who lack the neuroplasticity to face the changed reality. These people are dying off, though, which means that one demographic trend at least is working in our favor.
There’s also a beneficial asymmetry between the effort it takes to trigger Leftists and the amount of anguish that ensues.
On a base level, what this article is saying is that no victory won over lunatics is useful, and, almost, that nothing should ever be done. I disagree fundamentally. Twitter, which I personally regard as utterly worthless, is deeply important to some of the lunatics – because these people are genuinely mad – using it.
Their revenge toy being taken from their cranky, weepy, melodrama queen childlike clutches is an important symbolic victory. Up until very recently, these maniacs had been storming ahead unopposed trampling the rights of everybody who disagreed with them – i.e. the majority of the population – under censorious foot. They will now APPARENTLY, no longer be able to do this with impunity. Remains to be seen.
This is a valuable life lesson to these freaks, because to them the world IS the net. Never forget that the vast majority of the world’s population have nothing to do with Twitter so, ultimately, its effects on the REAL real world, away from shitty diaper-wallowing nutcases, is hugely overestimated.
So hitting these psychos where they live is fun, symbolically important and also, in many ways, utterly unimportant in the wider scheme of things. After all, bitter Twitter chatter is hardly going to stop Putin starting a nuclear war if he takes it upon himself to do so, is it? These people are only as important as they think they are in their own unbalanced minds, after all.
I must say that I do not and have never believed that victory is impossible. The third to last paragraph lays out a portion of my vision for the path to victory. What I contend in this article is that “triggering the libs” is not a victory and not even a step towards victory.
I don’t antagonise these people, never engage with them. Screeching at people on social media is just screaming into a void, presenting yourself as just another ignored salvo in the endless, inwinnable, pathetic he-said-she-said troll war. Zero point. Doesn’t stop me from deriving schadenfreude at the melodramatic meltdowns of sniffy, self-righteous nutcases online, though.
Thank you, Nick. This needs to be said and taken to heart.
The Right has been on a 300-year losing streak but still things the Left are weak, soft and delusional.
The ‘acid test’ for any political activity is: How is this action furthering the passage or implementation of a desired policy?
The reason the Right directs its ire at ‘the libs’ is because it keeps away the realization that there is not ‘Right’ at all.
There’s just a collection of angry people with no practical political experience to speak of.
However things turn out in Arkansas 3, Neil Kumar is at least trying.
Left-wing people will always find something by which to be triggered. If they can’t find a rightist from whom to take offense, then they turn on each other. They’re naturally very irritable. Higher neuroticism and low testosterone are the reason.
To your point, I think it’s good not to trigger them intentionally. It’s better to educate potential allies, and if the left cries about it, so be it. Twitter is a great venue to get the truth out there. I’m disappointed Trump said he won’t use it, but I have a feeling he’ll be back on there. We should be on there too.
It’s best to get the Left to forget about us and turn against themselves. Corporations bankroll NPR and other leftist power centers, and if corporations were a person, they’d be a psychopath, so there’s a lot of hypocrisy to exploit. The same companies that support BLM and gender pronoun nonsense treat workers badly–especially if they are necessary and do important work. Amazon buys electric vehicles but won’t give its warehouse workers time to go to the bathroom. So often the more prim and proper they are outwardly, the more ruthless they are in secret.
Kudos to Mr. Jeelvy for his unique and peerless perspicacity. This is an article that is worthy of a Knight Cross of Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. I would rate it as one of the best and most important articles posted on CC in the past three months if not longer, and I’ll readily endorse it to be “The Article of April” without any hesitation. It deserves to be read, re-read, savored, ruminated, cogitated, digested, and internalized by every self-proclaimed and serious White Nationalist/Dissident Rightist and supporter of the cause, with the extremely significant and thought-provoking question embedded in and clarified by the author in this invaluable piece of essay.
Mr. Jeelvy identified, diagnosed, dissected, and provided clues of treatment for a crucial and imperative, yet often unaware or unnoticed, question of strategic-psychological significance in combating the anti-White leftist liberal forces of the West. It was basically argued that the leftist-liberal camp and the rightist-nationalist camp have diametrically different mindsets and play by distinctly different rules in their cutthroat political-ideological-social-cultural struggle. The rightist-nationalist side tends to overestimate its own strength, gets conceited with superficial victories and is willfully ignorant of or uninterested in the enemy camp’s psychological traits and dispositions, due to their ill-begotten and misplaced sense of superiority; while the leftist-liberal side, owing to its innate complex of inferiority and psychotic mentality, is vengeful, spiteful, vindictive, paranoid, easily provoked, and tends to be aggravated and energized into relentless and tireless waves of of rabid, frenzied, and fanatical actions of escalating enmity and intensity, rather than being frustrated and demoralized by the failures, losses or injuries they perceive to have taken, even the insignificant ones. Hence “triggering” the liberals is not necessarily a good idea, at least not a cause for insouciant or unguarded jubilation or exultation.
Then, based on the analysis, the author raised a list of concrete actions which are hard work necessary to win for the Nationalist camp, beyond merely inflicting “psychic pain” on the liberal side. Just by casting light on this indisputable and critical discrepancy in mindset and behavior and sounding a bell of alarm against the wrongheaded celebration of “triggering the libs”, Mr. Jeelvy has made an inestimable and priceless contribution to guiding and navigating the White Nationalists vis-a-vis their leftist liberal enemy.
This exceedingly illuminating article also reminds me of some old proverbs in East Asian where I am from, which is distilled from ancient Oriental folk wisdom. Such adages include “Don’t beat bushes and wake a snake” and “Fear not a thief who stole from you, fear a thief who is constantly thinking about stealing from you“, which means once you “triggered” the mind of the thief, he would not stop until succeeding in his attempts.
Once again, this article is a gem and a timely and sobering message of alert to all of us. Mr. Jeelvy should be honored and saluted for penning it. Many thanks!
Thanks for the kind words. I’ve been beating this particular drum since mid-2019 at least, when I first noticed the right is satisfied with superficial or short-term victories while allowing the left to control the frame of politics. This is the first article (I think) I wrote on that particular topic.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment