Caustic Ramblings

I was reminded again today during a "debate" on some other platform, that the so-called "Alt Right" is just as bad as the Woke Left. The only thing that makes them less annoying than Woke Progressives, is the fact the Alt Right currently enjoys zero institutional power/influence. So arguing with them is harmless, in that whenever they lose arguments (their ideas are complete garbage, so they always lose to anyone who can slap together a coherent string of statements) they have no sympathetic internet hall monitors to cry to in order to get your account blacklisted or banned from whatever social platform you might be interacting with them on. But hypothetically, if these people were to be in a position of real power, they would probably be just as terrible and authoritarian as the Woke Left is right now when it comes to the exercise of that power.

Now, I do have to say that I used to lurk on some forums and other spaces where Alt Right people would hang out, particularly the "Chan" boards. But this was during the 2014-2017 era, back when the memes originating from the Chans were pretty funny and edgy, and largely spread around the internet in an ironic manner as a pushback against the initial emergence of Woke ideology into the cultural mainstream. After around 2017, with Trump firmly in office, Alt Right memes became stale and played out. By this time, anyone remaining too far to the Right openly found themselves banned from mainstream social media platforms and thus shunted into their own little echo-chambers. And like with any small echo-chamber, an atmosphere of shrill insularity is what results. I find such places to be utterly boring and obnoxious.

Identity Politics vs. the Intellect

Both the far Left and Right ideological camps are each built on shaky foundation of identity politics (idpol). For the Wokesters, it's class-based (PMC) idpol masquerading as various "civil rights" causes which ostensibly exist for the benefit of whatever grab-bag of "underprivileged" demographic groups are currently en-sympathy-vogue among the PMC-Left. And for one particular noisy corner of the Alt Right, the "White Identitarians," it's race-based, and focused on a collectivized "Whiteness" not too dissimilar from what Wokesters today like to focus their rage-energies on. This mentality assumes anyone living in the US who is of primarily European ancestry, must have the same political interests and cultural preferences (this is obviously not the case). Proponents of this particular idpol flavor seem to express the idea that within this homogenous "White" identity, there are no important class or cultural differences (also completely wrong). But I don't have enough space in this brief essay to go into the ins-and-outs of these bad beliefs. I want to instead focus on the main theme one might quickly come across when interacts with these people.

Besides the usual gratuitous racist rhetoric, the main expressive theme is Antisemitism. It's a totally unavoidable stink in those corners of the internet. Spend just five minutes in an Alt Right online space and you'll soon see the Jews being blamed for everything and anything wrong with the world; particularly things involving the downfall of Western Civilization. Of course, never mentioned are any problems with the Western culture itself, nor any acknowledgment of the natural rise/fall cycles every single civilization and culture is subject to, nor the acknowledgment that European Jews are in fact a subculture within the fold of Western civilization. Many of these Alt Righters seem to believe that "Jews" collectively lord over them like a privileged aristocracy. Taken further, "the Jews" are said to engage in all sorts of illicit and debased activities that of course go totally unacknowledged and unpunished. I won't get into the gory details, but I will simply say that many of these accusations are quite reminiscent of the "blood libel" hysteria so common in Medieval Europe. As someone of partial Jewish ancestry, this rhetoric of course rubs me the wrong way, to put it lightly.

Original Sin was always a Stupid Idea

I see the "Blame the Jews" rhetoric as being the mother of all "ancestral guilt" narratives. I see ANY narrative of this type as being a combination of wrong, evil, and stupid. But of course the proponents of these narratives always employ some permutation of the Special Pleading Fallacy to convey the idea that their own brand of hateful garbage is uniquely correct! The Woke Left today has taken the Ancestral Guilt Narrative and turned it onto different set of collective abstractions: "White people" and "whiteness." Though of course the American Woke Left is mostly White, and by that, they don't include themselves as being "White People" in this context. Well, I think this is because it's not actually racial hatred toward Whites as a whole that's at play here, but rather it's class hatred, despite what the more naïve elements of the Right might believe. When Wokesters screech about "White People" what they really mean is White People from the less privileged classes of society, i.e. non-PMC white people. You know, the Deplorables, the Rednecks, the inhabitants of the country's interior "flyover" states who consistently vote the wrong way, ect. But I digress much.

Finally, the racist/antisemitic corner of the Dissident Right so easy volunteer themselves, like the clueless dupes they are, as a ready-made boogeyman/strawman; one that gives the Neoliberal establishment and its corporate media bullhorn an easy villain for its PMC flock to fear as some sort of imminent and credible threat (which of course they are not). The Alt Right volunteer themselves as the the prefect rallying cry to bring unity to what's otherwise a morally-bankrupt and increasingly-degenerate cultural aristocracy. The emerging Populist movement has woken up to the fact that the PMCs hates their guts, though they tend to lack the precise language of class analysis to make crystal clear sense of what's actually going on (i.e. they think it's "Libtards" who are out to get them). Thankfully, most of the Populists are too good-natured to sink to the low of responding in kind to the PMCs with counter-bigotry. No, it's mostly just the Alt Right (who are rebel PMCs for the most part) who do that.

