While writing this Substack, I’ve thought a great deal about the future, and what a saner, more right-wing and traditionalist vision of things to come might look like.
But I’ve also found myself thinking about why it has become so necessary to consider new political frameworks and dispensations in the first place. After all, by rights, if the liberal-democratic system were functioning as smoothly and providing for an optimistic future in quite the way its numerous propagandists claim for it, we shouldn’t have to think about these things at all. Instead, we could get on with the business of…well, I don’t know, take your pick: developing truly innovatory technology, expanding into space and making the inner planets an extension of our civilization, preparing for the “Big Jump” to the nearest stars, creating great new works of art to astound future generations, or even just building happy and healthy families, and creating our own individual slices of Heaven.
But that’s not the case, is it?
The last truly innovative technology was, I suppose, the iPhone, and that was a decade and a half ago; perhaps, in retrospect, it wasn’t even all that innovative to begin with. In any case, nowadays all we hear about is Artificial Intelligence, which is certainly artificial, but definitely not intelligent. Hell, even cryptocurrency seems to have receded into the background, after that whole FTX fiasco; yet more evidence that the Left destroys everything it touches.
As for interplanetary expansion and the fantastic promise of interstellar travel? Well, that dream was aborted decades ago. I needn’t remind anyone here of the deplorable state of modern art, and the criminal Regime has so poisoned the relations between the sexes, and so thoroughly laid waste to the possibility of homeownership, that even the promise of a last redoubt and refuge in a loving family has been cruelly snatched away from young people.
From any people, really.
That’s why I enjoy writing about and discussing these ideas. I think it’s probably a cliché now in our circles that the long-promised dystopia is no longer a shuddersome future possibility—no, the truth is we’re already living in the “future” dystopia, the dismal, hopeless surveillance state of the 2020s that people envisioned thirty, forty, or fifty or more years ago. It may be true that 1984 came and went, but the depressing future of Huxley’s World Controllers, Zamyatin’s One State, or Levin’s The Family is aborning all around us.
Perhaps the people of the Soviet Union or Maoist China never even noticed their especial dystopias, because maybe, for them, that’s the way things always were, since time immemorial. But, given our unique history, we in the West certainly notice. And it rankles.
It’s also why I like to step back sometimes, and eschew the fine-grained analysis to take stock of the bigger picture from time to time. It can be all too easy to get swallowed up in the details and minutiae, which is why it helps to overlook the trees every once in a while, and catch a glimpse of that great big forest we all hope to see.
So I’ll put the details aside, for the moment, and address the pregnant matter of just what it is I’d like to see one fine day. Speaking only for myself, I can think of a few things—plucked at random from the tumbleweed of half-formed ideas rattling around in my mostly empty noggin—and I guess I’ll list a few of them here:
To begin with, I’d like to see a “democratic” government for once that actually respects the will of its people. This shouldn’t be too difficult a thing to accomplish for any country that purports to be a democracy, but…alas, here we are, in the early twenty-first century, and democracy can mean different things to different people in our post-modern world.
If, for instance, a people decides in a nationwide plebiscite that an experiment in globalist integration with other nations has gone too far, and that it is unwilling to further cede its sovereignty to a foreign and often inimical entity, that decision ought to be respected—and immediately. Those government ministers who disagree with that decision have the right and duty to resign, but not to endlessly obstruct and delay and flout the people’s will.
The same should apply when the people elect a head of state who promised national renewal and the reversal and revocation of the failed policies of his predecessors. In a true democratic republic, those who were rebuked should be turned out of office in disgrace, never to show their heads in public again; they emphatically should not be able to remain in positions of high trust, to further subvert and sabotage from within the government, needling and undermining and scheming and plotting, like a bunch of vicious old eunuchs in a Byzantine court.
I guess it would also be nice to live in a country that doesn’t violate its own laws with impunity as it deliberately (and maliciously) imports countless millions of impoverished and incompatible people to dilute the vitality of, and frankly disenfranchise, its original stock. I rather enjoy the idea of a government that doesn’t patronize its victimized populace by claiming this crime is committed for humanitarian reasons, or blames its own people for bringing this on themselves by being too lazy, or too infertile, or too racist.
Maybe it’s asking too much, but there’s something to be said for living in a civilization that doesn’t raze every spiritual element or kneecap all yearning for something higher, and reduce everything to the basest, most material and economic level. And then, after establishing the economy as the most important metric for success, proceeds to so mismanage it that recent history becomes nothing more than a litany of financial crises and ever more elaborate Ponzi schemes.
