Counter-Currents
Æthelred the Unready, as pictured in The Chronicle of Abindon.
1,932 words
You’ve probably heard at some point or another of the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelred the Unready. His name means nobly advised, or well-advised. His moniker, the Unready — Unræed in Old English — means unadvised, or poorly advised. Æthelred presided over England’s defeats by the Danish, first against Sweyn (Sven) Forkbeard and after that to Sweyn’s son Canute (Knut) the Great. While he did regain his throne, it is doubtful whether the old Anglo-Saxon Kingdom and the Wessex/Cerdicing dynasty ever recovered. The tragedy at Hastings was midwifed by Æthelred’s poor counsel.
A history of King Æthelræd Unræd would be fascinating in its own right, but I will here write about another tragedy in the making. We are faced in our time not with a single man who is being badly advised, but of an entire generation of young men who have had poor or no guidance from their elders. I am referring, of course, to the millennial and zoomer generations, who have been so badly advised that we are finding it difficult to live in the world.
As always, when we speak of society, we speak of ourselves, so let us begin with a personal anecdote. In the passage of time we find that things break down, and then we find it necessary to repair them. Every time something breaks down, I realize the bitter reality that I’m just not that handy, something which can be quite injurious to one’s self-respect as a man. Just recently, having failed to successfully clean a central heating unit and thus sinking into existential dread as I was cleaning up a mess of my own making, I reflected upon what it was that made me all thumbs with tools. Of course, the real question isn’t why someone is not handy, but rather why someone is handy — and the answer is invariably “because they were taught to be.” Certainly there are also innate traits that can make someone a better or worse handyman, but all handymen were at some point taught to be handy.
When we speak of teaching and learning, we are also speaking about the social roles of teacher and student. My teacher in the arts of minor home repair was my father. It’s not that he didn’t try to teach me, and it’s not that I did not want to learn; it was rather that, for the life of us, we couldn’t establish the lines of communication necessary to assume the social roles of teacher and student — or better still, of master and apprentice. It was small wonder, seeing as how poor we have been at assuming the social roles of father and son.
But hold on a second — that’s not right. My father was not a bad teacher, nor was I bad student in all matters. He taught me to swim, to box, to ski; he taught me empiricism; he taught me chess and poker; he taught me to read people’s intentions from their position in a given social context rather than relying on reading their personalities. He imparted his vast knowledge of criminal law, criminology, penology, and organized crime prevention to me while I was still in my teens. He taught me to manage my personal finances without needing an accountant. He even taught me to tie my shoelaces — no mean feat.
In that long list, there’s only one item to which I didn’t take like a fish to water. You guessed it: tying my shoelaces. Of all the things my father taught me, only one was genuinely difficult for both of us, and that was it. Everything else went very smoothly, with no hitches. Everything that had a hitch got derailed quickly. I remember my father would lose patience if I didn’t immediately grasp whatever it was that he was trying to impart to me. Like many highly intelligent men, he made a very poor teacher, because the core skill of a teacher is patience, and more specifically, a high tolerance for student error, as well as a willingness to repeat instructions as many times as necessary. My father hated repeating himself.
Not that I helped. I was, then as now, very willful, easily distracted, and prone to discouragement when I didn’t immediately take to something. My father would often say that I am impatient, and he was right. Of course, for a certain class of men, including both myself and my father, patience is learned, not innate. The mind needs to become silent before work or learning can take place, but much deceleration is required for the vast engines my father and I carry in our heads. Over time, I began noticing that my father hadn’t mastered patience as such, but merely domain-dependent patience. He could read mind-numbingly boring legal texts with very little effort, but could not bring himself to repeat instructions regarding the turning of a screw. He could concentrate very deeply on a chess game, but his mind could inadvertently wander away mid-conversation and he’d suddenly become inaccessible. The great irony of this was that he did not have the patience necessary to teach his son patience, nor was his son the type to have an innate propensity for patience.
