Firstly Prude, thank you for the length and quality of this article you've put together!
I've wished more people would focus on this aspect in this little thing of ours; the avenue of self-improvement and the conversations around that. To begin I've not explicitly thought of this but I would have to agree that the introduction of streams/podcasts has not, on the whole, been beneficial to politics in general, getting to listen to different people bloviate about a given topic while interesting from a "where does this person come from?" perspective has to work hard to straddle the line of Bloodsports and to be meaningful constructive content. Moreover, with all of these podcasts and streams we generally lose focus on what's really happening, we, I think at least, become focused on a meta-politics of sorts. Someone did X/Y/Z, a bill is being discussed, some protest is ongoing, a certain leader said a certain thing and so on, at some point, this becomes nothing more than politics as entertainment birthed by cable networks like CNN/FOX.
I and the many other young men (and women?) in this sphere gain literally nothing from hearing any of this nonsense and concerning ourselves with it. In fact, I believe it is on the whole entirely detrimental for the young folks in our spheres to wade into these topics, we should really only be tangentially aware of them and not be consuming them as if they’re the latest marvel movie. Those of us who participate in local and state politics and can succeed at obtaining important positions (that recent story of the young man in Maine who’s a GOP chair(?) comes to mind) are the exception and can spend some more time being aware of this but even then much like I’ve said its a fine line between trying to affect politics and create politics so-to-say and just participating in the meta-politics of consuming content (renaissance *cough*). To quickly summarize this portion as it's not the main point of my comment, politics is something to worry about only if it directly matters to your job (as in you’re a position/leader in your local political party) and the rest of us are better off being slightly aware of the major happenings but merely re-focusing on ourselves and our immediate surroundings– time is valuable and as young men, we have practically infinite time so let's not WASTE it consuming useless politics we can practically do nothing about.
“Needless to say, pure podcasting and bloviating as politics makes for bad politics.”-- agreed.
Now to the main point: self-improvement. Self-improvement is something that I find has been really thrown by the wayside due to JP’s fall from grace recently but it is something still immensely important to every single individual in our movement (obviously I’m a big Self-improvement fan, so much so I named my YT channel: The Improooover). The concept, shortened to SI from here on out, has evolved its own meta, similar to that of podcasting but in no way as bad. My feeling is that SI has been foregone by folks in our space in favor of doom-posting/bloviating about politics and so on. With few exceptions, radLib immediately comes to mind and maybe AA’s shilling/writing counts as well, are there people in our spaces talking more personally about their stations in life.
I understand the value of anonymity and that importance but its not difficult to be careful with the details or to generalize certain things to make it impossible to detect identities so that we can actually have meaningful discussions about the things going on in our lives. We all recognize that we’ve got lots of younger folks in our spheres and in the same breadth we’re willing to recognize the plight of zoomers (and everyone else for that matter) in this digital panopticon (thanks Gio) but I hardly see anything (which may be my fault as I can’t really devote lots of time to staying in the know because of work and school): videos, streams, essays, what-have-you, about how the ‘leaders’ of our spheres are doing in their personal lives, their businesses and their work.
Dave does the Lord’s work reading that guy’s (Ben White?) super chats about his dating life (and also shilling the Scylldings– hopefully they do another meetup this year, I’d actually be able to make it!), it's such a minor detail in the grand scheme of the concepts that Dave talks about on his streams but I feel as though those comments are un/intentional goldmines. Sure it's great to know of Spengler and his cycles, the esotericism of Evola, and so forth but is it a net benefit to let this level of deep erudition dominate our spaces when people willing to donate money to leaders like Dave just want help with how to meet women?
I immensely value the scholarly pursuits of all of the members of this little thing of ours but I personally think, as an elder-zoomer, that we shouldn’t let these scholastic pursuits paralyze our group’s ability to lead people of my cohort. I would much more appreciate the folks in our spheres speaking of where they’re at in life, how they got the things they did and didn’t do, and should and shouldn’t have done. Our space is filled with engineers, geniuses, former/active military, artisans, scholars, professors, husbands, fathers, and so on yet, our discourse isn’t dominated by humans speaking about the lives they’ve lived but rather about irrelevant politics or deep knowledge found in out of print books.
Self-improvement is a major aspect of our movement as we’re dominated by men and women probably within the bracket of 15-40 at the prime stages to create exponential success, the success that would ultimately benefit our movement and positively guide our nations into the next millennium! We should be focusing on creating our own millionaires, billionaires, politicians, Military/government/private leaders, husbands/fathers, wives/mothers etc. We’ve all got such immense experience but I feel that it is vastly underutilized as of right now.
