Hyperborean Futures
Wherein I discuss how the Right can build a (bi-)polar civilization for the twenty-first century…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Regime’s crackdown lately.
By crackdown, of course, I mean the frantic spate of canceling, account vaporizing, unpersoning, deplatforming, and general damnatio memoriae that many enterprises and personalities on the Right have been subjected to in recent months.
The ouster of Tucker Carlson at Fox News comes to mind, naturally, as does the attempt to deplatform Arktos Media, the police apprehension on dubious grounds of the likes of Andrew Tate and Robert Rundo, the ADL’s ominous noises against Substack, to say nothing of the low-level, background noise vaporization of accounts on Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, and elsewhere that goes on with alarming but by now predictable frequency.
Of course, this presages nothing good, and suggests that the left-liberal Regime is either so insecure, or, conversely, so invincibly confident in its power, that it is now comfortable with forsaking even the pretense of freedom of thought and speech that was—once upon a time—one of its most cherished shibboleths.
And that got me to thinking.
Everything about this Regime—despite its aspirations to global and total control of all mankind—seems to come from a position of weakness and fear, of trepidation and pusillanimity. I rather like that word, pusillanimity—“smallness of soul”—and not just because it’s a five-dollar-word that makes me look smarter than I really am…but because it so neatly captures the true nature of these people.
This fearfulness and timidity is reflected in their vision of the future; and this is, I think, yet another reason why they fear and despise nationalism so very much. I mean, let’s be honest—all the great undertakings in human history have proceeded from nationalistic impulses. The Golden Age of Periclean Athens was basically a nationalistic enterprise; ditto for Augustan Rome, with its Aeneid and imperial consolidation and that whole “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble” business.
The Space Race, and all its attendant breakthroughs and discoveries, was—when you cut through all the bullshit—just a nationalistic dick-measuring contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. More importantly—and this is what really causes the Regime’s hackles to rise—the Space Age and much else of the technological innovation and advance of the twentieth century have their roots in the astonishing scientific achievements of National Socialist Germany.
Even Philip K. Dick, in his famous alternate history novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), conceded as much, when he imagined—in his counterfactual 1962—that the Germans could travel anywhere in the world in the matter of an hour or two via suborbital spaceplanes, that they had outposts on the Moon and had already put a man on Mars, and that their engineers had dammed up the Strait of Gibraltar, drained the Mediterranean, and turned its bed into immense farmlands.
Every now and again, we still get a whiff or two of that old nationalistic fervor, when we behold such things as Russia’s Patriot Park and its new Military Cathedral, with its archeofuturistic architecture, its abundant esoteric symbolism, and its grand flight of steps that are said to be forged from the armor of melted Nazi tanks. Or maybe we glimpse it in the ambitious new capital cities arising from the deserts of Egypt and the jungles of Indonesia, or in the immense geoengineering projects undertaken by China around the world to extend the reach of its commercial empire.
Hell, as I’ve written about elsewhere, you can even see it in Trump’s calls for a kind of futuristic revival of the old, and almost dead, American spirit…although his plans were widely ridiculed and reviled, of course, and there’s no reason to believe anything of the sort will ever come to pass.
Let’s face it: America just isn’t capable of that sort of thing anymore. As a personal aside, I know someone who works at a premier archaeological institution—founded a century ago by the storied, Indiana Jones-like adventurer types—in one of the few states that actually has an archaeological tradition worth speaking of. Does he spend his days seeking lost treasures and making great discoveries?
Of course he doesn’t. He has to attend interminable Zoom meetings where a highly-paid DEI commissar and single mother with absolutely zero experience in the field—or anywhere else for that matter—lectures the staff about proper pronoun usage, and how not to offend minorities.
And I guess that’s the point.
The spirit of daring, of innovation, of spiritual and physical contest with nature and with destiny is just about strangled to death in the West, and its corpse dumped in a shallow grave and a few bullets pumped into its braincase just for good measure. This really is our totalitarian moment, in which a maternal and timid spirit, eschewing any real danger or challenge, forever counsels an unmanly caution and seeks always and everywhere to instill fear in its subjects.
