New Discourses
Politics • Spirituality/Belief • Writing
National Divorce Is National Suicide
February 01, 2024
Guest contributors: ConceptualJames
post photo preview

Should the United States split up? The country is more polarized than it ever has been, at least since the Civil War, having divided not so much geographically but culturally and ideologically. The two broad factions in this split are what we might call the “Red Team” (conservatives) and the “Blue Team” (progressives)—the irony in these color designations not being lost on many. Now that things are so divided, might it just be better to go our separate ways as peacefully as possible so we can get on with life? Might it be time for a “National Divorce”? Blue Team can keep the beach house, and Red Team can have the farm, and we can all move on to live happily ever after on our own terms?

No. National Divorce is National Suicide, and we’re only considering it because we’re being driven into the despair necessary to commit it.

Straight away, we can see that National Divorce means the death of the nation in the most banal and uninteresting way. If the United States splits, it won’t be united anymore, and so the nation we have today will have committed suicide. That’s not what I mean, though. If we were to proceed with a National Divorce, it will not be peaceful, and the ultimate result will be a state I refer to as Game Over—global tyranny under exactly the evil force provoking us to this extreme in the first place.

On Terminology

I’m going to use the term “National Divorce” for a catch-all for anything that breaks up the existing United States into more than one piece. This would include some split of states, like we might imagine, the secession of even a single state, or the outbreak of a second civil war. It also includes attempts to balkanize or “regionalize” the existing United States into contiguous geographical areas that declare some kind of sovereignty apart from the federal union we call the United States. Quibbling over the difference between these circumstances is distracting from the point and would require far too much development.

I have already introduced the terminology “Red Team” (conservatives) and “Blue Team” (progressives). These terms refer to the current rough big-tent political factions in the United States that roughly but inexactly correlate with support for the Republican Party, which is coded red, and Democratic Party, which is coded blue. They are meant to describe even people who tend to lean one way or the other in this rough divide and is not meant to indicate support or alignment with the political parties in any way. Perhaps think of it as “likely to vote ‘red’ or ‘blue’ in a national election.” Since it’s a placeholder, don’t take it too seriously.

These will develop into the terminology “Red State” and “Blue State” following the “National Divorce.” I am using those terms to signify the approximate new political entities after a binary division. Further balkanization doesn’t need to be discussed because it only makes matters worse.

“Game Over,” as indicated, represents the state in which the global tyrannical program, which is roughly enough Communist in its approach and structure, is able to move inexorably to a pan-Western or even global government under its control. It means the death of liberty. To put a finer point on it, if we reach Game Over, your children will grow up to be slaves, and most of your remaining years will suck.

The Case for National Divorce

This section will admittedly be cursory because it’s not the point. A National Divorce is a terrible idea, but, if we’re going to show that, it’s worth reviewing what people believe it will accomplish in the most charitable terms possible. In my opinion, these terms are fantastical, and the primary driver of these ambitions is catharsis—the letting go of pent up frustration against the corrupt regime, which seems to admit no outlet. That is, I want people to understand that “National Divorce” is not a serious or wise option but an emotional outlet for people who feel trapped and desperate. The goal of this essay is to discuss the possibility of a National Divorce in real terms in the world we actually inhabit and to urge people to understand we are making enough progress not to need to follow unrealistic but cathartic paths of action.

There are three primary arguments for National Divorce, one of which isn’t even really an argument. These are (1) to escape tyranny and live on our terms in new states; (2) to allow the Red Team to consolidate resources and power with which to fight back against Blue Team more effectively; and (3) it’s inevitable anyway (the non-argument). As you can imagine, I don’t believe in (3) at all and don’t think it’s doing anyone any good to believe in it, and I think (1) and (2) will not be allowed to occur in reality given the nature of what’s happening in the world and why. The bulk of this essay is dedicated to painting a picture of what I think would really happen instead.

Both (1) and (2) depend on the belief that Red Team will be able to create Red State that is no longer subject to the tyrannical overreaches of the current U.S. federal government. (Last reminder: “Red State” might represent more than one actual state, but we’re staying in the binary situation for simplicity.) Freed from the tyrannical overreaches of the current U.S. federal government and even international organizations like the United Nations, Red State could then chart its own course, build its own economy and society unfettered, build its own military, and engage in all the activities of a functional nation—perhaps even a mature Constitutional republic—which is impossible under the current U.S. federal government. The strongest argument in favor of National Divorce in this vein is that the current U.S. government and global environment present a genuine threat not just to our livelihoods and liberties, but to those of our children. For reasons that aren’t hard to imagine, it would even be able to out-compete its new Blue State neighbor and thus become the thriving nation the United States should be today, or at least something like that. Furthermore, freed from tyranny, it could also consolidate the necessary economic and military power to be a significant player on the world stage, if needed, and keep its enemies at bay.

Proponents of National Divorce often argue that such a move is not only beneficial but necessary. Some, on the more extreme end, posit that the U.S. Constitution, thus the United States itself, is already functionally destroyed with no hope of recovery. National Divorce would therefore allow us to reconstitute a new state (“Red State,” here) that enables us to recover the most of what the United States stood for and preserve the American way of life. This despairing sentiment is common, though not always stated so extremely, throughout the movement. Proponents also tend to argue that we don’t know what will happen and that we may well drastically overestimate the power of the national and global Blue Team, if not also their malice.

The justification for the need for such a split is that our differences, Red Team and Blue Team, are so irreconcilable that it isn’t possible to share a single political entity with one another. Each side finds the other side’s way of life, values, and aspirations inadequate to building a society worth living in, if not repugnant or degenerate. Since the rift is so significant and perhaps permanent, it’s time to go our separate ways as peacefully as possible. They tend to insist the essence of the National Divorce—it’s Geist, so to speak—has already occurred, as evidenced by the irreconcilable differences and irreparable rift between “blue” and “red.” They liken the situation to spouses who are legally still married even though their marriage in all meaningful respects has already died. Certain challenges will arise, but through the normal operation of statecraft, diplomacy, economy, and whatever else, the new states can settle into a new political arrangement on the North American continent and ease the pressure of this extreme, maybe deadly polarization.

National Divorce Lite: The Big Sort

Before moving into National Divorce properly, we need to discuss its precondition, which is known as “The Big Sort.” The reasons we need to discuss it are two: first, it ends in National Divorce, and, second, it’s being encouraged now, especially by elements on Team Red. (Arguably, Team Blue is doing the opposite and trying to infiltrate currently “Red” areas as heavily as it can afford to.) The general idea is that people should move to areas that match their politics, so conservatives should move to “red” areas and states and progressives to “blue” ones. Further, at least in “red” areas, the increased concentration in political power should be leveraged to make those areas more “red.” Everyone generally agrees that “blue” areas will do this kind of consolidation of power by default, though it will be accelerated by increasing their proportions in areas conservatives abandon. Many who encourage National Divorce consider this to be unstoppable anyway, so conservatives might as well circle their wagons in “red” areas, though they would never characterize it as running away. This Big Sort is a terrible idea.

Naturally, there’s already a “Big Sort” in the United States, but it’s not drawn very neatly on state lines except in presidential electoral maps. The divide is much more accurately urban versus rural, and all fifty states at present contain both urban and rural areas that tip either “red” or “blue.” It has been identified for at least fifteen years as a major problem and driver of destabilizing political polarization in the United States. A national Big Sort would amplify that dynamic tremendously and at scale, with the same dialectical conflict playing out in the urban/rural divide within each state, particularly the “red” ones. What this suggests is that a deliberate state-level Big Sort, or even increasing the urban/rural Big Sort (“get out of cities!”) will push us into more polarization, not less, and increase the chances of a National Divorce, which I argue ends in Game Over.

“The Big Sort” is therefore best thought of as “National Divorce Lite.” The term “The Big Sort” actually comes from a book from 2009 by Bill Bishop titled The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart. The primary point of the book is to argue that people were already moving to more like-minded areas, though he focused primarily on the urban/rural and urban/suburban divides, and that this dynamic was creating conditions that accelerate political polarization. Bishop was offering a diagnosis for American political polarization, to be clear, not prescribing some globalist plan, and his diagnosis wasn't good. The urban/rural “Big Sort” he identified was characterized as “tearing us apart,” he argued, threatening national unity going forward.