At the societal level, we are accustomed to the older generations complaining about millennials and zoomers being this or that way. What amazes me is that these perpetually dissatisfied elders ignore the role they played, whether by poor or bad counsel, in the formation of the youth as it is today. My father was thrust by circumstance into the unenviable role of a teacher for a problem child while being thoroughly underequipped and underprepared for it, and we should have compassion for his position. Yet, rarely do we have compassion for the way in which a poorly-advised child turns out in his adulthood, much less when society as such is far more culpable for millennials and zoomers’ ultimate fate than my father is for mine.
Millennials in the West have problems. They are burdened with heavy student debt. They do not earn enough to move out of their parents’ houses. They aren’t marrying and having children at replacement rates. In their desperation, they’re turning to Left-wing demagogues who are promising them student debt relief and housing assistance. They’re embracing replacement migration and the dissolution of the traditional family structure. For this and other reasons, they’re being derided by their elders, as if those elders had no hand in their behavior.
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Why did millennials incur massive student debt? Because they were told to do so by their parents and teachers. They were taught that they’re nobodies without a college degree, so they complied. When massive demand and government subsidies drove up college tuition costs, the banks and colleges worked out a scheme for financing tuition. Young men and women, having been taught that they’re nobodies without degrees, signed up for these loans which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy court, and their elders did not object, nor did they offer any counsel to the contrary. Now that it has become apparent that a college degree is not a guarantee of financial success, the elders mock and scorn the youngsters when the latter want relief from these onerous and usurious debts.
Why are millennials unlucky in love? Because millions of young men believed their mothers when they claimed that “girls want nice guys.” Their fathers remained silent, partly because they didn’t have the energy to argue with the mothers, and partly because they grew up and chased girls in a time when female hypergamy was still kept in check by residual patriarchal norms, so it wasn’t all that inconceivable for a nice guy to snare a pretty girl. So millennial men poured untold energies into “being nice,” and into listening to women and paying attention to their problems. They were rewarded with the dreaded friendzone while the girls wasted their youth away on those few who’d remained assholes despite all of society demanding them to “be nice.” Now in their thirties, some women are coming back to the nice guys, hoping to get some financial and familial security before they turn 40, but childbearing is unlikely at their age, and developing strong attachment after decades of promiscuous sex among the woman and quiet misery among the men is unlikely. What families do end up being formed by such relationships will probably end in divorce.
Why are millennials embracing wokery and multiracialism? Because ever since they were babies, they were inundated with propaganda embodying the Nuremberg Moral Paradigm — that the greatest possible evil is organizing along ethnic or racial lines and that the greatest possible good is diversity. Millennials dutifully obeyed their parents and teachers, who admonished them against being racist or intolerant. Indeed, so obedient were they that they were unafraid to hold their parents and teachers to their own standards, resulting in the cancellation of the old-timers by rabid Twitter mobs. They were encouraged to explore and express their sexuality, and they did — even though some of those expressions are not quite what the elders intended, of course. Many Gen-X mothers thought that their daughters would act like them: settle down with a nice husband after some mild experimentation. They did not expect millennials to dutifully and faithfully implement their instructions, complete with the transgenderism, promiscuity, and homosexuality so prevalent among this generation.
Why are millennials embracing demagogues? More importantly, why are they turning to unscrupulous manipulators such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, who grift off of them while posing as their mentors? The answer is simple: Because white men have an instinct to mentor and be mentored which is just as strong and vital as the sexual instinct. Just as a sexually unsatisfied man will turn to pornography to attain sexual release, so will an unmentored young man turn to mentor porn to escape his dreaded state of unræd. Alas, the false mentors wear their caps well and mislead many.
