Lay Down and Let It Rot

Refugees from a broken system

Midnight Climb, by Michael Kvac

It’s been about a week since my last post, and there’s good reason for that – it’s been something of a mad week.

The situation is this. My contract with my previous employer came to an end, without possibility of renewal, at the end of August. It’s not like that came as a surprise: over the last several months I’ve been attempting to find a faculty position and thereby move on to the next stage of my career. This wasn’t an entirely unreasonable hope on my part: my previous-as-of-two-days-ago position, a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at a major R1 research university, was intended to be a stepping stone to just such a career advancement, and I’ve spent the last few years putting that opportunity to good use. My CV makes other postdocs at my career level cry with feelings of inadequacy. My teaching evaluations are excellent; I’ve built up a solid record of successful proposals; I’ve been heavily involved at a prominent leadership level in various collaborations; I’ve sat on grant review committees; I’ve reviewed numerous papers; I’ve delivered invited talks at large international conferences; I’ve supervised and mentored students with great success; and the whole thing is capped off with a long publication list that – in contrast to, say Neal Degrasse Tyson’s – includes a large number of first-author publications.

I don’t say any of that to brag, but to set the stage for the situation in which I find myself: to the shock and dismay of my colleagues, and the dismay if not exactly shock of myself, unemployed.

Now, there’s a degree to which I was my own worst enemy here. Or rather, the inflexibility of my principles was my worst enemy. I decided early on that I would not lower myself to write a diversity statement, because I refuse to make a ritual declaration of ideological faith to a faith that I do abhor. I will not violate my conscience and that certainly includes a refusal to genuflect to the woke DEI – to do so is to DIE a little bit at a time. Over the last few years diversity statements have proliferated as a mandatory element of faculty application packages to the point where about half of the advertised jobs demanded them. On top of that, in the shadow of COVID mass formation, a fair number of institutions had mRNA transfection mandates, or resided in countries with such mandates; I refused to apply to these, too. In total perhaps two thirds of the advertised positions were ruled out by these factors. Of the remainder, I got interviews at a couple, but offers from none.

Perhaps I’ll have more luck in the coming season. Vaxx mandates are largely gone, save at a few holdouts like Canada’s Western University, which has just been hit with a lawsuit after it abruptly demanded its students and staff be boosted a week after tuition was paid. However, I’m not terribly sanguine. The main issue is the DIEing academy, in which individuals such as myself, with unfashionable skin colour and unfashionable genitalia with which my preference is to do unfashionable things, are placed at the bottom of an inverted hierarchy in which competence, ability, and accomplishment are all deprecated in favour of elevating representatives of ‘equity-seeking groups’. Here in Canada this form of discrimination has become entirely open and unashamed, with universities opening faculty positions, including prestigious National Research Chairs, that explicitly exclude straight white males. That’s a matter not just of woke administrators ramming DIE down everyone’s throats, but rather of woke administrators enthusiastically throwing in with our woke government, which has made excluding the stale, male, and pale from the professional classes a matter of national policy.

Alert readers will have noticed that I just wrote ‘here in Canada’. That’s because I just relocated back to the People’s Democratic Monarchy – hence the madness of the last week. With my income stream drying up to the point that the hunger stones are showing, I could no longer afford to remain in my absurdly expensive one-bedroom apartment – which has become even more outrageously dear thanks to the money printer going Brrrrr and all those excess Federal Reserve Notes flowing into real estate assets. Unwilling to watch my savings get bled away given that I’ll be living on them for an indeterminate time, I gave away all my furniture, spent several hundred dollars shipping what I couldn’t carry, threw my remaining belongings into overstuffed luggage, and fled the Disunited States like a refugee for the Post-Great Post-White North to claim asylum at my mother’s place¹.

Yes, dear readers – your humble author has become the archetypal middle-aged man literally living in his mother’s basement.

If you detect a note of bitterness in the above, you’re not wrong. I’ve invested over a decade of my life into this career, and to realize that all of it counts as nothing for the simple fact that I’m from a disfavoured group tastes like nuclear ash.

On the one hand, you might say – how do you know it’s your immutable characteristics, and not something else, say that your research field isn’t fashionable enough? The answer is I can’t know, as it’s not like hiring committees will tell you ... but I can tell you that I’ve been told by senior professors, off the record, that if I had a vagina I’d certainly have been offered a job, and probably more than one ... and I can also point to the numerous examples of universities explicitly excluding white guys from applying. The examples of universities implicitly excluding white guys are far more common. I once applied for a position that I was later told I probably wouldn’t get, as they really wanted to hire a woman; sure enough, the short list was all grrl power. In that case there was no indication in the job ad that it was a waste of my time to apply. It’s impossible to say how often that happens, but the safe money in this political climate is on ‘all the time’.