Lastly, I do realize there are other corners and factions of the Dissident Right, and ones that have more interested and nuanced ideas from that of the popular conception of the Alt Right. Maybe I'll get into those groups another time. Though, despite a few observational insights or worth to be found within, I find their ideas to also be intellectually-bankrupt, for the most part.

In my view, paranoia and fundamentalism so often go hand in hand. Take internet conspiracy culture as a prime example of this. One can find no shortage of youtube videos pages and webpages full of rantings and raving about "occult" and "pagan" symbolism being everywhere in pop culture. The cranks, lunatics and opportunists peddling this paranoia would insist that these symbols are mendaciously hidden in plain sight by a cabal of dark-evil-elite conspirators who have infiltrated mass media and big entertainment and are thus using their influence to openly gloat about all the secret occult knowledge they supposedly possess. And go to any video on youtube about any spiritual or religious topic imaginable and you'll see the comments section full of the same type of rabidly-incoherent, frothing-at-the-mouth rants, typically colored by a motley assortment of out-of-context Bible quotations, often in the form of just one or two isolated verses.

The central paranoia of the Christian fundamentalist in particular, is that every type of expression out there in the big bad world of pop culture, media and shared ideas, is an affront to or an attack upon the paranoid person's adopted version of whatever variant of Christianity they happen to adhere to. And of course there are those snowflakes who claim not to follow any particular domination; in their own words their rationalization might be something along the lines of, "I just follow the Bible, plain and simple!" Well, quite simple expect for the annoying fact that there are now more than 40,000 different ways of interpreting that "plain and simple" body of scripture. If this many disagreements do exist, then which one is correct? By what standard is an interpretation correct or incorrect? Who exactly should be vested with the authority of determining which interpretation is the most correct? (Entire massive bloody wars have been fought over this very question) Come on now, if the Bible was a clear and unambiguous message any average Joe could easy understand, then why isn't there just one Christian sect? The clear answer is that anyone claiming that they follow "nothing but the Bible" is either totally full of shit or they have self-deluded their mind into a pretzel.

Essentially, modern Westerners are supremely averse to genuine spirituality, and this is especially true for the most fervently "religious" Westerners. They are in fact the greatest enemies of spirituality. Modern modern people are materialists in one form or another. At least secular modern people are just ambivalent about or lackadaisically dismissive of spirituality, as opposed to wanting to wage "holy" wars against it. Literalist Christian fundamentalists are materialists and empiricists when it comes to everything in existence except the what they believe their scriptures say. And even then they glean a mostly-materialist worldview from the Bible. Jesus Christ **had** to have been a literal historical person, and the events depicted in the Gospel narrative **had** to have happened literally, word-for-word. The oh-so-lofty concepts of allegory and archetypes be damned!

People in general tend to be fearful toward what they cannot (or simply refuse to) understand. And thus they may project and lash out all their inner insecurities and psychic impurities toward anything reeking of higher wisdom. Think of the envious student who speaks using the worst of profanities against the teacher who flunked them for poor performance. And with the modern cultural take on Western individualism, so many people are cursed with a puerile entitlement complex that beams into their minds the notion that they are "owed" things for the mere feat of existing as an **individual**. And thus, in the realm of metaphysical matters, the Truth should simply fall into one's lap, regardless of their own particularity moral character, in-born temperament or level of accumulated merit. Nothing should be rightfully earned through effort and struggle; everything should be freely given out, because reasons.

The age-old Master/Apprentice dynamic has been pissed upon many times over by the hyper-entitled man/woman-child Westerner. And perhaps we could state that the 60s counterculture "revolution" only fanned the flames of this noxious adolescent mentality; everything thereafter became all about "me, me, me, me, myself, and I." The postwar (WWII) economic bonanza, coupled with the rapid advance in material high-technology, was the gasoline that made these flames 100x higher. And now with the internet, where everyone had all the information (or porn) they could ever want at their fingertips, the demand for instant answers to everything is even more magnified than before.

The self-righteous fundamentalist feels a seething rage toward any type of religious knowledge that is directly out of his reach. According his passion-ridden materialist mind, if **he** doesn't see it then it simply isn't there. And anyone who does insist it is indeed there must have some kind of hidden, nefarious agenda up his sleeve. Obvious the fundamentalist's personal God is an egalitarian and democrat who freely puts out all the secrets of the universe for anyone to effortlessly comprehend without any serious effort required. Within the paradigm of modern materialist science, if the scientist (in all likelihood, a glorified technician or doctor of rote memorization) can't read something with the instruments available to the practitioners of his field, then the proposed phenomenon in question simply doesn't exist, rather than being something that may or may not exist.

Homo Hubris is the man of the current era.