Despondency and Despair

Culture, Control, and Mass Shootings

I’ve had this mish-mash of ideas sitting in my drafts since February, but recent events have moved me to finish this thing out and get my thoughts out there, at least in some form or fashion.

The recent phenomena of mass shooting events, taking off especially after Columbine is something that my mid fifties parents don’t understand. It’s something that is foreign to them, especially for my father. He was a soldier for decades, an avid hunter and outdoorsman, and can remember having a rifle in his truck at high school to discuss hunting trips and recent purchases with friends in the 1980s.

Clearly, things have changed in ways both in the culture and its acceleration that have them shouting at their televisions and computers in an angry confusion. Hearing the a loud and viscerally angry yell of “WHAT THE FUCK” in the midst of reading the news isn’t something that shook me. I knew what he saw, it was the most recent headline with regards to dead children and a shooting at an elementary school. He was astounded, he couldn’t get it or understand why someone would do it. Neither do I, but I’ve lived through enough media cycles and mass shootings in my short life to know exactly what will happen next and what will take place. I have at least to some significant degree, become dulled to all this. I accept it as common part of my day to day life living in the United States, that, however rare these events are, they just come with living here in the same way politicians don’t mind the murder and massacres in Chicago because it’s a feature, not a bug of our current political system.

There are hundreds of other people who have talked about this at length, and those people will get ignored, in part because it goes opposite to solving a problem that has any actual intent on being fixed. One may ask why, and it’s because we have a ruling elite who sees the problem as a yet another nail in their procedural toolbox that they can hammer away with legislation, court rulings, and new boards and surveillance. Something that even the fat and laughable Senator from Texas Ted Cruz had managed to get right, that technocratic solutions won’t solve the problem, or at least it won’t solve it outright.

It’s not a nail waiting for a hammer to strike down this particular problem, as the hammer only contributes to the problem because it doesn’t address the hydra. The hydra, with its many heads thrown into the machine, its guts and bones causing disruptions, always growing new ones to replace the ones eviscerated causing more problems.

I’m not the world’s most well-read man, there are dozens of other people who swim in these circles that are. From Columbine to what we’re reeling from right now, we’re noticing that the cops aren’t acting the way they’re supposed to, which is to take down the perpetrator and stop the violence. Or that now there is evidence to suggest communication with retired(?) federal officials.

When the tweet-er and podcaster, who is also a sitting US Senator, was asked about why is this a uniquely American problem, it’s one that should be easy to say. America is a fundamentally sick country, its ills have been normalized, and exploited by those who take advantage of the many breaks and jagged edges of the machine in order to find positions for themselves in the midst of incentives generated by the bodies of dead children and gang violence. Although I suppose more honest answers towards the events about America’s gun problem could go back to more forbidden questions posed by Carlyle or the Moynihan Report, but perhaps we can address that issue in a future post.

But there is the causal problem that I feel needs to be addressed here. If the functionality of society as machine has failed to such a point wherein this is a problem of culture ills that seen its consequences move in an upward trend not just in mass shootings, but in suicides and other criminal acts then the machine is fundamentally broken. Many of our ills have been described as “aberrations” and that we shouldn’t be so reductive when it comes to trying to find specific points in history centuries ago that lead to some narrative or line of logic that explains how we got to here. I am usually hesitant to engage in root cause debate (as many a trad cath on Twitter likes to blame it all on Luther) due to its reductive nature. However nothing (besides Man’s fall and expulsion from Eden) has a singular cause or answer as to how we got here. Which is why I find the hydra explanation more apt. More heads and the creation of more upon shoving them into the gears and moving parts of a functioning society leads to its decline. You’ll see gaskets blow and things creep to a halt, whether that be the explosion of single parent households to government no longer representing your interests in the midst of replacing their constituent demography. Laying the groundwork prior the 20th century has its thru-lines in other areas, a common reactionary talking point going back to the Enlightenment or the French Revolution. There is mechanical causality, something which while linear, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s one singular root cause. Just as the logic of one item, being expressed for one singular purpose and nothing more can be used in less than a decade to get to where we are now. To continue with this hydra example, one change into the machine affects several other parts, now we’ve got married people with an invented right to privacy to use contraception within their domicile. Now what? Well we get an answer in the early 1970s with Roe v. Wade. Even prior to the 20th Century, you could see this in proto feminist movements addressing other questions, whether that be suffrage, “ain’t I a woman” and temperance. Again, how a singular issue to disrupt the social machine can spill over into all areas. Progressivism is a nice way to tackle these various clogs, blown gaskets, grinding gears and so on, is to treat them in the order of the importance for the totality of their liberation ideology, a humanist prosperity gospel which becomes the inverse of any true ontological substance: The Intersectional Framework.