I think there’s no better illustration of this fact than the whole climate change racket. This one issue is beaten daily into our skulls through an unrelenting and choking propaganda; personally, I can’t remember a day of my life when some variant of it wasn’t in operation. It’s all fear based, and there are people I know who truly believe—with a religious sort of conviction—that the world will burn up in twelve years.
It’s always twelve years.
And, meanwhile, this fear is cynically used to usher in the “posthistoric future” that the ruling clique, what Renaud Camus calls La Davocratie, desperately desires to make a reality. The bug-eating, the lab-grown meat substitutes, the fifteen-minute cities, the elimination of cash in favor of central bank digital currencies, the electric vehicles that can be monitored as easily as an iPhone…it all flows downhill from the climate change fear-mongering, to produce, in effect, a low-energy, unexciting, domesticated future.1
And all of it is based on fear of the future, which is perhaps understandable for the gang in charge—after all, they have the most to lose.
But I say to hell with all of that.
From the perspective of the Right, the future is a bright new frontier. Let’s assume, for a moment, that all the direst prognostications about climate change are absolutely correct. Let’s assume that global temperatures will steadily rise, that climate zones will expand to ever higher latitudes, that the ice will melt and the seas will expand.
In the more esoteric circles of right-wing thought, you’ll hear a lot about two half-fabulous, quasi-mythical continents or regions of the distant past—Hyperborea and Atlantis. Whether these places ever really existed or not is above my pay grade; but this much I can say—in a warming world, the Right has a chance to make them a future reality.
It’s what I like to call, for lack of a better term, our Hyperborean Future, and—with the help of (who better?) a Japanese conglomeration called the Shimizu Corporation—we can envision a future in a climatically changed world that is full of unprecedented opportunities.
I bring up the Shimizu Corporation for a good reason. Leave it to the Japanese to light upon the correct attitude to the future—one of ambition and daring. Years ago, in a kind of visionary project called “Shimizu Dream,” the architectural and civil engineering firm put on their futurist hats and dreamed big.
Perhaps the most spectacular of their future visions was something called the “Mega-City Pyramid”—a massive, two-thousand-meter-high, open-framework arcology built of carbon-fiber megatrusses. The megatrusses would form modular units that each contain office buildings or residential structures, and the whole fantastic monstrosity was projected to house about a million people.
But Shimizu’s “city-pyramid” is just the beginning.
Further plans call for a network of manmade lakes to be built within desert areas, especially the Sahara, and which would be connected to the sea and each other by a series of canals. These lakes would help ameliorate the harsh conditions of the desert and open them up to human habitation—a perfect corrective to a warming planet.
Even more spectacular are plans for modular floating cities, patterned after lily pads, that can be combined into huge wave-top “nations” that would drift about the world at the whims of the ocean currents; or undersea cities, rooted to the seafloor like giant anemones, and powered by ocean thermal energy conversion.
This is the sort of ambitious thinking that we need more of. And armed with these kinds of ideas and technologies, a Hyperborean, Faustian future for a revived West, spearheaded by Rightist leaders, could finally begin to take shape.
For one thing, the world has become ossified into its current dispensation of nation-states and international political organizations—there’s simply nowhere to go to build a new future, unless one considers space and the near planets…but that’s another story altogether. In a world of rising seas, however, the use of undersea and floating cities to construct entirely new polities—a “New Atlantis”—based on radically different political principles suddenly becomes an attractive possibility.
On the other hand, the expansion into higher latitudes of more temperate climate zones opens up a wealth of new territories for exploitation. The potential of Russia, the largest country in the world by far, has always been limited by the frozen expanse of Siberia; but a warmer climate would bring new opportunities, new cities, novel agricultural projects, and many new possibilities for resource extraction and use.
And the same can be said for Canada, most of whose population is currently clustered along the US border in the south.
has recently mused about Canada becoming the nucleus of a resurgent, neo-traditional Western civilization-state. Well…perhaps in the new dispensation of a warming world, with the United States collapsing into a welter of squabbling factions, and a multipolar world aborning, Canada—if only it can free itself of the likes of Castro’s bastard—could step in to take its rightful place as a more traditionally oriented leader of the West.Just imagine it: the Yukon and the northern islands are currently uninhabited—a frigid icebox. But as the climate warms, what’s to stop the hardy Canadians from erecting new cities in the formerly frozen wastes, from carving new canals and waterways up north and realizing the old dream of the Northwest Passage, from constructing huge fields of tidal power energy stations among the fjords of British Columbia, and from building mega-city arcologies of a million people or more on the newly-thawed Ellesmere or Baffin Islands?
