What Hath the Kingdom of God to do with Secular Rightists?

A friend from the Orthosphere, apparently unfamiliar with the Secular Right, seems to think topics such as evolutionary psychology, HBD, and “game” are unhelpful in countering the regnant soul-crushing left liberal zeitgeist we’ve come to know as the Cathedral. I was going to respond by email, but the email got too long—as you will see, way too long. So I decided to respond here, in keeping with this blog’s principal two-fold mission: a) document the consensus between the various branches of reactionary thought; and b) blog everything I spend more than half an hour or so on.

First, from the horses’ mouths, I review some of the many words of our supposedly unhelpful friends on the Secular Right on topics the seem to be of interest to the Orthosphere.

Dennis Mangan, atheist, Secular Right Blogger
Behind the Falling Japanese Birthrate:

Marriage has traditionally had a component of economic partnership, and when young women are capable of making as much money as young men, their interest in those young men drops. This is in part the idea behind hypergamy.

What is to be done? I believe that pornography does more harm to society than most observers have realized so far. A healthy society would try to limit or even ban it, though whether that can be done as a practical matter is another story. But it doesn’t seem as if anyone has tried.

Porn is Addictive:

So, porn is addictive at least in the sense that it causes habituation, i.e. a stronger dose is needed to cause the same effect as a lower dose did previously. This causes heavy porn users to lose interest in sex with a real woman, or become incapable of it.

Humans have learned how to intervene in the brain circuits that evolved to produce evolutionary desirable outcomes. Pornography, drugs including alcohol and nicotine, violent video games, junk foods that stimulate food reward, gambling, even successful stock trading: all of these stimulate dopaminergic neurons that cause pleasure. We thus get the pleasure without the outcome, or with radically altered and undesirable outcomes like ED and obesity. Also, the evolutionary-desired outcomes are short-circuited, in this case reproduction, although men’s sexual desire isn’t the bottleneck in the frequency of sex; it’s women’s. Even so, this wasn’t predicted to be among the consequences to widespread availability of porn, so it remains to be seen what consequences flow from this in turn.

Young girls in trouble?:

That being said, I’ve little doubt that girls are in trouble, though the idea that eating disorders and self-harm are the greatest dangers seems quite wrong. Obesity and incurable vanity, basically the opposite, seem far bigger problems. The expert says that “the toxic influences” of ads, celebrities, and porn cause these problems, and that the solution is for older women, “aunties”, to become more involved with and mentor these girls.

I submit that these older women are part of the problem, and as such, their involvement will only worsen the situation. Likely, many of these troubled girls are being raised by single mothers, most of whom got that way through their own poor choices, though egged on by society. And does anyone think that many or most of these mothers are not themselves wholly enslaved to ads and celebrities, as well as influenced by porn?

The real problem isn’t anorexia or cutting, it’s that these girls are being brought up to ride the Carousel, to look down on family life, to treat abortion as a sacrament, and to reject beta providers in favor of violent jerks. Both society and the girls’ mothers are complicit in this, and no number of “aunties” will solve that particular problem.

Why Do Parents Let Their Daughters Dress Like Sluts?:

Writing in the left-wing WSJ, Jennifer Moses asks, in yet another thumbsucker about modern manners and morals, Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That? Like how? According to Moses, “like prostitutes”.

Yet in the entirety of her screed, she never once speaks of doing anything to stop her own teenage daughter from dressing like a prostitute. On the contrary, she relishes the opportunity to aid and abet her daughter’s slutty dress:

In my own case, when I see my daughter in drop-dead gorgeous mode, I experience something akin to a thrill—especially since I myself am somewhat past the age to turn heads.

Especially since she’s past the age to turn heads. Elsewhere she talks about not wanting to be accused of hypocrisy because she and her peers went through the era of the sexual revolution – even though she hints that she regrets her behavior. In other words, it’s all about this woman, so typical of narcissistic boomers who, even though they now have got at least a glimpse of what it means to do the right thing, refuse to rein in their daughters because that would be “hypocritical”.

I wouldn’t want us to return to the age of the corset or even of the double standard, because a double standard that lets the promiscuous male off the hook while condemning his female counterpart is both stupid and destructive. If you’re the campus mattress, chances are that you need therapy more than you need condemnation.

