The Apsu Sea of The Real

Authenticity and the future

In this essay I will attempt to synthesize from a broad range of cultural inputs, past and present, to advance some ideas about the immediate future now coming into being.. The last few years have borne witness to great deviations from what many presumed would be inevitabilities, so of course I write what follows in a spirit of humility. Nonetheless, I believe I have an advantage over those who assumed a future of history’s end, of an ever-expanding liberalism uniting humanity into a great globohomo Babel, a materialist omniworld managed by clever, faceless people reading economic indicators for guidance. They proceeded, as they do in all things, by inductive reasoning, by extrapolating from the specific to the general, and had fair cause along those lines to suppose that what had been would always be, but more so. Recent developments have shown that not to be the case.

Not quite

My own outlook, that of a rightist and a traditionalist, takes a much broader view, based on an understanding of human nature as a qualitative whole expressed through multiple layers of identity and meaning, in both particular and universal dimensions. What I say will perhaps make more sense to those who agree with me than those who do not, but I believe it is true nonetheless. In its totality, I see before us a future characterized by a new commitment to authenticity, a return to transcendent realism as both a reaction to rampant artificiality and a positive movement toward a reclaimed humanity. A bit of background to the issue:

In the Beginning and The End

Gilgamesh spoke to Urshanabi, the ferryman, saying: "Urshanabi, this plant is a plant against decay by which a man can attain his survival. I will bring it to Uruk-Haven, and have an old man eat the plant to test it. The plant's name is 'The Old Man Becomes a Young Man.' Then I will eat it and return to the condition of my youth." At twenty leagues they broke for some food, at thirty leagues they stopped for the night. Seeing a spring and how cool its waters were, Gilgamesh went down and was bathing in the water. A snake smelled the fragrance of the plant, silently came up and carried off the plant. While going back it sloughed off its casing.'

Gilgamesh was the Lord of Uruk, a small island of civilization in a great sea of indifferent and impermanent savagery. He was too much for his people, so they cried out to their gods for aid. They sent them Enkidu, the wild man, the personification of nature itself. Gilgamesh sent him a woman to alienate him from his primordial connection to animal life, then wrestled him into submission. They became great friends and had high adventures. But they ran afoul of the gods and Enkidu died. Bereft of his comrade, Gilgamesh became horrifyingly aware for the first time of his mortality, and sought through one last quest to surmount it. Utnapishtim, the Sumerian Noah, told him of the Great Flood that only the ancients remembered, and that at the bottom of the Apsu, the Dreaming-sea sacred space of timeless creation, lay a plant that could grant him everlasting life. He found the plant at great cost, but in his mortal weakness lay down to sleep, and the snake came and found it, and taking it “sloughed off its casing.”

These lines remain, stamped into river clay fired by the flames of a burning city, from the very dawn of human literature. Some nameless scribe stabbed them into the smooth surface of his pliable tablet with a sharpened reed, giving form to his thoughts in a way that would endure through the aeons. Men forgot how to read them, then learned once more. The old stories became new again. The serpent shed its skin.

I was reminded of all of this when I recently re-read Philip K. Dick’s novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Most people, if they think about it, consider it a kind of afterthought to the movie based upon it, the groundbreaking, visionary Bladerunner (1982). But while the film does use elements from the novel, there are important thematic differences. For one, the novella, far more than the film, dwells on the significance of animals in the future society. People are desperate to own anything real, as most living animals were wiped out as a result of nuclear war, and in lieu of a real bird or racoon, they buy electric versions of varying quality. The major initial motive of main character Rick Deckard in the book version is to earn enough money by “retiring” replicants (androids that closely resemble humans) to buy a real goat for his wife. There is also a more direct focus on religion, which in the future has been reduced to experiencing the vicarious sufferings of a man named Mercer on TV. While Mercer is revealed to be a fraud, Deckard begins to experience visions of himself being pummeled by rocks in a similar fashion to the televised confessor.