The idea of a “Big Sort” wasn’t limited to a book that only a relative few are aware of. At least as recently as 2022, for example, state propaganda outlet NPR was publishing articles about The Big Sort, by that name, which it insisted was being accelerated at the state-to-state level by Covid-19 policies. “America is growing more geographically polarized—red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes are becoming bluer. People appear to be sorting.” Their conclusion generally agrees with Bishop’s: “‘The Big Sort’ may be making Americans more politically extreme.”

That’s not how the article ends, however. It ends somewhere more encouraging of The Big Sort: “Moving to areas with people you agree with has advantages.” It’s worth reading the final portion of the article in its entirety for how instructive it is about the dynamic:

What a difference a new city makes. Twelve-year-old Mya Wooten is taking a social justice class at her private school in downtown Austin, an opportunity they would not have found in Greenfield. 

Mya says a recent assignment was to pick an issue to protest. “It was ocean pollution, women’s rights, or LGBTQ rights,” she says. “So my topic was women’s rights, and I made a poster of an open woman's mouth and it said, ‘I have the right to be heard.’” 

By moving to Austin, the Wootens joined The Big Sort. They made Greenfield a tad less purple, and Austin a smidgeon bluer. Tiffany sometimes wonders if they've done the right thing. 

“I’m not sure that it’s super healthy for us to be completely putting ourselves in a box and saying, ‘I’m gonna be with the blue people because they think exactly like me.’ We need to be able to communicate with each other even if we do not fully agree with each other.” 

The Wootens miss having their ideas challenged and engaging with the other side. On the other hand, she says, “We feel among our people in Austin.”

NPR, in other words, seemed to be encouraging The Big Sort in 2022, even while acknowledging that it increases the political polarization of local, state, and national politics. From this fact, we might conclude that The Big Sort is advantageous to the political objectives pushed by NPR.

Why would that be the case? You might be thrilled to find out there’s a proposed solution to The Big Sort, and it even has a name you’ll likely recognize now. The proposed solution to The Big Sort is called “The Great Reset.” 

As it turns out, The (Ze) Great Reset is not just some big evil plan by the executive chairmain of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, means to be initiated and accelerated by Covid-19 after being officially inaugurated by now-King Charles (then Prince). It started out as an innovative new idea in urban planning that could solve The Big Sort, as detailed in a 2009 book by Richard Florida titled The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity. The premise of the book is that “history teaches us that periods of ‘creative destruction,’ like the Great Depression of the 1930s, also present opportunities to remake our economy and society and to generate whole new eras of economic growth and prosperity.” The Big Sort is characterized as part of such an “opportunity,” although the book’s primary focus is the Great Recession of 2008.

“We’ve reached the limits of what George W. Bush used to call the ‘ownership society,’” Florida warns in the earliest pages, after discussing how Karl Marx analyzed the upheavals and “resets” characterizing the birth of that period. Economic polarization between urban centers and suburbs, as well as between cities and rural areas, overlaps with ethnic and sociopolitical polarization under the economic Big Sort. His solution is a “Great Resettle” into the urban centers of what he calls economic “megaregions,” which appear to operate effectively like an early draft of what we would today call SMART 15-Minute Cities.

Of some note, on the cover of the newest edition of The Great Reset, Florida’s 2019 book The Rise of the Creative Class is mentioned and promoted. Of course, “the creative class” is exactly what the World Economic Forum today says will be the upper, or ruling, class of the new world, as opposed to the “useless” class of dispossessed laborers who have all their labor performed by machines and artificial intelligence. Taken as a whole, these points raise some serious red flags about the willful political separation of the United States, however frustrating it is to live nearby complete idiots who hate your way of life.

The Israeli Disengagement Experiment

Big withdrawals of a more extreme kind may also provide some clues as to the wisdom of encouraging The Big Sort. For example, in 2005, Israel formally disengaged from Gaza under a plan proposed by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The Israelis dismantled twenty-one settlements in the Gaza Strip as part of the “Disengagement Plan Implementation Law,” compensating Israelis living in Gaza to relocate into Israel as residential areas were fully demolished.  The rationale was straightforward. Lacking any possibility for a possible peace with the Arabs calling themselves “Palestinians,” who were largely represented by the radical Palestinian Liberation Organization and the terrorist group Hamas, Sharon decided to disengage to strengthen its control in the State of Israel. In other words, this is the same logic as is driving conservatives in the United States toward a National Divorce plan.

The results are, in fact, that Israel was able to consolidate its power, which was already considerable due to U.S. and U.K. support, within the State of Israel, and it was pressured into a permanent defensive posture by allowing a permanent antagonistic terrorist quasi-state to develop on its borders with the chartered intention of destroying Israel completely. As it turns out, the bad guys were able to consolidate power in the unchecked environment too.

There are many parallels to draw from this experiment for an American Big Sort or National Divorce. By fleeing your “blue” state as a conservative—perhaps because Conservative Influencers, some of whom have a financial stake in it—told you to, that “blue” state loses some of the remaining capacity to check the power growing within it. That power is broadly Communist, so it can be expected to operate in a permanently antagonistic and even terroristic way because it hates everything that isn’t Communist, including you. It will be able to do so not just in “blue” states but also from within “blue” cells located inside your “red” state, located heavily in every “blue” city. 

Far from weakening the Blue Team, in exchange for some temporary reprieve in your conditions (and, of serious note, safety for your children), this action enables a great consolidation of Communist power in regions under their control and thus weakens and eventually ends any capacity to drive those agendas and develop outward-facing political force. Since free people do not willingly move to Communist regions very often, this migration is effectively one-way, replicating some of the conditions of the Israeli Disengagement Experiment.

In return, you’ll be able to consolidate “Red Team” power in your “red” states, though, right? No. You will not successfully consolidate “Red Team” power anywhere, really. People who aren’t Communists—unless they are Fascists—don’t act like Communists, so they don’t readily consolidate power. Furthermore, the “red” states will remain fully infiltrated since their cities are already “purple” or “blue,” complicating the situation. This leaves “red” states with a constant internal and external pressure dynamic to turn “blue” or to go all bad by embracing Fascism. Supposing those regions want to stay “red,” they eventually therefore have to abandon the Constitution and turn increasingly Fascistic, which, among other things, leads to undermining and throwing out the Constitution and its protections on individual liberty, which just so happens to coincide with the Communist goal on the ever-concentrating Blue Team.

Eventually, in other words, this path results in rupture, which can look like secession of one state or several together or in serial, (civil) war, or National Divorce, which I'm using as a catch-all term for these phenomena. The point is, The Big Sort is a precondition for the Leftist agenda because it ends here, as both the polarizing logic of The Big Sort and the evidence of the Israeli Disengagement Experiment indicate.

National Divorce

What would happen, realistically, if the United States fractured because of Blue Team (Communist) provocation from the federal government, intolerable conditions in “blue” states, foreign interference, and an escape campaign from the Red Team that definition isn’t nice to call “running away from their responsibilities to their own backyards”? Nothing good. First of all, the United States wouldn't exist anymore, and both remnants—Red State and Blue State—would be weaker. This end of the United States is the banal end of the United States mentioned near the start of this discussion, which is not the same as Game Over. The Constitution, however, would be dead, and both Red State and Blue State would have to decide on how to re-constitute themselves.

It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen in the Blue State in that regard. It would immediately modify the Constitution to look rather like Canada or California, in order to “fix” it. Whatever its political construction, which would likely include a drastic increase in executive power, it would almost certainly limit free expression (First Amendment), eliminate the right to bear firearms (Second Amendment), and encode “equity” into the fundamental “rights” of its citizens (Fourteenth Amendment). In other words, it would trend softly Communist immediately. It would also ally itself with the rest of the “civilized” world, including the European Union, the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and very likely China.

For its part, the Red State would likely attempt to maintain something very much like the present Constitution, at least at first, though there would immediately be huge internal strife over whether any liberties should be curtailed in order to prevent turning “blue” or to handle “blue” infiltration, which is already significantly present, entrenched, and incorporated institutionally within its borders. These debates would be furious and polarizing. The Red State would likely be declared a rogue state, and it will find allyship with other nations to be difficult, if not impossible, in the present global environment, which will likely be primed to turn against it, despite economic possibilities. This will suit the isolationists but will not be strongly to the advantage of the Red State in a global political context.

