Chris Rufo is Right

Contra Mundi

I hadn’t meant to write another essay so quickly after my previous one, but I think I might have something useful to contribute to the right wing crisis du jour. In case you missed it, Chris Rufo, NormieCon-adjacent nemesis of DEI, put out a series of posts on X that read as follows:

This relatively bland but encouraging missive got a good bit of hate, and Rufo’s response was to double down. This was the tweet that really set everyone off:

Rufo was backing up an earlier assertion he had made that the economy was basically sound by noting that unemployment was statistically low and that there were jobs near the relatively well-off area where he lived that paid reasonably well for the taking. Nevertheless, right wing X exploded at the suggestion/ implication/ hint that any of them should work at Chipotle.

What’s interesting is that the reasons why this was terrible advice varied, though different strains of argument had some overlap. Many people seemed to think he was telling young men to give up trying to get tech jobs and settle for serving fast food, which led to another round of calls for pajeet-pogroms. Others questioned whether $70,000 was enough to live on given inflation and the rising cost of living. But the main thrust of most of the complaints was that working at Chipotle was poorly remunerated and disrespected corporate slavery, beneath the dignity of a free white man, who is being denied his proper inheritance by Boomer machinations and should settle for nothing less than . . . well, that part is a bit vague.

Everyone seems to know what they hate- the unfair system stacked against them. The Rufo-buse stems from his seeming acquiescence to that system and his supposed encouraging others to accept it as well. What’s lacking though is a positive vision for what would replace it, or whether it should be replaced at all.

Vagrant of Rhodes

had a long thread where he explored some of these tangents. I don’t want to give short shrift to his argument, where he lays out the deeper implications of the dissatisfaction with the economy in terms of broken social trust and other degradations stemming from global capitalism. Highlights include:

This is all true; working for a huge, soulless corporation that is wholly indifferent to your very life is deeply unsatisfying. But it’s not really a novel complaint. The much-maligned Boomers offered the same critique of the system in their heyday- it was what being a hippy was all about. And those bearded burnouts were themselves hardly original. Their parents’ generation had its beatniks and bikers. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was written in 1955, which is the time we’re all supposed to be tradding for. Henry David Thoreau thought things had gone too materialist in the 1850s.

But for some the problem isn’t the meaninglessness of the work nor is it the fact that it doesn’t pay enough. At another level, there seems to be the impression that this sort of job would result in a kind of social stain much akin to losing varna.

Johann Kurtz

wrote a piece just yesterday morning about why young men should reject working at Chipotle as a career or even a stepping stone because of the loss of status it would entail, blighting one’s permanent record and restricting future career and marriage prospects. There are acceptable pathways through life and fast food just isn’t one of them. It’s worth quoting at length:

To secure the (ever rarer) foundations of a good life - marriage, property, children - men must make excellent choices at every stage of their youth. These foundations are becoming harder to achieve. The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.

The best white collar jobs - those which pay well enough to buy a house and start a family - require your CV to tell a strong and coherent story, featuring good grades, good schools, good internships, good skills, and good personal projects.

One false step in terms of how you spend your time can have serious ramifications. Tempers are high because the young understand exactly how fragile their situation is. . .

. . . working as an assistant manager at Panda Express as a post-graduate will compromise your ability to land good white collar jobs later. You are seriously risking permanent downwards mobility if your CV shows you held this position for longer than three months after graduation. It shows a lack of foresight: why didn’t you have a proper job plan lined up after you graduated?

CV expectations are now higher than they ever have been. Competition is intense and brutal. There’s no room for missteps on this subject. A lot of older people don’t realize how much of an issue this now is.

Before I address this critique specifically I should mention the more general confusion running through all of the varied complaints- search the threads and see for yourself- a profound cognitive dissonance stemming from minds that seek both to reject the system and accommodate themselves to it. They want what the system offers even as they ostensibly refuse to do what they would have to do to be a part of it, and what they reject about it changes with the circumstances of whatever particular internet argument is taking place.