The reminder came from the one element of that theme retained in the movie- the scale from an electric snake that served as evidence leading Deckard to one of the synthetic people he was employed to destroy. This shedding of false scales does not represent any kind of rebirth, however, but rather a traceable mark of artificiality, a signifier of the presence of both the pseudo-animal and the pseudo person who owned it, whom Deckard kills. In the movie, as in the book however, there is the same longing for authenticity- the real- a connection with nature, differentiation, and humanity- juxtaposed with the reality of homogenous, artificial modernity. In the film, it is left ambiguous whether Deckard himself is a replicant; while in the book he takes the psychological test and passes as human, though with indications that he has been warped by his work and is less human than he once was. The book explores the notion of redemption through sacrifice- Deckard taking up the torments of Mercer in the wilderness- while the film and its sequel focus more on the affirmation of life as the signal quality of humanity. Taken together one sees that breaking through artificiality into authentic life is bound up with both suffering and self-emptying love. The film’s Roy Batty saves Deckard’s life for no other reason than in doing so he gives his own life and death meaning. He has someone to tell his story; like Gilgamesh he is human because he both lived and died, but also because he did things and felt things and transcended all of it by choosing the higher way, in his case of saving the life of his enemy above the satisfaction of victory through his death. He lived authentically.

It’s interesting how much science fiction evinces a longing for such groundedness. In a genre based around the very liberal notion that man’s command of technology will lead to ever-greater domination of nature and material abundance one sees everywhere the countertheme of a timeless humanity and natural limits reasserting themselves over and against artificiality. While this does manifest as philosophical meditations around the question of whether aliens or robots can be ‘human,’ for example, there is also a kind of physical tactility to the sci-fi experience. In worlds where the reader or viewer is given to understand that machines can think the humans still make all the important decisions. Jobs that have long since been automated even in our own time still employ human workers in outer space. Fights are as likely to be settled with hand-to-hand combat rather than lasers- often for convoluted or poorly-explained reasons that still make aesthetic and emotional sense. The Dune universe posits a conscious mass-rejection of computers and their replacement by heightened human powers, with a feudal nobility who settle interplanetary disputes with knives. Even in the techno-rationalist paradise of a setting like Star Trek one finds primal madness like the hormone-driven Vulkan mating rituals.

It’s the music that sells it.

All this serves to illustrate that as modernity has crept along, dissolving traditional norms in the solvent of artifice, there remains a great longing for the real. And in this the visionaries of science fiction were and are quite correct. Authenticity is the currency of the future. I’m certainly not the first to say it, but I think the notion deserves some further exploration.

The Meaning and Marks of Authenticity

I should also clarify that by ‘authentic’ and ‘the real’ I mean those features of life which are both at once the most apprehensible to the senses and of transcendent significance. It is distinguished from the artificial by two traits relating to the latter. What is false, fake, or artificial is ephemeral and undifferentiated- it is fungible and disposable. The authentic is a matter of sentiment as much as reason, and because of that resists strict definition, but it’s not so difficult to grasp with experience.

Consider for example a loaf of bread. What comes to mind? If my mother were asked that question, it would mean at least a passing memory of a childhood that included my grandmother’s daily, fresh-baked loaves. They had a texture, a taste; they looked a certain way. But the smell would be what lingered in the recollection. My mom worked in a grocery store for years surrounded by mass-produced baked goods. But there were no doubt stray moments as she went through her day where the scent of the real thing, that yeasty substantiality, passed through time and space into her mind, carrying with it the impressions of Pennsylvania mornings at the breakfast table, the tile floor beneath and the sun-lit farm-fields through the windows. She never read Proust but in her way she knows his madeleines.

