I have lately seen a number of posts on Substack decrying the vanity of all our talk. They ask impatiently “What is the point of all this intellectualising in the face of a very practical doom?”; they accuse this forum of naval-gazing and hair-splitting while we should be sharpening our swords. I sympethise, and find some grounds for agreement. I sympethise, but I believe that these voices are missing the point.
Where we are now is a talking shop. Substack is a medium of written rhetoric, and this thing we have developed in our eccentric corner of it, whether it remains on these servers or not, is a forum of written rhetoric. It is an arm of the greater body of dissident spirit, and though its possibilities are limited they should not be undervalued.
Those calling for a more eminently practical direction often have not appreciated the sharp edges of our situation. Whilst we can provide certain practical encouragements between ourselves and foster substantive offline brotherhoods, nothing more acute than this is practical here, or anywhere else in internet land. We are watched by unknown eyes, both flesh and silicon. Moreover, even if this were not the case, the amount of acrimony now seen on Substack over relatively abstract matters would seem as nothing compared to the rancour which would erupt over competing practical strategies. Our philosophies are not yet well aligned and our circumstances vary tremendously, so calls to action are largely sound without meaning. Action is necessary; reaction is eventually inevitable, but what is effective and what is just cannot be prescribed en masse. The actions of men are conditional, and if they are wise men we can hope for more from them than any cleverly devised strategy could engender.
Yet is is inevitable that we should feel impatient, and it is understandable that we sometimes trip over an inward doubt that our reading and writing here is no more than mental onanism. Therefore let us give a thought to the why and how of this dissident writing chamber. To be named a talking shop is to be insulted, but I say that there are two kinds of shop. One is a dispensary, a cubicle of the market where goods (and often ills) are sold according to fashion and demand. This we should not be, and we have sometimes been tempted into the mores of the marketplace by pragmatism and faulty cultural upbringing. The other is a workshop, where the skilled worker exerts his skill to bring about a thing of worth. Perhaps he cannot be wholly careless of making money, but his shop is primarily a place of labour and the refinement of talent, where the necessary and beautiful is brought forth. To this end I offer a logic for our discourses under three heads; formation, training and distribution.
Formation
First and foremost Substack is a place where we are coming into formation. We are being aligned by respect for the best strains of ideas, enlarged by a shared wealth of potent facts, and sharpened in the facets of our understanding by common consideration of the towering problems and boundless prospects which have brought us together. We are making up our mind. Some of this is through the combative opposition of clashing principles, but those principles go out in the same general direction, and at a great tangent from the line of modern convention. Mostly it is not a process of dialectics which is refining us into a more holistic agreement but rather the passion itself which invests us with the energy to argue in the first place; we care. Perhaps some discords are superfluous, but almost all are earnest and intelligent, not the kind of half-ironical word-mongering of conventional media channels.
I have previously argued that we are not really “right wing”; I would prefer to call our shared motive “rectification”, as John Carter rendered in from my argument. I believe that this is more widely felt now. Many of the ideas we share are old, even perennial, but the character of what we are about is basically new. It is not simply the continuation of a political tradition, or the renovation of a spiritual outlook; it has a flavour of its own that can be recognised by those within it. We smile with a wry smile when we hear the shadow of our population being called “far right extremistm” not only because it is lazy and cynical, but because even if our detractors spoke in good faith they have not the eyes to see nor the ears to hear what the spiritual crux of our passion is.
Believe it; this little cultural cul-de-sac, this few thousand essays on the last redoubt of public free speech, is the bleeding edge of live truth in the world. You might find instances of deeper penetration, greater genius or more perfect understanding elsewhere in individual publications, but nowhere this energetic joint pursuit of reality; of Rectification. This circumstance may not last long. Rurik Skywalker, amongst others, has a strong distaste for “ideology” and “philosophy”. I can understand his healthful antipathy, especially by his own reasoning, but for want of better terms we are forming an ideology and philosophy, but the ideology is not strictly political and the philosophy is not rarefied; they are natural outgrowths of a spiritual motivation.
We should keep this purpose of formulation in mind in what we do. Each word laid down, each discussion, is shaping the structure forming in our minds individually and corporately. Does it do justice to the overarching spirit? For indeed, though we ourselves are building out this nexus of thought, we may not be able to take full credit for its emergence. To some degree this motley posse of voices crying out in the wilderness is the chosen body of the vital, necessary truth, call it angel or egregore or folk soul. This is not to say that we must all play quiet and nice, or go with humorless seriousness, but that we should move with a certain respect for the weight of the process; be earnest and act according to the principles suggested implicitly by this spirit. For example; it has often bothered me how much I and others have leant on the habit of peppering essays with images. The direction of the spirit of our Substacks naturally pushes us toward being men of focus, discernment and depth, and pricks us everywhere to abandon the trappings of modern trends. Do we need the entertainment of vaguely apposite pictures every third paragraph? Maybe it is undeniably effective as a strategy for the success of internet “content”, but such strategies are trained on the common behaviours of crowds, and we must become an ever more uncommon crowd. Let us cast off trivial habits. This may seem itself a trivial point, but this cohesive spirit being formed is also a matter of taste, which Ruskin told us was ultimately the only morality. It costs us little to exert and exhibit a better taste in such a matter, and nudges us a little further into the mold of men worth knowing.