“Why won’t these evil, insane, blue haired, bepronouned, HR land-whales give me a chance?!”- Average Dissident

Is wagie life bad because it’s spiritually polluting? Then why complain that no one will hire you and that you can’t buy the house you want or marry that 10? Are you a Bronze-Age Nietzschean warrior too aristocratic to roll burritos? Then answer an ad in Soldier of Fortune and go do that (say what you will about Nietzsche, he lived a Spartan life to free up his resources for his greater mission). Are you profoundly middle class and derive your self-worth from your profession and economic status? Then just be fake and gay and get hired- more on that to come.

Over and over comes the confused refrain of contradictions. I want to live a traditional life in an organic community with high social trust doing meaningful work and also inhabit a big blue city among an atomized mass of millions while working a laptop job. I embody the Faustian spirit of the West- moving, expanding, conquering- but I’m certainly not going to live in the middle of nowhere. I’m a based koryos-Chad warrior Uber-bro who seeks out the most comfortable and risk-free life I can wrangle. I revolt against the modern world, save that I accept its moral authority and values. I want to have enough money to eat at a place like Chipotle, but no self-respecting white man should work there, so we’ll have to import foreigners to do it, except we’ll also need to deport them, so the Chipotle will close, and I’ll have to listen to Boomers talk about how many restaurants there were when they were young and remember what they took from us! And above all, I consent to be judged by the people I claim hate me, to live according to their expectations, and accept their opinion of my worth as “status.”

Honestly, I am pretty mad they took this from us.

I don’t often disagree with Johann Kurtz, but here I must. If you’d be embarrassed at the prospect of HR seeing Panda Express on your resume, just imagine what they’ll think about your Christianity. If you’re a traditional young man and you’ve successfully dodged the service industry and landed that sweet job in corporate America, you’ve almost certainly now embarked upon a life inimical to your values, and you’ll need to come up with some clever responses when they ask what your department’s plans are for Pride Week, for your Newsome for President donation, or, if you’ve really made it, what you’ll be wearing to that Spirit Cooking party with the Podestas. This isn’t to say that everyone working in such an environment is evil, and there’s much to be said for getting your foot in the door to get the power to make things better. But you’re hardly setting yourself up for that kind of battle when you’ve trained yourself to appeal reflexively to the people who hate you.

My resume shows me working at Marriott for thirteen years, parking cars, waiting tables, hauling furniture, and bartending- all the while going to several state schools I attended whenever I could. I worked that way even after I had chances to advance my prospects materially, because I liked college and hoped to make a life at it. That didn’t work out as I’d hoped at the time, but with mature reflection I realize that mortgaging my future to the modern university system would amount to the same thing as working for a corporation. We all have to make compromises, but looking back, I’m grateful I didn’t make more.

I never cared what the businessmen who dined at the golf course clubhouse that employed me thought of me and I couldn’t imagine structuring my life around appeasing them from self-interest or otherwise. They had money and presumably houses and families (so did the manager of my restaurant) but I can’t recall even one of them, after more than a decade, with anything interesting to say. They were the class of people that voted right and imported left, who lived by bread alone, and while their work was lawful and remunerative I can honestly say I preferred, and would still prefer, my six-hour shifts that left me free to read my books to whatever logistics-management-software-engineer-regional-systems-distribution-marketing bourgeois twaddle they were up to.

The only interesting golfing businessman- it’s why they tried to assassinate him.

But that’s just me. If you want a white-collar job under Current Year conditions then following Kurtz’s advice to trim your life according to the whims of your future employers makes sense, but is that what you really want? Is that what you should want? Are “marriage, property, and children” the foundation of a good life? If so, why did Christ have none of them? Why did He reject the kingdoms of the world? Why did He not tailor His message to the suit the Romans and Sadducees? If Christianity isn’t your thing, ask yourself whether a proper Homeric hero would bite his tongue rather than miss a chance for a sweet corner office. Would Plato advise a bright young man to tie his whole life to salaried employment with a disinterested corporation? If that sounds silly to you, because we live in the real world where real people should train and obey like samurai for the chance to work at Google, then you should consider yourself fully accepting of the neoliberal worldview. You might be right, but hardly Right.

