Sep 22, 2022·edited Sep 22, 2022Liked by N.S. Lyons
I guess a counterculture that becomes the dominant culture is sort of like a revolutionary movement that has long since claimed victory, conquered the state, but still relies upon the identity of "radical outsider" because that's who they've seen in the mirror all these years. I'm thinking of old Soviets, old hippies, corpulent King Castro still in his jungle fatigues, etc, who would sooner face the firing squad than face the fact that they've become moralistic prudes and tyrants and lords of the manor with the same dirty hands and grubby motives as the rest of us.
And I guess they hold their illusions together much like our Social Justice ruling class does: locking themselves in an epistemic Versailles where the light stays flattering and no one would dare mention an uncomfortable fact (bc why bring up what you're also guilty of?), repackaging the same old nostalgic wine in new bottles ("Another toast to the glorious Revolution!"), and huddling together in the warmth of shared sanctimony, where the final consolation is being better smarter holier than those peasants in the countryside.
The absurd spectacle of our upscale NYT/NPR/PBS ruling class (who look like Ken Burns in the street but see Huey Newton in the mirror) writing, producing and directing this endless afterschool special called The Resistance™ is fake and tedious for 100 reasons, but the hardest part for me has been the eradication of artistic freedom and imagination, or really how just about anything fresh and real has been replaced by the same exact compulsive and reflexive "political" gesture.
I came of age in the 80s in NYC and saw Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle, Cindy Sherman, Mapplethorpe etc, and there was still the frisson of the shocking and all the subversions we're so familiar with by now: Hey, look it's a woman flashing her tits and smearing her period blood on some Old Master! Hey look, a black woman dressed as George Washington! Hey look, it's Reagan and Falwell making out and tugging each other's dicks etc etc...but it's 40yrs later and we're still supposed to consider something "creative/radical art" because it subverts norms and traditions that didn't even survive into the 21st century.
"Fighting the Patriarchy" and "Subverting Gender Norms" are really the initiatory religious rituals for the young and "educated" of our time, but like all rituals they've become completely detached from their original purpose and drained of any meaning besides LOOK AT ME. It's like our entire creative class is stuck performing this same dance of Damnatio memoriae of the 4 Olds, or they've dug up the corpse of some heretical Pope and now the entire village has lined up to take their hack at it. (And the corpse looks suspiciously like Archie Bunker.)
Will we finally get past the reign of the post-60s counterculture? Will our virtual revolutionaries ever be dragged into the realization that all this time they've been fighting phantoms and playacting Rebels vs Oppressors like kids playing Cops v Robbers with Mommy & Daddy paying for the costumes and refreshments? I'll believe it when I see it, and if I do, I'll be breaking out the Dom P.
hey i was part of the crowd so am in no position to judge...but the vibe was more libertine than puritan, more playful joy than punitive moralism, which at least for me makes anything more forgivable...then again i am also wearing nostalgia-tinted glasses...
CP sorry if I was too abrasive...was deeply attracted to much of the transgressive aesthetic of the underground 80s myself. Can still remember the day I bought a copy of Kathy Acker's 'Blood and guts in high school'...am feeling old. The great sell-out touches some very raw nerves.
hey thanks all good nothing abrasive at all...is hard to tell tone here on the internet...im certainly guilty of getting overheated myself now and then....cheers
This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I can only ask "what the heck has taken them so long?"
The kids of my good friends who live in the UK have gone around and around on politics with me. They were livid anti-Trump and thought I was a lump of stupidity for supporting him. Then the pandemic and the education of what socialist authoritarianism really was... and now they are just waiting for one to reach the point of dual citizenship and want to move back to the US where they will join me in political action to get Republicans back in power. They see this as critical to saving the US and Europe.
I keep thinking... what is wrong with these kids supporting the political establishment and globalist cabal that is intent to make their lives even more miserable? If this change is real, maybe we should label it "woke".
