by Brett Stevens on June 29, 2017

Nick Land over at Outside In cited a tweet by Pax Dickinson about the nature of anonymity in reality-based movements like the Alt Right. He says:

Being non-anonymous in the Right counterculture in 2017 selects for lunatics and charlatans. Our best potential leaders are still anonymous.

Like all broad statements, this one takes some time to think over, especially in the wake of the current drama of Counter-Currents versus AltRight.

In my experience, being an outsider movement invites lunatics and charlatans as leaders, no doubt, but more importantly, as supporters. The audience selects its leader in any system where the leader depends on popularity to survive, and since politics is both a social popularity contest and a type of marketing/advertising adventure that sells a product, those who succeed will be those who find the largest audience, not those who are the most accurate in describing the situation and how to respond to it.

That is the fundamental tension on the Alt Right, as everywhere else in humanity: what is right (or more right) versus what is popular.

If we were to diagram Western Culture over the past thousand years, we would see a steady loss of what is right to what is popular. It started with the mercantile bourgeois middle class, undoubtedly, but then expanded into full-on prole revolt as the carnies, baristas and housemaids took up the same ideology that the educated college students did.

Dickinson has a point in that honesty is still taboo. You cannot expect people to publicly tolerate you if you say, for example, that we need to deport everyone who is not a Western European, and then thoroughly purge the remaining group to avoid degeneracy. It is not sociable to tell black people and Asians you want to ship them home, or to point out that the Irish, Italians and Slavs wrecked American politics by being diversity of a white kind.

Nope, what wins is what sells, and what sells is what people already want to believe. They want to believe that everyone can be included, and if they go “racialist,” this means they want to include anyone with a semi-plausible claim on being “white,” which they interpret as skin color and not heritage (so Derek Jeter, Martin Gore and Pete Wentz are welcome).

Humanity is a closed-circuit self-confirming bias machine. We get a notion in our heads, and then see tunnel vision until we can select enough data to fit the theory (instead of selecting a theory to fit the data) at which point we project our notions back onto the world and assume that we are correct because other people agree with us.

The Alt Lite is entirely comprised of people in the grips of this process. They want to believe that “normal” life can carry on, if we — as the clickbait headlines have it — just do this One Thing! For the Alt Lite, the one thing is cultural libertarianism. For the white nationalists, it is racism. For the Communists, it is wealth redistribution. For the Christians, it is come to Jesus and work even harder at your pointless job.

All of these are wrong.

All are obviously wrong, but you should be suspicious when you see how popular they are.

All are wrong both at the broadest level, mainstream politics, and the narrowest, underground politics.

People are the same in both groups. They pursue what is convenient for their minds, even if inconvenient for their bodies. Whatever makes them feel mentally comfortable about the world and their place in it, they turn into a religion, which is really what an ideology is. Ideology is the idea that “we should” do something a certain way, and then everything will turn out Just Fine in the best of the bourgeois reality-denial tradition.

In this way, we can see that the problem is people pandering to the audience, in addition to the question of anonymity. (Some of) the best writers choose to stay anonymous because they do not have to please any audience. That way, they can write what they see as true and not care if it is popular or not. They also do not face having their lives destroyed by a vengeful Crowd triggered by their words.

But on a larger level, the Alt Right is dividing. On one side are the mass culture people who rely on stuff like 4chan and Reason.com for their opinions. They want something that is emotionally satisfying. On the other side are the people concerned with real-world solutions. They are more likely to read The Wall Street Journal and RealClearPolitics than 4chan or Reddit, and they want ideas that are consistent with history which offer solutions to us.

This is the group I have pioneered since the early 1990s. My idea was to apply realistic theory, like de Tocqueville, Huntington, Nietzsche and Wolfe to the ideas of the Right. This has continually been thwarted by people who offer non-solutions that seem interesting to a large group of people who are merely projecting. My previous sites like American Nihilist, CORRUPT and the LNSG took these positions.

Now it seems the Right is catching up, both mainstream and underground. Ann Coulter is talking about ethnic homogeneity; the Alt Right is discussing the possibilities of monarchy. These are interesting times we live in!