Meanwhile, we can also bet that the rest of the world will not be idle during this turmoil. Lacking the stabilizing presence of the united United States military on the global stage, we can presume nations like China, Iran, and Russia, at the least, will make some significant territorial and other moves to maximize their own advantage during RIP-America’s turn into political chaos and reorganization. Israel may or may not survive. Taiwan almost certainly wouldn’t. South Korea is an open question.

Neglecting the world stage (for the most part), two paths run from here, and both are terrible. Nobody wins this. This “divorce” includes a Communist (narcissistic abuser) side who will not live and let live, so bad stuff is coming. I don't know which of the following two paths is more likely, however, for one specific reason: nuclear weapons exist.

National Divorce Scenario 1, The Fast Option

After divorce, the Red State will find itself in the aforementioned turmoil, with issues internal and external. Getting organized will not necessarily be a smooth process, and elements on at least two factions of the Red Team and at least two locations (internal and external) of the Blue Team will be working against its unity. This circumstance will, at least temporarily, severely cripple Red State, which is not to its advantage.

Another consequential fact also bears here: former U.S. military and nuclear arsenal installations are still on Red State lands. Blue State won't just give them up. In fact, they’ll go to great lengths over them. Conflict rapidly escalates in this scenario, and Blue State will immediately call upon its global allies and the United Nations, at the very least to secure the nukes. Simultaneously, those military bases become a real problem. For context, Fort Sumner in Charleston Harbor played inside this story in 1861, and that specific conflict started the Civil War. Should that happen over a military installation in a National Divorce situation today, we rapidly progress to Game Over for the reasons that will be made clear below, just put on a more urgent timeline.

Because of the nuclear arsenal and the likely standoff over Blue State ("U.S.") military installations inside Red State, the instability of a National Divorce would immediately trigger a global emergency, demanding every possible sanction and pressure on Red State to prevent it from being a nuclear-armed rogue state. The more aggressively Red State works to take over a military base or, worse, secure a nuclear installation, the more urgent and powerful the global response will be against it. At best, the resulting war will be terrible. In reality, Red State has few realistic prospects in such a conflict, even without the massive internal turmoil weakening its chances.

Imagine what such a scenario would look like. The Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus all around the rest of the globe will immediately insist that this is the New Confederacy but with nukes, and it will be the focus of the entire world's resources to break it immediately, even in its new-nation disarray. The military in those bases will be divided, and with the Constitution undermined, their loyalties will be confused. The former United States, which is now Blue State, will insist these are theirs. They also control the necessary operational codes for the nuclear installations. Attempts to seize a nuclear installation will be met with ungodly force with all the urgency that nuclear deterrence demands.

You might be cowboy enough to think Red State could fight its way through that, but that's not likely and would leave a wrecked world. You might die on your feet, but you and your kids still die, and it's not remotely desperate enough a situation in the currently existing United States to justify that risk yet. In fact, however, Red State will almost certainly not be organized or cowboy enough to secure operable nuclear weapons for itself in this scenario. Even tampering with them would demand a global response, including a nuclear response. Red State isn't the US; it's a rogue state, so it would be globally justified. Almost all of the world would declare itself Red State’s enemy with nuclear urgency.

You can imagine it easily. Blue State is allied with the UN, China, and the other Five Eyes nations. The entire West Coast, New England and several Atlantic states, and all of Canada immediately open themselves as water and land routes for a full-scale invasion to secure America’s teetering nuclear arsenal and control Red State as a rogue actor. Supply lines will largely be cut to Red State from the rest of the globe, crippling its nascent economy, supposing it even has a military to equip. The operation would be quick, brutal, and total. Red State would cease to exist with many of its intrepid citizens dead.

This is the “Fast Option” because Red State would likely last only a few months before collapsing under global pressure or all-out war. Then it's over. This is Game Over. Anything in the process that triggers civil war, with a National Divorce formal or not, triggers this outcome, and it will be quick. Nothing is left to stop the Left Globalists, who therefore win. Everyone who survives is a global slave (“global citizen”) and the resistance is destroyed. We all arrive at Game Over.

National Divorce, scenario 2: The Slow Option

There is a more insidious path that is also more typical of the evil we’re dealing with in the world today. A National Divorce leading us onto this path would, as just outlined above, depend upon a more-or-less peaceful full nuclear disarmament of Red State plus the sacrifice of most of its potential military capacity, which it might not make. Supposing it makes the necessary concessions to Blue State and the world to avoid the Fast Option to Game Over, however, it enters onto the Slow Option to Game Over.

In the Slow Option, the states separate somehow or another more or less peacefully into Red and Blue, the Red is forced to let Blue take back most of the former U.S. military and all of the U.S. nuclear arsenal as a minimal price of entry to a peaceful divorce. There’s little doubt about that. Otherwise, it will be the fast option to Game Over.

The next two years or so of the Slow Option are going to be awesome for most former U.S. citizens in the two usual ways. Blue State, after rapidly completing its soft Communist revolution will leave the revolutionary phase and enter the phase of “building socialism.” That means it will rapidly clean itself up like San Francisco did and dedicate itself to rapidly building an economy in the model of China. It will likely receive major global help. Things will be much cleaner and efficient. Their alliance with China, the UN, and the rest will be tight. Life will become very good in Blue State. Business will thrive, people will make money, stuff will work again. Blue State residents just have to deal with the Woke “Sustainable and Inclusive” program, but not to the extent that it disrupts business or energy production. Those will be deemed necessary to Build Back Better, given the circumstances.

People from Red State will also have it relatively good, at least psychologically. They will be free from Woke “Sustainability and Inclusion” and able to start growing as a new, freer nation (unless they go Fascist). There will be some internal turmoil, and life will be relatively hard but exciting and largely free again. Of course, Red State residents will be propagandized to the fullest extent Blue State powers can reach to encourage them to move to the seemingly utopian Blue State, which abandoned the worst of its destructive ways. They will be allowed to move to Blue State whenever, but only through thoroughly renouncing their “red” values, and this demand will be reinforced by law, social credit, and a new Constitution that “fixes” the old one. This will be the minimum precondition to enter into the Built Back Better Blue State world. More than a few will leave, but few will come the other way, to Red State.

That’s because for all its potential, Red State will find it difficult to make friends on the world stage and, by demand of the “global community,” will in many ways be sanctioned by the rest of the world. Having lost much of its coastline, it will be limited in trade and national defense. Still, there will be all kinds of building up, Red State style! Homesteading, “making it happen,” developing a new economy, growing up a homegrown militia as the new Red State military—these will all occur more or less unhindered except by the limitations of the global environment. Access to supply lines will be limited, prices will be high, but there won’t be heavy restrictions.

Of course, former Blue Team residents of Red State will be a constant problem, at least those who stay—and many will, as spies, subverters, and infiltrators. Blue State and foreign entities will almost certainly encourage this, and Red State will find it difficult to maintain freedom against this constant internal problem. It may find itself having to jettison many of the Constitutional freedoms it separated specifically to try to preserve, and this will be encouraged by its radical contingent within. It’s likely Red State will become a version of exactly what it sought to escape, just with different priorities, in the need to deal with these issues and under the pressure of its own “redder” radicals.

Nevertheless, Red State will have access to just enough to be able to struggle forward, but life will actually improve. It must be allowed to gain strength, but Blue State will be a far nicer place. This will cause brain drain, population issues, talent issues, etc., for Red State. Again, at the same time, Red State is likely to drift or even lurch at times further “red,” which is to say toward Fascism. The Constitutional protections of the United States that Red State presumably sought to preserve somewhere will mostly be lost by necessity. All of this will be amplified by the global community’s Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus into relentless propaganda against Red State, which it will destroy your social credit to question or challenge.

Red State must be allowed to consolidate and grow in strength, maybe even with a Fascist-style government that has no use for “lib’rals” and throws them out, strengthening Blue State, which would already be beyond tolerating useless radicals—but that would fund them to be exactly that while they remain in Red State. Constitutional protections will be jettisoned to prevent re-subversion, and this will keep conflict high inside, and the “global community” will be forced to become more and more wary of Red State and its trajectory. Sanctions and other international issues would likely mount for Red State, adding to its challenges.

