Hope of the Online Right

We Are Winning

Alex Kuchetta and Pedro Gonzalez tried to declare the online right a failure about two weeks before Bronze Age Mindset was positively recommended for the first time in a New York Times interview.

The online right-wing, which developed especially around the Bronze Age Pervert, but has grown to include a constellation of independently successful writers and thinkers, is far from dead. I have never met Kuscheta, and I haven’t spoken with Pedro in about 3 years, so I don’t know what all went into their foolish pronouncement. The point is that all clear eyed observers can see their pronouncement is driven by a desire to attack the existing online right rather than an impartial diagnosis of its “failure.”

As someone who isn’t a “success” of the online right, but who has at least been around a long time and dished out a few bangers here and there, I am in a good position to assess the online right—being well disposed to its figures and aims, while being neither financially or emotionally dependent on its success or failure.

How the online right is a success is obvious: the number of followers commanded by the principal accounts typically top 100k. The engagement these accounts get far outstrips the engagement of accounts in other online “camps.” The readership for the online-right writers is wider and more interesting: when “established” writers try to set up shop on their own, apart from institutional support, they regularly find that fewer people read them than they thought or hoped. They look at anons plugging away and think, “well I will definitely rack up bigger numbers” and then poof, bang, they have trouble gaining traction.

How did this happen? What was and is the hope of the online right, such that young talented men continue to look to it for friendship, education, entertainment, edification, purpose, and much else?

The Hope of the Online Right

We look for a new enlightenment, rather than promising to restore what can’t be restored, or “return” to what we left behind for good reason. Kuschetta insists “the online right is just vibes, nothing more than vibes.” Vibes and aesthetics play a role but are not the whole. There is a budding right-wing enlightenment that breaks from the egalitarianism of the European Enlightenment, while embracing the European Enlightenment’s emphasis on science and technology.

An enlightenment of this kind represents a new project that could succeed and remake so much of what is broken today. It rests on two compelling premises.

First, it seems like America and our civilization generally has stalled. Does that mean our faith in nature and nature’s God was misplaced? Not at all. The truth of nature was hidden, covered over, to accommodate the weaknesses of men. We must (and thankfully can) recapture the truth of enlightenment, namely, that all men seek their own interest, that the bad are bad through no fault of their own, and that good men are distinguished from bad men by their excellence rather than their obedience to authority. The bad are driven by their self-interest to distort nature and lie about her because they are unlucky, whereas the excellent are driven by their self-interest to unveil nature and defend her because they are her beneficiaries. Bad men are driven by anger and dissatisfaction with a world they seem so poorly suited for, while the good men are driven by a love of life.

Second, in unenlightened times, men believe in divine sanctions; for example, the Athenians claimed Athens on account of their being autochthonous to it, i.e., literally grown from the earth where the city was. The kingdoms of Europe grounded their right to Feudal authority on divine right, i.e., God granted men the authority to unify into a kingdom and hold sway over their respective lands. In today’s discourse, fools believe there are “indigenous peoples” who, by that fact, have a right to the land that “colonists” or “oppressors” “occupy,” i.e., that there is a “right of first occupant,” somehow justified by the fact that “first occupancy” is the only peaceful way to possess turf. The enlightenment of old times and the rightwing enlightenment of today are not deeply concerned with “right of first occupant” so much as “the right of the better.” By dropping this apparently common, all too common, need for justification, the enlightenment allows men to frankly admit the nature of things to themselves: good men need to organize politically; they need to have a country of their own, i.e., a place that is theirs to the exclusion of “mankind”; they need to be free to focus on philosophy and war. These needs, on account of their being actual needs, are justification enough. A good example of an enlightened position: let’s say you were an enlightened Jewish man. A homeland carved out in some lovely and amenable part of the world would be as good and perhaps better than a homeland in Israel. The divine claim is not necessary. If you were an enlightened Jew, and there was no divine sanction promising your people Israel, you would not by that fact say “well we are forever stuck being an alien people in some other people’s homeland,” you would instead say, “we can, if we want, organize into a political body and make some country of the earth our own country, our own homeland.”

Let me put that point in strictly Nietzschean terms. In the past, men had what was called a “horizon.” This horizon was good for “life.” But it was not true; the truth has destroyed the horizons of mankind. Truths like “the earth orbits the sun,” “stars suffer birth and death,” “man descended from apes” destroy horizons. They all suggest that man is more or less an accident; that he is not a planned or purposeful part of the whole. There may not even be a “whole” to speak of. This leaves mankind with one last horizon: the hard, horizon destroying, truth. Enlightened men of today, believing that the Universe is all there is, and believing it isn’t concerned with them, also know that man needs a horizon. The enlightened men of today are those who are strong enough to establish their own horizon: a grand struggle for the cultivation of the aristocratic type against all odds. Horizons of OLDEN TIMES selected for and supported the aristocratic type. The implication of a horizon-less world is that there is no way of distinguishing good men from bad men, no reason to take life so seriously. The truly enlightened men struggling to cultivate the aristocratic type are pitted against the falsely enlightened men of the modern age who believe they have discovered the utter meaninglessness and frivolity of life. The truly enlightened have enemies in the falsely enlightened, and vice-versa. This boundary between the good and the bad is Nietzsche’s man-made horizon; a horizon made possible by the historical situation of mankind after the success of the European Enlightenment. Indeed, this is the last possible extension of that enlightenment, a perfection of it once its basic tenets have conquered and subsequently been misunderstood.

