Off-Grid vs. Alt-Grid

Posted By Nicholas R. Jeelvy On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled

[1]1,616 words

We’re in a bad economic period and we’re feeling it. Due to a combination of factors, mostly related to the inflationary policies of the world’s governments during the COVID lockdowns and ongoing lockdowns in China, we’ve seen price inflation that has made it more difficult and more expensive to live. Everyone around me is complaining that they’re feeling the crunch. I nod and agree with them because I can see the prices rising. But I have not felt the impact as severely, particularly as it relates to food, or at least food that I prepare for myself.

I buy my veggies, eggs, and cheese at a farmers’ market. I buy my meat at a local butcher’s, and I buy my fish at a local fishmonger’s. I have noticed some of the prices on individual items rising, but overall, not by much and not enough to make me change my purchases. All in all, this inflation hasn’t impacted me greatly, even though my income hasn’t changed. What gives?

I wasn’t a typical consumer [2] to begin with. I spend less than the typical person on clothes, although I buy more expensive, higher-quality pieces. Of the five winter-appropriate coats and jackets I own, four are more than ten years old and two are older than me. But more importantly, I do sometimes go to the supermarket, and I’ve seen the prices there rise quite sharply, especially on food. It occurred to me that I’m better insulated from price inflation because I’m living off-grid, in a sense.

Of course, the notion that I’m living in any way off-grid is laughable on its face. I’m an urbanite through and through, having spent my entire life living in the downtown area of a major European city. I make my money online; whenever I work, it usually involves a computer, the Internet, and the English language. I depend on “the grid” to heat and power my house. But still, there is enough economic space between me and the money spigot, and only one degree of separation between myself and the food producers such that I’m relatively protected from price inflation on food.

But as they say, the worm was turning. I started thinking about the concept of “off-grid.” I can’t say that I haven’t indulged in the agrarian fantasy. When I was a young boy, I wanted to live all alone in a woodland cabin — just me and my books and nature, and not a soul around. Sometimes I still think about lighting out for my grandfather’s old house in the hills, rebuilding it and starting a new, agrarian life. I could raise chickens and rabbits, revitalize the old orchards and fields, and with enough capital, maybe even expand into serious agriculture. Of course, I could take the path of the gentleman farmer and employ people to till my land while busying myself with the intellectual pursuits of an online racist in good standing with the White Nationalist community. But then a little voice in the back of my head brings me back to reality: “You, in the country? You, with your fancy boy shoes and hatred of everything insectoid? You, who cannot hold a normal conversation to save your life when interacting with a small circle of mostly normal people [3] who’ll remember your name and face?” It’s a ridiculous proposition.

But even if I ignored all of my personal hang-ups about country living, from insects to the dearth of opportunity for peacocking and dandyism, to having to interact with people (hawk, ptooey), there’s still a lot of problems that would face us if my wife and I were to pursue the ideal of living off-grid, or even seeking “self-sufficiency.” The biggest one would probably be that just living will take up a lot more effort than in a modern city. Going off-grid in earnest would end one of the most important benefits of modernization and technological progress: specialization. For example, the greatest benefit of having central heating is that there’s no need to get up early in the morning to start a fire. Nor do I have purchase, haul, or chop wood. In short, having central heating saves me the labor of doing so the traditional way. I purchase the labor of the heating company’s employees along with the heat when I pay my bill. This frees me to do other things which better suit my unique talents, such as writing for Counter-Currents.

[4]

You can buy Tito Perdue’s novel Morning Crafts, here. [5]

Incidentally, this article is being written uncomfortably close to its deadline because my radiators were due for their triannual cleaning — something that preoccupied the bulk of my week. Now imagine how little I’d be able to write if all the labor related to heating my home were to fall on me, instead of being easily purchased. And what about food? What about water and power?

In the past, cultural creation was limited to the aristocratic class precisely because they were free from these labors. In the modern day, cultural creation is less restricted because we’ve found ways to foist these labors onto machines and an ever-shrinking subset of the population. That doesn’t mean everyone could or should engage in cultural creation; merely that more people have the opportunity to do it, and it is less restricted. This is important to us as White Nationalists because we are a metapolitical movement, for the time being. All we do is cultural creation or other types of cultural work. In the future, when we progress to the political stage, we’ll again be operating in a theater traditionally reserved for the aristocratic class — again, because they were free of labor. Recall that tired conservative bromide about libtards not working for a living [6]. It’s true, and furthermore, it is one of the many reasons libtards have been winning for the past 150 years. Will you really have the energy to do politics after a hectic morning of chopping wood, feeding chickens, or a long winter night of watering corn leaves so the plants don’t freeze?

People may argue that having an independent power base which arises from moving out of the cities and adopting country life is more important for politics. That may well be true, but who’s to say you’re independent? What makes you think you’re independent of the system if you heat your house using a wood-burning stove? Do you think firewood grows on trees? Okay, maybe it does, but things that grow on trees, including trees, aren’t necessarily abundant. In Saxon England, timber-felling was strictly controlled by the aristocratic class in order to prevent over-logging and deforestation. Whether trees were felled for firewood or lumber, one had to secure permission from the local Earl in order to do so, and the punishment for unsanctioned timber-felling was harsh. This policy was instituted due to the fact that, left to their own devices, the peasants would quickly over-log and destroy all the trees and forests, leaving nothing for future generations. When I recently read someone describe a wood-burning stove as a mark of independence from the globalist system, I chuckled to myself as I imagined a horde of MAGA-hat-wearing suburbanites descending on America’s forests and cutting them all down within a year or two, just as their forefathers nearly hunted the white-tailed deer to extinction during the Great Depression. But more ridiculous still was the notion that our Orwellian, computerized, and malicious states could not control firewood as a resource when the comparatively weaker, analog, and benevolent pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon aristocracy controlled firewood with remarkable ease.

I could get into a host of other ways in which village life makes people more controllable than city life, but it would be beside the point. Moving to the country — or even more absurdly, going “off-grid” — is not a magic pill that solves political problems. It is in many ways a council of despair, and I suspect that it also comes from a desire of conservative Americans, who mostly live in suburbs posing as small towns, to describe themselves as hardy country folk, as opposed to the degenerate big city libtards. Naturally, I can’t abide such a contrivance, but there is a kernel of truth — or more precisely, useful thinking — in the urge to move to the country. A sizeable cohort of White Nationalist farmers could be the beginning of an agrarian populist movement [7]. Insofar as it can dictate terms to the government, such a movement could be far more powerful than what has hitherto been tried. Of course, we must not forget that the world’s governments and corporations keep a tight grip on farmers through regulations, as well as cutting them in on the grift by making cheap immigrant labor available to them, or else by heavily subsidizing their activities. Bu let me offer you a vision of the future.

Recently, aiming to expand my business in a new direction, I spoke on a whim to one of our friends who had indeed moved to the country and started a farm. I needed a product for my business that he produced. Although we couldn’t hammer out a deal, a vision came to me out of this failure: nationalist farmers supplying nationalist businessmen and nationalist consumers. Nationalist city slickers doing their shopping at a nationalist farmers’ market. Nationalist city slickers creating culture and political capital with the support of nationalist country folk. Nobody living off-grid, shutting society out, but building an alt-grid — an economic and social network within broader society; sometimes interacting with it when it is useful to us, and at other times exploiting it mercilessly, but avoiding it in all the ways that matter, chiefly to avoid the poison they try to pass off as food and culture.

Now, that’s a program I can get behind.

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

[9]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:

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.