I know of what I write not because she’s discussed it with me in any detail, but because I have my own dim recollection of it, decades and decades ago, visiting that very house when I was young, eating that same bread. It comes back to me only in bits and pieces; for my mother it must be so much more vivid. And of course bread is never just bread. Christ manifests His very body in bread baked by women like my grandmother, in common ovens with pans brought from peasant kitchens in southern Poland, made in a manner little changed from antiquity- millennia upon millennia of women’s craft and wisdom bound up in every loaf. It’s the physical instantiation of her love and care for her family. In a reductive sense of course it’s the same glutenous calories as the Sunbeam in the plastic bag. But grandma’s bread is different- better- even if you could exactly, chemically match the taste it wouldn’t be the same, even if you lacked the words to explain it. That ineffable quality that differentiates the two is what I call authenticity.

There are people who remember this, people for whom this ritual helped form them. This work was hard, but it charged that which was consumed with meaning.

The marks of authentic life are independence and rootedness, a kind of paradox, yes, but one with great explanatory power. By independence I mean freedom and agency; freedom is that measure of self-control possessed by a man that enables him to navigate a fallen world with goodness and dignity, while agency entails freedom in the sense of being above the influencing power of the artificial, the ability to make decisions with the higher things in mind. Such independence is possible only to the degree one can discern those higher things, the order of the universe that culminates in a God both immanent and transcendent.

This is the foundation of rootedness, that an authentic person is an individual, but one connected to a place, a culture, a community, a workplace, a Church, and a family. A rooted person is one whose being exists within a network of boundaries, obligations, and duties. His individuality springs from the reality that no one other person occupies his node in the web of connections around him; he is irreplaceable as a person even if someone could be found to fill his role. A life is authentic to the degree own chooses the real over the artificial.

He gets it too.

There are a myriad of ways one could explore the advent of authenticity to come. Men and women with more experience in particular areas could add much to this discussion. The latter in particular could address what authentic womanhood means after the deluge of trans propaganda. I therefore won’t pretend my tour will be exhaustive, but I can think of three areas in particular where the real will reassert itself.

The RETVRN of the Worker (Speaking of Ol’ Jack Burton…)

The Industrial Revolution began with the dethroning of the artisan and his replacement by machines; it culminated in the ascendancy of the managerial class, those people most able to become machine-like in their disenchanted, reductive quantitative materialism. One can read James Burnham or James C. Scott for the political dimensions of this, or Rene Guenon for its spiritual aspects, and many others besides, but in sum the changes represented a fusion of political and economic power behind an agenda of global material prosperity at the expense of religion, tradition, nation, community, and personal happiness. GDP was god and the manager was his profit, promising a reasonable rate of return, full stomachs, and mild entertainment as the price of forgoing risk and enthusiasm. Anomie and atrophy could be treated with pills and distractions.

Junger wrote prophetically but prematurely concerning the role of the industrial worker in all of this. Subjugated to the now-supplanted bourgeoisie, taught to want what their masters wanted- comfort and stability- the workers lost their proper sense of themselves as a force more proximate to elemental reality and with an innate authenticity the middle-classes, those dealers in man-made abstractions, could never possess.

His getting-it-ness goes without saying.

Now the dusk is settling on the manager’s day in turn. The laptop class whose claim to political, economic, and social status lies in their unique ability to organize and control information is on the verge of being displaced by artificial intelligence. AI will do to them what the steam engine did to the mule. It may be that Joe Biden, rather than Barack Obama, actually represented them at their peak, the former being the senile facade for a diffuse network of unaccountable managers good at everything but managing. They had their heyday, but the end of the Cold War made them incoherent and incompetent, obsessed with equality and diversity even as they isolated themselves as a caste and fetishized their own overcredentialed ‘merit.’

It’s their latest debacle, the War in Ukraine, that points most obviously to the sort of future I mean. The recent election has empowered people who understand that all the banking power on earth is useless against people who produce more shells than you and have more men willing to use them. Drones have proliferated, certainly, but the war is one of trenches stormed by war parties, grim men counting coup against their enemies under callsigns. We must build things, and to do that we must have workers- not the abused proletariat of Sinclair’s The Jungle but skilled tradesmen that straddle the line between the independent artisans of old and the mass industrial base of the future. Behind this will come a great need for energy, transportation networks, men willing to go into harm’s way as both workers and warriors, and a social code to sustain it all. It will be a world of grease and burrs and smoke and steel, hard men producing tangible guns and butter in long-fallow factory towns. Junger made the connection between the worker and the warrior in the modern age, but it will be in the postmodern that that ideal is fully realized.