The American twist on the Nietzschean project:

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.

(from Longfellow, The Builders)

For Nietzsche, the final extension of the Enlightenment project would remain atheistic. Unlike Nietzscheans who thought “well that’s that for God,” the American poets and intellectuals set out to deserve the gods again. BAP seems to follow this line in his book.

Please no say “there no proof,” “I didn’t see it.” Scientific proof would be totally forbidden here: in fact there are many strange occurrences that have been recorded by many, as much as any event can be recorded, but this lacks any scientific meaning, it’s a case of “not applicable.” If an impish deity of the lower kind, with which the world is full, some purple goblin with a wicked face showed itself to a pedant in a white coat, the scientist would convince himself he was hallucinating—and in any case, without being available for study, for testing, for experiments that can be seen by others (this standard has been abandoned for many fields lately), its existence would not fall within the power of “science” at all. No, and what do you say to ancient accounts that such creatures showed themselves to men before, and maybe still do? Why would they show themselves to you? The weakness and spinelessness of modern man—no god would show himself to such creatures, to be jeered at! Why? Remember why the young men in Mishima’s story of the League of the Divine Wind were so inflamed with passion and anger on behalf of the immortal gods. They knew that, without them, without the breed of warriors, the many would forget the gods. They would become powerless spirits hiding among the reeds, the subject of superstition, ridicule. The true gods have a kind of power, but not the kind the many imagine. Why should they care for mankind? They are rare and precious, and it is for man to find, acknowledge, and honor them. This, at least, was the ancient view: and the foundation and preservation of oracles was the first question of life and also of statecraft. Gods could not control nature or fate, but could reveal its workings at key times. If a god showed himself today to you, in a dream, would you have the inner energy and power to honor him and do his bidding in the world? Or would you, neutered by the modern pervasive hivemind of the slave, dismiss it, and yourself as unreal or unworthy, when it is the modern bugman and his blabbering that lacks reality. But I want you to be intoxicated with the highest enthusiasm and ready to receive these greatest blessings with great confidence! (BAM, 24)

Cultivation – Something to Do

My personal hope when I learned of the Online Right was that it would specifically strengthen the Straussians. My writings on this explain my position well enough: What is Straussianism, Straussian Temperature Check, and Straussians and the Bronze Age Pervert are some essays that are still available. My first real attempt was the essay “The Justice of BAP” which was published in the old Experiments in Honesty website. This hope failed to play out. Does that mean the online right is a failure? I don’t think so. I think Gonzalez and Kashetta are interpreting their own failures as failures of the online right. But what can they say about people like BAP, REN, and Lomez who are clearly successes? What do they think of Yarvin’s stardom? If the nerd is getting the girl, that’s clearly due to some success.

Most importantly, there are so many things to be done! Here were some of the original hopes held out—the kinds of things we were going to do, are doing, and still can do.

Those of us on the online right were to undertake a regimen of self-cultivation with the understanding that we would serve as models for those to come, and rebukes to our rulers and the mass of mankind that seeks the destruction of higher life.

We could benefit ourselves and others by cultivating our bodies.

We could benefit ourselves and others through unearthing the true history of the world, rather than a history shaped by ideological need.

We could benefit ourselves and others by reviving the study of Ficino’s Christian Platonism.

We could benefit ourselves and others by raising the standard so high as to be nearly indistinguishable from philosophy itself. Instead of indulging in frivolous “I like my philosopher” debates, we were to raise the philosopher as a type and see what in each reflected the fastidious excellence characteristic of the philosopher. We were going to lay history bare and show the inner agreement between all genuine philosophers, even if it meant dangerously denigrating their unserious disagreements that mankind takes so seriously.

These four examples suffice to make the point: the new right seeks to combine self-cultivation, benefiting our friends, and furthering an interesting political project.

Currently academia claims to be the place where self-cultivation meets public service. I still think the online right should take over departments, found schools, produce scholarship and books, and attack the regnant academic lies and norms.

Outside Academia

These projects can be carried on outside academia—obviously, and thank goodness. I still believe men or groups of men carrying on enlightenment cultivation projects need to keep in mind that academia is their enemy and will try to discredit their efforts.

In the end, there are two things always needed: talented men and money. Right now, the Establishment Left and its various intellectual adjuncts hope to keep the money from reaching the talent. The solution to this is just time and effort: we keep pushing, they keep losing.