Although I’m anti-woke, I’m also a gay liberal man who believes passionately in the ideals of the Western Enlightenment. I’m appalled at the extent to which the religious ideology of the progressive left has, like a tsunami, engulfed all major institutions. They have embraced an ideology intent on erasing those of us like me who, for example, accept that biological sex is real. BUT! I’m old enough to remember that those who most fondly desire to erase people like me from the face of the earth have historically been on the political and religious right. I’ve read that nowadays conservatives have accepted gay rights, gay marriage, etc. Great, but allow me to skeptical. I think that, down deep, almost all heterosexuals believe gay people are inferior. I grew up with fundamentalist Baptists in the Bible Belt in the 50’s and 60’s. It doesn’t fill me with ecstasy to think that there are a lot of alt-right intellectual “hipsters” who think the Latin Mass is cool. Given history, it will take only the slightest nudge for the right to start demonizing gay people, or any other group that doesn’t fit in to its idea of “tradition”. Is there ANY major religion that doesn’t demonize homosexuality? I would love it if all those in the heterodox community were like N.S. Lyons, Leighton Woodhouse, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Shellenberger, etc. but for now I’m still living on the lonely archipelago of the radical middle, who thinks that both the dominant voices on left and right are, for the most part, nuts.
Reminds me of a Catholic priest from China we met several years ago, and his hopefulness. Yes, the CCP harassed them. Yes, the oppression was getting worse (though not yet too bad in his province). Yes, they forbade any religious instruction of children. But he was optimistic and evangelical, because after 18 years of being starved for meaning, many young adults were VERY open to the Gospel and ready to question what they had been told.
"Dissent against state-sponsored transgression, however is now transgressive. All of what was once revolutionary is now a new orthodoxy with conformity enforced by censorship, scientific obscurantism and eager witch-hunters..."
You have put your finger on something extremely exciting and hopefully/eventually culturally profound. The transgressive cultural ethic of the 1960s is, indeed, now beginning to come under attack (with all the legitimate turmoil and potential creativity that such a journey implies).
It became clear by the mid-1970s that behind the hippie often stood the thug and 50 years later that behind the thug emerged a totalitarian left political/cultural establishment which allows no dissent.
If this newly emerging counter-culture were to contain an authentic interdictory (like young people for a Latin mass) dimension that was to catch hold we might have the possibility of the birth of a new axial age ( where moral history turned-- as it did between 800 and 200 BCE) and out of which emerged Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Platonism, Judaism as well as Stoicism.
A counter-culture as a return to limits--can't get any more revolutionary than that!
Tremendous! Curtis Yarvin makes the same arguments in his insane, purposely obscure way. He refers to cultural trader as “dark elves” and the entirety of the cultural elite as “the cathedral”.
I find that the three people who show the best judgement on Substack are our author Lyons, Paul Kingsnorth and Leighton Woodhouse. I read many other people on substack: Jesse Singal, Freddie deBoar, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Chris Hedges, Caitlin Johnson, they are all brilliant but not quite the same: not as cogent or complete, they are partial. Of course, who am l to judge - just saying.
Good old Curtis is in the class of his own, he, for me , is a must read, painful though it can be.
*yawn* Moldbug is a warmed-over Ayn Rand with even less charm. Go read Atlas Shrugged, it's way more entertaining than anything Moldbug has ever managed to vomit up.
Confession: Moldbug is living a role that intrigues me...an influencer backed by a based sub-group within the oligarchy. As a reader of Vilfredo Pareto, I am convinced that we must look to dissident sympathisers within the elite to lead change.
Dark Elves as Curtis puts it: elite persons who sympathize with the dispossessed and reject the orthodoxy of their fellow elite. Of course this is the thrust of Lyons argument. The dispossessed who found Trump will never get it done, traitorous elite embracing something more are the more likely source of change.
There's another word that begins ra.... that better describes him, IMO.
"It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff (as should be the case with any intellectual—anyone who takes this as an endorsement of white nationalism is an idiot). Maybe this doesn’t need defending. But I feel the urge to defend it anyway."
Curtis is exploring the nature of power. His project is an explication of how we govern ourselves, how we vest power in some people for the purpose of ordering our society: how we run stuff. He explains the options available to us to run any group of people. In this regard he is extraordinary successful.
He follows the bouncing ball, he explains his thinking in a playful and indirect manner ( I don’t think he cares if we get it) and then follows the evidence where it leads.
He concludes1 democracy is impossible 2 oligarchy is venal, self-serving and fucked because the “selective advantage of dominant ideas “ is inescapable and 3 monarchy is the only solution. He is correct and if you disagree with him you are wrong; he is holding a mirror to reality and the image he reflects back to us is accurate not distorted. Again, if you disagree with him you are wrong, he’s done the work and you haven’t, you need to re-evaluate your thinking.
