Short Thoughts About The Long Emergency

Welp…

While I was gathering notes on my last piece about coronavirus and the post-COVID world, some inexplicable intuition told me that I ought to get the piece written and published ASAP, because its relevance was going to fade fast (That’s precisely why I don’t often write about current events, and prefer meta-level “evergreen” topics instead). And now here we are, at a point where the blaring headlines about coronavirus from a week and a half ago seem as distant as the news that the Titanic sank.

It feels as though I should write something long and detailed about the riots of the past few days, but the honest truth is that everything I’d have to say about it, I already said in my COVID articles. I won’t be so crass as to tell the world “I told you so”, but I will go so far as to say that those pieces have aged pretty well in the short time (which seems like a long time) since I wrote them, and that I stand by everything I said. So instead of repeating them here, I’ll confine myself to a quick review of my main points in light of what’s currently going on.

•Expect the Unexpected

Boy, who saw this coming a couple of weeks ago, huh?

•Get Out of The Big Cities

Here’s Scott Adams, echoing the most critical advice from my COVID pieces.

My aim here is not to try to bolster my point by showing you that a media celebrity agrees with me. It’s more that Adams is basically an elevated-IQ normie who’s slightly ahead of the curve, and represents what most normies are either thinking now, or will be thinking in six months. So if a normie barometer like Adams is saying that cities are over, that means this view has left the fringes and is headed toward the normie mainstream.

And here’s what the normies are waking up and realizing: The big cities will never recover from this. Not as places that smart young people want to leave the countryside and migrate to. Not as centers of industry and innovation, or of wealth and power. Not as anyplace that anybody wants to be if they can avoid it. The period from January to April of 2020 proved that most people can work remotely; then May and June came by and showed them why they’re really going to want to. The exodus from the cities, which was already well underway before any of the events of this year, is going to turn into a stampede for the exits. Everyone now understands that big cities are deathtraps during times of disruption. Don’t be the last rat left on these sinking ships.

•When You Get To Your New Hometown, Become a Valued Member of the Community

Lone wolves won’t get as far as they may think when trouble comes; you’ll want to have friends to help you out.

•Get As Self-Sufficient As You Possibly Can Be

You never know when a business you work for might find itself unable to continue to employ you due to unexpected circumstances…

…or when truckers can’t or won’t be making deliveries for a while for one reason or another.

So plan to be as independent as you can manage to be.

•Stop Counting on the Government to Save You

Even if the government and their enforcers were reliably on your side, which they won’t be, they’ve shown that they aren’t even capable of saving themselves when things get bad. At this point, relying on them to be able to save you is suicidally stupid.

•Things Aren’t Going Back to the Way They Were When You Were a Kid 

The fact that these riots dragged on for days on end with virtually no pushback from the government is not just troubling in and of itself, but as a sign of where things are headed. Here’s some wisdom from our forefathers: The real reason why no government can allow riots to continue is that they pose a direct challenge to the government’s core claim to legitimacy. People surrender some degree of their right to self-determination to a government in exchange for a promise from that government to maintain order. When it works, it’s a good deal, which is why having a government is basically universal among humans. But where a government allows chaos, it reneges on that deal; it ceases to uphold its side of the bargain. This means that citizens are left to come to the realization that they’re being ripped off – that they are continuing to surrender that degree of self-determination to a government that gives them nothing in return. This destroys that government’s legitimacy, and thus is dangerously destabilizing. No government that wants to keep existing can let this happen. But ours has.

I don’t think our current government has much time left in it. And no, I’m not talking about the election this fall.

•Expect Anarcho-Tyranny To Intensify

Here’s 2020 in a single picture:

This is just a small sample of what’s to come. As empires decline, the government invariably becomes simultaneously more incompetent and more oppressive. Rethink your relationship to the government accordingly.

https://twitter.com/YossiGestetner/status/1267193403181355008

•Buy Guns and Learn How to Use Them

Not swords.

Not bows and arrows.

Guns.

•Pick Your Battles Carefully

The “III%ers” seem to have decided not to play the designated villain role that the left had in mind for them during these riots.