I’ve not written about the zoomer generation because I am not a zoomer and I do not understand them well. I observe some things about them which annoy me greatly, but I don’t speak about them, because if there’s anything I’ve learned from being left in a state of unræd by my elders, it is that we must first have compassion for struggling young men, and that criticism without offering a realistic alternative is more cruel than compassionate. I have nevertheless observed that zoomers are left in a state of unræd, and that they suffer for it. I’ve therefore endeavored to be a mentor to young men in those areas which I understand well enough to teach. The problems I’ve run into are familiar: I am impatient with young lads who struggle to grasp new concepts, and I hate repeating myself. No matter how far I try to run, my father follows, because Lion King was right, and all our fathers live inside us. For this reason, I’ve had to learn patience and compassion, traits that do not come easily to me. I’ve had to learn to slow down and walk young men through difficult concepts and movements, learning to manage both their frustration and mine.
When I teach, I build my own future, because I expect these lads to carry on the struggle even after I no longer can, and in ways which I cannot. If we are to win, we will need young men who are æthelræd — nobly-advised — but in order to provide such noble advice to them and rescue them from unræd, we must first become noble ourselves.
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21 comments
This is an excellent article that I really relate to.
What you describe, handiness, is what is referred to nowadays as “adulting.”
Young people are so clueless (as am I) in skills that lie beyond the keyboard that even using an oven or changing a tire makes one handy.
That said, there are a lot of young men who excel in performing specific tasks because we live in an age of specialization.
These men know their way around cars, electrical wiring and everyday appliances because they went to a vocational school. Some were taught by Dad, but not many. Same goes for young women who cook and knit, albeit to a lesser degree.
Unrelated, your following faux pas made me laugh:
“so it wasn’t all that inconceivable for a nice gay to snare a pretty girl.”
This isn’t untrue. Even gay men married ladies back in the day.
This is spot on. The call to first enoble ourselves is great. I do think there is some element of perfection is enemy of the good. The skillsets that the GenX fathers picked up living on the farm or the ranch were vast: hunting/fishing; basic survival; mechanical repairs; weather and climate cycles; agriculture; large scale engineering and agriculture infrastructure … …
In my case few if any were transferred to me. I am going to have to combine with men who have skills I don’t and vice-versa. Every day a boy or young man go without mentorship is a day we all lose. I’ve thought of forming a Society for the Formation of Men. The idea would be both the formation of people of the age of a man who are still boys, and boy aged males who need to become men. Part of the journey of the boys in mens bodies or partial boys in men’s bodies is to just man up and learn with the boys. I’ve put some thought into the resources required to make this project organized for our people and how we might coordinate them. It will have to be informal using a distributed network since freedom of association is gone in anything organized.
Great Article! I love the approach of compassion. Modernity has harmed us all, because we let it. Now, with great intent, we can begin reclaiming our manhood and our peoplehood.
Sounds like you’re confusing GenX with another generation. They grew up in the 1970s-80s, not the 1870s-80s. I’m a borderline X-er-Millennial and always noticed they were the first generation where the guys and girls were not taught traditional skills.
No. I am not confused. Men who grew up in rural America in the 20s-50s had a huge set of skills that made them men who could impart a huge set of skills and embodied masculinity the author of this piece referred to. I know from experience. The dislocations of the revolution of the 60s: no-fault divorce; de-industrialzation; women in the workforce full time; … interrupted the transfer mechanism for many. The GenXers in my experience were victims of a discontinuity whose fathers were real men whose government and women abandoned them.
Were the settlers from the 1870s who came out in covered wagons and built railroads through the Sierras and took on Indian raiders and the wild frontier another level of strong than that? Of course. But the contrast between those pioneers, and the pre-60s rural men on the level of manhood as expressed in all manner of hard skills is tiny compared to the pre-60s rural men and most of GenX. GenX took it in the shorts almost as much in a different way than later generations.
love them in order to be able to guide them better.
A people without gods is a people without reference points.
Our gods were forgotten, we have survived until now by worshipping the dust of ancient wisdom, but today that is no longer enough.
We need sages, initiates and poets to reach the greatest number of our people.
Jordan peterson hasnt had 1/1000th the influence on millennials as black rappers and celebrities like kobe bryant, lebron, snoop dog, jayz, kanye west, drake, etc. Normie millennials think these knuckledraggers are beyond reproach and have deeply embodied their philosophy of drugs, promiscuity, and sports. It probably started with the boomers own obsession with sports.