On the other hand, you can say: well maybe you just aren’t good enough, sure there’s discrimination, but other groups have dealt with that in the past and overcome it. This brings to mind the apocryphal black woman scientist beloved of Hollywood screenplays, who had to be better than all the men in order to bust through the glass ceiling and beat the old boy’s club at their own game. You know, the Hidden Figures plotline. This is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of woke discrimination, however. The ‘sexist’ and ‘racist’ discrimination of yore was founded primarily in the idea that other groups couldn’t do things, because they lacked the ability; when an individual from one of those ‘oppressed’ groups demonstrated that ability, they were given seats at the big boys table. The wokeites make no such claim: they don’t say that white guys lack the ability to do things, but rather that in order to correct ‘historical inequities’, they should be prevented regardless of ability ... indeed that the very notion of ‘merit’ is merely a synonym for patriarchal white supremacy. There’s no amount of hard work that can bust through such a barrier. The only way around it is to wear a wig and cut your dick off, or discover (or invent) an ancestor belonging to some lost tribe of American Indians². I feel like something of a fool for not figuring this out earlier. As recently as a few years ago I maintained precisely the illusion described above: that all I had to do was work so hard, be so good at what I do, that the merits of my curriculum vitae would drown out the shrieking of the banshees in HR.

On the gripping hand, you can say: why would you even want to be a part of this institution, in any case? And on that, I don’t really have a good response, because deep down I’m not sure I really do. Do I really want to spend the rest of my life biting my tongue around the zampolit, publicly agreeing with what I privately despise, all so I can collect a paycheck from a failing institution that’s become a twisted parody of what it once was? To what end? I suspect I ultimately wanted to show I was good enough to reach that level, more than I wanted the life it offered.

The day after I arrived here, my brother called to catch up. He commiserated with me about my situation, and described similar goings on with his former employer – a municipal police force. It seems the female chief wanted an inspector’s position filled by another strong independent woman, who naturally enough and in sharp and glaring distinction to her male competitors lacked the necessary qualifications. The lady chief therefore simply rewrote the regulations, and hired the woman ... who has since, in my brother’s words, demonstrated herself to be an absolute airhead who fucks up everything she touches.

This kind of thing is everywhere.

And it’s corrosive at a level that I don’t think people have fully realized.

It isn’t just that placing incompetent people in positions of responsibility gradually erodes the ability of institutions to perform their core functions. Civilization depends to a large degree on the willingness of men to go above and beyond, to compete with one another in various arenas in order to win prestige, wealth, and ultimately women. The urge to excel is the engine that drives everything, whether scientific discovery, technological innovation, athletic performance, or economic development. The need to prove oneself, and to gather the rewards that come with it, is what motivates young men to put in long hours, to work hard, to push themselves to their very limits and beyond. We don’t grind because we can’t not grind: we grind because there are incentives that make grinding worthwhile.

The system of diversity spoils, in which rewards are allocated on the basis of group membership, hits that urge like a JDAM. If it does not matter how hard you work, how many hours you put in, how much you achieve ... then it all becomes entirely pointless. Eventually, you stop straining against the immovable object, and go grab a beer and sit on your ass in the shade.

I think that’s happening all over right now. There’s been a lot written about the Great Resignation, how people have been just walking away from their jobs over the last couple years, and how employers increasingly can’t find anyone to fill open positions. There’s also been a noticeable drop-off in productivity amongst those who have stayed in their positions; we’ve all felt that, I think. People are just phoning it in en masse. Sure, a certain element of that is the combination of ennui and a lack of accountability that comes with remote work. But there’s also an entire generation of young men that have been relentlessly trained into the realization that they’re at the bottom of the progressive stack no matter what they do ... after a while, why would they continue bothering to even pretend to try?

In my case, I’ve gotten very lazy over the last several months, from a professional standpoint. As it became clear that I was very unlikely to get a job offer, my desire to do anything beyond the absolute bare minimum professionally simply evaporated. Now, true, I’ve been working from home since the beginning of the lockdowns: while the university technically returned to in-person work about a year ago, they retained the mask mandate until mid-summer (and re-instated it for the beginning of the academic year), and I absolutely refused to wear a mask so, screw it, work from home it is. During most of that period I had no problem motivating myself. I’m a solitary worker by nature and don’t need in-person accountability. I do, however, need to have some sense of a payoff.

