Real Team-Building

The Deer Hunter

2,283 words

In those cursed and difficult years when I still worked in an office (tfu tfu), the aspect I most hated was the forced socialization. Every now and then, the boss or the chief Human Resources hen would organize a get-together, a “retreat” for the purposes of “team building.” I hated every second of these get-togethers. It was bad enough spending eight hours a day, five days a week with these people, not counting overtime, but now I had to be deprived of what little free time I had in order to pretend I’m their friend? Needless to say, I was King Sourpuss on these outings.

The truth is, my disdain for normies predates my entrance into dissident circles. I hated spending time with so-called normal people due to their sheer blandness and their obvious discomfort with any conversation approaching anything remotely controversial. There’s also the minor question of normal people’s abysmal aesthetic tastes and the way their preferred music, fashion, and food choices annoy me.

While I had managed to purge all normies from my social life with a ruthlessness that’d make Stalin blush, it was impossible to be rid of such contemptible people in my work environment. Naturally, I can grit my teeth and bottle up my true feelings in exchange for a salary, and provided the length and intensity of exposure remain within the confines of the professional relation, but sadly, that is too much to ask of the modern workplace. It is not enough that we are polite and professional with our coworkers; we must also be their friends.

Having escaped the cruelty and humiliation of regular employment, I was glad to be rid of this type of forced friendship where every fake smile concealed a barely-suppressed urge to let slip the dogs of honesty. I now only spend time with people I choose to spend time with, and I don’t have to pretend to be friends with people I wouldn’t even think about paying attention to if I saw them walking down the street. And yet, I was reminded of this curious trend in modern employment recently when my better half was put through the administrative wringer precisely for eschewing these get-togethers.

I wouldn’t be honest with myself and my readers if I didn’t ask the question: What is the impulse that drives my decisions and my tastes here?

When disarticulated from my own unpleasant experiences with co-workers, the idea of working and being friends with the same people seems somehow cozy. Indeed, one of my favorite scenes from The Deer Hunter is the one where the band of lads going from the steel mill, where they all work together as a single work gang, to the pub, where they all drink together as friends. It shows the kind of camaraderie that I find endearing and look for in my own life. Besides, doesn’t the idea of the people surrounding you not being fit to be your friends sound a little . . . finnicky? Am I not just a child refusing to eat his spinach and broccoli?

Indeed, I did not initially run into this problem when I first entered the workforce, but rather all the way back in the earliest days of my miseducation. I could not for the life of me stomach being around “normal” children. They were uninspired, uninspiring, and frankly, boring. Things became worse as I grew older, not better. The initial alienation, which was very strong to begin with, became compounded by years of contempt for people’s dullness, and at the same time, a bitterness over always being seen as the outsider (which I always was, but nobody wants to be the outsider).

When I complain about the modern workplace forcing me to be friends with my co-workers — or at least “strongly suggesting” it, in the contemptible non-committal jargon of the managerial class — what I’m essentially demanding is that my employment be a purely economic transaction; that I merely sell labor and time (mostly time; only fools and horses work, after all) for money. There’s something very modern about this insistence that all my obligations to my employer should be strictly professional. Going even further back than the industrial workers who go straight to the pub after the steel mill, we have the peasants of yore who engaged in agricultural labor and did not have an employer, but rather a lord. Their co-workers, for lack of a better term, were their families and neighbors from the village they rarely left. Even when they travelled to cities and market towns to exchange their goods, they regarded this foreign land beyond the nearest hill as strange and dangerous. Man is a provincial creature.

So, when I yearn for the right to be left alone on my off-time and to choose who I associate with, I am in a sense rebelling against my Geworfenheit — my Thrownness, as Heidegger would put it, into the world – and more specifically the involuntary associations resulting from my circumstances.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise to the reader that I’m not on particularly good terms with my blood relatives. After all, I didn’t choose them, either — but I’m not alone in this impulse. Indeed, our entire civilization runs on this impulse, the yearning to be free of involuntary association. We flee the fractious villages where everything happens in the context of everything else for the oily cities, slick with the grease of commerce, where we become lost in a series of decontextualized events which may as well be random. After all, what does it really mean when a passerby on the street looks at me with a degree of hostility? In all probability, nothing, or at least nothing relevant to me. Maybe he doesn’t like the cut of my jib, or maybe he argued with his wife and is now staring daggers at people on the street in a vain attempt to offload stress — but ultimately, it is irrelevant to my existence. But in a village, where everyone knows everyone, it could mean any number of nasty things, all of which mean life or death in the narrow rural context.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Graduate School with Heidegger here

The great irony, of course, is that even in the teeming megalopolis, the semi-involuntary association of the dreaded teambuilding exercise does not allow the taciturn man to experience social ego death in the mass. What we thought would be the liberating oil of commerce was a lie: These structures followed us all the way to the city. You can escape them — for a while, at least — by being a contractor or consultant, but to do that, one must take greater risk than the employee. It is a conscious choice to be a wolf rather than a dog. Starvation and freezing to death are the very real potential costs of not wearing a leash.

