Your Questions Answered
Digital nomad hordes! The engineer-hero returns! The future of academia! Political realignment! Alien invasions! And do I believe in God? Like beer? Have a green thumb? Most importantly, am I single?
As promised in the Twenty Thousand Subscriber AMA (which I really should have called Twenty Thousand Subscribers Under the Sword-belt), I have endeavoured herein to answer the numerous questions you asked. There were a lot of them, so this ended up being rather long, particularly as many of them were excellent.
Since there were inevitably themes, I’ve made a rough attempt to divide the questions and answers into categories, these being:
Advice, Personal Questions, Philosophy & Society, Alien Invasions, Futurism, and Literary Inquiries.
This is a very rough classification, as some of you asked multiple questions across a range of topics, and for the reader’s convenience I’ve kept questions from a given reader together in one place.
didn’t ask a question, but he did write a couple of haiku, which I thought were great, and which I offer here as an aperitif:Crazy Old Guy Haiku
Alt. Title: No One Cares What You Think Boomer Boy
Come for me now fools
Old man in old fortress waits
Teeth still real and sharp
My Wish for Snowflakes Everywhere
Alt. Title: Grow a Pair
Free speech difficult
Skin must be tough mind open
Word wounds heal for most
And now, on to the answers you asked for.
Advice
That story about the man who became a philosophy major made me think: What advice would you give a young man looking to strike a balance in his education between the pursuit of knowledge and economic success?
In general I prefer not to give advice, because the circumstances of any given life are simply too different. That said, I’ll give it a shot. To pursue knowledge, read books – old books, difficult books, books that genuinely make you think ... avoid the bestseller lists, everyone reads these and it is almost always shallow slop. Don’t let anyone tell you what to read: follow your own interests. Read broadly, don’t let yourself get obsessively locked into one or two narrow subjects, and then try to draw connections between the ideas you encounter.
Of course reading is only one aspect of knowledge. You should also engage with the world, with other people. Listen when people talk, even when you think they’re kind of retarded, which most people are. Almost everyone knows something you don’t, even if you know more than they do in general. Even if they’re trying to deceive you, you can learn from this – about the ways of deception, the tricks people use, the manipulations they engage in. Ask questions, and ask questions about the answers. The world is a school, it is always trying to teach you, but you need to be open to the lessons it offers.
Economic success is a rather trickier thing, one I don’t have much insight into ... I’m not especially economically successful myself, largely because I’ve never been very interested in making a lot of money so long as my very basic needs are met. However, I would say that it helps to be interested in what you’re doing, for its own sake. Naked greed is seldom rewarded in the long run: it is usually better to find something that you are good at, that you enjoy, that you have some passion for, and then aiming to become extremely good at this. Treat it as a sort of game, rewarding in its own right. There are no guarantees but for many such a path leads to success in the long run, although that run is likely to be more of a marathon than a sprint.
What traits would a modern day philosopher king need to cultivate, to seize the Crown that lies in the gutter?
Mastery of rhetoric, especially its modern forms of meme warfare and poasting. Understanding the concerns and psychology of zoomer males. Shameless, total, unrepentant apostasy towards the clay idols of the left. A clear-eyed understanding of – and ability to harmonize with – the psychological, economic, biological, and technological currents driving the modern world. Finally, mastery of the techniques of Game, and the ability to deploy these on a mass scale, in order to seduce the women.
Of all the countries you've been to, if you had to pick one and stay there, which would it be and why?
So far Tokyo has been, by far, my favourite place to live. There’s a mix of urban convenience and energy; every kind of cultural taste is catered to at an extraordinarily high level of what can only be called sublime artistry; the city’s fractal organization means that anything you could want is within a five-minute walk of the nearest train station; infrastructure is flawlessly maintained; the food is both delightful to the senses and very healthy; the high population density is softened by the fastidious cleanliness of the Japanese, as well their gracious consideration for the personal space and privacy of those around them; while the exquisitely landscaped Shinto parks provide easy refuge when one grows overwhelmed by the noise and the neon. Yet to live there is to always be a foreigner.
I also found Belgrade to be deeply pleasant, for somewhat different reasons. There’s a vibe there that’s really hard to explain, a sort of fun wholesomeness. The city feels incredibly safe, like they’re all looking out for one another, though I suspect this is also because the men are all armed to the teeth and have a gentleman’s agreement to confine their criminal activities to EU countries; there’s always something fun to do; they read books; they respect learning; they enjoy themselves, cheerfully partaking in all of the usual vices but without letting this get in the way of their familial responsibilities ... it’s a very Orthodox thing, I think, this effortless balance between day-drinking and seeing that the kids are still looked after. The Protestant mind cannot comprehend, etc.
My first night in Belgrade, I was sitting on the terrace of a cafe, and watched as a gypsy girl – perhaps ten years old – walked up to try and sell roses to the customers. She zeroed in on a young couple, but was soon shooed away by the waiter, who did not seem cruel in his treatment of her, though he was quite firm. The moment he’d returned inside, she scampered back up on the terrace with a mischievous little smile on her face and went straight back to the young couple. The girlfriend was obviously quite charmed by her, and sure enough, the gypsy girl was successful in prevailing upon the boyfriend to purchase her rose. She then stayed for some time, feet dangling on the bench as she chatted away with the couple. The scene felt like something from Norman Rockwell, and it was not the last such incident I witnessed during my time there. If Tokyo is the archetype of the technotropolis taken to the apex of perfection, Belgrade is simply gloriously human – deeply imperfect, dilapidated, constantly whirling from one crisis to the next ... yet there’s a friendliness to the city that won me over immediately.