A few years down the road, notably after Red State develops a functional semblance of its own military, the world together with Blue State will simply provoke a war with Red State. The pretext might be the increasingly Fascistic turn Red State was forced to take. It might be that Red State feels a bit of its new strength and decides it’s time to take action to remedy the unfairness of its global standing. In any case, it will come about in the typical Blue Team way: through a provocation that sets Red State up to be the first militant actor. Now the world has to act and it must act decisively to “preserve democracy” on “the global stage,” or some such rhetoric. 

This event, which immediately becomes an urgent global emergency against the rogue Red State launches the world back onto the Fast Option pathway to Game Over. Maybe Red State can put up more of a fight in the short term, but it will be the entire world against Red State, which hasn’t had a chance to organize sufficiently to deal with such an onslaught. The world will be led to believe through the by-then-very-sophisticated Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus that Red State is the aggressor it was always painted out to be. The Slow Option therefore also ends at Game Over and gets there at full velocity.

National Divorce Is National Suicide

National Divorce, which starts with The Big Sort and through pushing desperation into foolish action even before such a sort could be accomplished, results in Regime Change (Game Over) ultimately, and the Red Team has no realistic pathways to coming out on top. We might feel great for a little while, but it’s a short road to Game Over.

To divide the United States and break the reach of its Constitution and Bill of Rights will create a scenario in which all the power tips to the Global Enemy. You, no matter where you find yourself in that world, will not have a future unless you brainwash yourself and join the Global Collective. Your children will not have a future unless they are part of the Global Collective. This is not a peaceful path to restoring anyone’s way of life. This isn’t 1776. These aren’t the British. We are dealing with Global Communists who have already entrenched themselves in massive arrays of power and are making a legitimate bid for global control.

You might believe, like mentioned near the beginning of this discussion, that what is described above is inevitable, so we might as well “rip the Band-Aid off.” That’s not true. A National Divorce is not inevitable. In fact, it's completely avoidable, allowing us to assert the power of the Constitution of the United States to secure the rights of our people and then to be a beacon of freedom and life to the world again, the world’s “last best hope.” We’re already making incredible strides in that direction, and rather than directing our enmity at our complicit countrymen as new challenges arise, we can continue to channel that into justification to expose and ultimately dismantle the revolution banging against our doors. Every evil move they make can be turned into discrediting them with a far broader audience. The rats orchestrating the revolution will jump ship if the deal looks like it’s going bad, and then they can be incentivized to talk. When they talk, the Enemy—not the country—goes into a downward spiral. The Constitution can prevail, and American can be made great again, with the rest of the free world behind it.

We are already making progress, even in hard states like California. The Courts are siding with us more and more. People are awakening. DEI and ESG are damaged badly. We know how they play their games and do their tricks. We realize how much bait they put in front of us. Their scams and schemes are backfiring. Inconvenient truths for their continued power surface week by week. The tide is turning.

The way out begins with faith in our nation, its Constitution, and most of all its good people. Faith in God, including the sacrifices you need to make and courage you need to show to prove that faith, is also warranted. Winning, though, also means taking the difficult road of sticking up for the place you live.

If you live in a “blue” place, and being as much sand in the gears against the Communists as you can. By organizing—which is impossible if you leave—you can consolidate local-level and eventually greater power that can keep the Communists from taking another inch. Look at Take Back Alberta in Canada, which is a country worse off than the U.S. Look at Garry Tan and his stand for San Francisco. Look to the millions of Americans waking up to the fact that they have to win back control over their back yards by standing and fighting, not retreating to some desperate last stand for them and their kids. Groups like Moms for Liberty are activating parents in almost every state and making progress, taking the fights to the local and state levels first so that we can keep all fifty stars on our Star-Spangled Banner. These examples are the real stuff. Be careful with what ideas you get from influencers. Edge sells but loses. Not all of them are even honest. Communists infiltrate and then rise up from within, leading patriots into traps.

Keep faith and fight for the integrity of the US and its Constitution! A National Divorce is National Suicide. Suicides are deaths of despair. The Communists are provoking us to despair so we’ll, as a nation, take our own life. They want us thinking this is Cowboys versus Communists so they can get us to make the very mistakes outlined in this discussion. It’s not. It’s those who have faith in the integrity and strength in this nation and its founding ideals against those who do not, and we’re showing up far too successfully to throw it all away with delusional fantasies of a “National Divorce.”

community logo
Join the New Discourses Community
To read more articles like this, sign up and join my community today
0
What else you may like…
Videos
Podcasts
Posts
Articles
Stakeholderism and the Post-America Movement | James Lindsay

Saving American Liberty, Session 1

From August 22-23, 2025, in Dallas, Texas, New Discourses was proud to host a learning seminar event called Saving American Liberty, featuring talks from New Discourses founder James Lindsay and the founder of Sovereign Nations and New Discourses partner, Michael O'Fallon. The event opened with a talk by Lindsay outlining what is known as the "Stakeholder Economy." You may associate this idea with the World Economic Forum's "Stakeholder Capitalism" model, ESG scoring, or the UN's Agenda 2030, and you're right. In this penetrating lecture, Lindsay explains what the Stakeholder Economy model is, how it works, its historical roots with elements from the Soviet Communist model the Nazi German economy, and how it's applied to our lives today, both in the CCP and throughout the West. Join him for this important lecture on the shape of the dark future being pressed upon us.

Notes (PDF): ...

00:57:01
The Commissars of Neo-Socialism | James Lindsay
00:00:59
What is an American?

Enjoy this final moment from our recent event in Dallas, TX, where James Lindsay explains what it means to be an American!

00:03:12
The Seven Criteria of Cancel Culture

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 126

Is there a good way to know if you're seeing (or experiencing) cancel culture or a struggle session? As it turns out, we can lay out some basic criteria for exactly that. Thanks to one helpful X user (https://x.com/Sarodinian1/status/1948081917577863467), in this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay lays out seven criteria for cancel culture and struggle sessions that can help you identify when they're occurring so that we can better resist them. Join him for this important information.

The Seven Criteria of Cancel Culture
The Russian National Socialism of Aleksandr Dugin

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 175

Who is Aleksandr Dugin, and why does anyone care about him? This turns out to be an increasingly important question as Dugin's crackpot Fascist philosophy increasingly informs the "New Right" (Woke Right) in America. Dugin is a radical Russian philosopher who has sometimes been referred to as "Putin's philosopher" or "Putin's brain," though it is unclear how invested in his thinking Russian leader Vladimir Putin actually is. In 1997, Dugin wrote a short but unambiguously Fascist essay called "Fascism, Borderless and Red" (https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/DuginA-Fascism-Borderless-Red.pdf) to call for a new Fascist movement in Russia modeled directly off not only Mussolini (https://newdiscourses.com/2024/01/fascism-idolatry-of-the-state/) but off of Hitler's National Socialism (https://newdiscourses.com/2025/06/the-nazi-experiment-vol-1-the-nazi-racial-worldview/) in Germany. In this episode of the New ...

The Russian National Socialism of Aleksandr Dugin
The American Idea

New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 125

Is America just an idea? No, it isn't, but America is based on an idea. That idea is simple: free men and women can govern themselves by taking personal responsibility, and organizing the political structure this way will produce both liberty and prosperity. No other nation in the history of the world has been explicitly based on an idea in this way, and the results have been tremendous. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay reminds every American of the idea his country was based on and calls them back to it. Join him to be inspired and have your faith in America restored!

The American Idea

I recently had a conversation with an old married couple (about 75 years old) who exclusively watch leftist establishment news - mostly CNN and MSNBC, in Canada. Without provocation, they started ranting about how RFK Jr. was a crazy kook and conspiracy theorist and was doing great harm to people because of his anti-science beliefs. I gave very gentle pushback through simple questions, like "What's crazy about that?" and "Why do you think that's true?"

They did not have the cognitive capacity to handle these simple questions.

Over many years, I've had many conversations with people that have broken minds, and most of the time they become aggressive and abusive. This is the first time that I've encountered in person the most simplistic and stereotypical response - the behavior that is extensively documented in the literature about cults, and brainwashing, and perpetual cognitive dissonance, and everything else that is intrinsic to Woke and Leftism - and it was without any ambiguity.

I could see the ...