Not even when the left has tried to goad them into it (which they have been trying to do incessantly since the riots started).

“And I’ll look down and whisper… no.”

The little we’ve seen of the III%ers has been at the edges of their own towns and neighborhoods, making it clear that communists and diverse peoples can smash and burn their own territory if they like, but that it won’t be expanding to anyplace under the Boys’ protection, cops or not. That’s precisely the right strategy to take. Defend what’s yours, but don’t rush in to save people who will only treat you like villains for your trouble. Again and again, conservatives have lost because they came in and cleaned up after the left made a mess of things, effectively shielding their enemies from the entirely predictable consequences of their own bad decisions. Not this time. Sort it out yourselves, just don’t bring it where we live.

“Cleanup on Aisle Five!”

•The Most Important Election In Your Political Life Might Be The One For Your Local Sheriff

Because these are the guys who will decide whether to encourage you to defend yourself when necessary…

…or whether to try to illegally disarm you in the middle of a riot for the “crime” of protecting yourself and your property.

So pay close attention to that election – just as much as you would to the one which chooses who will occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

(This also relates back to my point about the benefits of having friends in bad times. If one armed man tells the cops to fuck off when they try to disarm him during a riot, he gets led away in cuffs. If fifteen armed men tell them to fuck off, it’s a different story.)

•Stop Listening to Blackpillers

We’ve hit the limit of the practical utility of bitching and groaning about how the world isn’t fair for not handing us what we want on a platter. Complainers bring nothing useful to the table at this point, and despair is a mortal sin for a reason. We have serious, hard work to do. People who just want to wallow in edgy nihilism are nothing but time-wasters. Go be emo somewhere else.

“Can I interest you in a tale of woe?”

I wrote this hurriedly and published it while the riots were still top of mind for everyone. Hopefully my next piece can be a bit more evergreen. Until then, stay safe, and start making plans!

The Squirearchy: Introduction

The megacities are dead: nothing can, and nothing should, be done to save them. The entire incentive structure inherent to urban living pulls those living in them toward leftism and degeneracy, and there is fundamentally nothing that can be done about it. Yes, big cities are engines of culture, but the culture that does emanate from them is poison, has been for decades, and will continue to be in the future. Yes, big cities are engines of the economy, but have long ago caused our economy to have a vastly excessive emphasis on the finance sector, and this has thence degenerated into thinly-masked, “too big to fail” fraud on all sides, built on a foundation of usury that is both sinful and unsustainable. Further, it should go without saying that our cities, once gleaming, have descended into dystopian hellscapes of crime, poverty, pollution, dependency, degeneracy, atomization, alienation, and meaninglessness, which cannot be fixed and which all of the boutique bookstores and arthouse cinemas in the world simply can’t make up for. And, in fact, they don’t have to – the internet age has (perhaps ironically) created a new world in which almost all of the cultural and economic opportunities that once could be enjoyed only in the big city are available virtually anywhere. All of these truths should draw us toward the conclusion that the traditionalist right should abandon the cities entirely; meaning we should both reject the idea of mass urbanization as a good, and we should physically abandon them ourselves as well. In the short term, this means that each of us should move out of the cities for the countryside as soon as it is practical to do so. In the long term, it means accepting the idea that the Restoration must involve a recentering of society, from one centered around megacities to one centered around a “manor culture”, led in both a cultural and political sense by country squires who form a de facto or de jure aristocracy.

These are the core ideas around which I will base a series of essays that will be appearing here in the coming months. Like my Christania series, they may not be sequential – in other words, I may intersperse them among other pieces on other topics – and I am not at present sure precisely how many of them I may end up writing. I will, however, explore the topic as thoroughly as I can, including providing some theoretical models for the new society that I believe we should be moving toward creating in the long term. This will, in many ways, be personal for me, as my own plan in the next few years is to leave the cities and move to someplace rural, conservative, and non-diverse.

So then, please do keep checking back in this space, because the Squirearchy will, I promise, be coming soon, In the meantime, anyone who may wish to get a head start on this series should do so by reading this excellent recent essay by Ryan Landry, which touches on many of the ideas that I plan to present going forward.