Sarah Tasker
Speak to us, teacher, of marriage.
Would that I had more to say; alas, never having been married, I have very little. To be honest I can’t even speak with any authority about the care and feeding of long-term relationships ... my romances, while probably more numerous than most, tend to be intense, tumultuous, and short. This is probably a character flaw.
I literally can’t quit smoking because of you John Carter !! Love your work
My work here is done. No one likes a quitter.
In a line from your article "Crumbling DEIvory Towers" you mentioned the Cambridge model of education. I thought about that a lot and was in the process of developing our training plan for our 30 technicians in the Midwest. What you said about public verbal tests or debate with an expert in the field changed my whole way of thinking about qualification. I built my training program around this concept with weekly verbal quizzes recorded. Long story short, it has been very successful and now the parent company wants to roll this out Nationwide. They have about 400 technicians and want to grow to 700. I'm calling it the "Cambridge Model" because of our emphasis on expertise verified by verbal tests instead of lifeless, inconclusive written ones. The program is having a lot of success right now, but I'm feeling a little bit of imposter syndrome because I really don't know that much about this Cambridge model of learning, it really all came from a couple lines in your article. Can you point me in a direction so I can learn more?
That’s incredible that you were able to apply this to such excellent effect. Honestly I don’t have a whole lot more to say on the subject, myself, as I’ve never studied at Cambridge and was educated myself according to the (sub)standard Prussian factory model that predominates in North America. If I recall correctly, the article you’re referring to was examining an article written by a Cambridge professor, who was expressing his own disappointment at the way the new administration was diluting the Cambridge model. In any case, the only (rather unhelpful) advice I can give is to just look more deeply into the subject, or perhaps approach Cambridge faculty directly...
Crumbling DIEvory Towers
While I like to jump around subject matter here, in order to keep myself – and you – from getting bored, one topic that I return to regularly (as a dog returns to his vomit, as a sow returns to her mire) is the ongoing polycrisis in higher ed. You may have noticed, as I just wrote about this a week ago.
Personal Questions
• What is your marital status?
• If you are married, do you have any children?
• If you aren’t married now, do you plan to be when you find the perfect Martian princess and will you have children, hopefully more than one?
• Would you insist on having a traditional wife, i.e. devoted to home and hearth, your helpmate and stay at home mother, and if not, why?
• Is there any religion whose tenets you would adhere to?
• Do you believe God and evolution are not mutually exclusive?
• Did you grow up in a stable and happy home, both mother and father present?
• Do you have a book in the works?
1. I am single – never married, never divorced. My longest romantic relationship was only a few years, and that some time ago; most have been much shorter.
2. To my mother’s continual frustration and despair, I am as yet a Darwinian dead end, and must so far content myself with vicarious Darwinian success through my several nieces and nephews.
3. I’m not at all opposed to marriage ... though under the current legal frameworks, it offers little in the way of benefit to men, and much risk. Should I find the right woman – or the right woman, find me – I would consider marriage. Children, naturally, I would love to have them, and yes, ideally more than one.
4. I’m not really much for the trad lifestyle, but on the other hand, high-intensity career women aren’t terribly appealing, either. I think I would get very bored very quickly with a Betty Crocker style housewife ... but by the same token I’m not at all interested in sharing my life with a Strong Independent Woman who will try to play the alpha in every situation. A companion, a helpmate, a source of support, and a co-conspirator, absolutely ... but I’m rather jealous of my independence, and am likely to walk the moment I feel I’m being tamed as a draft animal. This is probably why I’m still single.
5. I haven’t really found one yet, to be honest. This will sound very Reddit, and I want to emphasize that I am the furthest thing from hostile to religion ... I’m just not very good at religion, as they tend to have interpretative rules that insist I arrive at pre-ordained conclusions. The result of this is that I end up being a heretic no matter what religion I look at.
6. The supposed tension between a cosmic mind and evolution has always struck me as deeply absurd. There’s no conflict between the two at all, and I get equally annoyed by Darwinists insisting that their (incomplete) model for morphological change rules out divinity, as I do by religionists insisting that the influence of divinity on the cosmos rules out morphological change. That said, I tend to find that both parties will often conflate Darwinism (or more accurately, the neo-Darwinian synthesis) with ‘evolution’, which leads to a great deal of imprecise thought and unnecessarily stupid arguments.
7. More or less, yes. My parents never divorced, though my father did divorce his previous wife, as a result of which I also grew up with elder half-siblings, which introduced a certain degree of tension into the household. My parents, however, rarely quarrelled, and though strict, were supportive and loving. Overall my upbringing was deeply traditional and conservative, something for which I am eternally grateful.
8. I do.
1. Are you handsome?
2. Do you know some people claim they made composite materials that have an emittance over 1, meaning they claim their materials can emit more energy at a temperature than a black body? It occurs to me this breaks the Second law of thermodynamics, but I'm not sure how to publish my proof. Can you give any pointers? I also have stuff regarding the incompleteness of the ideal gas model, and hopefully some other stuff too, later on.
3. You seem pretty keen on "war" as a sort of passtime of the "elite class". Are you aware we're not in the 18th century anymore, and that "war" in the modern world has more to do with systems management and engineering than with motivating large groups of men to not run away from the battlefield as in ye olde days?
4. Serbia had a Woke uprising start soon after you left. Coincidence? :)
5. Which TES game do you think is the best?
6. Do you have an opinion on this piece: Is Consciousness Fading in the Modern World, and more generally on [Gaius] Baltar's writings?
7. Is Deimos Station (is that the name?) ever going to be moved out of the cold icy grip of Stack and into the warm embrace of acktchyually free Internet? Something like an IRC server? A BBS? Hotline KDX?