I guess it would be nice to have a government that doesn’t coddle the homeless, and permit them a free rein in the cities, but rounds them up and either has them committed or else finds them an occupation—for their own sake, if not for society’s. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I think a government that permits its people to become so drug-addled as to be frequently zombified and suicidal, and does nothing to prevent and militarily punish the foreign drug dealers responsible, is worthy of no loyalty whatsoever.
I’ll even go so far as to say that a government that enthusiastically and eagerly punishes a habit that, while perhaps unhealthy in excess (but what isn’t?), in moderation conduces to a nimbler mind and far less obesity, while at the same time permitting and even promoting narcotics that destroy the mind and sap the will, is positively an evil one.
What else? To live in a country whose government doesn’t stir up petty racial, ethnic, sexual, and political hatreds to maintain itself in power might be pleasant; I could say the same for one that promotes law and order, that punishes wrongdoers, murderers, pimps, and thieves, that rewards the just and the law-abiding, and doesn’t stir up riots whenever a distraction is needed or a certain political outcome desired.
I suppose there are some other things I’d like to see. Nothing major, really—just little, idiosyncratic things here and there. A country that isn’t riddled with so many goddamned laws that you never know when you’re breaking one. A country that doesn’t stir up such animosity between men and women that everyone’s miserable and sexless and childless and depressed. A country that doesn’t lurch from one failed war to another, bringing untold misery to millions around the world, before discarding these unfortunates and the soldiers it deploys like a used condom.
I guess it would also be nice to live in a country whose government isn’t so relentlessly hostile to, and suspicious and resentful of, its own people. One that isn’t always surveilling and manipulating its populace. One that isn’t always keeping dirty little secrets—whether of its myriad past crimes, its complicity in the development of the COVID-19 pathogen, its possible contact with extraterrestrials or acquisition of their technology (hey, it’s been in the news, and I had to make a UFO reference), and its sordid history of engineering coups and regime change (foreign and domestic).
I think that’s a good start. Just a bare minimum of standards, to begin with. Then we can talk about the interesting stuff…the positive stuff. I think it was Neema Parvini who wrote in The Populist Delusion about what a virtuous, benevolent elite (as opposed to our worthless, hostile “elite”) can accomplish when it works in concert with a people predisposed to accept its leadership. That’s certainly not the case in the West these days.
But just think of the possibilities—they’re virtually endless. Men and women screwing again, and making babies. Schools and universities worthy of the name, and actually devoted to expanding man’s knowledge of the world and his place within it, instead of churning out yet more antidepressant-swilling Marxists. A heroic art and architecture that is truly meet for a vigorous, expansive, and imperial people—accompanied by a great and cathartic sweeping away of the Modernist and Brutalist trash that so oppresses us.
Then we can get on with the business of blasting men and women into space to visit and colonize faraway worlds. Maybe we’ll lose a few in the sun, or send a few astray into the interstellar void; maybe there’ll be a crackup or two during the descent to Mars or Venus, or some heroes might perish of radiation sickness when their spaceship crashes onto Io or Europa. Hell, there might even be something lurking under that black, oily ocean on Saturn’s moon Titan, and it’s conceivable it might claim a life or two.
But at least we’ll be doing something again…not sitting around bitching about the patriarchy, or Bud Light, or Hunter Biden’s self-recorded fap sessions, or misgendering, or the latest Barbie movie (I’m sure there’s going to be a sequel or ten), or whatever. I’ll miss bitching about Hunter Biden’s self-recorded fap sessions, but there’ll be a greater consolation in knowing that mankind has a purpose again, and that however bad things are down here, at least the species is doing something worthwhile up there—building colonies, fighting to survive in hostile environments, shaping entire planets in our image (or in the earth’s image, at least), and maybe devising new and maturer philosophies and bodies of knowledge to help explain all the things we’ll discover out there.
Or, who knows? Maybe the allure of space exploration will lose its luster, and our future civilization will be content to explore more spiritual and metaphysical avenues of knowledge from the confines of the earth, all the while building a planet-bound culture and society that is more worthy of human beings. Either way, it would really be something, I think, to live in a hopeful and future-oriented civilization, one that’s going somewhere—rather than one that endlessly navel-gazes and relitigates past grievances ad nauseam.
That’s why I try to stay optimistic. We’re at a low point, sure. We’re saddled with some pretty rotten people, and, for now, they’ve got all the power to inflict upon us a long train of abuses. But that won’t last forever. They’re vicious and humorless and stupid, and—what’s worse—they have no real vision. It’s heartening to find so many people of like mind here and elsewhere, so I know I’m not alone in thinking this way.
Anyhow, that’s why I keep at it, and so I’ll keep looking at alternatives to the reigning liberal-democratic Regime, hoping for a way out of this mess, and a future renaissance for the West…