Regarding FDR:

@NewDiscourses James, and everyone else for that matter, I suggest that you read/listen to the work of Matthew Ehret (Canadian Patriot, Rising Tide Foundation on substack and YouTube, etc.) and his wife, Cynthia Chung, for a different perspective on FDR.

Their research into the occult underpinnings of the would-be ruling class elite globalists might interest you, too. Ehret claims that FDR has been purposefully misrepresented by his enemies, then and now. Ehret also discusses the "coincidences" of those presidents who were assassinated and their opposition to and/or thwarting of the globalist bankers plans.

I would encourage you to connect with Ehret and Chung as they have many criticisms of both left and right. Ehret hosts a regular podcast on Badlands Media with Ghost-of-based-Patrick-Henry (Gordon McCormick).

Here are some links: https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/fdr-vs-keynes-and-the-city-of-london?utm_source=publication-search

...

September 03, 2025

All over in my various newsfeeds I've noticed that Woke Right has been adopted all over the place to describe what's happening with Tucker, Candace Owens, Carl Benjamin, et al. I think James won this one. Woke Right did catch on!

post photo preview
Catharsis or Civilization: A Statement from Our Founder on the Life of Charlie Kirk
by James Lindsay

I've been trying to share a particular message for a couple of years now, and I can never quite find the words. I doubt I will tonight, but I have to try again because I watched my great friend get murdered over it today.

We have a choice: catharsis or civilization.

There's no other choice for us. We can have a civilization, where people are civilized enough to live, work, and trade with one another in a productive way, a safe way, a trustworthy enough way, or we can abandon it for the pursuit of letting the negative emotions of the past years, decade, or decades consume us.

There's no other choice.

If we choose catharsis, we let our emotions, our Pathos, get the better of us. We turn to our anger and look to give it more justifications. We turn to our frustration and seek an orgiastic release through whatever deeds vents it. We turn to our oppression, our rage, our despair, our fear, and we let it flow through us until the Pathos pours out and covers the land in what will eventually be fire and blood.

Catharsis is tempting, and stepping into it will be libidinous, orgiastic, elevating, and divine, until we realize that it's the feast of demons upon everything we could have built and everything we could have passed on to our children and our posterity.

Civilization is harder. It's bitter, in fact, in comparison to catharsis. It means swallowing hard and taking all those negative emotions and sublimating them into something productive, something that builds rather than makes us feel better. Civilization feels like injustice, in fact, even though it is the only basis for justice outside of Heaven and Hell, if they exist.

If we choose civilization, we're allowed to be mad, but we must temper our anger into right action that builds something to leave a better world, which will dissolve it, of course. We're also allowed to be frustrated, but we must sublimate our frustration into the dedicated search for real and lasting solutions to our problems in a civilization worth living in and passing to our children. We are not allowed to despair, though, and we cannot persist in fear. We must have faith that swallowing and metabolizing all of our negativity to turn it into a flourishing society is possible and worth it, and faith will drive out fear and is the mortal enemy of despair.

Civilization is not available on the wide path. It is the narrow path, at least so far as worldly life goes. Veer too far to one side or the other, or even for too long a moment forget your purpose or principles, and you lose the path, lose civilization, and lose everything worth having.

Without civilization, though, we will find ourselves in a terror beyond our comprehension. Maybe it will be like the philosopher Thomas Hobbes described it in the wake of the terrible English Civil War, when civilization was nearly thrown aside. Violent, solitary or tribal, nasty, brutish, short, a wicked and selfish war of all against all. It looks like the favelas of Brazil.

Maybe we'll end up conquered, fighting among ourselves while our enemies feast on our folly. Maybe we'll end up holding it together, for a little while anyway, under a tyrant who can, for a time, make it all stop and demand order. Maybe we all just end up learning Mandarin and get along mastering the ins and outs of social credit existence.

Civilization is worth fighting for, and catharsis is the kind of momentary pleasure followed by pain that every virtue stands in opposition to. In a civilization we, and each of our children after us, can live as individuals, free to pursue our dreams in sufficient safety and opportunity to generate abundance. Catharsis will be a groupish disaster with all the allure and hangover of a drunken mosh pit.

Again, I'm not expressing myself the way I see this issue in my mind. It's such an important message that I just can't get right, no matter how I try.

What I will say is that, for any differences in the particulars my great friend Charlie Kirk and I have had, Charlie Kirk stood for, lived for, and acted to his dying breath for civilization. He was far too temperate and wise, even at 31, for catharsis.

How can I be sure?

Under strange circumstances once, I found myself out on a skiing boat on a lake with Charlie Kirk. Music was playing, we were having a good time enjoying the morning. Charlie, with his standard grin, bare chest in the sun, laughed a little and explained himself, "I had fun once, guys, and I hated it."

Then he made our host change the music from something fun and hip to... classical. And we ran up and down the lake alongside all the other party boats listening to Bach, Vivaldi, and Stravinsky, not having fun even once and loving it. Charlie Kirk lived for civilization, and nothing remotely like catharsis would have been near his mind, heart, or soul, even in its darkest, most frustrated moments.

Charlie wanted to win, but he wanted to win so that we can move away from evil and move away from cathartic, orgiastic destruction and toward civilizational order, where his family and children could grow up as strong, proud Americans.

More than that, Charlie lived for Jesus, the Logos, as He is named in John 1. He knew the difference between the Logos and the Pathos, human though he was. He understood civilization is built on the rock of Logos, and that it can never be built on the churning sands of Pathos.

That's how I know that Charlie understood the choice I still cannot articulate. We have two options, and only two. They are catharsis and civilization. Charlie Kirk lived that we would have civilization.

May Charlie Kirk not have died such that we spiral into catharsis and evil.

Read full Article
post photo preview
The Dark Heart of Woke: Manufactured Alienation
by James Lindsay

At the core of both Fascism and Communism as radical ideologies is a sense of alienation. In fact, it’s alienation with the injustice of the alienation turned up to eleven. This alienation breeds resentment, envy, hatred, self-pity, and radical politics itself. It is also, in these evil systems, deliberately manufactured specifically for this purpose.

About Radicalism

First, a word about radicalism. What does “radical” mean? It means “at the roots,” or more accurately, tearing out the roots of the existing system to replace them with a new system with totally different roots. Radicalism means wishing to dismantle the existing system and replace it with something the radicals prefer. It almost never works.

Resentment, envy, self-pity, and a certain kind of hatred—not to mention psychopathology—is therefore often at the roots of radical politics. Certainly it is possible that a political system is actually oppressive and needs a radical solution, but it is also very common that the radicals are in a perfectly functional system but don’t feel like they fit within it. When that feeling turns sour, we get radical politics of the sort under examination here.

About Resentment, Envy, Etc., and Their Agitation

Second, a word about the politics of envy and resentment. At the heart of radicalism is a suite of negative emotions that stem from a sense of alienation. These primarily include envy (of those who are not or do not feel alienated), resentment (of the same), hatred (of the same), and self-pity, which is the most destructive of all human emotions. These often tend to sour under the feeling of alienation into something nasty Nietzsche called ressentiment, using the French word to distinguish it from mere resentment. Ressentiment is like envy that has curdled; it’s resentment that has turned putrid and has been directed outward. It’s the feeling the prisoner has for the freeman when he hates him merely for his being free.

Radicalism is often the politics of resentment through alienation, and Woke is no exception. While it’s frequently the case that the person who feels alienated will go on to develop these other emotions at the roots of his radicalism, and thus become a radical himself, it is much more often the case that the sense of alienation is inculcated by others who are already afflicted and that these negative emotions are encouraged to develop to a far larger degree than they might have under organic individual circumstances. That is, I suppose, Woke is a mind virus, and its receptor sites are almost all located in the emotions attached to feelings around fairness and belonging.

Radicals spend much of their time agitating others to join them in their misery, a process they call “consciousness raising.” They are actively teaching people to see themselves as alienated and to feel resentful about it. This is one way Wokeness spreads.

About Alienation and the Alien

Third, a few words about alienation—and therefore also about the “Alien force” that alienates. Alienation here ultimately refers to the idea of being made an alien in or to your own circumstance. In the circumstance of radical politics, what this implies is feeling like there’s a circumstance that fits you, and you belong in that circumstance by some right, and you are or feel removed or estranged from it, likely unjustly.