1. Except when my mother is speaking, the descriptor ‘handsome’ is very rarely applied to me. Words that are used more commonly in my presence are ‘viking’ (not the sexy kind with flowing blonde locks and piercing ice-blue eyes, but the brutal, moody bear-like kind); ‘burly’; ‘yoked’. It’s been a few years since I’ve been blessed with ‘jacked’ ... keeping body fat down to the required percentage is difficult as an endomorph. On too many occasions for it to have been accidental, my appearance has been compared to Kratos.
2. This is the first I’ve heard of such meta-materials, and at first glance it indeed seems like this should violate conservation of energy. Unless there’s some hidden energy source that isn’t being accounted for. Do these materials include radium by any chance?
3. As a very ancient principle has it, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. This has been the case since men first marched out on long campaigns, with the only real difference between Caesar’s time and our own being the complexity of the machinery of war and the consequent lengthening of logistical tails. But there’s nothing in that to suggest that there is no necessity to motivate large groups of young men to fight, if one wants to win. The Russo-Ukrainian war is something of an example, here: both sides have really struggled at that, as a result of which there are young Russian and Ukrainian men all over the world, lying low while the slaughter grinds on. One might also point to the serial failures of Washington elite to provoke any enthusiasm for an invasion of Syria, as a result of which American involvement there was never able to rise above the level of material support for anti-government forces and a certain degree of special forces operations; hence, the Neocon plan to roll up the entire Middle East in a few years stalled out completely.
4. In fact, I was aware of this! The inciting incident – the collapse of a concrete overpass or something, which killed numerous people – happened shortly before I left. Recently a contact back in Belgrade informed me that anti-corruption protests had been gathering pace ever since. It certainly does have the whiff of colour revolution about it.
Actually, just before Serbia I was in Romania ... and after I left, the Georgescu thing kicked off ... hmmm I’m seeing a pattern here...
5. I’ve never played The Elder Scrolls – I’m not really much of a gamer in general, nothing against them at all, I simply don’t have time – so I have no opinion.
6. I haven’t yet read that particular essay, but I’ve read other of Gaius Baltar’s work before, and it has always been excellent – insightful, informative, and interesting. I am broadly well-disposed to all writers who adopt science-fictional characters for their pseudonyms.
7. I assume you mean Slack, rather than Stack. And, yeah, Deimos. That was an interesting project which just kind of died after a while. Over time I found I just didn’t have the energy to keep up with it, particularly as there were certain users who tended to dominate the discussions, meaning that I’d glance at a thread and see, ah yes, a hundred posts by the same two people... I’ve largely limited myself since to public engagements, here and on X, along with participation in a few group chats with frens selected on the basis of proven alignment (and even then, my group chat engagement is not always so regular ... it can become overwhelming, and writing takes time).
What is your home academic field? I ask because I did so many things outside mine that I think something I learned there helped make me flexible or enabled me to exploit something most of my teachers never saw.
Someone here mentioned Ontario. I must have missed that. I figured you for out in one of the western provinces.
I’m generally a bit cagey about my home field, at least in terms of putting it into writing (it’s been mentioned on a couple of podcasts), but I will say that it was in the exact sciences. There’s no question that the things I learned there ended up being applicable to other endeavours; by the same token, skills I picked up from my studies in the humanities were of use there. Specialization is for insects, etc.
And yes, I’m an Ontario boy. I’ve been out west, but only briefly and only on a few occasions.
A great pleasure in life was being in university because I could always find somebody truly interesting and smart to hang out with. It's a lot of fun to watch a bright and whimsical brain at work and consort with others of the same appreciation. So now the question: how much can you tell us about yourself, your background, without compromising your privacy? I'd truly like to know just who the hell you are.
Man, that’s really open-ended. Just passing me the rope and hoping I hang myself with it, aren’t you? I’ve probably said a fairly large bit about myself already, here and there ... male, white, Canadian, roughly middle-aged, STEM background, scifi nerd, travels a lot ... you really need to be more specific...
I saw on Twitter that you used to date a hot chick who thought she was a dude. What was International Women's Day like? Or more importantly, how crazy was International Women's Night?
True story. She was also great – far and away the most brilliant woman I’ve ever dated. International Women’s Day never came up; relationship didn’t last long enough to overlap.
What is your name and where do you live? Tell us how old are you, your home address, your date of birth, your social security number, your wife's name and maiden name, how many kids you have, how old they are, and...and...well, that should do it.
John Carter; Barsoom; well over a century at this point, pushing two; Royal Tower, Greater Helium; I forget; Barsoom doesn’t assign numbers to people, you filthy Earther; Dejah, Thoris; one.
what's your favourite beer?
I’m the furthest thing from a beer snob, and will drink almost anything that isn’t the piss-tasting bilge water known as the IPA. If there was ever an Emperor’s New Clothes situation, the IPA fad is one of them. It originated with clueless hipsters botching the brewing process and hiding the awful taste by making the taste more awful still by dumping criminal concentrations of hops into their foul swill, after which their hipster friends would sip the resulting abomination and insist to one another that home-brewed beer really was just so superior to the soulless corporate product. No one could admit they were lying and it snowballed from there.
I was a voice crying in the wilderness about this travesty for years. It’s now far more socially acceptable to admit to despising IPAs, but even when every beanie-wearing nerd in tight pants was proclaiming their undying devotion to the awful concoction I knew that at least some of them were lying through their manicured lumberjack beards. My friends would drag me to a microbrewery, which would offer a selection of IPA, double IPA, Mad Jack’s Candy Skull Kill Your Tongue and Nuke Your Testicles With Phytoestrogens Triple IPA, chocolate orange-peel stout, and a weisse beer. Disliking stouts, and considering neither chocolate nor orange peel to be flavours appropriate to a damn beer (beer should taste like beer), I would request the weisse beer. Invariably, they’d be out of the weisse beer, and after a while this had happened too often to be coincidental.