Thank you Prude for writing this article to help me put my disjointed thoughts to paper, maybe I’ll record a video on this to continue working through my thoughts.
“I think this ongoing focus of pop culture, dating advice, and the day to day is a sign of either waning energy (with a potential aura of defeatism) or that there is growing need for something more heartfelt.” I want meaningful relationships and knowledge to be shared and cultivated in this little thing of ours, politics and esoteric erudition are mere distractions.
Regardless, God Bless you and your family my friend.
Thoughtful piece. I think you are pointed in the right direction. I feel I am in a very similar space. Small ball. Too many want to hit home runs. Sometimes we just need to make contact with the ball. The little, local, real things. But also synthesis. I could write sermons and preach online. I have the training. But what is needed, as you say, is synthesis. Too much of the right is people grasping at things, hoping to make them work. But pulling together insights from scripture, Gregory of Palawan, Aquinas, Calvin, Burnham, Ellul, Schmitt and others into something of a new cohesive whole that can challenge the world of the current regime which includes much of the institution building and maintaining class from politics to the university to places like churches. There is a lot of dead wood to clear away. A lot of work to be done whether locally in the real world or in the Twitter/Substack/podcast world. Many of us are on the same journey thinking and feeling the same things and that can only be a good thing.
This is kind of why I stopped watching Gavin McInnes' show. You can only so much of: "imagine if the races are reversed," "Look at what the Trannys said on TikTok," "what's Antifa up to," or "hey kids guess what gaffe Wacky Joe made today." It gets old... I mean, I get it -the pozz sucks, man.
Much better to listen to you and Gio discuss the coming cosmo-future war between the "Ron Paul Maoists" and the "Islamo-Duginists," the perspective White Paper on removing microplastics from every male scrota, or how each and everyone of us can do our part in fighting back the dahkkness that is the Favela Longhouse.
"At the end of the day, cleaning your room isn’t going to change the world otherwise Peterson wouldn’t have had the dark night of the soul only to become a Daily Wire husk he would have become something else."
I think you're missing some punctuation in this sentence.
Firstly Prude, thank you for the length and quality of this article you've put together!
I've wished more people would focus on this aspect in this little thing of ours; the avenue of self-improvement and the conversations around that. To begin I've not explicitly thought of this but I would have to agree that the introduction of streams/podcasts has not, on the whole, been beneficial to politics in general, getting to listen to different people bloviate about a given topic while interesting from a "where does this person come from?" perspective has to work hard to straddle the line of Bloodsports and to be meaningful constructive content. Moreover, with all of these podcasts and streams we generally lose focus on what's really happening, we, I think at least, become focused on a meta-politics of sorts. Someone did X/Y/Z, a bill is being discussed, some protest is ongoing, a certain leader said a certain thing and so on, at some point, this becomes nothing more than politics as entertainment birthed by cable networks like CNN/FOX.
I and the many other young men (and women?) in this sphere gain literally nothing from hearing any of this nonsense and concerning ourselves with it. In fact, I believe it is on the whole entirely detrimental for the young folks in our spheres to wade into these topics, we should really only be tangentially aware of them and not be consuming them as if they’re the latest marvel movie. Those of us who participate in local and state politics and can succeed at obtaining important positions (that recent story of the young man in Maine who’s a GOP chair(?) comes to mind) are the exception and can spend some more time being aware of this but even then much like I’ve said its a fine line between trying to affect politics and create politics so-to-say and just participating in the meta-politics of consuming content (renaissance *cough*). To quickly summarize this portion as it's not the main point of my comment, politics is something to worry about only if it directly matters to your job (as in you’re a position/leader in your local political party) and the rest of us are better off being slightly aware of the major happenings but merely re-focusing on ourselves and our immediate surroundings– time is valuable and as young men, we have practically infinite time so let's not WASTE it consuming useless politics we can practically do nothing about.
“Needless to say, pure podcasting and bloviating as politics makes for bad politics.”-- agreed.
Now to the main point: self-improvement. Self-improvement is something that I find has been really thrown by the wayside due to JP’s fall from grace recently but it is something still immensely important to every single individual in our movement (obviously I’m a big Self-improvement fan, so much so I named my YT channel: The Improooover). The concept, shortened to SI from here on out, has evolved its own meta, similar to that of podcasting but in no way as bad. My feeling is that SI has been foregone by folks in our space in favor of doom-posting/bloviating about politics and so on. With few exceptions, radLib immediately comes to mind and maybe AA’s shilling/writing counts as well, are there people in our spaces talking more personally about their stations in life.