I regretfully conclude that in Europe, at least, the only ideology strong enough to contest the degeneracy, and that is not actively persecuted by the establishment (cf. recent events in Germany), is Islam.
Yeah, well, if you are primarily anti-degeneracy, become a Muslim. I am pro-white and pro-European, so I want Islam out of Europe.
LOL! Good observation. Our purpose is to prevent white extinction. We must never forget this. As long as whites exist (preferably under conditions of racial sovereignty), there is hope for an infinity of other things, whether reactionary or revolutionary. If we die out, then what is (and was) the point?
This is, of course, not to say that matters other than race aren’t also important. They are, at least to me. But in any sort of hierarchy of political values, white survivalism is obviously the highest concern for white nationalists (and, I would argue, it ought to be for conservatives – and ideally, all other whites – as well).
Islam is its own brand of degeneracy
@Vehmgericht
I don’t think such is the case.
What is being tolerated and promoted is the presence of racial minorities. These groups also adhere to Islam therefore it may give an impression that the globalist/philosemitic/anti-White ruling bureaucracies are comfortable with Islam in Europe.
Pouring filth on Islam in the name of “freedom of expression” or “freedom of speech” while protecting Jewish $ob stories from any respectable criticism, let alone mockery or ridicule, clearly demonstrates where the sympathies of the authorities actually lie.
It is a kind of safety valve the ruling elites have to divert legitimate and justified nativist anxieties. Target Islam and spend your hard earned money on intellectually retarded grifters who fleece justified nativist anxieties leaving parasitical small hats secure in their castles.
*Target Islam and spend your hard earned money
^^It should be read as: Target Islam and then deceive people into spending their hard earned money on…
Great essay. Our movement needs to emerge from compassion for one another, not contempt and harsh judgement.
The instinct is real.
Not all, but too many young white men today, at least those I meet in the West are a mess of autism, homosexual mannerisms, other abnormal social-spergisms and may well be on drugs (prescribed or not). They are glued to instagram on their smart phones, video games and all manner of porn. Negro-worship is completely normal.
What is this mentoring ? What are we getting them to become ? A lot of them don’t want help. They are happy as they are. Whatever their father taught them or didn’t, if they have parents who can bail them out of trouble they don’t care about anything.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally think it’s very hard to be an external mentor on this very unstable, shifting, pozzed, anti-white, dehumanizing quicksand we’re all – in one way or another, sinking into.
And I’m never sure what reaction to have when I see this stuff come up on the right. ‘Setting an example’, ‘being a man’. The ‘Trad Guru’ you mentioned once. Some of this is in danger of becoming part of the quicksand itself.
I’ve said on here before if you could go back in time and pluck Caesar or Alexander the Great and drop them into the middle of today’s modernity I doubt they would do very well.
And honestly, and I hate to say this, but this is why people like Nick Fuentes become influential dissident figures. As much I find him repellent, he speaks to these spergs, these weirdos, these socially deformed mutants of this generation with at least some chunk of oppositional truth steering them in a political direction that’s at least preferable to the useless waffle that comes out of Peterson’s mouth. It’s not mentoring, it’s not development on a personal level, but we can’t even reach many of these people and I’m not sure we should even try.
It might be better to just steer them politically as their own blob and don’t try to help them.
And honestly, and I hate to say this, but this is why people like Nick Fuentes become influential dissident figures. As much I find him repellent, he speaks to these spergs, these weirdos
Nick Fuentes has burned himself out.
“I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally think it’s very hard to be an external mentor on this very unstable, shifting, pozzed, anti-white, dehumanizing quicksand we’re all – in one way or another, sinking into.
And I’m never sure what reaction to have when I see this stuff come up on the right. ‘Setting an example’, ‘being a man’. The ‘Trad Guru’ you mentioned once. Some of this is in danger of becoming part of the quicksand itself.”