Sludge Detox

The metastasis of AI has an irresistible economic logic to it, one that fits well with the reigning mores of neoliberalism. LLMs can, for example, produce books faster than any human can, and are getting better at crafting pastiches of actual human writing that are increasingly indistinguishable from the real thing. But as the overhead decreases and the barriers to entry become negligible, any limits on producing such artificial text fall by the wayside. Amazon is already choking with AI-generated sludge, and it won’t be long before movies, music, television, and every other medium is similarly saturated. But of course the more crap that’s out there, the more the new crap learns from the old, and attempts at differentiation will fail due to the convergence of all machine learning on to the same end of producing endless copies without originals, all substantively identical in their identical lack of substance.

His getting it did not take place. Also, Brian Cox should play him in a movie.

It’s telling that Barnes and Noble, the bookstore that sells books, is making a stunning comeback in the face of the digital onslaught. The book is back- the physical, ink and paper, tactilely distinct medium. But more than the tangible book, the author, the real, human author, is returning, a personality and a voice behind a text. Substack here leads the way. Certainly there is AI content on Substack, but the best check on that is the ability for authors to interact in real time with their readers. The distinctive presence of a writer doesn’t just come through in his stories, but in the narrative he or she has crafted around them, a property that comes through in comments, chats, livestreams, podcasts, and videos. A written text is an invitation into the author’s mind, and the discerning reader will be able to take one look around and know whether he’s in a beige box or a home with a personality.

It would be perfect if Substack were to become not merely a host for digital writing but an actual publisher. The company’s commitment to free expression and lack of censorship is vital in an age where such beliefs are in short supply. The stealth editing of online sources in recent years, among other things, has led to a pushback call for a revival of physical media as a whole. Expect demand for DVDs, CDs, and even vinyl records to increase along with books.

The gamma males of the Class of 1997 will be glad they hung on to these.

In keeping with the notion of authenticity extending to the transcendent while being rooted in the physical, one should expect to see a renewed commitment to the real in health and food in addition to aesthetic hygiene. The ascendancy of RFK and his MAHA ideology is but a leading indicator of a phenomenon that’s been circulating throughout the internet for years. Our mass-produced food is killing us. Grandma’s bread will be the least of it- people are embracing localism, rejecting factory farming, and getting health and nutrition advice from sources not beholden to big corporate interests. This isn’t to say it’s all quality information, but the ethos of self-study, critical thinking, and ethical considerations is promising.

And it’s not merely our food; our lifestyles are killing us. As the recent dust ups involving Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Rufo illustrated, people are re-evaluating what there’re actually getting from their working lives. There’s a problem of physical and mental health at work ultimately rooted in a crisis of meaning. The ethos of managerialism prescribes finding status and significance in our role in the economy, but with so many people- especially young men- shut out of that, many will seek out ways to construct an integrated work-life whole centered on productive labor, family life, and involvement in community above purely monetary gains. Exercise clubs- physicality once more- and church membership, especially traditionalist denominations, will become part of that emerging culture.

Meming the future into being on Reddit

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

The world of education has undergone huge changes in just a few years, the ramifications of which are still being played out. The key takeaway is that public school, such as has been the standard for a century, is no longer normative. That’s not to say that majorities of families have abandoned it in a technical sense, but it is no longer the default option for the most engaged and discerning parents (one must also take into account that there are areas where zoning and home prices have created de facto private schools as well). The great project of neoliberalism to deracinate whole populations through mass immigration has resulted instead in a more consciously felt sense of identity among those enriched by diversity, such that many people now perceive a threat to their religious, cultural, and ethnic norms that can best be addressed from a retreat from a system dominated by those who see them as obstacles to free trade and into their own curated programs.