No further excuses needed to let your daughter dress like a whore, because not allowing her to would be tantamount to rolling back the clock, when the nation was conservative and Christian. Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of progress, not even your children’s welfare.

Would that more than a small handful of cranky, marginalized Christian pastors could speak with the frankness and authority of atheist Dennis Mangan.

James A. Donald, atheist, Secular Right Blogger
On what used to be called marriage:

My personal observation is that every successful marriage is quietly and furtively eighteenth century, so thoroughly politically incorrect as to be illegal.

And a little reflection reveals that the New Testament/eighteenth century form of marriage, in which both parties give consent to sex once and forever, and the wife submits to the husband, is simply the only kind that can work.

If the male does what is best for himself, and the female does what is best for herself, the outcome is likely to be unsatisfactory for both parties. To solve this problem, the New Testament commands an indissoluble contractual commitment to mutual support, and sexual availability, so that, once married, you are stuck with each other, for better or worse, and required to have sex according to the other’s desire.

What unites neoreaction?:

Neoreactionaries, all of them, respect the past. Traditional solutions derive from Nature, or, some would say, from Nature’s God, and embody unspoken and difficult to explain wisdom. Sweeping them aside was apt to have disastrous consequences, and, in substantial part, did have disastrous consequences.

Reactionaries, all of them, are realists, seeing the real, not the official truth.

Neoreactionaries, all of them, recognize that races are different, the sexes are different, and man is a hierarchical animal.

Neoreactionaries, all of them, regard the official truth, the Cathedral as highly unlikely to have any connection to the truth, indeed as evil and insane. If all academics and the New York Times agree on X, the neoreactionary assumption is that X is likely to be a lie. The only way one would get such agreement is if it is enforced, and, if enforced, must be untrue.

Christianity and morality:

If Christianity is going to defend us against progressivism, where is the defense of Christianity against progressivism? Only Dalrock and Sunshine Mary are resisting the progressive takeover of Christianity, and they are heavily influenced and motivated by the atheist reactionary branch of the PUA movement. It is the atheists influencing Christians to put aside nihilism, rather than the other way around.

Civilization: Hold back the darkness:

If you have a plan for victory over progressivism, don’t think of making entitlements expand at a one percent slower rate, think of restoration of the basic requirements for civilization, think of civilization protecting itself by enforcing them against the savages and subhumans. Plan on jailing a significant number of government employees, and forcibly rusticating most of them. Plan on taking a good part of the criminal underclass and some of the welfare underclass permanently out of circulation.
Any plan for victory over progressivism has to start with firing most government employees, imprisoning those that say “you cannot fire me”, and similarly throwing most of the priesthood (by which I mean official science, public broadcasting, high status universities, and the like), off the government tit. This is necessarily going to be rather like a coup.

Victory over progressivism means firing the old official priesthood, and hiring a new, saner, and substantially smaller, official priesthood. Changing the official priesthood is apt to result in a holy war, which can get very nasty indeed, although when the old priesthood is decadent, one can frequently get away with a single battle, as when the Regent of the King of Hawaii defeated the high priest. I am pretty sure today’s progressives are decadent, and have been decadent for over a century, so full scale holy war may well avoidable.

The Dark Enlightenment:

The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men arenot created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.

…

If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.

Not the Jews:

It was the Puritans, and their descendent groups, a bunch of people that wore colorless clothes, black or dark brown with a few flashes of white, modeled after the costume of Cromwell, that caused everything to go to hell. When they got on top, re-establishing the puritan theocracy of Cromwell, now known as political correctness, everyone in power started imitating them, resulting in the modern business suit, so that it ceased to be a very reliable indicator. The rot set in when everyone important went monochrome. But to this day, if a businessman wears a bright flash of red and or gold in an otherwise orthodox formal business suit, for example the Koch brothers, it is at least a hint that he is rebelling against the rule of the progressives, whereas a predominantly dark blue tie in an orthodox business suit tends to indicate progressivism, as for example the Google founders. Puritans, now progressives, are near monochrome, avoid sharp color contrasts, tend to dark blue, grey, dark brown, and so forth. Their opponents, even to this day, tend to have a substantial flash of color, often red or gold, though the difference is no longer as reliable, consistent, and striking as it was in the days of roundheads versus cavaliers. Big hats are also a tell. Cowboy hats, top hats, sombreros and so forth, are not progressive and never have been, all the way from 1600 to the present. If anyone unironically puts on a cowboy hat, progressives will spontaneously burst into flames from insane rage – for example Bush derangement syndrome, even if they know or strongly suspect he is only pretending to not be a progressive.

