Götterdoomerung

On Faith, Hope, and Charity

The school year is done, and I’m off to the woods for a hike- or so I thought. For no sooner had I gotten back in my car after stopping for a bottle of water than my engine sputtered out an awful rattle upon my turning the key. So now, rather than a day in the woods it’s a meandering time-kill waiting for AAA. Such is life, I brooded as I waited.

It costs a fortune to fix a car problem these days, and should the issue prove terminal to my 2005 model Civic I would have a terrible time replacing it. Everything is more expensive and seemingly growing more so every day. When I was younger a problem like this would have been a crisis of life-changing proportions; with little money for major repairs, and being fully dependent on driving to get to work and school, not having a car could have meant unemployment, homelessness, and a screeching halt to a future. Even though my circumstances have improved, that sense of fear and powerlessness lingers, that haunting thought that one is never really safe from the poorhouse.

AAA was supposed to be there in no less than 90 minutes. I walked over to the local fast food outlet, grabbed a drink and waited. But then, not fifteen minutes later, the tow truck driver texts to let me know he’s almost there. He pulled up in his wrecker with a car already on it, which mystified me for a moment, until he got out and asked me to pop my hood. He performed a few quick tests, adjusted some things, and told me I’d be fine, but that my battery was perhaps bad. I went to the auto parts store in my now fully functioning car, and the clerk, upon further testing, told me everything was fine and that there was no need for me to buy anything.

In my salad days I could eat two of these at a sitting.

The tow truck driver could have just taken me to the repair shop, where they would have done the exact same work for probably several hundred dollars. The clerk could have told me I needed any number of things, but declined to take advantage of someone who clearly knew little about cars. I should mention this all took place in the small town north of where I live, where generations of working men and small business owners have built reputations among their peers. There are countless such places around America, and presumably throughout the West, and despite everything bad we hear about in the media, it’s important to remember that they’re out there.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things unseen. We on the right- my version of it at least- hope for a world bound together by such a fellowship of reciprocal obligations, bonds of duty, and ultimately love. It’s faith because we don’t always see its object, but we hold fast to our belief that it’s present nonetheless. Those short encounters with honest, hardworking men doing meaningful work were glimpses into a reality that’s easy to forget when things seem so wrong generally.

Faith is the first of the Christian Theological Virtues, those crowning ornaments to the pagan Cardinal Virtues. The second of these virtues is hope. Hope is that promise that something better awaits us, that we are not abandoned in a cold and empty universe, but rather await eternal life. Martyrs went to their deaths smiling, knowing that the tortures of the moment could not separate them from the love of Christ. Hope tells us that the world around is ultimately not in the hands of our enemies, but the One above all who created us and in whom we can choose to abide.

Faith holds the chalice. Charity tends to the children, while hope looks heavenward.

Charity, the third, is sacrifice, the acknowledgment of what one is given and the return of those gifts to their Giver, to be used on His behalf. It is beyond generosity or liberality. Charity hurts. Charity is the pelican feeding its own blood to its hatchlings; charity is losing one’s life to find it. It’s forgetting one’s pride and what one is owed and forgoing the praise and even the gratitude of others.

To the pagan, ancient or modern, such is mystifying nonsense. The soul is mere breath and soul and the gods eat the flesh and blood of men, rather than the other way around. Hope is foolish; the world will end in an indifferent cataclysm where the ashes of the just blow through the empty bones of the wicked, all condemned to a gray nothingness. And charity is the silliest presumption of all, the notion that one should sacrifice in silence and suffer privation for the sake of unknown others- what could be less life-affirming?

I point all of this out because it’s important to remember that political questions are really just religious ones, and one’s view of the former is inevitably guided by the philosophy one has regarding the latter. This is the fundamental nature of the discussions and debates we find ourselves in here on Substack and in the wider world- whatever else we seem to be arguing about, ultimately, it’s about the sort of spiritual universe we suppose ourselves to be living in and the consequences of those notions. And for my part, if nothing else, I want to inspire others at the very least to embrace faith, hope, and charity over and against their collective modern manifestation- dooming.

It’s something I see all the time. I’ll post a note or article about something, and invariably someone comments along the lines of, “I don’t think anyone can stop the system. They control everything. You can’t get ahead in this world. What’s the point?!” You demonstrate some way in which things are getting better- they’ll tell you they’re actually worse in every other way. You celebrate a victory- they’ll proclaim it’s pyrrhic, meaningless, or illusory. A writer or YouTuber or politician they admire says or does something unexpected- it’s all over, he’s cucked!

This would perhaps be understandable if it were the adjunct to a life of withdrawal and personal discipline, leaving a corrupt world behind to become worthy in some hidden place. I have no doubt such men are out there. But the sort I speak of claim there is nothing more to be said about anything yet just keep saying it. They’ll tell you the schools are terrible but will neither teach nor work up some better idea. They express contempt for activism while despising the indifference of the public. When you ask what they plan to do if they don’t like your ideas, the response, such as it is, is generally some rationalization for why any course of action is pointless.