The sense of political alienation is usually believed to be the result of having been (actively) alienated from your rightful inheritance or sense of belonging in society by some hostile force—the Alien who alienates. It is, of course, generally assumed people would not intentionally remove themselves from their own rightful context. Alienation in radical politics is something that has been wrongly done to you by some force outside of you that you cannot control.

The outside, interloping force that removes the alienated subject from his rightful context and circumstance is, from the perspective of the radical, an Alien power. It doesn’t recognize the legitimate circumstance of society or people’s rightful claim to it and its inheritance. Instead, it comes from outside and imposes itself into and over that circumstance to usurp it for itself. While there's a lot of depth that could be added to this (notably talking about Gnosticism in various stripes), now is not the time for that

Understanding this mechanism and belief structure, which is fundamentally dualistic (split), is absolutely necessary to understanding the underlying mythologies and ideologies of both Fascism and Marxism. Both depend upon it fundamentally and intimately

A Clarifying Example

A sadly familiar example will help us understand. The way the Woke Left sees race and racism is that we should have a fully egalitarian and thus “antiracist” society, but that’s simply not possible. Our “state of nature,” in their eyes, has no racism and no room for racism. So, where did it come from? The short answer is “white people,” but it requires understanding more deeply than just that.

The Woke Left racial mythology (and it is a mythology) is that white people at some point in the past decided upon their own racial superiority and imposed racial categories onto all people specifically to name, maintain, and enforce their own “white supremacy.” White supremacy is an ideology meant to convince all people in society that this outside, artificial imposition both of racial categories and of racialist superiority and inferiority is “real,” “natural,” “just,” or what have you. White supremacy therefore alienates people of color from their full participation in a society that is supposed to be intrinsically “antiracist.” White people, as an interloping Alien force, impose this racial framework and racism to their own benefit and thus alienate themselves from their full humanity, which is supposed to be “antiracist.” In so doing, they become the Alien who alienates by race.

As a brief aside, the Iron Law of Woke Projection is located here. The pathological modes of Fascism and Communism (Woke) do not actually represent true humanity, as they claim, but are themselves an interloping Alien power that alienates people from their societal inheritance in other forms of societal organization. This, though, is what they accuse the mainstream society outside of their cults of doing. The Iron Law of Woke Projection is an iron law, therefore, because the entire psychosocial apparatus of Woke political worldviews is Alien-projection. It couldn’t be otherwise.

Alienation and Fascism

Since I usually start with Marxism and lose people, I’ll start with Fascism, which is actually easier to understand. Fascists fundamentally believe that there’s a past state of their own society that was roughly a golden era that is now corrupted. It fell through the corruptions of some alien powers being allowed sway—that is, through tolerance

More specifically, they have a romantic fantasy about their past as a people and the society and fruits they should have inherited from it, but they are alienated from that society and its inheritance by the inclusion of an interloping power. That power is the Alien that has corrupted the system for its own gain and to their loss

So Fascists look back to some mythological, romantic point they come to believe is their past and feel aggrieved as a people (collective) from having inherited the fruits of that past. Notice that they are likely to write historicist accounts of their past to reinforce this belief and to spread it. They go on to blame outsiders (political, cultural, or ethnic) for having displaced them from a glorious life they’ve lost due to illegitimate impositions of the Alien politics, culture, or ethnicity

In response, they seek to band together (fasces, from which Fascism gets its name, refers to a tight bundle of thin faggots) to reclaim their lost inheritance through brutal political power and the imposition of the romanticized past state as it was, they believe, meant to progress to the glorious future they’ve failed to inherit. (Talk about an entitlement complex….) So the Fascist, ultimately, feels alienated from a glorious society (that never really existed) and the firstfruits of that glorious society. Alienation is at the core of his disposition

Fascists, then, see themselves as alienated or dispossessed political, cultural, or racial elites who have lost the opportunity for an idealized Received Society, which the Alien has prevented them from receiving. The Alien is his enemy, and he must destroy his enemy and reclaim his lost society. Identifying and destroying the Alien who has alienated him—along with its societal enablers—becomes his chief political project. All who do not join him are believed to be sympathizing with and part of the alienating force and are therefore as much Enemy as is the Alien

The Fascist Project of Counter-Alienation

The Fascist project is therefore to awaken people to a consciousness of their alienation—which most will not have detected—and its alleged causes to get them to band together in the effort to reclaim their “future past.” Notice here, then, that it isn’t just a sense of alienation but a manufactured sense of alienation, deliberately spread to others, that drives the process of “awakening” (Woke). Of course, the most awakened Fascists will have to lead the program, not mere recruits, and they will restore the conditions for the common good and a future Golden Era in exchange for everyone’s liberty

Obviously, the “renewal” process begins (and proceeds) through punishing the Alien and its representatives and sympathizers, resulting in tyranny and mass murder. That is, the project is actually one of counter-alienation. Seemingly ironically, in the name of deposing the Alien who alienates them, the Fascists themselves become the imposing Alien force who alienates. This is a crucial point to understand. Rather than seeking to end alienation, they seek to counter alienation with their own more powerful and compelling alienating force. In staring into the abyss, they become the enemy they wish to destroy. Given the suite of negative emotions driving Fascist radicalism, it couldn’t be otherwise.

Who Were the Fascists?

Obviously, since there are different ways Fascists can feel alienated from their idealized Received Society, it can manifest in different ways. Three historical examples make the case

In Italy, the Italian Fascists arose around the idea of displaced Italian Nationalist identity, which was partly based on rejecting the internationalist agitations of Communism. In Spain, the Francoists arose around the idea of a displaced Spanish National cultural identity rooted particularly in Catholicism—so long as it obeyed Franco. It too claimed the internationalist and cultural (especially anti-religious) agitations of Communism as part of the Alien problem, but it hardly limited itself to purging Commies. In Germany, Hitler and the Nazis proposed a hybrid alienation scheme of German Nationalist identity and a German racial identity (based in part in eugenics and in part in the occult ravings of the Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, who, in alignment with pre-existing currents of German antisemitism believed that Jews represented the lowest (spiritual) racial form

Thus, to simplify, the Italian Fascists under Mussolini believed they were alienated from being fully Italian and sought to restore Italian Nationalist identity and usher in progress under its banner. The Spanish Fascists under Franco felt alienated from being fully Spanish and sought to restore Spanish Nationalist and Cultural identity through a kind of Nationalist-Catholic reunification program and usher in progress under its banner. The German Fascists (National Socialists) under Hitler felt alienated from being fully German in both practical and a profound occultist racial senses and sought to restore German Nationalist and mystical-racial identity, from which Hitler believed “high culture” sprung, in order to literally complete history (that is, to usher in progress under its banner). All three were unmitigated catastrophes

A similar utterly failed experiment was conducted in various ways throughout South America under the banner of (Catholic) Integralismo in Brazil, or Brazilian Integralism (reintegration of Catholic Church, state, and economy). Its program was different because the Alien was ironically framed primarily as colonialist in nature (that Iron Law of Woke Projection never misses), particularly blaming Western liberalism and Communism as alienating both indigenous populations and the working classes. South America is mostly Communist today as a result, not least because Integralismo gave way to Marxist Liberation Theology in so many cases (e.g., Dom Helder Camara, the “Red Bishop” of Recife). [No, Pinochet wasn't an Integralist, to be clear, but another sort of Fascist

So, as indicated, we understand Fascism as an ideology of (Gnostic) alienation and resentment where there is some idealized group that is a contingency of history itself who has been displaced from its rightful inheritance by an Alien power that must be destroyed

Alienation in Marxism

I’ll be briefer with Marxism, but it is ultimately the same, differently (same energy, opposite direction).  First, note that if you don’t realize that alienation, “the Alien,” and estrangement are very explicitly at the very center of everything Marxism thinks and talks about, you don’t know anything about Marxism. Marx talked about these concerns all the time and characterized his entire philosophy around them.