Where was I?
Ah, yes. You were asking me what beer I like, not what I hate.
Alexander Keith’s is pretty good.
My question is, do you enjoy gardening?
Hail Thor, god of protection, fertility, and healing for our Folk
I’m not a big gardener, but I’ve done my share. Growing up, we had a vegetable patch that supplied all our greens for the summer and early autumn, and I had responsibilities for weeding, watering, eating uh ‘picking’ the raspberries, and so on. I’ve done a bit of community gardening work as well. But since I move around, a lot, I’ve never had a garden of my own.
Philosophy & Society
Your thoughts as to why lawyers and finance people are so dominant. Even as a financial type myself, this seems suboptimal. Winning by intimidation? Why are others intimidated? Differential awards attracting better people? Better discipline? I can see that happening with marketing but Engineers?
I think this connects into my answer to Rikard’s question (see below) about the return of the engineer-hero. During a Platonic phase, society places a high emphasis on abstraction over the concrete. One expression of this is the increasing dominance of the priestly class – for our society, academics, journalists, and lawyers. In economics, you see power shifting to finance, at the expense of resource extraction, manufacturing, engineering, and so on. As we go further into an Aristotelian cycle, we’ll probably see the influence of finance decrease – and indeed, the big push now is to reshore manufacturing, remove barriers to resource extraction, and so on. It’s also worth pointing out that the world’s richest man is not an investment banker, but an engineer.
To go deeper into the nitty-gritty of it, there’s of course the role played by the fiat money system, which places enormous economic power into the hands of those positioned most closely to it – namely, bankers and their friends. That system started growing at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the foundation of the neither-federal-nor-reserve Federal Reserve, reaching its apex with Nixon’s termination of Bretton Woods, and we’ve been living in the long decline ever since then (just glance at wtfhappenedin1971.com). But again, that system seems to be on its last legs, and it’s likely that whatever succeeds it will be grounded in some physical or digital asset which is much harder to game (e.g. gold, Bitcoin), in turn transferring power from those who deal in the abstract to those who engage with the concrete.
I have three questions:
Do you have an opinion about your fellow Canadian* Marshall McLuhan? To what extent do you believe his dictum that "The medium is the message?"
When I first came across his theory I considered it overwrought Communications nonsense. Words are words! It doesn't matter how they're conveyed! Yet Information Technology has changed the course of history. An old joke:
Q: What's the difference between Hitler and Roosevelt?
A: One used the new technology of radio to establish a personality cult and mobilize his citizens for war. The other had a mustache.
Boomers got got by TV. My parents don't believe anything unless a person in a suit behind a desk on a decent-sized screen reads it to them off a teleprompter. Aliens could touch down in the next town over and they wouldn't consider it real unless Anderson Cooper acknowledged it.
So my third question: does this apply to the Internet?
*I didn't even know Marshall McLuhan was Canadian until I double-checked his phrase. Just a detail.
I only counted two questions.
I’ve only read one McLuhan book, The Medium Is The Massage, which I picked up in high school. Regarding the idea he’s most known for, that ‘the medium is the message’, this seems intuitively correct to me. The way in which information enters our minds – as spoken words, as text, as images – conveys meta-information that influences how we think about that information, and therefore how we think, period. This isn’t actually that novel of an observation. The druids, for example, refused to commit their doctrines to the page, out of the merited fear that this would lead their memories to atrophy; I’ve also read that the Greeks insisted on reading texts aloud, as they did not trust words that were spoken only in their heads.
Historically, the arrival of a new information technology has tended to result in a change in human consciousness, often leading to bloody upheaval. A classic example of this is the printing press, which led to people reading the Bible for themselves, which led to the Reformation, which led to the Thirty Years War. As your joke alludes, there’s probably also a direct line between the invention of radio and television in the early twentieth century, and the ruthless ideological warfare of the First and Second World Wars. We’re living through a similar period right now, as social media tears at the social fabric, and there’s every reason to expect that it will spill its own oceans of blood.
Do you believe in God?
Considering all of world history, what do you think has been the best civilization?
Do you believe that civic (as opposed to ethnic) nationalism is possible?
Yes, I believe that God is quite real. Though I don’t often use the word, save for poetic applications, as it is overlaid with so many wildly contradictory meanings that it is very easy to be misunderstood.
The best civilization so far was that of the ancient Greeks, because their civilization was organized around the principle of producing the highest type of man. After them, I would place the Romans, the Renaissance Italians, and the British Victorians.
Civic nationalism is an oxymoron – civicus and natio are entirely distinct concepts, the former relating to formal membership in a state as a citizen, the latter to membership in a lineage by way of blood. They can be reconciled only if citizenship is assigned based on descent rather than paperwork – in other words, ethnic nationalism (which is practically a redundancy, as it means the same as ‘nationalism’). Civic patriotism might make more sense, although again patriot derives from patris, ‘fatherland’, with the sense of ‘land of one’s fathers’, again carrying the implication of common descent. It would probably make a lot more sense to simply speak of ‘civicism’, if one wishes to emphasize the bond of an imagined community based on membership in a commonwealth divorced from any genetic basis. But in practice, humans being human, civicism doesn’t actually work very well.