That’s the kind of thing I’d like to see in 2100.
Not billions of frightened insect-people huddling in equatorial wall-cities in fear of the heat (although, I must admit, The Line idea is pretty cool, if only on aesthetic grounds); but a bunch of rough and rugged, Conan-like Russians, Canadians, Swedes, Danes, and Alaskans rushing into the once-frozen north to build a new Hyperborean civilization of politically-incorrect barbarians at the pole. Not just the Canadian islands, but Greenland, Svalbard, Novaya Zemlya, and even Franz Josef Land and Wrangel Island could become the center of a loosely-confederated empire of based, futuristic northmen who occasionally swoop down upon the bugmen of the south in demoralizing—but never devastating—raids.
Place a few cold-hardened floating and undersea cities at the newly ice-free North Pole, and voilà!—you’ve got Thule, capital of New Hyperborea.
And when I say Hyperborea, I don’t just mean the far north. Maybe I should also say “Hypernotos” or “Hypernotosia,” or something weird like that—by which, of course, I mean the far south…Antarctica.
Because if the glaciers thaw and melt away, then there’s a vast new territory down south that’s ripe for conquest by our Australian and Argentine brothers and sisters. An ice-free East Antarctica would be a vast island-continent, with West Antarctica an archipelago of islands lying just off its coast; this is the perfect geography for a well-placed pyramidal mega-city or two, the promising seeds of an inchoate, future neo-traditional polity. And maybe, instead of cooking up diseases in Chinese labs, we could put biologists to work designing some genetically enhanced floral species to colonize the newly glacier-free continent and make it a little more welcoming…perhaps something based on the southern beech or Araucaria species that, millions of years ago, used to flourish in a less frigid Antarctica.
The resource and mineral wealth of the Frozen Continent would make its colonizers rich beyond their wildest dreams; and it would be more than enough to underwrite their independence and allow them to form their own nation-state or ethnopolitical bloc, a major player on the world stage. And if that doesn’t shake things up around the neighborhood, I don’t know what will.
Again, I say to hell with the Left’s fear-mongering and climate alarmism. For a suitably prepared and ambitious Right, a toasty future presents an almost endless prospect for adventure and opportunity.
So keep on using your gas stoves, fellas, and eating steaks, driving gas-guzzling trucks, leaving the AC on when no one’s around, and just generally boosting your carbon footprint by whatever means available.
Because the future looks like pretty bright to me…
Which, unsurprisingly, happens to be entirely consonant with the kind of leftist ecological utopias presented in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s B1 and B2 scenarios all the way back in 2000, at the very dawn of the twenty-first century.
Now that’s a fascinating take, and I hadn’t thought about it that way. I’ve always wondered why people who claim to be future-oriented are so relentlessly pessimistic about it; if they’re truly “progressive,” shouldn’t they be the most pollyannish people imaginable?
I also think there’s a smug sort of anthropocentrism involved—these people really believe that humanity has removed itself from nature, and therefore anything it does is “unnatural.” Which is total BS. I have no doubt there’s a connection there with all this transgender and transhumanist business as well—it’s almost as if progressives view themselves as godlike beings that have transcended the limitations of nature and matter.
Excellent point about the traditionalist way of seeing things, too!
Carbon cultism is bullshit but I've been telling Canadians for many, many years now that if it's true, it cannot possibly be a bad thing for Canada, and therefore they should support it.
What it shows, though, is a general anxiety about the future - a sense that it can only get worse, possibly inevitable for those who think they've reached the apex of human development. A psychological trap within progressivism perhaps? Whig history makes you think you are always at the top, with nowhere to go but down, and you therefore come to fear change while schizophrenically proclaiming its glories? While traditionalists who see things more cyclically understand that in many ways we are closer to the nadir than the zenith ... and that therefore we can in fact, improve things by changing them.