Marxists believe that all of humanity is the alienated group, and the bourgeois class is the Alien. That is, certain human beings are alienating all human beings from their rightful inheritance and proper circumstance unjustly for their own benefit

Marxists do not look back to a past romanticized golden era for their inspiration, as Marx told us in 1852, as do the Fascists. They look, he claims, “to the future,” but this isn't quite right and requires understanding Marxism properly to comprehend

Marxists all believe they are alienated from an idealized future that recovers the idealized past. They believe they are oppressed through the Alien who is located in the “dominant” or “oppressing” classes in each society throughout history. Private property becomes the alienating force that estranges man from himself and prevents his realization of the idealized future that recovers the idealized (communal, “social”) past. Marx stated frequently that realizing this idealized future is therefore humanizing, which is a “complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being.”

This belief sounds confusing and crazy, so we should unpack it a little. Marxism actually adopts the dialectical nonsense of the wildly degenerate Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau to outline its (Gnostic) theory of man, history, and thus the future from which we allegedly alienate ourselves. Rousseau believed man is imprisoned by the strictures of civilization and is only truly free in his proverbial State of Nature (“man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”). Rousseau also liked civilization and all its perks, so he dreamed of completing man by finding a way to live in our State of Nature (free and noble “savages”) while retaining all the fruits of society (“savages made to live in cities

Marx echoed this sentiment clearly in his definition of true Communism: “Communism [is] the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore [is] the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development

Marxists believe that all human beings as one giant group alienate themselves from their true inheritance (Communism: a stateless, classless society of plenty for all) by alienating ourselves from who we really are (Communists). We allegedly do so through the acquisition of private property (fundamental right to exclude others from your property), which inherently defines each person as an individual who can hold and withhold property from others (which is the basis for all wealth

People who support the concept of private property are therefore the Alien who alienates all of man from his inheritance, which is his State of Nature while “embracing the entire wealth of previous development.” It is from this preposterous fantasy future Marx believes Communists take their inspiration instead of some stupid, romanticized past era partway along the track. Marxists still romanticize the State of Nature (origin point, Alpha Man) but want him completed (Omega Man) at the same time.

Marxism’s Remedy to Alienation: Sublation

Marx rejects the mere rejection of private property “as human self-estrangement,” though. That, he argues, defines a low, ugly, brutish, dirty “crude Communism” that doesn’t have any higher culture or “wealth of previous development” to grift off of. While Fascism seeks to throw off the alienating force in a kind of counter-alienation, Marxism seeks to transcend the alienation entirely.

The problem is how it’s supposed to get there. Marx’s solution to this problem was through two means: violent revolution followed by “inversion of praxis” by the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” First, there would be revolution, in which the masses would rise up under the direction of the Communists and “expropriate the expropriators.” Then, the Communists would establish a dictatorship in the name of the workers called the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would effectively re-educate, re-train, and brainwash everyone through forced re-socialization (“inversion of praxis”) to become progressively more socialist. The Communists saw this as a kind of remembering of who people really are (socialists), but it’s quite obvious that it’s just another counter-alienation move.

Curiously, Marx saw this process beginning with class consciousness, which he explained begins through “supersession” of the self. How did he say you supersede yourself and come to a class identity? “Supersession as the retraction of alienation into the self,” he explained. That is, you radicalize yourself by coming to see yourself through the lens of your own alienation, which will then awaken that suite of negative emotions that leads to the revolutionary radicalism that drives his project.

Marx’s project, like that of the Fascists in another fashion, is ultimately transformative, though: man must transcend private property, not merely reject it. Only in that way can he retain “the entire wealth of previous development” and high culture while creating a stateless, classless society in which man is as free as he (always) was in his State of Nature, from which he is alienated

Marxist Agitation into Counter-Alienation

Marxism therefore mobilizes class conflict by trying to awaken the exploited classes to their alienation and also some of the exploiting classes to their participation in the total alienation of society (think: “feminism is good for men too”). That solidifies it as yet another destructive counter-alienation project in which a sense of alienation is encouraged and then exploited to their political ends

Those who cannot be awakened into militancy or allyship, the Marxists always believe, have effectively sided with the Alien and must be destroyed. Maybe two hundred million corpses testify to how destructive and impossible this program is in practice. The result we can see: resentful people who conclude their lack of success in life is due to alienation by the Alien power adopt a radical politics intentionally destructive to the existing order

Their objective is to claim as much of the infrastructure of that order as they can (“seize the means of production”) but also to destroy not only everything they cannot but the entire order upon which it is based so they can replace it with their own (which always conveniently place themselves in abusive power they use to alienate people from their own societies as an interloping Alien). It must be this way because the roots of the existing society are ultimately either the Alien itself or that which allows and enables the Alien to alienate

The politics will always be radical. The power claimed will always be abused. Destruction and mass death will always result

These Are the Politics of Resentment

The reason for these Marxist and Fascist catastrophes isn’t superficial. It’s as fundamental as a foundation can be. Their entire world-concept is based on a theory of illegitimate alienation, resentment, pride, entitlement, covetous desire, self-pity, and rank incompetence at anything except manipulation and usurpation

The (Gnostic) metaphysics of the Alien is the taproot of these programs, whatever their forms, scapegoats, and excuses. Since they cannot see beyond these metaphysics, their project is not one of eliminating alienation (or oppression, or injustice) but of counter-alienation. They are always becoming the monster they believe controls the world.

How Are Marxism and Fascism Different?

Marxism and Fascism manifest differently (same energy, opposite direction) because they locate the pre-alienated state in different places and thus bear a different vision for the completed utopian future, but they’re ultimately variations on the same theme. 

Marxists have a better but more fanciful sales pitch: a world of total freedom and no oppression or injustice based on our State of Nature while retaining the plenty we achieved through our Fall from that noble original state. The Fascists boast a more realistic and brutal one: a complete return to a fictionalized Golden Era and the glorious future it promises for our people by kicking out and destroying the interlopers who stole it from us. Marxists, in fancier words, reject historical contingency while Fascists embrace it and place it in different “received” features like politics, culture, or race. 

Why Is This Woke?

What being “Woke” means, ultimately, is having “woke up” to at least one of these dark fairytales of alienation and having committed yourself to “doing something about it.” 

Woke is a distorted consciousness born out of a sense of alienation and is therefore a way of seeing the world and acting in it

The Woke consciousness, necessarily, is critical too, in the sense of Critical Theory. That’s why you could say that being Woke means using Critical Theory. Why? Because as dispossessed outsiders, the alienated people aren’t in a position to challenge (or even fully imagine or articulate) the circumstance that should have been absent the Alien power. They’ve lost or lack the means. What they can do, however, is criticize the Alien power for not being the glorious vision in their dark fairytales, allowing them to pull at the loose threads of existing society and radicalize the people who can be led into feeling dispossessed and resentful of it. 

Woke is therefore a parasitic, toxic mentality that attacks the society it is attached to because it feels wrongly alienated from it. Alienation is at its core, and that alienation is often not so much real as it is profoundly manufactured for the political ambitions of tyrants, some of whom share in the resentment.

Read full Article
post photo preview
Why Cult Beliefs Don’t Stop When Proved Wrong
by James Lindsay

In the 1950s, there was a UFO cult called the Seekers, and it was infiltrated by a psychologist named Leon Festinger who wanted to understand why they believed what they believed and how their beliefs worked. In particular, he wanted to see what happened when their very specific central prediction, around which the cult orbited, did not come true. 

The Seekers believed there was an impending catastrophe that would strike the world on December 21, 1954. On that date, there would be a gigantic global flood. As a cult they engaged in lots of rituals and “awareness raising” activities about the impending disaster. 

The Seekers also believed in aliens—it was a UFO cult. Specifically, they believed that aliens would save the faithful Seekers from the coming disaster. In particular, the aliens would rescue the faithful Seekers for trying to warn people about the coming catastrophe. They also believed the aliens had the power to intervene on Earth if necessary. As everyone might suspect, the aliens would only intervene, believed the Seekers, if there was sufficient faith in Seeker doctrine and its vision of living a moral life on Earth. 

Obviously, what the Seekers believed amounts to a 1950s UFO-based version of the biblical story of Noah recorded in Genesis 6–9. Also obviously, they were completely wrong. 

Leon Festinger understood this and wanted to understand not just the Seekers but the phenomenon of cults. To learn more, he infiltrated the cult, posing as a faithful Seeker, and observed it through the lead up to the fateful December 21, 1954. Additionally, from his position inside the cult, he was positioned to observe and interview subjects when it turned out after that date that nothing of the sort had happened.