By the intermixture, winnowing and synchronisation of thought we are formulating a thing here, and that thing is made mostly of our own selves. Sure there is a deal of duplication and specious wrangling, but that should not blind us to the actual value of our councils. We cannot define simply what we respect; we do not conform to an explicit manifesto, but all of our talk has been far from pointless. Movements, cultures, substantial friendships; these things are not made by just “getting down to business” and talking brass tacks. By a million agreements, disagreements and coupled contemplations a living theme is brought forth.
Training
We respect the ideal of hierarchy. We gasp for the birth of a worthy elite. Well, look around you; this is more or less it. By this stage a considerable proportion of the men with an active thirst for reality and the intelligence to slake that thirst have found their way to this corner of Substack in one way or another. I wonder if anybody has managed to make a rough census of the population of dissident Substack? Apart from intelligence agencies of course; that goes without saying. My guess would be that whatever that number is would account for more than a third of the men in the world with the motivation and capability to qualify them as an elite worthy to enter the future. I don’t take very seriously the idea of “counter-elites” already successful in our civilization; Musks and Trumps and Carlsons. Success does not make one elite, and success in a banal and backward world tends to indicate against nobility. This can be observed in a number of ways, such as the level of our discourse, which (when we aren’t goofing around) is so far beyond the tone of general culture as to be untranslatable, but is most surely evidenced by the simple fact that the ethos of our efforts is dedication to reality; to cleave to it ever more closely no matter how uncomfortable and inconvenient it is. A few make a living here, but nobody is getting rich, and many of us write and read at the risk of personal blow-back. Of course any intellectual subculture will cry the same of themselves. The journalists all profess to “truth above all” as their guiding star. Well, I don’t need to labour this point; we err often enough, but the difference with us is that it’s basically true. There are many practical benefits to chasing truth and reality, but truth is a principle, a spiritual lode star, and the pursuit of ineffable, unconquerable principle is a better marker of nobility that a thousand more palpable evidences. Seek first the kingdom of God. We are a germinal elite. Having nothing to rule we are not an aristocracy, but a nobility is no less a nobility is obscurity and perplexity. Elites have to come from somewhere in the first place, and heaven or history is churning the order of all things as we watch. We might not rise in the churning for many long years, but we or our children or their children will shoulder some kind of eminence out there beyond our current horizon, and it is not vanity to think of ourselves as set apart. To qualify this I would say that a significant proportion of a true elite will be found amongst us; our habituating these essays is obviously no qualification in itself. To the extent that this implied elite is actual, the discourse of Substack must function to train it as an elite whilst testing its prospectants; a school both trains and tests.
Many worthy men, many capable men and many sensitive men exist outside the Substack world and the tide of dissident thought, of course; many objectively better men, in fact, than the average member of this enclave. Yet this subset here has more of the character of an elite, evinced by an active concern, by intellectual grappling with the issue. An intellectual grappling is not enough eventually, but it is evidence of proper will. Our virtues are nascent and incomplete, but we are animated by ambition and interest in a way that others, including some men of greater accomplishment, are not. We are not satisfied with ourselves, and we will not be satisfied if we find ourselves only better than the level of our culture. We will not be satisfied if by some miracle a fresh political weather makes us secure and comfortable in our day as our parents were in theirs. Our interest in the workings of the world is not idle curiosity or pragmatic self-interest; it is a soul-urge to know, with a feeling that we ought to know; that somehow this understanding is our proper concern.
Whilst an elite need not be marked by intellectualism, the exercise of intelligence and a heartfelt concern to understand the broadest realities possible do denote an elite. Even regarding virtues of physical, mental and moral strength, it is not so much what you’ve got as what you actively aspire to- and why you aspire- which defines an elite. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Of course there is a strong component of blood and natural talent to any nobility, but still, the Catholic athlete of good stock with an engineering degree and an iq of 130 who is satisfied with his gifts and largely unconcerned with realities beyond the gates of his ranch may be a less promising candidate for an elite than the many impecunious Substack readers struggling to thirty press ups and laboriously reading Thomas Carlyse with the aid of a dictionary in the bleary hours of the morning. The latter is not just trying to get to the condition of the former, but hopefully looks to a higher and wider state, of Rectification within himself first, but of his people also, so that they can stand to heights which only imagination has so far suggested. Imagination itself is key.
The training of an elite must be very broad. Other writers have made worthy efforts to describe what such training is, but most of its disciplines must be pursued alone or with a few like minds in the solid world. Yet sharpness of thought, beauty and cogency of rhetoric, power of comprehension; these things can be fostered here. They are already. In various discussions I have had with other writers I am often amazed and sometimes humbled at the incredible scope of their erudition, and yet this is usually free from the flavour of brittle scholasticism; it is a lively understanding. Even in technical and mathematical prowess our ranks are not wanting, but such specialism is not necessary to the fruitful high-training of minds. We need strong wits, honest mastery of language, supple flexibility of mind. We train ourselves to see and to convey that which is significant. An element of this is competitive, and it should be competitive. Whatever our subscriber counts, we should be competing to tell the most truth best. We should be producing our own Emersons, our own Gayley-Simpsons, and we will. We fortify our limbs elsewhere, we perfect our self-command elsewhere. This is a forum of writing, of argument and intellect, and we should use it as it is suited.
