For some time now I’ve wanted to write a companion piece to Ted Kaczynski’s account of the average leftist in “Industrial Society and Its Future,” a.k.a. “The Unabomber Manifesto.” It’s one of the most valuable and enduring parts of the Manifesto, providing an acute description of the social and psychological factors that make modern leftists who and what they are, the things that drive their perpetual revolt against all that’s good and nice and sane and human. I’m not a trained psychologist, but then again, neither was Uncle Ted. You don’t need to be to see what’s going on.
I think there are very clear similarities, actually, between left — and right-wingers in their motivations, especially if we’re talking about the less mainstream parts of the right like the so-called “dissident right,” and I think these similarities would reward a detailed examination. Providing one would also piss off certain people, and increasingly I’m in the mood to piss those people off, since they’re making themselves a huge burden for anybody who has the misfortune to be associated with them, by choice or otherwise.
Take what Kaczynski calls “feelings of inferiority,” for example. Kaczynski says one of the two main reasons leftists are the way they are, besides being “oversocialised” (meaning they tend to overidentify with particular social values like equality and anti-racism), is pervasive feelings of inferiority. Leftists feel inferior, for various reasons, including physical ones, and so they lash out at the things that make them feel that way.
It’s not hard to understand.
Here’s a good passage from the Manifesto.
“Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.”
Most right-wingers are content just being hobbits, harmless little creatures with parochial tastes and concerns
What Kaczynski is describing is something like the structure of resentment, rooted in weakness, that Nietzsche believed was the cause of the “slave revolt in morality,” an actual historical process that produced Christianity and then much later its afterbirths liberalism, leftism, socialism and communism. The weak masses revolt against the dominant values of the aristocratic minority, which in reality are just an extension and justification of aristocratic life, and in the process of revolting against those values, they turn them on their head.
Everything that’s good becomes bad; everything bad, good.
Right-wingers like to tell themselves, buttressed by Nietzsche and increasingly by age-old arguments about biology and physiognomy, that resentment is the exclusive possession of the leftist. They’re the resentful ones, not us. They’re the ones who feel inferior — because they are. But, really, that just isn’t the case. Right-wingers are driven by resentment as much as leftists; although I think there are some interesting variations in the way that resentment manifests itself and why.
I’ve found myself increasingly referring to a number of different people “on our side,” mostly in private conversations, as “inverted leftists,” because I don’t really think of them as right wing at all. These people, who will remain nameless, strike me as leftists who’ve simply ended up on the right because the left doesn’t want them. For whatever reason, often through personal fault of character — perhaps they’re just so disagreeable that even leftists can’t tolerate them — these people have been made outcasts and so, isolated and embittered, they end up in the only place that really does have endless lebensraum for isolated, embittered, disagreeable people: the right wing and its fringes.
But resentment on the right is more widespread than that, especially when we’re talking about the dissident right. To see this, you only need to have a little bit of success yourself, or pay attention to what happens to those who do.
Anybody who has any success in our little corner of Twitter soon faces accusations that they are, in fact, paid agents of someone or other; they couldn’t simply be enjoying organic success on the basis of their ideas or personality or both. Oh no. They have to be bought and paid. The paymaster is usually Peter Thiel or its (((the Bedouin))) or Mossad and Israel; although they’re all connected in the end, apparently.
A whole ecosystem of small-to-mid-sized accounts now exists for the sole purpose of providing a “media market” education about the Thiel-funded right-wing bodybuilders and the Dimes Square takesellers (also funded by Peter Thiel) and so on. These gurus start drawing overlapping circles and crazy diagrams that wouldn’t look out of place on the walls of Rust Cohle’s lock-up, except their diagrams have nothing to do with anything and Rust Cohle was totally right about the Yellow King and Carcosa and the green-eared spaghetti monster who scared that little girl way back in “92.
Some might call this plain old tall-poppy syndrome, which is a pretty common thing, maybe even universal, but I think there’s more to it than that. There’s individual malice at work, for sure — many of the self-appointed gurus are angry their podcasts or their dumbass health grift failed, or they got kicked out of Sovereign House because they’re just revolting and smell and scare the hoes — but there’s a more general truth at work too. The right as a whole has been conditioned to fail, over decades and decades, in what amounts to a collective form of Pavlovian reinforcement. Right-wingers are so accustomed to losing, to being kept on the outside, to being disappointed and betrayed, that as soon as things do start to go their way, they don’t know how to react — except to kick out with the same defeatist accusations, like the tortured dogs they are.
It’s the Gates of Toledo all over again!
And what makes it worse is that there’s literally no place on the political spectrum that’s further from the centre of power and influence than the dissident right, nowhere that’s further from involvement in what Kaczynski called “the power process,” which provides satisfaction and a sense of achievement in life. By joining the dissident right, or ending up there, the most likely outcome is you’re committing yourself to a life of ignorance and impotence, and there’s no way that’s good for the soul. At the very least, you have to guard against these things twisting you, and there’s no guarantee they won’t, even if you’re strong and talented.
Which isn’t, of course, to say that this makes the dissident right or its ideas wrong. It doesn’t. Large parts of the dissident right worldview, if there is such a thing, are correct, and for what it’s worth I certainly don’t consider myself to be a part of the mainstream or “traditional” right. But these circumstances do predispose members of the dissident right to a peculiar form of resentment that makes trying to do anything within the sphere far more challenging, and ultimately self-defeating, than it should be.
Ted Kaczynski was concerned with why leftism, as a manifestation of the particular nature of industrial society, is so dangerous to everyone. An account of right-wing character, by contrast, would have to deal with why right-wingers tend to be dangerous only to themselves and their own credibility.
I’ve actually been thinking about this contrast quite deeply over the last week or so because of the recent “Basketweavers” exposé published by Hope Not Hate, which I featured briefly for some reason known only to them. The Basketweavers are one of these voluntary groups that claims to be creating parallel social structures and a new “counter-elite” for when Based World finally arrives. In reality, though, they’re all just hopelessly retarded, and what they’re really creating is a huge stinky mess for anybody who’s close enough to get splashed when the shit hits the proverbial fan, as it inevitably does.
I was going to write something at length about the nature of the exposé and the repeated failure of these “counter-elite” groups on the right to do any vetting or gatekeeping whatsoever, but then I just thought — I can’t be bothered. I also don’t want to carry any water for an organisation — Hope Not Hate, I mean — that was responsible for revealing my identity and acts as a state-sponsored organ of left-wing terror.
Anyway, if you want to understand why the real problem for the right is almost always a personal one — a matter of character, judgment and taste, meaning human capital — look up the report. You’ll understand exactly what I mean.
I’ll summarise: You can read as much Gaetano de Mosca as you want and proclaim yourselves to be an “elite-in-waiting,” but if you let people into your group who are obvious infiltrators and then you all go down the pub and take pictures of yourselves doing Nazi salutes — well, you deserve everything you get because you’re not serious people. You’re fucking morons.
It rather puts me in mind of Curtis Yarvin’s piece about dark elves and hobbits, which I still haven’t actually read in full. I think I get the gist of it though. You need elites — elves, of one variety of another — to achieve anything in the political realm, but most right-wingers are content just being hobbits, harmless little creatures with parochial tastes and concerns.
A hobbit can pretend to be an elf, but it won’t fool anyone. There are the hairy feet, for one thing, and the size, and then there’s the reek of pipe smoke and the constant eating.
Here’s my advice. Stick to being a hobbit. It’s less painful for us all.
