History Isn't Your Therapist
Guilt Isn't Power & "Feeling Bad" Isn't a Strategy
Decline, Fall & Dissolution don’t arrive as catastrophes, but instead they condense gradually over Time as preferences harden into institutions & habits, meaning that said trajectories are but several decades in the making, long before they are ‘noticed’…
Thus, when the signal finally pierces through the copium, hopium, denial & LARP… what One sees are typical reflexes of a DOOM-ed people. For the West, this means split gravitation towards two reflexive Nationalisms, both masquerading as strategy:
The first reflex is towards Ethnosolipsism & its sundry corollaries… be they delusions of grandeur, ‘Kang-ing,’ obsessing over the ‘glory days,’ etc… essentially the belief & conviction that History’s constraints apply everywhere except to the ‘Chosen People…’
The Ethnosolipsist denies Decline outright, insisting that Collapse is staged, temporary, &/or sabotage… chiefly due to the nameless hordes of enemies ‘from within & without’ whose sundry plots & schemes have briefly taken control of things…
History then, is merely paused media per this delusion, awaiting a reboot & reactivation once the correct slogans are mouthed & the correct vibes are likewise hashed & rehashed the umpteenth Time with sufficient conviction, theatre & fanfare…
Symbolism replaces genuine Energy-Material Capacities in this diseased mode, whereby lots of flag-waving & ‘based meme magic’ is somehow supposed to stand in for rusting factories & long decrepit logistics… all things that quietly emigrated long ago!
‘The Ancestors!’ are summoned as talismans by said Ethnosolipsists, as if mere ‘blood memory’ is a substitute for competence, discipline, coordination & production… It’s essentially a poor man’s Polytheism, albeit its idols are hideously gaudy & pathetic…
& so every loss is reframed as treason, while every limit is just persecution… & every failure is just more ‘proof’ that destiny was once again stolen from aforesaid ‘Chosen People’ unfairly… who for some reason are always the suckers & rubes in the story!
This whole delusion may feel heroic, but it functions essentially as nostalgia cosplay, & is inherently thus loud, moralizing & boorish, yet lacking any strategic weight whatsoever when it comes to practical, ‘on the ground’ realities & pursuits of import.
Emotional intensity, autistic sperging & incessant terminally online escapades… are mistaken for genuine power & influence, while grievances (real or imagined) are confused with leverage… yielding a sycophant bunch without any genuine relevance…
The second reflex is what can be dubbed Exemptionism, whereby the individual accepts Decline & Fall, albeit in the abstract sense, while seeking essentially to exempt ‘his people’ concretely from all the relevant key impacts from said processes:
Said group concedes to entropy & sundry Negative-Sum conditions in theory… yet they nevertheless whisper that their people remain special regardless of the mounting evidence that their society is wholly impotent at doing basic maintenance & upkeep…
Nationalism thus becomes a sort of hospice spirituality here, seeking to offer comfort without obligation during said Terminal awareness… & so while not delusional like Ethnosolipsism, it nevertheless seeks a naive state of exception that is unjustified:
Decline is acknowledged in murmurs & with tears… afterward it is aestheticized into irony, melancholy & more symbolic refusal… whereby the whole spectacle just reeks of the weird pageantry of ‘The Noble Defeat,’ albeit with more overall cringiness:
Empirical reality is nodded at politely, then it is summarily filed beneath a heap of irrelevant vibes, resignation & bouts of curated pessimism… ipso facto, the result is just a drug-addled populace consuming digital opiates & endless DOOM-scrolling…
& yet the Exemptionists nevertheless continue to pride themselves on their alleged realism & honesty… while clutching onto their exceptionalistic rhetoric like a bland, sentimental heirloom, effectively signalling to others their utter emotive irrelevance:
What we see then is that both these reflexes ‘Perform’ seriousness while refusing actual physical activity in the real world… namely, coordination, sacrifice, discipline &/or actually seeking to understand the ecology & biology of Limits around them:
The first crowd yells about revival… while the other sighs about inevitability; & in doing so, neither builds capacity & actual basic infrastructure ‘in the present tense’… thereby being no different from the drug junkies of the late Qing during its downfall:
For though their differences are rhetorical & merely surface level… functionally both convert Decline & Fall into identity maintenance rituals… looped over & over again into digital opiates of choice… which in turn are sold to them by foreign bots!
In that empirical sense, denial & exemption are just mirror images… each seeking to avoid moral responsibility through opposite emotive strategies… but de facto they are both easy pickings for intelligent outsiders with bot farms seeking a quick buck!