Your Reenchantment of the World essay has held my imagination in something of a vicegrip since you posted it, your work has a way of doing that more generally (Pixel Valhalla, Maple Maidan, Eye at the End of Time, etc.); but it struck me as interesting that the piece itself didn't seem to get as much attention as others in your catalogue.
Im sure both the breadth and depth of the thing rendered it a little arcane for some, and to some degree I'm among them; but among the sheer bounty of ideas that could be expounded upon there, the concept of Logomythy, of attempting to rework/rewire our study of our study and the world with it has really stuck out to me. I'd be very keen on reading any further thoughts around that concept if you had any gas in the tank for it, whether thats here or elsewhere in a full revisit.
Also new fiction when? 1st piece was güd shit.
The Reenchantment of the World is a very long essay, so I wasn’t surprised that the reaction was somewhat muted. I usually find that the longer a piece, the longer it takes for it to have an impact, which makes perfect sense because it takes longer to read; fewer people will read it because longer works are much more of an investment of one’s attention; and many of those who might intend to read it are likely to put it aside and forget about it entirely as the the timeline offers up new (and shorter) works for them to peruse. In this case there’s also the subject matter: the pieces that tend to get the largest reactions are the most obviously political, while essays of a more philosophical nature naturally appeal to a smaller, more select audience. This is absolutely fine with me.
You’re not the only one to find the concept of logomythy intriguing. To be entirely honest I’m not totally sure what to do with it. The word came to me in something of a burst of inspiration – what does it mean if we invert the order of mythos and logos, to make logos subject to mythos rather than vice versa? It seems to me that there must be something there, but when I’ve contemplated the concept in any detail, I’ve yet to come up with anything much more interesting than ‘the story of logos’, which is about all I was really able to do with it in Reenchantment, beyond perhaps pointing via implication to something I can’t quite articulate that might go beyond this. It really requires a somewhat radical reconsideration of philosophy, in the sense of going right back to the root ... and our minds (and certainly my mind) are so shaped by the intellectual course of the last 2500 years that this is a very difficult thing to do. Heidegger, I’ve read, tried to do this in his Being and Time, which might be worth looking into.
The Reenchantment of the World
Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.
Pixel Valhalla
When moderns think of the afterlife, if they believe in it at all, they tend to imagine the Great Retirement Village in the Sky. It’s a pleasant grassy field next to a placid lake, where it’s always mid-September, rain never falls from the fluffy white clouds, and the sun is always warm but never hot. Waiting on the shore are Grandmama, Uncle Albert, an…
Maple Maidan
This one is a bit long (okay, they’re all a bit long). I’ve divided it into three main parts. The first describes the problem Canada has turned into, both for its own people, and for its Southern neighbour. The second explains the motivation behind what is apparently the new president’s favoured solution: annexation. The third part lays out how this mig…
The Eye at the End of Time
It’s trite to observe that the Great Awokening is a fundamentally religious phenomenon, representing a sort of secular Abrahamic heresy mining the latent guilt swirling within the hearts of post-Christian whites and thereby activating the messiah complexes of the Anglosphere’s Protestant populations, who have exhibited other similarly sel…
This is the fiction piece Iserlohn mentioned; unlike the essays, it is available only for patrons.
Hector Saves His Dad
“What the hell, John? You’re putting something behind a paywall? Aren’t you always talking about how you deliberately put things out there for free?”
Vlad Ulreche
I don't have any particular question, but I desire to know more about the man from Barsoom, especially in regards to faith and spirituality, or lack thereof.
Well, I believe there’s a God, and between Him and us many gods, which you might also call angels and demons; I do not think consciousness perishes with the body; I believe that Mind is primary to Matter, and that the matterium we inhabit is best thought of as a sort of massively-multiplayer role-playing game operating as a vast academy. But then, such metaphors may reflect nothing more than the prejudices of the historical era I inhabit.
Alien Invasions
of (you should click over and give Andrew a read by the way, some great essays over there). I want to know when you're leading the field trip to Mars
You’re welcome to come visit Barsoom whenever you wish! All you need to do is find a cave in Arizona...
More seriously, I’ve had people ask me if I’d go to Mars myself aboard one of the SpaceX Starships. My answer to this is that it very much depends on the time-frame. At my current age, this would be one hell of an adventure. But I’m not likely to be a billionaire any time soon, and Musk’s most optimistic projections have the cost for transport to Mars coming within the range of middle-class affordability – say a few hundred thousand dollars or so, within the range of a typical suburban house – perhaps twenty or thirty years from now. By then I’ll be getting rather old, and I do not think Martian settlements will have much use for senior citizens.
But you never know what the future might bring.
My only question is: when does Barsoom invade? We will be ready to join you at the landing grounds.
One person asks when I will lead people to Mars, another when I will lead Martians to Earth!
I will respond to this question with a question: how do you know that Barsoom has not already invaded? The tharks might stand out, but the Red Men of Mars do not look so different from the men of Earth...
In the event of an alien invasion, what species' head(s) do you wanted mounted on your wall when it's all over?
People can’t decide if they want me to invade Mars, invade Earth from Mars, or repel a Martian invasion.
In answer to this question, it’s well-known that the Greys are essentially biomechanical peripherals of a synthetic digital hive mind, thus, mounting their heads on spikes would do little to dissuade them, particularly as they have a tendency to dissolve into ectoplasm once life functions (insofar as they can be said to be ‘alive’) cease.
Though evolved beings, mantids suffer from the same hive mind problem: their heads make a fetching ornament, but trying to scare the beasties away is a losing game. All you can do with that particular xeno is exterminate.
Sasquatch could probably be frightened away with a grisly display – they are infamously shy cryptids – but I am not sure we should consider the gentle, reclusive Bigfoot to be an enemy, and would rather converse with one than kill it.