Eventually, December 21, 1954, came and went, and… nothing happened. This failed prediction marked a crisis of faith for the Seekers.

What did the Seekers do? Did they abandon their beliefs? No! They did not abandon their beliefs, except in a few individual cases. Instead, most Seekers experienced some form of emotional crisis and emerged from it with a powerfully increased commitment to the Seekers’ cult beliefs. Festinger was intrigued.

Most of the Seekers emerged from the crisis of their failed prediction firm in a new belief. They believed that their faith and devotion had saved humanity because the aliens saw it and intervened to prevent the flood, thus saving not just the Seekers but also humanity at large. Yay, Seekers!

That’s obviously nonsense, but it served as the foundation for the psychology not just around cults but around conspiracy theories (not conspiracies, which are real, but the “theories,” which are borderline crazy crap).

What Festinger observed is that under certain conditions, people do not abandon their conspiracy theories or cult beliefs when presented with solid evidence those beliefs are wrong. Instead, they modify and repackage their beliefs in even more tenuous ways so they can keep believing them. With the Seekers, the aliens magically intervened thanks to their Seeker faith. Who could check this claim? Well, nobody, and that’s the point.

Festinger explained what happened with the Seekers by formulating what’s called the theory of cognitive dissonance, which many have heard of but may not fully understand. When our minds are occupied with two contradictory but strong beliefs (cult doctrine versus hard evidence, for example), a state of great psychological discomfort and unrest called “cognitive dissonance” arises and becomes an impulse for the subject to resolve that discomfort, which is psychological but can be profound and manifest with physical signs.

There are a few roads to resolving the state of cognitive dissonance, but two stand out. One is to double-down on the cult belief or conspiracy theory, which is called “rationalization,” and the other is to accept the hard facts of reality and repent of your error, which is also psychologically painful.

Under many conditions, the psychological pain of facing reality is far too high for most people to bear, and they will instead rationalize. Perhaps the moral implications of their beliefs and resulting behavior is too high, so they cannot face it. This is easily understood. Imagine you transitioned your child and have to cope with the fact that you've done them irreparable serious harm in the name of “inclusion” so you could feel virtuous. That’s hard to walk back from. This recommitment to the beliefs rather than facing the emotional pain of facing the consequences of your error has been called the “Backfire Effect.”

Festinger observed with the Seekers that their commitment to the cult beliefs was too deep, so they could not overcome it. Instead, they not only came up with a rationalization for what had happened that preserved their beliefs; they also specifically came up with a rationalization no one could check—an unfalsifiable rationalization. No one could know whether or not the immensely high-tech aliens and their UFO came close enough to Earth to stop the flood but without being seen. It had to be taken on the Seekers’ word.

It turns out this phenomenon is common. When a cult’s doctrine gets crushed by a collision with reality, the psychological and social importance of the cult or its beliefs can win out and cause the individuals involved to make their beliefs unfalsifiable instead of letting them go.

The question here is why that commitment is so deep. The answer, when factual embarrassment and moral culpability aren’t the only explanations, is almost always that one’s social milieux and sense of identity get wrapped up in the cult and its beliefs that it’s more important to keep seeing yourself in line with the cult than in line with reality. For many people, there’s simply no going back if being part of the cult is who you are and how you fit in.

So how does someone get so locked into a cult that they’ll deny reality, even at the point of catastrophic falsification of their beliefs?

Being socially locked into a cult is usually its primary hold over people, particularly at first. Eventually this social lock will creep into one’s sense of identity through the processes of psychosocial valuation on the self (answering: how do I fit in as a valued member of a community I esteem, thus who am I in relation to this community and in a more universal sense?). At the point when the cult defines your identity and sense of virtue and worth, you’re deep in, and there’s no easy escape.

This gets worse in ideological, political, and religious cult circumstances, especially rigid and militant ones—like Communism, Fascism, Woke Left, and Woke Right. Part of this is psychosocial, as before, though with a particularly vicious twist. You will be heavily punished both socially and psychologically for any defection both while inside the cult and while attempting to leave it—and you know it. In fact, you have probably participated in that punishment ritual against others by the point of being fully ensconced in such a cult.

In ideological cults, though, there’s an even deeper layer because there’s substantial doctrine that allows you to intellectualize your beliefs in terms that sound true and reasonable. This feature facilitates the rationalization process of deepening cult commitment against exposure or contrary evidence (the “Backfire Effect”). While rationalizing the UFOs through unfalsifiable claims seems risible (from outside the Seekers), the ideology of ideological cults is the cult’s rationalization schema turned into a totalizing worldview. There’s already no escape!

Because the conditions of an ideological, totalizing cult can be so vicious to defectors of any kind, rationalization is the easier road in the case of doubt or encountering contradictory evidence, and most (not some) take it. Millions of people died, property was destroyed, and everything fell apart in a horrible war last time we attempted a mass movement based on your “new” world-changing beliefs? That’s because the people back then did it wrong and didn’t believe it sincerely enough! Obviously. Of course, this belief cannot be falsified.

This is the essential feature Festinger noticed, too. The rationalizations of the Seekers were that the aliens came and, from a safe distance, saw the faith of the Seekers and their righteousness and so intervened to stop the flood. No one could see this happen because it was far out in space and very high tech, and the bad thing the Seekers predicted simply didn’t happen. “Nothing happened” became “evidence” that something happened.

The way it was possible is that the Seekers changed the fulfillment conditions of their beliefs without changing their beliefs. Their new belief structure reaffirmed the cult rather than evidence against the cult’s bogus doctrine.

What Festinger noticed, ultimately, is that when cult beliefs and conspiracy theories encounter hard evidence that they’re wrong, or other exposure, most of the cult’s victims will cling to the cult’s beliefs by rationalizing them in ways that render them unfalsifiable.

While the example of the Seekers is clearly instructive, take the example of the moon landing being “fake and gay,” as some people today phrase it. The equipment from that landing is still mostly on the moon, and it has been observed in multiple ways by orbiters and even from the ground (in the case of the mirror array for laser telemetry).

Confronted with this evidence, deniers will counter that the imagery is all faked, probably by NASA, which is also “fake and gay” and also Satanic, including because the acronym represents something nefarious and evil in secret Hebrew which is probably also in the Talmud but only the one Jews will never let you read without having to kill you if you do…or something. The conspiracy mindset only grows deeper, and the evidence in front of their own eyes gets denied. At every turn, new evidence is just more “evidence” of the alleged conspiracy, and the belief becomes unfalsifiable.

Not incidentally, this is in a way similar to the state called “demoralization” that Yuri Bezmenov warned about with regard to Communist subversion. The “demoralized” person, Bezmenov explains, cannot see or comprehend as real evidence that contradicts his demoralized and propagandized view of the world “until the boot comes crashing down on his balls,” at which point he might still rationalize it away.

This is the ideological equivalent of locked-in syndrome, where someone is fully locked into their minds because their bodies are in every way absolutely frozen and unusable, even though they are fully conscious. Another good way of putting it, especially when the cult belief is a political ideology, is that people in (ideological) cults are ideological prisoners of war. People still wearing their masks alone in cars are Covid ideological POWs, for example. So are most deep conspiracy theorists, though for different belief programs.

You might think this is a dumb-people problem. Not so. Notice that rationalization is an intellectualizing and abstracting process, so higher intelligence isn’t a guard against it but a liability for falling into it. Smarter people can rationalize better. If you find yourself wondering how smart people can fall for this stuff, it’s that they’re still human (thus social) and are in a literal sense too smart for their own good. They're expert rationalizers.

Festinger did not have a particularly optimistic prognosis for this circumstance, and I have to admit for myself that as the internet and social media in particular have exploded cult recruitment and expansion (including conspiracy theories), that it's hard to be optimistic about our psychosocial environment under the circumstances we've built for ourselves.

There’s genuinely only one antidote: exposure to reality until the victim of the cult begins to see it for themselves. Something has to become undeniably out of alignment with the cult’s views, and the cults failures and manipulations have to become visible. Only then can the process of escape begin.

This process can take months or years, though, and it will almost never be from a sudden change of mind. The process of leaving a cult is literally called “deprogramming” for a reason.

Read full Article
See More
Available on mobile and TV devices
google store google store app store app store
google store google store app tv store app tv store amazon store amazon store roku store roku store
Powered by Locals