It is a self correcting framework, attending to the needs of its various niche identity and minority groups to best associate which can take advantage of the system it parasitizes itself off of while it wrangles for complete mental control, like a fungus creating a zombie out of an ant, or a zombie prion. It’s an effective memeplex, a mind virus if you will. It creates its own hierarchies within regards to its own oppression olympics, balancing and juggling rather effectively the needs of its feminist, environmental, gender, and racial movements. You’d be apt to point out that it doesn’t grok logically speaking, after all a woman’s right to choose (read: baby murder) is about women, but what is a woman in 2022? You won’t get a logical answer, but as Nick Land pointed out in The Dark Enlightenment, the left thrives off of dialectics. Any time there is contradiction, there is an avenue for power to be created. I can also expect someone to tell me to move past the 2015 era talking points about the left. “No one talks about intersectionality anymore, get better material, read a book dumbass!” My question is that we know these things still operate, the critical theory is still there, and the publish literally everything that they’re doing. It’s a great ideological moving tool to get towards bigger things, getting more or less all facets of these various niche left wing positions united towards some globalist revenge wherein manmade eschatologies of all sorts are found through owning nothing and being happy while companies work in tandem globally at these conferences or with status seeking millennial women nearing 40 and childless looking for some form of meaning by pushing for more HR and more ESG. All of this, has been part of the great hellscape we live in, and it has been going on for some time, and it took center stage in the 20th century. We should repeal the 20th Century, by all means, but we’d have to go back further.

Now you’re wondering just what the hell this all has to do with the topic at hand, the tragedies that we see on our news screens, and the immediate rush of politicians, NGOs, and intelligentsia to make exploitative snuff stuff to push the agenda in the midst of a shooting like what we witnessed. Clearly we’re seeing young, despondent and dispossessed men seeking something, and can be easily manipulated or taken down the rabbithole where these acts are the only way through.

So if you ask, “Are the kids alright?” The answer is clearly no.

We live in a time in which man as been tamed, to where the logical conclusion of what Lewis wrote is right before our eyes.

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

The abolition has led to the atomization. The atomization leads to a search for meaning. The atomization includes digital deracination, and millions of men looking for anything. Ideology, violence, gangs, porn, the desire to transition, self harm and suicide just to feel like they are something or just flatout end the pain.

“Just ban guns.” - We know how this ends. “Just look at Australia!”

Speaking of Australia and its gun ban. Suicide deaths using firearms more than halved in ten years, from 389 deaths in 1995, to 147 deaths in 2005.This is equal to 7% of all suicides in 2005.... Over the same period, suicides by hanging increased by over 52% from 699 in 1995 to 1068 in 2005.

You aren’t going to fix this by pen, at least not with the powers that be. In a time of great decadence and depression, wherein men kill themselves, Americans are living shorter lives, and we’re spiraling towards war, economic depression, and technocratic global rule, what more can you expect than these sorts of actions being played out the way they do in order to speed up their own forms of complete control. The powers that be do not care that men are despondent, angry, and have the very will sapped from them while they’re surrounded by endocrine disruptors and food that’s basically poison. Why not listen to the stranger online who tells you to pull the trigger and do it? After all, why not do something that leads to more control over the citizenry, exacerbating the problem? Culture is an easy thing to fuck with when you have the means to tear it apart.

Perhaps this is my own exasperation, knowing that the men of the West are looking for meaning, leadership, a caesar, a superman, or the second coming. But no man knoweth the hour, and we cannot languish waiting for something to happen. My viewpoint at this current moment is knowing what dangers and poisons lie in front of us and how to avoid them - and maybe bring some of our fellow men along with us.

A cultural vanguard is just as necessary as an intellectual one. To save what made men men, and our beliefs to carry on in perpetuity. Enjoying the decline may be just laughing at its absurdism, but getting your rocks off by playing into the same incentive structure that destroys what you hold dear is not a viable option. You may not have fun, and there is time for fun in the right place, but perhaps that day will come when the breathing space has been secured. After all, we’re in a time where the elites of our time see themselves as the only true human beings alive, wanting to be something akin to Homo Deus, while the rest of us are gluttons, serving in make-work eating the filth they sell in the name of their post hoc rationalizations for salvation when it really means control. They’ll profit off their insects and fake meat while groveling and moaning as they enjoy their private reserves.

This despondency and despair, that leads to so many convenient affairs is a feature, not a bug of the culture that was weakened in the 19th, hijacked in the 20th, and is set for collision course in the 21st.

Finish your race, fight the good fight, and keep the faith.

Feel free to refer to this piece anytime that you see a school shooting, mall shooting, or really any other mass shooting event in the United States, because unless what is addressed in this piece is left untouched they will certainly continue well past our lifetimes.