Indeed, it’s these involuntary associations which give life meaning, and for the soulless bugmen and underfucked hens working in modern corporations, the involuntary association imposed upon them through company retreats and team-building exercises is what gives them meaning: It establishes them as community members of good standing, holding all the correct beliefs and repeating all the right clichés. Far from feeling superior to them, I should probably take a long, hard look in the mirror and recognize that I’m the defective one, arrogant and childish, unwilling or perhaps unable to get along, inadequate for any society outside of a soulless commercial dystopia.

And yet men like me have always existed: restless, taciturn, convinced from birth that they’re meant for something bigger and contemptuous of those content to keep tilling the land, unwilling or unable to get along with them. We all know the story of the simple farm boy who sets out to have an adventure, but truth be told, the adventure-seeker will not be happy with a settled life even in the grandest of cities. In times of old, men like me joined armies or robber bands to seek fortune and glory in battle, or hopped a merchant mariner on the way to Hong Kong, because even the stinking bilge is better than spending the rest of your life as Assistant Second Horse Rumpswab in a two-horse town which is a horse short.

Here we are, in 2022, in the ass end of modernity, and there’s no adventure left. All that’s open to a young man is to go be a living prop in some corporate psychodrama where highly ambitious women of mediocre looks and intellect twist their powdered faces into false smiles and organize team-building exercises. How natural, how proper does the use of a battleaxe seem in those moments when we are forced to go through these motions, this cargo cult of camaraderie which is modern team-building? How we wish that a rocket artillery barrage would shatter the building and dismember everyone in it, just so that the falsity and boredom would stop, if even for a blessed moment.

Is it possible to find a way out? The army seems like an even greater bureaucratic nightmare than corporate work in some respects. Brigandry? Forget it. Our age’s lawlessness stems from anarcho-tyranny, resulting from a state strong enough to extort and harass law-abiding people but unwilling to crush criminal gangs. The only way out, it seems, is to retreat to an inner world of fantasy: escapism. Fantasy literature, gaming, or even radical — or more precisely, extremist — politics online. Driven insane with boredom and pointlessness, young men will look for some simulacrum of struggle and find it in role-playing as a Nazi, TradCath, or tankie online.

What is lacking, and what men look for, is the kurias, the wolfpack, the gang of young men who are off on a grand adventure. Naïvely, they seek it out in imageboards and video games. They’re likelier to find it in dissident institutions such as, for example, Counter-Currents. As for adventure, there is no adventure grander than bringing about the renaissance of the white race after its unfortunate decline.

Of course, having been at this for a while now, I felt a certain degree of consternation in the fact that it involves less hands-on battleaxe work than I expected. Indeed, it is in a sense more office-bound than what I used to do when I was an attorney. Very little litigation goes on, unless I find myself invited to an online debate (not that I find them useful). But in writing for Counter-Currents and in hosting The Writers’ Bloc, I find that I would not terribly mind being invited to team-building exercises with my fellow White Nationalists and contributors to Counter-Currents. Service to the cause has allowed me to spread my wings and soar into the great, sacred blue, whereas I felt like Baudelaire’s albatross chained to the ground before.

Ever since I was a young lad, I doubted myself. I did not enjoy spending time with the people around me, so I concluded that there was something wrong with me. I did not get along with the other kids at school, the other students in college, or indeed, my colleagues in the workplace. Over the years I made peace with the fact that there’s something wrong with my social module, and devoted myself to the friendships and relationships I cultivated outside those official contexts. But now, after years of thinking of myself as a taciturn fellow, here I am, breaking out of my cocoon, a beautiful racist social butterfly.

It may be that what was missing from my life was not some magical “social intelligence,” but simply people worth socializing with and the context of a grand, unifying cause to make such socialization worthy. It’d appear that old Mircea Eliade was right that everything flows from the gods and their ordained, fundamentally religious order. Friendship comes from the gods, it was instated by the gods, and man seeks out friends in order to move closer to the gods — to the Axis Mundi of his faith. Only within the context of this religious faith can friendship truly exist.

Relations between men are not strictly horizontal: man to man, as the saying goes, but mediated by the context in which men live. When we say that we speak man to man, there’s an unspoken and unwritten code of honor among men that is being referenced. Only from the Axis Mundi and the gods in their function as lawgivers can such a code arise. The man without a cause cannot, therefore, even have any friends. Indeed, when I made my commitment to the cause public, which coincided with a significant decrease in my alcohol consumption, I discovered that many of my old friends had been merely drinking buddies. Old John Barleycorn can indeed provide a para-religious experience, and he is a powerful god, capable of great cruelty and mercy in equal measure, but he will not form asabiyyah the way a cause will. Men do not die for each other because they once shared a bottle of Jack.

Through the cause as a central organizing principle not merely of our movement, but also of my own life, and now that I’ve given myself over to it, I have managed to find genuine belonging, just as I managed to find genuine education. Finally, something worth doing and people worth doing it with. When we toil away in the mines of racism, the vision of victory sustains us, and when the long day is done, we retreat to the tavern for a sip of the local brew, pleasant, noble fatigue pulsing in our weary arms.

How glorious, how self-affirming to be a cog in this divinely ordained machine, a soldier in this holy army, a man among men on the greatest adventure of my life.

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