Would that more than a handful of scattered conspiracy-minded Christians understood the depths of depravity unleashed in the West, and mourned the loss of Christian Civilization as much as atheist James Donald.

Roissy, aka. Heartiste, self-described Minion of Satan
The Fundamental Premise:

Eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap. Every psychological dynamic you see playing out in mass societies liberated from artificial constraints on the sexual market flows from this premise. This means, as a systemic matter, women are coddled, men are upbraided. Women are victims, men are victimizers. Women need a leg up, men need to man up. Women have advocacy groups, men have equal opportunity violations. A woman subjected to the indignity of eavesdropping on a tame joke about dongles makes national news, while the chilling fact that 95% of all workplace deaths are suffered by men barely pings the media consciousness.

Prosperity Is The Problem:

The prosperity America achieved will be her undoing. This isn’t idle apocalyptic talk. There is plenty of historical precedent. There are plenty of indicators that cultural and economic and lifestyle collapse are beginning their long march through the Western citizenry and institutions. The armies of disintegration have amassed and the first waves have stormed the citadel. Aided and abetted by people who don’t understand the forces at work, and who wouldn’t change direction even if they did understand. Prosperity is enervating. The will to dismantle it, temporarily, to save it, is weakened totally by the comforts it provides.

America is dying. Unless the powerful divest themselves from their voracious egos and accept that they have been steeped in a mountain of lies for 60 years, perhaps 150 years depending on your point of origin, and until that day they reverse the path they have taken this country, America’s slow, asphyxiating dying will finally, unmercifully, reach closure… in her death. Today, the Lords of Lies are our masters. Tomorrow, the truth will reign, over a rejuvenated America or a bitter wasteland. Either way, the truth will reign.

Are The Cads Outbanging The Dads?:

A society of both cad ascendance and civilization is unsustainable and incompatible. One or the other will go, and the pendulum with either swing back to dads or civilization will regress to accommodate the rise of women choosing cads. All social and economic indicators (particularly the debt overhang), and my personal experience in the bowels of the dating market, lead me to be pessimistic about a happy resolution to this building tension.

Cultural Eugenics: A Theory

In sum, the white ruling class lost its sense of shared destiny and obligation, and the white working class lost its kindred alpha male to emulate. The cultural eugenic program has morphed from one to lift the weakest tribe members and humble the strongest tribe members, to one in which the strong tribe members have decided to kill off or banish to the wastelands the weaker tribe members.

This is not a recipe for national greatness. Or even survival.

The Middle Class Quiet Riot:

At this point, I don’t think there is any saving America from decline and obsolescence. We are on a trajectory eerily similar to that of past empires which have risen and fallen. It’s almost as if there’s an immutable, unchanging, universal human nature at work that has been the guiding force in world matters since we left the jungle upright.

I will say this: if there is any hope of salvation, any way out of the death spiral we’re slipping down, the Lords of Lies must be defeated, by pen or by post. It matters not how the job is done; they simply must be ousted from power and deprived of influence, or, more generously, convinced of the error of their ways and reformed to the side of Light, if America is to have a chance at redemption. The mediocre masses and the vulgarians will not abandon their memetic medication and hypocritical self-aggrandizement until they see a glimmer of new leadership, new voices, that permit them the courage to think clearly and say so with strength of conviction.

The first step begins now:

Men and women are radically different along many important psychological and physical dimensions.

Not all men are created equal.

Some men really are worth more than others.

Some cultures really are better than others.

Some people can handle the task of building and maintaining prosperous civilization better than other people.

Trust is a perishable quantity vital to an orderly, wealth-generating society. It does not grow with persuasion, coercion, sloganeering, or after-school specials. It is organically emergent and intimately tied to relatedness: cultural, moral and, yes, biological.

There is no such thing as a proposition nation, only propositions that can be affirmed or refuted.
High-minded ideals must fall when they are proven unworkable, or millions will die, soul or body, in service to their continued justification.