Economic factors play a role here, too. In China, there’s a parallel phenomenon. The slogans Tang Ping and Bai Lan – Lying Flat and Let It Rot – have caught on in their online youth culture over the last couple of years. They articulate what seems to be a widespread sense in the Middle Kingdom that there’s no point in even trying, because it doesn’t matter how hard you work ... you’ll never save up enough to own your own place and have a decent middle class life, so you might as well just coast. Obviously, in China there’s no issue with Han being discriminated against in favour of recent immigrants or ‘historically disadvantaged’ populations: China is a de facto ethnostate, there are no recent immigrants³, and the Han could care less about the plight of minorities. My guess is that this is the Chinese youth reacting to the entrenched corruption of the Chinese Communist Party, not by revolting against it, but simply by refusing to kill themselves working for it.

After chatting with my brother, I related the anecdote about the police inspector to my mother. She chuckled and responded that at another point, he’d indicated that he was sure his wife would get a position for which she was unqualified, solely on the basis of her sex, and that he was entirely at peace with this. She considered that to be a point of hypocrisy, and it is ... but it’s also an inevitable and logical response to the corruption of a spoils system.

This is the other form of subtle corrosion eating through our social fabric. Western civilization depends on the widespread perception that there are rules, that those rules are fair, and that if we all play by them we can all have a decent life. Diversity, equity, and inclusion has put that perception to the sword. When it’s gone, there’s no longer a cohesive social order in which we all work together for personal and collective benefit. There’s just a carcass from which you’d best strip what meat you can before it rots.

It isn’t just my brother who’s happy to advance his familial finances by exploiting this system. Most of the young guys I know, the ones who understand the full dimensions of the antijustice that’s been foisted on us, have exactly zero loyalty to the system and are dead set on extracting whatever benefits they can from it, with no intention of doing anything more than they absolutely have to to feed back into it. This generally takes the form of finding ways to get whatever monetary benefits they can from the social welfare state. There’s a stark contrast with the ethic of previous generations, for whom reliance on the welfare system was shameful, and who therefore wanted to avoid even the appearance of freeloading. It’s not that the younger guys don’t understand that a system weighed down with parasitism must ultimately collapse. They understand that very well. That’s the point. They don’t see that system as their system: it’s a system controlled by their sworn enemies, who have repeatedly and publicly declared their intention to marginalize and displace them. The choice they have is between being hardworking taxpayers, whose taxes get diverted to supporting the burgeoning families of their replacements while their hard work is ignored in favour of promoting said replacements ... or instead, maximizing whatever benefits they can extract from the system while it still lasts.

The system we’ve created is rapidly destroying our society. Low-IQ mediocrities are elevated to positions beyond their abilities, where they blunder about like apes in the control room of a nuclear reactor. Men of ability are frozen out, and either stop trying and lose themselves in drugs, alcohol and video games ... or begin actively working to destroy the system. And the reigning ethos becomes grabbing whatever you can ... stripping the wiring to sell the copper, rather than laying the wires to enjoy the benefits of electricity.

In the meantime, now that I’m officially funemployed, I’ll have a lot more time to entertain you all with my meandering Neo-Gonzo stream-of-consciousness writing. The next couple weeks in particular, I’ve got nothing but time on my hands ... as a Pureblood Untouchable, Canada’s Liberal Occupation Government has decreed that I must remain in quarantine for 14 days, unless I should test⁴ positive for the Dread Rona, in which case the LOG informs me that an additional 10 days of house arrest get tacked on. Luckily, they don’t seem to be very vigilant about actually enforcing the quarantine: in the days since arriving, I’ve had not a single visit or call from public health to verify that I’m being a good little slave, and I’ve gone for a few night rambles around the neighborhood once it was late enough that I figured any such call was unlikely. It’s the little rebellions in life that make it worth living.

Get Telegrams From Barsoom!

1. It seems to be the season for fleeing. Rolo just had to exfiltrate from Minsk after another Kafkaesque run-in with clueless secret police boomers, lest they send him back to Ukraine so their coke-head quisling can send him to the front lines to get chewed up by his co-ethnics’ artillery.

2. I know a guy who did this. In fact, he’s the only white dude I know who’s recently been successful at getting a faculty job at a major Canadian university. The guy is six-foot-plus and blonde, but gets away with being an oppressed representative of Turtle Island’s First Nations because he cleverly told them he had a great-great-great grandmother who was a member of an extinct tribe.

3. Chinese immigration policy is very simple: No.

4. I’m very annoyed about the tests. I had a perfect streak of never having once taken a coronavirus test, broken upon entering the People’s Democratic Monarchy.