That leaves reptoids, which are extremely long-lived and rather terrified of death as they have no souls, so it really is the end for them. A wall display of taxidermied reptoid heads would not only make a fascinating conversation piece, but would have the salutary effect of frightening the fell creatures away – no sooner would they open a transdimensional portal, than they would conclude that this is perhaps not the best place to look for pain to snack upon.
Futurism
Is there a way forward for academic work? Right now I am thinking Mary Harrington is on the right path: work with your hands and think in your spare time because all the sinecures and pensions that used to exist for lateral and dissident thinkers have gone away.
The only venue within which scholarly projects can be pursued with any meaningful degree of intellectual freedom or honesty is outside of the academy. This is something I’ve written about many times, and nothing I’ve seen recently has changed this evaluation; moreover, there are multiple indications that academia itself is entering into what may prove to be a traumatic contraction phase.
I’m not sure that doing manual labour is necessarily the best path forward for would-be scholars, but there’s also no particular reason the two can’t be combined, and indeed some already combine this. But the Internet’s growing patronage infrastructure opens new possibilities for independent knowledge production, which can enable scholars to do what they’re supposed to do – devote themselves to scholarship.
The Internet is not necessarily the only available option. Consider: why must scholars find positions at large, established institutions? Why could they not, for example, set themselves up as independent, self-governing partnerships, in analogy to the mode of organization adopted by lawyers, doctors (admittedly less common than it used to be), or the owners of gyms? They could operate small schools, teaching what and how they please, to patrons who attend for the same reasons gym rats work out: for the sheer joy of improving themselves. The proceeds could then be used to fund their research. There’s no particular reason an academic department has to be affiliated with a sprawling institution, after all.
Your thoughts on the return of the "engineer hero"-archetype so common and popular in futurist/modernist fiction during the 19th century and up until "Metropolis" or thenabouts?
What does it herald? Why is it returning? Will the same genres and zeitgeist that followed it also return, do you think?
Time truly is a flat circle. This particular return is a welcome one. For too long we have been saddled with the mad scientist, the frazzle-haired Dr. Frankenstein/Albert Einstein knock-off, either dabbling in things man was not meant to know, or with his head stuck firmly in incomprehensible clouds of no earthly use to anyone.
The engineer-hero returns, I think, because our social order is pivoting away from an abstract, Platonic conception of the world, back to a more empirical, grounded, Artistotelian relationship to the real – that is, rather than worrying endlessly about mere theory, there is now a more practical-minded orientation. You see this also in politics, with the return of frankly expressed Great Power realpolitik and the increasing irrelevance of the ideological constructs that dominated the politics of the twentieth century. In technology this expresses itself as a renewed focus on the world of atoms over the world of bits: new energy technologies, transportation technologies, manufacturing techniques, materials science, automation, and so on. At the same time of course we have the gradual re-emergence of the high frontier in the social imagination.
I suspect that this will indeed lead to a revival of the sorts of pulp adventure fiction that thrived in the 20s and 30s, since these forms are more suitable to an external orientation in which doing is more important than cogitating. In fact, you see this happening already, on the margins.
As to why this is happening, the lazy answer is ‘it’s cyclical’, which is true but maybe not so helpful. The cycle is driven by a mixture of possibilities being exhausted, boredom, and the worst tendencies of the previous cycle being driven to their extremes. Here at the end of the Platonic cycle, we’ve lost touch with our embodied selves; we experience the world almost entirely through screens; we’ve lost sight of very basic truths, such as the difference between male and female; the over-emphasis on theory has led our existing elites to lose their grip on power, and on the world; the material world around us is visibly and rapidly degrading; much of our society is functionally insane. We therefore need to ground ourselves again in hard truth, which is to say the tangible and verifiable: physics, biology, engineering.
Initially this will lead to a new growth of technical capabilities, which will renew and remake the world once again. Some of these capabilities will have military applications; some of these applications will be quite horrific. At the climax of the last cycle we split the atom, and to deal with that went screaming in terror into the comforting embrace of priestly rule.
I feel like we're at a fundamental shift in the foundations of political and economic theories. We haven't seen a major new theory since, what?, Marx and Engels. Adam Smith before that. Everybody else is tinkering at the edges.
Beyond the political infighting that's a substack staple, it seems that there is a deep philosophical bent to many writers on the right on substack. Could we see a new political/economic theory arising out of this?
Do you foresee any realignment or redefinition (and I don't mean voting habits) in the fundamental political economies? What would that look like to you?
Maybe after I retire, I'll take time to be thoughtful and write more coherent questions.
As far as I know, the only new political theory that’s been proposed is Alexander Dugin’s ‘Fourth Political Theory’, though I confess that I’ve not been successful in understanding what exactly it is that he’s on about. The three political theories of the twentieth century were, essentially, Liberalism (Adam Smith, Locke), Communism (Marx, Engels), and Fascism, where ‘fascism’ is really more like a grab-bag of ‘everything that isn’t liberalism or communism’. If you look at the actually existing fascisms of the twentieth century, you’ve got everything from reactionary monarchism (Franco), to state-corporatism (Mussolini), to racial socialism (Hitler), to religious nationalism (Codreanu).
As an aside, I tend to think that this is why the West’s embattled ruling class tends to call all of their critics ‘fascists’: they consider themselves to be liberals; their critics generally aren’t communists; therefore, by process of elimination...