This makes Curtis unique and essential: his thinking underpins all my thinking. He is our Marshall McLuhan.
Great stuff! The challenge will be to resist becoming a merely performative outlet like the preposterous 'young fogeys' of the Thatcher era. As you pointed out, the preferences of young women are a crucial factor.The misery
of wine aunts, aging girl bosses and detransitioners is guaranteed to undermine the current dominant narrative.
The new traditionalism is an overdue recalibration of the culture after a century of aggressive modernism. The stakes are high because our elites have become ever more hostile to inherited forms of culture even as these have become vestigial at best. The war against heritage will inevitably target those who seek to recover or recreate what has been lost.
Wasn't there a traditionalist revival in the UK amoung a certain set of cool intellectuals in the 20s and 30s - I'm thinking Evelyn Waugh and his crew that converted to Catholicism or renewed their faith in response to the war and the Lost Generation excesses - didn't last long as I recall
Don't worry, more is coming soon! In recent months I've had to work through a number of promises for external content I perhaps unwisely agreed to, but had a responsibility to fulfill. In the future my plan is to learn to say no and focus more fully on my subscribers here.
This piece landed just as I’d been thinking that glassy-eyed conformist centre-leftish wokeish hierarchical liberalism seems to be a deeply conservative dogma. If seeing the emperor’s dangly bits is the new radicalism, bring in the new counter-culture.
I guess a counterculture that becomes the dominant culture is sort of like a revolutionary movement that has long since claimed victory, conquered the state, but still relies upon the identity of "radical outsider" because that's who they've seen in the mirror all these years. I'm thinking of old Soviets, old hippies, corpulent King Castro still in his jungle fatigues, etc, who would sooner face the firing squad than face the fact that they've become moralistic prudes and tyrants and lords of the manor with the same dirty hands and grubby motives as the rest of us.
And I guess they hold their illusions together much like our Social Justice ruling class does: locking themselves in an epistemic Versailles where the light stays flattering and no one would dare mention an uncomfortable fact (bc why bring up what you're also guilty of?), repackaging the same old nostalgic wine in new bottles ("Another toast to the glorious Revolution!"), and huddling together in the warmth of shared sanctimony, where the final consolation is being better smarter holier than those peasants in the countryside.
The absurd spectacle of our upscale NYT/NPR/PBS ruling class (who look like Ken Burns in the street but see Huey Newton in the mirror) writing, producing and directing this endless afterschool special called The Resistance™ is fake and tedious for 100 reasons, but the hardest part for me has been the eradication of artistic freedom and imagination, or really how just about anything fresh and real has been replaced by the same exact compulsive and reflexive "political" gesture.
I came of age in the 80s in NYC and saw Karen Finley, Annie Sprinkle, Cindy Sherman, Mapplethorpe etc, and there was still the frisson of the shocking and all the subversions we're so familiar with by now: Hey, look it's a woman flashing her tits and smearing her period blood on some Old Master! Hey look, a black woman dressed as George Washington! Hey look, it's Reagan and Falwell making out and tugging each other's dicks etc etc...but it's 40yrs later and we're still supposed to consider something "creative/radical art" because it subverts norms and traditions that didn't even survive into the 21st century.
"Fighting the Patriarchy" and "Subverting Gender Norms" are really the initiatory religious rituals for the young and "educated" of our time, but like all rituals they've become completely detached from their original purpose and drained of any meaning besides LOOK AT ME. It's like our entire creative class is stuck performing this same dance of Damnatio memoriae of the 4 Olds, or they've dug up the corpse of some heretical Pope and now the entire village has lined up to take their hack at it. (And the corpse looks suspiciously like Archie Bunker.)
Will we finally get past the reign of the post-60s counterculture? Will our virtual revolutionaries ever be dragged into the realization that all this time they've been fighting phantoms and playacting Rebels vs Oppressors like kids playing Cops v Robbers with Mommy & Daddy paying for the costumes and refreshments? I'll believe it when I see it, and if I do, I'll be breaking out the Dom P.
You are unjustifiably kind. They were never revolutionary. Most of the countercultural authority figures were
sheep who showed up and followed the crowd.
hey i was part of the crowd so am in no position to judge...but the vibe was more libertine than puritan, more playful joy than punitive moralism, which at least for me makes anything more forgivable...then again i am also wearing nostalgia-tinted glasses...