The gradual feminization of the culture, the workplace, academia, government, media outlets and even family life has not been an unalloyed good. Quite the opposite; the observed evidence better fits the theory that elevating the female disposition and particular talents to sainthood in all facets of life has taken us down a dystopian road, as we can see in the rise of single momhood, sky-high safety net deficit spending, limp-wristed SWPLs, male cocooning and dropping out, and stagnating technological innovation.

Privilege is a good thing. Men build nations so that they may codify their privilege and enjoy it, and pass it on to their posterity. Those who rail against this privilege should be shunned and invited to leave and build their own nations more suited to their tastes.

God may be dead, but his copybook headings hold illimitable dominion over all.

The ego is the greatest enemy man has ever faced.

These truths I’ve outlined, currently buried in a mile-deep bunker by custodians of the Temple of Lies, aren’t just idle musings. They have policy implications. Deny them at your peril.

Would that more so-called “conservative” Christians cared for the truth about human nature and civilizational survival as much as “Minion of Satan” Roissy.

My Comments
No advanced civilization can survive long without the Ten Commandments. St. Paul makes it clear that the law of God is written on the hearts of all men. I think Bruce Charlton is overly simplistic in thinking that a return to Christianity (whatever that might in fact even mean) is the (singular) answer. How did Greece come to dominance in the world? How did Rome? All of the ancients had a robust and mature view of all the earthly virtues. Christian and Jews cannot take credit for having invented them.

Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude have been grafted onto the Christian faith as the Natural Virtues. St. Thomas Aquinas, following Augustine, relies heavily upon ancient pagan thought and common reason. Christianity brings nothing new to the table of public order that wasn’t already well-known, that isn’t well-known to any man who thinks rationally about public order. Christianity baptizes all truth, wherever it may be found, as God’s truth.

Of course, Christianity brings also a Savior, and by him a means of grace; correspondingly an ideal kingdom will certainly be one in which its leaders honor Christ foremost. But this doesn’t explain the success of such “godless” modern states such as Japan and lately China any more than it explains the failures of “Christian” ones such as Spain and Greece.

Men and nations rise and fall according to their own virtue, to how well they respond to the reality by which God has spoken to them. Some have received Divine Revelation. Some have not. But every man has received enough to live uprightly; and every nation has received enough to order itself well. The common good and adaptive fitness are two sides of the same coin. If not, how can anyone tell one from the other?

So of what use is the Secular Right? (Truth be told, they often ask the same of us!) Well, as you can see from the above, they are correct and articulate on many issues of concern to the Orthosphere; nearly all of them that happen to “touch earth” by my count.

In response to Jim Donald, Bonald recently commented at the Orthosphere, “In that case, the Dark Enlightenment and the Orthosphere are carrying out a useful division of labor. Liberalism makes both empirical and non-empirical claims. Both are false and pernicious, and we’ve got a group of people working to debunk each.”

Jim Donald published a Magnum Opus on Natural Law back in like 1993, when I was not yet even a neo-con. Read it and tell me where he disagrees fundamentally with Aquinas on the matter. I’m not saying he doesn’t, but he comes to remarkably similar to conclusions. Why because Jim Donald and Aquinas (and Augustine and Aristotle and St. Paul before them) believe at least what their own eyes tell them. Each one, every single one, is a realist. Everyone single one has a positive disposition toward truth, as it is, wherever it lies, wherever it leads.

The truth is real. The best and brightest of the Secular Right get that. And what of the less than best and brightest? Well, you don’t have to read them.

Jim Donald goes farther than most in advocating officially state sponsored religion. Why? Because it is the natural state of a people to have a shared religion. And Official Religions, because they are official, are much more benign than Unofficial official religions such as we have today (Liberal Christianity). I make the same point in a previous post, that a religious heritage works best when it stays clear of the extremes of rigor (phariseeism) and laxity (pietism). Modern Liberal Christianity is the absolute worst aspects of both.

In case you haven’t noticed, we live in a culture now completely dominated by lies, regarding the sexes, regarding race, regarding economics, regarding politics, regarding equality, regarding health and happiness and meaning in life. Those who can see through those lies, articulate a response, and fight against them are our friends, irrespective of the divergence in our prior metaphysical commitments.

Every road out of Jerusalem, is also a road into it.