Yet decline isn’t something the ‘invader’ imposes here; it is domesticated, narrated & normalized for comfort… the dynamic is more akin to a junkine getting his fix from his dealer… & then blaming his addiction on said dealer, & not his own actions!
For it is preferences that select for outcomes, & said outcomes then simply expose aforesaid preferences, & it is here that both camps avert their eyes from the loop & try to offload responsibility elsewhere for the whole self-inflicted gong show:
For though the Ethnosolipsists mythologize the past while the Exemptionists aestheticize the end… causality, biophysics & ecology make a mockery of both, offending them equally for the utter farce that they engage in for therapeutic relief:
For what appears as Collapse isn’t what these two groups obsess over like junkies… but instead the actual consilience among values, incentives, behaviours, biophysics & ecology, all patiently compounded over many decades to get to said end outcome…
Yet neither reflexive nonsense by both sides asks &/or ponders what basic survival requires under constraints & Negative-Sum Conditions… as both prefer the symbolic rehearsal which acts as their opiate & copium of choice, sans genuine practical import:
Power is thus confused with identity, & so too is agency confused with self-image… & eventually we see even actual relevance get confused with moral description, with the farce becoming ever more ridiculous to all external observers, devolving further…
The result of all this drivel is that History itself is treated simultaneously as an audience, a therapist, & a judge… rather than a merely indifferent selector of outcomes, whose entire nomology lies strictly with math, biophysics & ecology:
The emotive appeals, nevertheless, are hurled out en masse… slop whose primary purpose is to target memory, nostalgia & sincerity… as opposed to physical markers like logistics, endurance & coordination, essentially ceding all that ground to others:
While both camps demand some form of meaningless recognition while refusing the cost of history constantly changing… There are others of more keen & pragmatic dispositions who don’t miss nor hesitate when it comes to fleecing this sorry lot:
Ethnosolipsists who demand Restoration without genuine sacrifice & the Exemptionists who demand dignity without actual practical action… they are simply the future playthings of those with more cunning, wit & organizational prowess…
For as each continues in vain to offer emotive relief to their hollow adherents, the result is strategic paralysis, guaranteed by aforesaid forays into delusion & wishful thinking by both camps… cementing their gradual descent into overall irrelevance:
Mockery, ridicule, satire & outright lampoon… are thus warranted for this spectacle, as both ultimately sell a wide variety of coping mechanisms as genuine policymaking & whatnot, de facto ensuring the inevitable exit of all serious pursuits of said things:
There is then a very amusing & contemptible thing that happens amidst all this… whereby applause is requested for honesty &/or defiance, while overall material leverage remains scant to absent… further cementing the theatrical nonsense afoot…
Decline & Fall becomes content, discourse, & posture, rather than a predicament that demands a fundamental transformation out of dead & debunked paradigms… the cult of ‘do something!’-ism persists simply because of said overall helplessness & conceit…
The nation then persists symbolically as overall state capacity & genuine problem-solving capabilities dissolve beneath performative drivel & its faux-seriousness, & nationhood is thus rendered moot as a means of bringing about ‘real world’ change.
History… doesn’t interrupt this entire farcical process, nor should it be expected to, for it records those outcomes & then efficiently reallocates agency & whatnot elsewhere… as past ‘victors’ are swept away in their newfound & dangerous hubris & irrelevancy:
This is neither a malfunction, nor is it trickery, nor even is it some form of scam… It’s just the overall World System executing according to revealed preferences from decades & centuries prior… deterministically moving nations to their deserved ends…
Genuine discomfort… the sort that lies in recognizing collapse as something gradual, incremental & downstream of several choices (micro & macro) by individuals & groups taken in unison (& not ‘betrayal’!) is rare to find, especially in both said camps:
For both Ethnosolipsism & Exemptionism bind together as One evasion… albeit wearing two different masks, forever binding its sundry adherents to a pathetic form of cattlehood, robbing volition & agency from those who now cease to be ‘people’…
The end result is the aforementioned newly demoted cattle plead sympathy from History, entropy, the Almighty, etc., wholly oblivious to the fact that they’ve all moved onto the next chapter, & onto those who still behave like people with sound faculties…
T.S. Eliot, writing a century ago, thus correctly foresaw what such a deracinated, worthless, & hollowed out Civilization was going to become post its Terminal Descent into the Abyss… whereby the whole spectacle just ends in naive & hushed boredom:
“Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” ~ T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, excerpt
Brutal framing but fair. The distinction between Ethnosolipsism and Exemptionism is sharp, both essentially beingemotive coping dressed up as politics. Seen this play out in decline discourse communities where the nostalgia posting gets more engagement than actual organizng. The T.S. Eliot quote lands hard.