CP sorry if I was too abrasive...was deeply attracted to much of the transgressive aesthetic of the underground 80s myself. Can still remember the day I bought a copy of Kathy Acker's 'Blood and guts in high school'...am feeling old. The great sell-out touches some very raw nerves.
hey thanks all good nothing abrasive at all...is hard to tell tone here on the internet...im certainly guilty of getting overheated myself now and then....cheers
Clever, that wasn’t clever that was brilliant, what a fantastic formulation and funny as can be!
thx! u very kind
This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I can only ask "what the heck has taken them so long?"
The kids of my good friends who live in the UK have gone around and around on politics with me. They were livid anti-Trump and thought I was a lump of stupidity for supporting him. Then the pandemic and the education of what socialist authoritarianism really was... and now they are just waiting for one to reach the point of dual citizenship and want to move back to the US where they will join me in political action to get Republicans back in power. They see this as critical to saving the US and Europe.
I keep thinking... what is wrong with these kids supporting the political establishment and globalist cabal that is intent to make their lives even more miserable? If this change is real, maybe we should label it "woke".
Although I’m anti-woke, I’m also a gay liberal man who believes passionately in the ideals of the Western Enlightenment. I’m appalled at the extent to which the religious ideology of the progressive left has, like a tsunami, engulfed all major institutions. They have embraced an ideology intent on erasing those of us like me who, for example, accept that biological sex is real. BUT! I’m old enough to remember that those who most fondly desire to erase people like me from the face of the earth have historically been on the political and religious right. I’ve read that nowadays conservatives have accepted gay rights, gay marriage, etc. Great, but allow me to skeptical. I think that, down deep, almost all heterosexuals believe gay people are inferior. I grew up with fundamentalist Baptists in the Bible Belt in the 50’s and 60’s. It doesn’t fill me with ecstasy to think that there are a lot of alt-right intellectual “hipsters” who think the Latin Mass is cool. Given history, it will take only the slightest nudge for the right to start demonizing gay people, or any other group that doesn’t fit in to its idea of “tradition”. Is there ANY major religion that doesn’t demonize homosexuality? I would love it if all those in the heterodox community were like N.S. Lyons, Leighton Woodhouse, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Shellenberger, etc. but for now I’m still living on the lonely archipelago of the radical middle, who thinks that both the dominant voices on left and right are, for the most part, nuts.
Reminds me of a Catholic priest from China we met several years ago, and his hopefulness. Yes, the CCP harassed them. Yes, the oppression was getting worse (though not yet too bad in his province). Yes, they forbade any religious instruction of children. But he was optimistic and evangelical, because after 18 years of being starved for meaning, many young adults were VERY open to the Gospel and ready to question what they had been told.
Bravo! Peter Thiel calls this movement a "rag tag rebel alliance" . . . here, if you haven't seen this yet: https://youtu.be/balGGAd6ZrI
Right-on N.S. Lyons.
"Dissent against state-sponsored transgression, however is now transgressive. All of what was once revolutionary is now a new orthodoxy with conformity enforced by censorship, scientific obscurantism and eager witch-hunters..."
You have put your finger on something extremely exciting and hopefully/eventually culturally profound. The transgressive cultural ethic of the 1960s is, indeed, now beginning to come under attack (with all the legitimate turmoil and potential creativity that such a journey implies).
It became clear by the mid-1970s that behind the hippie often stood the thug and 50 years later that behind the thug emerged a totalitarian left political/cultural establishment which allows no dissent.
If this newly emerging counter-culture were to contain an authentic interdictory (like young people for a Latin mass) dimension that was to catch hold we might have the possibility of the birth of a new axial age ( where moral history turned-- as it did between 800 and 200 BCE) and out of which emerged Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Platonism, Judaism as well as Stoicism.
A counter-culture as a return to limits--can't get any more revolutionary than that!
Tremendous! Curtis Yarvin makes the same arguments in his insane, purposely obscure way. He refers to cultural trader as “dark elves” and the entirety of the cultural elite as “the cathedral”.
I find that the three people who show the best judgement on Substack are our author Lyons, Paul Kingsnorth and Leighton Woodhouse. I read many other people on substack: Jesse Singal, Freddie deBoar, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Chris Hedges, Caitlin Johnson, they are all brilliant but not quite the same: not as cogent or complete, they are partial. Of course, who am l to judge - just saying.