The actual movement that we are part of is bigger than the Alt Right or mainstream Right. We are part of the worldwide cultural wave that wants to replace the Enlightenment™-derived order with a realistic or consequentialist one. We realize that in the hands of the herd, every human endeavor gets dumbed down and destroyed, so we want “out” of the herd game.

This joins together many people. The teenage goths at the mall. The disaffected academics and writers. The everyday Joe who realizes that Amerika ain’t America anymore. Benjamin Netanyahu realizes that he better kicks the Palestinians out, or they’ll outbreed the Israeli Jews and take over. Dave and Susan in the cul-de-sac who just want to live in a nice place with nice people like them. We all see the fail.

Hunter Wallace shows us the nature of this organic cultural wave against the philosophy behind modernity:

I think our online counter-culture will grow to a critical mass and it will start spilling out into the real world. As we are already seeing, the ability of Antifas to engage in â€œno-platformingâ€ through violent confrontations is rapidly being neutralized. Once the threat of physical force is eliminated, we will be able to â€œplatformâ€ and start organizing our disaffected supporters in any region we want, even in bastions of the Left like Berkeley, CA and Washington, DC. The inherent weaknesses of online culture will be washed away by more natural bonds as this scene shifts into the real world. The â€œmainstreamâ€ political system is unresponsive to our needs. It doesnâ€™t matter who we vote for these days. We seem to get the same policies. That doesnâ€™t mean it is completely useless. Every troll has the power to vote and can wreck â€œmainstreamâ€ primaries and general elections. We can vote for outlandish candidates in order to disrupt â€œmainstreamâ€ culture and weaken the dominant taboos. This is what we did with Trump who in spite of all his failings still managed to inflict great damage on our enemies. I think the most enjoyable activity is creating families through this alternative culture â€“ matching men with women who share the same ideas, watching them get married and have children. Iâ€™ve seen it happen many times now. Iâ€™m already watching our children get older. I enjoy building our network across the South and connecting people who share our values and ideas in their local area. In doing so, I am consciously weakening their ties the â€œmainstreamâ€ and reorienting their lives toward our culture.

For those of us in the West, our version of the order is Western European, and with the fall of Europe there is no stronger signal of this than the American South, a WASP-driven, highly Nordic-Germanic style of hierarchical society which had a caste system, its own aristocracy, and a strong culture with distinctive language, customs, values, cuisine and practices of worship.

What will never protect and nurture this — as all culture needs — is democracy, consumerism, and other forms of rule-by-popularity (“demotism”). People in groups make terrible decisions, even if the group is intelligent. Mass culture will only produce horrors. Whatever is popular, is wrong.

The Alt Right, despite being called “populism,” is a revolt against this. We want an end to modernity. We want to go back to natural living, with a natural order and an organic society — arising from people born together, with similar values and abilities — with a natural order that makes consistency of both our spirits and the biological, material world around us.

The risk to us is that we will become assimilated by Leftism through backdoor entry, namely that what is popular today will lead to the idea that “we are all equal” tomorrow, and then we are right back where we started. The Alt Lite is Leftist entryism, but so are elements of the underground Right that insist we are all equal just because we are white-skinned.

If we are going to save ourselves from that fate, it will occur by creating a hierarchy where we have the best and brightest — the opposite of “most popular” — making the decisions and the rest joining in support of them.

Right now, some of our best leaders are anonymous because they realize that public spectacle will always be corrupted by the public and made into the same thing, which starts out looking libertarian but ends up being like the Soviet Union. With Leftism, as with immigration, zero is the number. Any intrusion of the Other leads to our corruption.

And so we see a future for the Alt Right. We are the people who are disconnecting from the herd, and setting up an order which is against the idea of the herd being right at all. We realize that 1789-2016 was the era of liberal democracy and Leftism, and that is has now ended. We see that our people are balkanized. And yet, we are the people building tomorrow from the ashes of today.

Tags: alt lite, alt-right, anonymity, fake right, populism

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