I understand the value of anonymity and that importance but its not difficult to be careful with the details or to generalize certain things to make it impossible to detect identities so that we can actually have meaningful discussions about the things going on in our lives. We all recognize that we’ve got lots of younger folks in our spheres and in the same breadth we’re willing to recognize the plight of zoomers (and everyone else for that matter) in this digital panopticon (thanks Gio) but I hardly see anything (which may be my fault as I can’t really devote lots of time to staying in the know because of work and school): videos, streams, essays, what-have-you, about how the ‘leaders’ of our spheres are doing in their personal lives, their businesses and their work.
Dave does the Lord’s work reading that guy’s (Ben White?) super chats about his dating life (and also shilling the Scylldings– hopefully they do another meetup this year, I’d actually be able to make it!), it's such a minor detail in the grand scheme of the concepts that Dave talks about on his streams but I feel as though those comments are un/intentional goldmines. Sure it's great to know of Spengler and his cycles, the esotericism of Evola, and so forth but is it a net benefit to let this level of deep erudition dominate our spaces when people willing to donate money to leaders like Dave just want help with how to meet women?
I immensely value the scholarly pursuits of all of the members of this little thing of ours but I personally think, as an elder-zoomer, that we shouldn’t let these scholastic pursuits paralyze our group’s ability to lead people of my cohort. I would much more appreciate the folks in our spheres speaking of where they’re at in life, how they got the things they did and didn’t do, and should and shouldn’t have done. Our space is filled with engineers, geniuses, former/active military, artisans, scholars, professors, husbands, fathers, and so on yet, our discourse isn’t dominated by humans speaking about the lives they’ve lived but rather about irrelevant politics or deep knowledge found in out of print books.
Self-improvement is a major aspect of our movement as we’re dominated by men and women probably within the bracket of 15-40 at the prime stages to create exponential success, the success that would ultimately benefit our movement and positively guide our nations into the next millennium! We should be focusing on creating our own millionaires, billionaires, politicians, Military/government/private leaders, husbands/fathers, wives/mothers etc. We’ve all got such immense experience but I feel that it is vastly underutilized as of right now.
Thank you Prude for writing this article to help me put my disjointed thoughts to paper, maybe I’ll record a video on this to continue working through my thoughts.
“I think this ongoing focus of pop culture, dating advice, and the day to day is a sign of either waning energy (with a potential aura of defeatism) or that there is growing need for something more heartfelt.” I want meaningful relationships and knowledge to be shared and cultivated in this little thing of ours, politics and esoteric erudition are mere distractions.
Regardless, God Bless you and your family my friend.
I hope you do a video!
Thank you for your thorough and thoughtful comment.
Thank you Prude, if and when I get around to it I'll leave the link here as a comment!
Thoughtful piece. I think you are pointed in the right direction. I feel I am in a very similar space. Small ball. Too many want to hit home runs. Sometimes we just need to make contact with the ball. The little, local, real things. But also synthesis. I could write sermons and preach online. I have the training. But what is needed, as you say, is synthesis. Too much of the right is people grasping at things, hoping to make them work. But pulling together insights from scripture, Gregory of Palawan, Aquinas, Calvin, Burnham, Ellul, Schmitt and others into something of a new cohesive whole that can challenge the world of the current regime which includes much of the institution building and maintaining class from politics to the university to places like churches. There is a lot of dead wood to clear away. A lot of work to be done whether locally in the real world or in the Twitter/Substack/podcast world. Many of us are on the same journey thinking and feeling the same things and that can only be a good thing.
This is kind of why I stopped watching Gavin McInnes' show. You can only so much of: "imagine if the races are reversed," "Look at what the Trannys said on TikTok," "what's Antifa up to," or "hey kids guess what gaffe Wacky Joe made today." It gets old... I mean, I get it -the pozz sucks, man.
Much better to listen to you and Gio discuss the coming cosmo-future war between the "Ron Paul Maoists" and the "Islamo-Duginists," the perspective White Paper on removing microplastics from every male scrota, or how each and everyone of us can do our part in fighting back the dahkkness that is the Favela Longhouse.
Good read, thanks Prude
Hope you enjoy your time away this week
"At the end of the day, cleaning your room isn’t going to change the world otherwise Peterson wouldn’t have had the dark night of the soul only to become a Daily Wire husk he would have become something else."
I think you're missing some punctuation in this sentence.