Regarding the emergence of a new political theory, I’m a bit skeptical. True novelty is an extremely rare thing, particularly in human politics, which tends to oscillate around a set of organizational archetypes that were mapped out by Greek political philosophers over two thousand years ago (democracy, oligarchy, monarchy, tyranny, etc.) There hasn’t been much evidence of departure from the basic forms they identified. While the details of any given system are of course unique, the basic character of political systems is remarkably stable across time and culture.
That said, I think it’s clear that we are seeing a vast political realignment. What’s emerging right now is a multipolar world order organized around civilizational blocs rather than along ideological lines, in which ‘right’ is not found so much in appeals to the theoretical axioms of political theories, but rather following the frank principle of ‘what is beneficial for us’, where ‘us’ is simply ‘people like us’. It’s a turn from idealism back towards hard-nosed practicality. That won’t necessarily be a bad thing in the long run. The ideological enthusiasms of the twentieth century spilled a great deal of blood and squandered a vast quantity of treasure. Which is not to say that there will not be war: there will always be war. However, my hope is that the warfare that characterizes the multipolar age will be pragmatic competition over resources between professional militaries pursuing limited objectives, rather than all-out ideological total war aimed at absolute annihilation ... more like the contests of the Middle Ages or the Age of Exploration, rather than the madness of the twentieth century.
The civilizational blocs will necessarily have fuzzy boundaries, due to the interconnection of high-speed intercontinental travel and telecommunications. You’ll have regions dominated by this group or that, each with their respective core territories where their own customs are enforced; but these will be interpenetrated by all sorts of little ethnic enclaves that act like little outposts of the various civilizations, which will require some kind of overarching agreement upon certain basic principles of diplomacy and trade. Think something like civilization-states as the background, with network states overlaid on top, all woven together into an incredibly complex, symbiotic societal mesh.
Would you consider yourself a digital nomad at this point? I know Lord Miles (who is a meme, but also admirable for his boldness) has decided to drift from country to country for the near future. I have to admit that it is appealing, especially for people who are smart, have some savings, and aren't being represented or recognized for their skills in their home country. Also, the Scythians and Indo-Europeans traveled a great deal - so it's in our blood! What are your thoughts on digital nomad "community" in general - is it a fool's errand or is there a spark of legitimate possibility and adventure there? Is it possible for a parallel community to emerge from that kind of a liminal space, or is it destined to be a mismatched bundle of sovereign individuals with no greater loyalties?
Man, this is a really excellent question, touching on a topic I’ve been meaning to address at length for a while. Yes, I’ve basically been living the digital nomad lifestyle for about a year now, which actually isn’t that much of a departure from how I’ve spent much of my adult life already, the only difference being that I get to choose where I go now rather than going where work takes me. The key isn’t having savings, though this helps – it’s having a deterritorialized income, specifically so that you aren’t drawing down your savings. If you’re living on savings, you aren’t a digital nomad – you’re just a tourist, on vacation.
Digital nomads are a pretty diverse group. They have a variety of motivations: some are looking for love; some, fortune; some, adventure; some have simply figured out that the cost of living difference between the first and third worlds enables them to enjoy a much higher standard of living than they can in their home countries. Many are driven by a mixture of all these factors.
What they tend to have in common – aside from having found some way of supporting themselves online – is that they tend to be young, well-educated, high-agency, and male. There are some women pursuing the digital nomad lifestyle, but it seems that it appeals more to young men. I suspect this is a mixture of young men being naturally more adventurous, and more willing to travel alone in strange and potentially dangerous countries in which they don’t speak the language; but from talking to them, many also feel like they’ve been driven out of their home countries by the DEI gerontogynocracy.
Most digital nomads drift around for a while, a year or so, taking advantage of the mobility the lifestyle affords. However, eventually they find that the loneliness gets to them. Socializing is relatively easy – it’s easy enough to find language exchange events, for example, where one can meet other digital nomads as well as locals – but such encounters tend to be very transient and therefore lacking in depth and meaning. Eventually they tend to pick a spot and settle there for a year or three; no doubt some will stay in their new homes for the rest of their lives, gradually going native. Most probably ultimately return home. Often this is cyclic: a few months in the home country, a few months abroad.
There’s no question that there’s a strong element of hedonism to the digital nomad lifestyle. Those language exchanges I mentioned, for example, are essentially big parties where young expats mingle with young locals, and those are far from the only opportunities for enjoyment. Some lose themselves in sensual pleasures, but many possess greater self-discipline, and use their freedom to advance themselves professionally and work on themselves.
The phenomenon is rather analogous to the Romantic wanderjahre of the 19th century – rootless, sensitive young men adrift on the roads, searching for something they can’t quite articulate to themselves, but aware that whatever it is, it is not to be found at home. This is why Lord Miles seems like a gentleman adventurer out of another age, while being something of a paragon of the current age; the vast majority of digital nomads lack his spirit, preferring to reside in safer locales, but I suspect the example he sets will inspire others.
When I visualize it, I think of the digital nomads as a sort of cloud of ionized particles, kicked into a high-energy state by the socially disruptive effects of technology, surrounding the Earth and spiralling around invisible magnetic threads of economy, climate, and experience. Currently, that cloud is wholly atomized: it is internally only very loosely connected. This prevents them from being true nomads, which traditionally have a tribal social structure, moving from place to place as a cohesive group. This social atomization also makes them collectively powerless. Though they can be individually impressive, as a group they are as dust on the wind.
There is, however, a very interesting potential to this group. Many of those I talk to are acutely politically conscious, painfully aware of the desperate conditions back home – indeed, this is a very large reason why they have taken to the road in the first place. They are the disinherited sons of the West, and they are not happy about the state of things in their fatherlands. If some influence could unify them, enable them to coordinate among themselves for common goals, they could become a force to be reckoned with – organizing from exile as a distributed swarm to launch multipronged unrestricted warfare, in the Chinese sense of the concept, on the regimes at home, undermining them economically, morally, and spiritually ... and then perhaps returning in a sudden flood like Odysseus coming back to Ithaca to deal with the suitors, restoring order and taking their rightful places.