At its worst extreme, an entire worldview takes hold, all-consuming and immovable, wherein some group- which is to say Jews- is held to be the motive force behind every evil on the planet. Once seen, this ‘revelation’ is seldom unseen. It becomes a kind of perversion of the virtue of faith. Even if it doesn’t look like Jews, hold steady brother, and the Jew will appear. It’s the anti-hope, because no matter how good things look you know some Jew is rubbing his merchant hands together to destroy it, and the very opposite of charity, as the immediate response to every appeal to reason or seeing things in some more positive light is merely evidence of a still more pervasive conspiracy, to be met by vituperation.

This isn’t so much a defense of Jews qua Jews (though that qualification will do me little good) as it is an exhortation to avoid going down a path of personal misery, misanthropy, and cringe. To those too far gone this will have little impact and it isn’t really for them. The people I hope to reach are on the fence, partly in this world and partly amenable to reason. If this is you, I offer the following.

Writing is hard work, and more than the labor involved there is the emotional toll of putting oneself out there with every post and note with the wish to be taken seriously, liked, shared, restacked, and ultimately seen as someone whose opinion and art matters. It doesn’t always work. And when it doesn’t work, or work as well as we’d supposed it would, it hurts. And thus, our pride wounded, there is the temptation to give up, either simply to stop writing or else to turn down a dark path of dooming.

I never link to Wikipedia, but this article about Doomer is especially useless, ironically inspiring dooming, which I’m meta ironically going to ignore.

I honestly think that one of the main problems less popular RW writers have is that they define themselves by what they hate. Granted, if you’re a connected normiecon and hate Trump and have a network in place to shill you you can do ok, but if it’s all how bad things are all the time, how we’re always losing, how this or that group controls everything so how can we get ahead- it’s demoralizing and repulsive. Men are fallen beings, but even the most debased of creatures, i.e. leftists, get tired of hearing about fail all the time. How much more should this be true of those who claim to be purveyors of timeless truths?

Look at the biggest names on the dissident right. How many of them spend all their time talking about how awful things are and how powerless we all are before the terrible supposed power of Big Jew, and how many of them are positive, solution-oriented, and above all, encouraging? Consider Raw Egg Nationalist- here’s someone who’s given helpful lifestyle advice to millions, created his own magazine, and so much more. Consider Lomez, whom no doxx could destroy because his hard work and focus on elevating others gave him a vital constituency of friends and allies. I mentioned BAP last time; I don’t even really like his stuff, but I respect that he doesn’t spend his time talking about all the things he can’t do because people won’t let him.

Now consider those who rant all day about the forces keeping them down. Even once you account for the personality and thought processing disorders there is still a core of off-putting misery that repulses anyone with the will, energy, and ability to do something to make the world better. The sorts of people who gravitate to that kind of thing aren’t looking for knowledge so much as excuses and affirmation. As I mentioned in my last piece that touched on this, were I conspiratorially inclined I might think doomer stacks (among other platforms) serve as a way of grounding the spark of true reaction (or rectification) in an inert mass of whinging, sad-sack mediocrity.

Think about the all-time inspirational figures of the modern rightist canon. Tolkien wrote masterpieces about faith, hope, and charity. Evola and Guenon had none of his religion but all the same guided the perplexed through the dark modern age. Seraphim Rose, like any true monk, believed himself to be living in the End Times, and rejoiced at the prospect, working hard to bring the classics of the Church Fathers to the awareness of his (and our) contemporaries. They didn’t make excuses, blame a cabal for their problems, or ever fail to forge ahead despite setbacks.

The plain truth is that dooming is just a mask for laziness, cowardice, and vanity. It’s a pose of knowing weariness at the ignorance of others that serves to (badly) conceal self-loathing, neediness, and arrogance. Puffed up in their pride, the doomers surround themselves with others who validate their dysfunction- much like drug addicts or tr00ns, fellow doomers all- and vent their impotence on each other until they can no longer bear one another’s company and fall out, as they invariably do. But they’ll always find some new confirmation for their miserable worldview- some headline, some essay, something- and be back at it again and again. You’ll see them in the comments here, saying the same things they’ve said a thousand times to a thousand other people, accusing me and others of being a part of whatever is holding them back, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

To them I’ll simply say this: I want you to thrive. As God is my witness, I want you, whoever you are, to turn from the Slough of Despond you’re currently mired in and find something to give you a positive path forward. If you’re not getting the results you want from what you’re doing, ask yourself why you’re doing it. If it’s to get validation from others, that’s a thin reed to lean on in the end. My only advice, based on the small success I’ve been blessed with, is to find something worth saying and say it. Have faith that your work means something, hope that things will get better, and be charitable to others. I firmly believe that if you do so, you’ll succeed.