We can also say that dissident Substack is possibly the best possible educational primer for a new nobility in terms of curriculum. Though not everything here agrees, we have a precious wealth of recapitulated knowledge, often improved and expanded in its recapitulations. A few hours reading our best writers can equal or better many weeks reading university library shelves in terms of direct, discerning understanding, and expose you at breakneck speed to a dizzying constellation of significance from Blake to cyberpunk to the real reason for the price of bread. The fact that what you read here is largely free means that we can garner a profit of knowledge out of all proportion to word count, and in this we are privileged beyond a student in the most conventionally prestigious institutions.
Our knowledge must be better than that of society, more true and more comprehensive. Along with various other qualities, we must have the articulate power of mind to wrestle such knowledge into the service of practical wisdom. This is an arena for such training, almost perfect in its way.
Distribution
Distribution is the practical purpose which dissident Substack is suited to; distribution of information, advice, aids and contacts. Distribution is not organisation. Substack is not the catacombs where revolutionaries gather to elect their capos and discuss battle tactics. It is more like the coffee houses of old London or certain pubs and barrooms which become the spiritual and intellectual home of a movement, political, artistic or otherwise.
As alluded to in the last section, our unsecret club offers a vantage of factual reality which is almost unique, and which it is imprudent or illegal to offer in the outside world. We are publicly audible, so we must be measured in our words, but with very little euphemism we can convey understandings which are disproportionately potent. These understandings are to our great advantage now and in the future. What we distribute here are puzzle pieces to a functional map of the working of the modern world. We might sometimes get a few pieces mixed up or upside down, but people outside are not even allowed to handle such puzzle pieces. Even if all we ever rule is ourselves, even an incomplete map may allow us to navigate much more wisely through our decisions. I would bet that few people reading this are ever going to take a vaccine again, and could probably tell you cogently why not, nor are they likely to be eating much seed oil, buying electric cars or voting for the lesser of two evils. Information- valid information- it is stored here by the tonne and distributed calmly and intelligently to any who need it. This is different from the sense of “training” outlined in the last section; here I mean the distribution of information as a means of advantage to living which aid us in ratcheting our chances upward.
Mostly we are alone in our quest. Few of us can count even a single man known to them locally who live in the same world intellectually, even if we have a few “based” friends. Therefore our development is solo or in small groups widely separated. Simple advice and direction therefore becomes invaluable. A truly motivated man can likely do without explicit advice on how to do anything in our day; few things are beyond the reach of quick research, yet he can be aided in receiving recommendations from like minds. Their advice is likely to be more efficiently pruned, and more geared to his purposes and principles. He is also more likely to trust the advice of men who share his bent, and validity has a way of clumping together. Clear sight in one thing aids clear sight in another thing, and the man who can puncture the political fables of his day is at least a little more likely to give sound suggestions on poetry and nutrition.
What we distribute between ourselves is for the enrichment of ourselves, making ourselves what we must become. Dissident Substack is not evangelical, it is not pamphleteering. Scant little of what is written here aims at converting anybody to our lane; it assumes we are in the same lane, even if we buffet one another a bit, and the whole effort of our discourse is to perfect our strength and understanding. In so far as it is possible it is very good that we can distribute relationships which can germinate in the real world, but this is not the place where we form a tangible nexus. We distribute that amongst ourselves which serve to make us each and all men worth connecting as need and opportunity arise; or if not then as islands of living nobility in the stream of our individual lives. Robert Frost tells us rightly, “all men work together, whether together or apart”. But they have to be men. We strive to be men, and if we reach that lofty attainment then we can be assured that our efforts are neither vain nor truly disjointed, whatever befalls.
So I put it to you that dissident Substack is good for what it is, and our impatience should not induce us to try driving a screw with a hammer. It will be better if we continue its work with an appreciation of the great significance of this workshop, and I have offered a view on how best it should be used. Indeed we should winnow out what is poor and puerile, what is redundant or conceited, but those failures are only irritants at the edges; we need not throw up our hands in exasperation. As to burning off fat, a simple rule may be: do not think about something to write about, write about something you think about. We must not succumb to content creation. I hate the word “content” used by online thinkers, especially amongst dissidents. Content is a mass used to fill up a vacant space. Intent is what content too often lacks. Even in our comments and messages let us demonstrate earnest intent, never making small talk or practicing trivial ingratiations. We serve a curious angel, and it is the glance of his approbation which should most concern us as we gather here talking dangerously of Rectification.
Thanks for reading. Now is as good a time as any to ask you for your patronage if you can spare it. I hope to devote considerably more time to my efforts here, and to progressively make more of my thought than polite argument.