There is of course another potentiality in this group, which is that it may serve as the organizational and demographic foundation for a Western network state. Indeed for the sort of coordination that I suggested above to be at all possible, such an entity is practically a prerequisite. First, to provide the necessary degree of organization; second, because it would require stable power centres beyond the reach of established Western authorities, which are impossible to maintain with a mob of mere individuals living as dissipated tourists.
Literary Inquiries
Have you considered aggregating, editing and printing your "best of" for posterity?
One more - can you point to a definitive edition of Edgar Rice Burrough's essential Princess of Mars/ Carter books? I ordered one off Amazon and it arrived with horribly printed 6 point font.
I have considered publishing a volume of collected essays, yes, but it is a project that remains for now very firmly in the conceptualization stage. You’re not the first to ask about that, so I guess there’s demand. I’d need to find an artist...
Unfortunately I can’t provide much useful guidance on Burroughs editions of A Princess of Mars. There are certainly numerous terrible versions out there, particularly on Amazon. I have a paperback collected works edition I picked up some years ago, which is fairly nice, but I can’t remember which edition it is, don’t have it handy, and a quick Google doesn’t turn it up.
How did you like editing The Bushido of Bitcoin? Would you do such „job“ of helping edit emerging works (that you like) again/more often? Or even regularly, as one of your income streams?
So, that was a really interesting experience, and it was also a lot more work than I’d expected ... and I expected it to be a lot of work. It took over a year, and we went through multiple drafts together. I don’t even want to think about how many hours it involved.
I’m not particularly interested in expanding my editorial services more widely. As it is, this blog takes up a fair bit of my time; in addition to this, I have my own books that I want to write. Just editing the guest essays that appear here once every month or so can use a lot of my time – I don’t, as a rule, simply take these as they’re first submitted, but work with the authors to improve the flow of the text, draw their ideas out, and so on.
Speaking of The Bushido of Bitcoin, you can read a very nice review here:
You can find an excerpt of The Bushido of Bitcoin here:
And you can buy it here:
That’s all for today (it was a lot, I know ... but there were a lot of questions, many of them excellent). Thank you to everyone who participated! If you’ve got any of your own, feel free to ask them. I’ll leave this here because Substack complains if I don’t
And leave it there, for now.
Fantastic commentary on digital nomads -- you're bang on with essentially every point. I was one myself for a good five years before settling down in Hungary after finding a lovely woman.
The sense of adventure, intellect, and propensity for risk-taking is something I've found in all digital nomads, though after a while, one has a sense that the hedonism of it all is a little *too much*. Some of the greatest people I've met and some of the worst embraced the lifestyle completely, though my experience is that most eventually gravitate to one particular locale, or, as you say, return home.
Given that my home -- New Zealand -- is a bit of an odd and unfavourable place these days -- especially for someone looking to find a good woman and have a few sprogs -- I landed in Eastern Europe like so many. Belgrade sounds wonderful, a lot like Hungary, really. People don't have much but they make do. Every culture has its quirks, not to mention its ups and downs. Adapting is hard, but it can be done. I'm sure some reading this may have done it.
It's interesting seeing the other side of digital nomads -- to look upon what they become when the lifestyle loses its lustre; most come out the other side as well-rounded, worldly human beings, but some can never quite let go of the golden years. I'm not sure I can: there's an undeniable thrill to making money on your laptop then strolling out of your bungalow for an early evening ocean swim in Thailand, for example.
Some can never let go of these moments, thus they are destined to try in vain to repeat them, lost in a false reality where they never truly grow up or move on. It's rare, but I've seen some guys become shells of themselves this way.
Nothing anchors you and gives you purpose like a family, at least as a (somewhat) virtuous man.
I hope you get the chance to start a family, too, one day, bro -- reckon you'd have a lot to pass on.
Now you've just gotta find a woman who's worth the time.
*Good luck*! (taken voice (: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zNdw4DaUM8)
What a great treat! Thank you for that - lots of questions and lots of answers. Just like the best kind of smörgåsbord and knytkalas*.
Beer-question made me laugh. I'll try any beer, lager, porter, small-beer, bitter, pilz and such once. And most only once. Make mine dark, heavy, and pilz-like and I'll camp out next to the tap for the evening. IPA is like intercourse in a canoe. And "light beer" is a flogging offence.
(Oh for the days of youth, when downing a crate (24 cans/12 Liters) during an afternoon and evening was no big deal!)
The Platonic to Aristotelian shift is a good way of putting it, not just because it may herald a move to realism, pragmatism and practicalism but also to ethics again becoming a real deal. 'Nicomachean Ethics' is looking at me from the book-shelf as I type. Fitting that you mention Plato and Aristotle, since to the Greeks Mars the planet was Pyroeis:
"The Fiery" - a single glowing ember can be rekindled into a fire rivalling Muspelheim itself.
If every people in Europe re-discovers the classics and lace them together with their own ur-history once more... oh, tremble would the grubbers and grifters when met with opponents who, in the face of an enemy using abstraction and greed as his only tools, respond with the iron hand of will made flesh.
As a Swedish Viking is claimed to have told a French priest once, after receiving baptism and being told it was customary to pay a gift to the church for this: "I give you your life. Would you prefer a different gift, just say so"
That kind of lakonic humour hides a very specific, very direct yet sly and keen mind.