To be clear, I fully accept that things are hard for young people, especially young men. I can state confidently that I almost certainly spend more time with that particular cohort than anyone reading this. But there is something very unseemly about the degree to which people go on about how uniquely bad things are, pulling out endless charts and statistics and anecdotes all to drive home the point that that there is no hope (there will be a good bit in the comments). There’s a despair to it all that’s off-putting and demoralized. I suspect that deep down some amount of it is rationalizing; a lot of young men simply don’t actually want a family and a job and gain some emotional satisfaction believing that the system will only allow them a life of self-centered consumption rather than that of duty and sacrifice they claim to desire. But I don’t think that’s true of everyone and I really believe a lot of the anger comes from energetic young minds with no constructive outlet. They want something different, better, and their own. They want hope.

Is that possible? Can things be changed? Sure, but change means fighting and fighting means struggle and suffering. Credit to Rufo- he’s staked out his own section of the battlefield and achieved some real results. He’s not perfect- and far too accepting of liberalism- but he’s taken his hits and I respect that. But he’s a professional activist with a niche career. What course for the rest of us?

The first thing any of us must do here on the right side of things is make a mental break with the world. To reiterate, I fully accept the critique that the system is stacked against young people and young men in particular. It would not be wrong to call it evil. To my mind then, the last thing we should be doing is conditioning those same young men to dedicate their lives to pursuing external validation from that very system. I’m not telling people to abandon white-collar jobs and live in communes. I’m saying go where you can do and above all be good with minimum concern for whom you must appease to be there. A house and a family are fine things, worth fighting and dying for, but they cannot be the foundations of a good life, because ultimately it’s not within our power whether we have them or not. The only true measure of a worthwhile life is a commitment to transcendent virtue, which is available to anyone, and is threatened most directly by a desire to conform to the transitory and fallen world. As a wise man once said:

The next thing is to have a clear idea of what the goal should be. To some extent this varies from person to person, but there must also be a collective vision of a more just society that benefits the common good. To my mind, the economy and political life of the country should be organized around allowing the average man to perform honest work that rewards him such that he can buy a modest home in his own community and raise a family in reasonable security. A republic that can offer that is a just one; a dictator that could do so- just as well. The system should allow for the creation of local and regional patronage hierarchies while remaining flexible enough for real talent to rise (and dead weight to sink). All activism should be geared toward that end.

The third thing is to treat work as work. Too many of us have adopted the Calvinist notion that work is some measure of Divine worth. Work is a curse; toil is the inheritance from our fallen forebears. But through the redemptive power of Christ, work done in His name, any lawful work, is given dignity and meaning. We cannot look to the particular outcomes of our labors as their value, but rather, the end to which they’re put. To work for some good end will require good men to trade wealth and status in the eyes of the world for the opportunity to do something more valuable.

What would the world look like if the brightest young minds of the right stopped chasing the approval of the overclass that hates them and moved instead into a fundamental avenue of influence- education? Apart from the family, what better way could there be to influence the future of society than by taking command of the process by which the young are cultivated? This would mean exactly what I described before, sacrifice- less money, less esteem, and less freedom. But it would do some real good and set the stage for a new generation trained on seeking validation not from the whims of someone reading their resume.

Near where I live there’s a Chick-Fil-A. I know the owner. He gives the young people in his community jobs, offers a third place for Pee-Wee football teams to have late dinners, and provides for his wife and children. Men like him are pillars in their community; they do more for the world than any stock-jobber, and should never be ashamed of their positions. How many men, looking back over the course of their lives, would trade their high status for the real love such a man as that evokes in those who knew him?