This is a crucial point. An indiscriminate charity doled out to anyone on the one hand can sap everything you have; on the other, however (and I am quite guilty of this) you can just as easily end up sliding into a vaguely misanthropic haze in which a sneer curls on your lip every time anyone opens their mouth in your presence. I’m inclined to say that a qualified yes is the optimal stance to strike these days when it comes to interacting with people in general.
Accordingly, I might obnoxiously hold forth on a number of topics relating to spiritual matters, racial realities, or other such favorite phenomena of the Dissident Right in private or even (selectively of course) public settings; but the fact remains that most of the conversations being conducted on sites like CC are simply beyond most folks. In trying to carry on about these topics with many people it is simply a waste of time: it’s quite obvious when a person’s eyes glaze over after a mere minute of speech. Discerning dissidents would do well to not waste themselves in such fashions; it would be better to mentor and teach selectively to those that can be reached after such persons are identified.
In regards to simple “handy” matters of self-sufficiency I’d add that I’ve been trying to adopt a similar attitude when it comes to understanding, realistically, what can be done in a given situation.
For example: my father (a typical “handy-man” so to speak) has varying degrees of knowledge relating to auto-repair, HVAC, plumbing, electrical work, construction, etc. as a man of his generation; whereas I can hardly tell you the difference between a Philips and a Flathead and despite my father’s best efforts there is no getting around that. At a certain point, I’ve tried to reconcile myself to this fact and use what little time I have more effectively even if, as others have noted, giving up on being “handy” wounds a sense of masculine pride so to speak. We are what we are and it’s best to try and simply make the best of it. I cannot fix a washing machine like my old man, but I can work more effectively with information so why not utilize such a capacity? Whereas my father might pay a taxman to handle his yearly tax filing, I have the capacity to file my own. Being able to work with and understand abstract concepts and information to some degree, I may sit down for a couple of hours and read through the federal and state filing instructions and so will be able to handle filing myself. If I have any questions I can always ask family friends who file their own taxes for any advice—to say nothing of the innumerable resources on the Internet. It’s a minor example but there are a number of everyday ways for a man to be self-sufficient in the information age even if he isn’t inclined to, say, the traditional mechanical techniques of being “handy.” Returning back to the above quote then, to avoid the real risk of sinking in the “quicksand” of postmodern living it’s essential that, if necessary, attitude adjustments are made accordingly whether in relation to mentorship relations or one’s own capabilities.
“so it wasn’t all that inconceivable for a nice gay(sic) to snare a pretty girl.”
Best typo… ever. Is CC looking for assistant editors? 😀
There is something extremely exhausting about rearing children. I find that an 8 hour shift has nothing on just an hour or two of taking care of my kids. I think it is the patience that you talk about. It is extremely taxing. It takes a certain kind of person to be a teacher.
On the note of editing. I always like to print out a hard copy and look for errors on that as opposed to the screen. I feel I am more reading a hard copy whereas with the screen I am scanning. Same goes with studying. I type my notes as I am a fast typer but print them out and study from the print out. I learned this the hard way getting a 40 on a test after studying my notes on the computer. When I printed the notes out and studied using the hard copy I got a 90 when I retook the test. Like CC says regarding payments with checks, “sometimes the old ways are best.”
Well, you can’t get them all right.
That was what I told myself after submitting my thesis. Even after what I thought was the final reading I did one last scan and saw that on the cover page that was a boilerplate I got from someone that it read the wrong year. At that point I had my, “you can’t get them all right” moment and submitted after changing the year.
Very enjoyable article Nick. One factor you didn’t mention is the problem of hyper-specialisation. Once upon a time if a man wasn’t a drooling retard he could get most jobs with nothing more than a handshake. Then along comes not only those degrees you mention, but years of experience funneling him into one skill set. At the same time every other field gets more complicated. So now fixing your own car, for example, is vastly more difficult than in the 60s or 70s, and the manufacturers are doing their utmost to make it impossible.
This deserves an article of its own, what specialization necessarily means for humans as it relates to the status hierarchy.
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