Good old Curtis is in the class of his own, he, for me , is a must read, painful though it can be.
Lyons is a soothsayer.
Moldbug is a totally unoriginal moron. "dark elves" WTF? Go watch Rings of Power if you want dark elves.
Are you the guy that gets Freddie deBour so upset?
Curtis is corrupting the youth of Dimes Square...he is a gateway theorist for those at risk of thinking. More power to him!
*yawn* Moldbug is a warmed-over Ayn Rand with even less charm. Go read Atlas Shrugged, it's way more entertaining than anything Moldbug has ever managed to vomit up.
Confession: Moldbug is living a role that intrigues me...an influencer backed by a based sub-group within the oligarchy. As a reader of Vilfredo Pareto, I am convinced that we must look to dissident sympathisers within the elite to lead change.
Dark Elves as Curtis puts it: elite persons who sympathize with the dispossessed and reject the orthodoxy of their fellow elite. Of course this is the thrust of Lyons argument. The dispossessed who found Trump will never get it done, traitorous elite embracing something more are the more likely source of change.
I'll decline the suggestion...already read ATLAS and, besides, everything worth reading on self-interest. was written in the 17th/18th centuries.
Curtis is a rascal.
And he gets paid for it!!!
I just hope that he appreciates his luck.
Some billionaire is his patron.
There's another word that begins ra.... that better describes him, IMO.
"It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff (as should be the case with any intellectual—anyone who takes this as an endorsement of white nationalism is an idiot). Maybe this doesn’t need defending. But I feel the urge to defend it anyway."
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/11/why-i-am-not-white-nationalist/
I disagree. No evidence. CY, like the rest of us, is trying to negotiate a minefield while maintaining his intellectual integrity. More power to him.
I was thinking about this this morning.
Curtis is exploring the nature of power. His project is an explication of how we govern ourselves, how we vest power in some people for the purpose of ordering our society: how we run stuff. He explains the options available to us to run any group of people. In this regard he is extraordinary successful.
He follows the bouncing ball, he explains his thinking in a playful and indirect manner ( I don’t think he cares if we get it) and then follows the evidence where it leads.
He concludes1 democracy is impossible 2 oligarchy is venal, self-serving and fucked because the “selective advantage of dominant ideas “ is inescapable and 3 monarchy is the only solution. He is correct and if you disagree with him you are wrong; he is holding a mirror to reality and the image he reflects back to us is accurate not distorted. Again, if you disagree with him you are wrong, he’s done the work and you haven’t, you need to re-evaluate your thinking.
This makes Curtis unique and essential: his thinking underpins all my thinking. He is our Marshall McLuhan.
You are exactly right! Curtis has done the work. He analyses how it works...above all how people collect the rent on dominant ideas.
Racist, hum, I don’t see it.
None so blind as those who will not see.
Clever
Great stuff! The challenge will be to resist becoming a merely performative outlet like the preposterous 'young fogeys' of the Thatcher era. As you pointed out, the preferences of young women are a crucial factor.The misery
of wine aunts, aging girl bosses and detransitioners is guaranteed to undermine the current dominant narrative.
The new traditionalism is an overdue recalibration of the culture after a century of aggressive modernism. The stakes are high because our elites have become ever more hostile to inherited forms of culture even as these have become vestigial at best. The war against heritage will inevitably target those who seek to recover or recreate what has been lost.
Victory to the gods!
Wasn't there a traditionalist revival in the UK amoung a certain set of cool intellectuals in the 20s and 30s - I'm thinking Evelyn Waugh and his crew that converted to Catholicism or renewed their faith in response to the war and the Lost Generation excesses - didn't last long as I recall
Be brave and speak truth to power.
Smokin good, N.S.
Love your writing but seems like your not writing that much on your substack.
Don't worry, more is coming soon! In recent months I've had to work through a number of promises for external content I perhaps unwisely agreed to, but had a responsibility to fulfill. In the future my plan is to learn to say no and focus more fully on my subscribers here.
This piece landed just as I’d been thinking that glassy-eyed conformist centre-leftish wokeish hierarchical liberalism seems to be a deeply conservative dogma. If seeing the emperor’s dangly bits is the new radicalism, bring in the new counter-culture.
Was there much of a revolt against covid restrictions amongst the young? I don't remember seeing any.