The mission of John Dewey and his progressive successors was to divorce the student from any sense of history or culture and make him an adaptable and socially malleable instrument of smooth economic function, one committed to the principles of equality, democracy, and materialism. Happiness was a matter of satisfying personal desires, which would come from the careful management of resources on the part of credentialed elites. Traditionalists fought this but lost out in the initial rise of liberalism to world domination; one might read the liberal but decidedly fair-minded (in 2001 at least) Diane Ravich on the battles of a century ago. But with the challenges to the liberal order of late the prime vector through which it perpetuates itself must naturally come under question. Older ideas are coming back and tradition is once more in the ascendent.

Education (as opposed to technical training) will, pace the techno-optimists, become more the property of the few, but more still the project of those committed to authenticity. For the masses there will perhaps evolve a system of AI teachers holding forth to those few students without the technical wherewithal to hack their way out of their digital holding pens to play the video games the system is conditioning them to consume in any case. But οι ολίγοι will be set apart by their parents for initiation into deeper things- the Bible, the Classics, history and literature and mathematics, all done with pen and paper and brainpower. The cultivation of the self in this manner will serve as a mark of differentiation over and against the artificial program of the many, and thus will attract those seeking such marks of status, but also, thankfully, those spiritually committed to the life of the mind. The most authentic quality a human can possess is the cultivation of the rational mind to the end of contemplation of the good, especially that ultimate good, God, and His works.

I say the least about education because herein lies the most to be said; it’s deserving of its own entire essay. But I should here clarify that I do not mean that there will be a strict distinction between those who employ computers and AI and such in learning and those who stick with pen and paper. One could conceivably have a wholly traditional education using mainly online resources, and one can be a progressive liberal with a typewriter- John Dewey was, after all. The difference lies in the relationship between the student and teacher and technology. Is it being used as a tool or a machine? The former is something adapted from nature to a particular purpose, the latter is a system to which the individual adapts in turn. Throughout this essay, for example, I linked to Amazon, referenced Reddit, and of course the whole thing was typed on a laptop and a phone to be distributed by email by means of a website. I’m neither a Luddite nor a hypocrite; authenticity means to render things their due in their proper place. The point is not to make a fetish out of hand-knitted wool scarves or to snobbishly distain people who lack the resources to buy craft beer. It’s to reverence those things that have meaning and to build a world where such proper perspective is the norm.

TikTok and Johann Kurtz get it.

The Forward is Not Back but Above and Beyond

This is a reactionary essay, like all my work. The temperament is easy to misunderstand. To those who believe in a history with sides, one which progresses toward a singularity of gray goo undifferentiated polymorphous perversity, anything that deviates from the path of novel genders, hair colors, and foreign neighbors is anathema, a type of backwards gaze into atavistic stagnation. But the true reactionary doesn’t look back; he looks up. Truth is a timeless thing, manifesting in different ways in different ages according to the ways in which men are prepared to receive it, but impossible to fully suppress. Truth will out.

And so it has come to pass that the great age of artificiality has made itself so odious in the eyes of so many that its victims are forced, despite themselves even, to look beyond it. They’re now gazing in the same direction as myself and many others. Evola spoke of the differentiated man who would cultivate the inner strength to survive and flourish in the times of spiritual desolation in which he lived. Unlike him, I have the hope of a Christian that things will get improve, and as I’ve argued, I believe the signs are present of an incipient awakening.

The man of late neoliberalism is the digital nomad. He lives everywhere but is home nowhere- his aesthetic is “online” and his decor is “hotel.” He manipulates information for people he doesn’t personally know in a way that affects an indeterminate amount of lives of others he knows even less of. His relationships, hobbies, and persona are all evanescent and heavily informed by what he thinks others are doing, which he knows about from social media. That word is vital, so to speak- his whole reality is mediated, lived through screens, ad-adjacent, and above all, artificial. He voted for Harris because it was what people like him were supposed to do, and what else could he do but be that?

The repulsiveness of all that is perhaps what is most compelling in causing the more thoughtful of that sort to look inward. A proto-manifestation of this was the Hipster, but he was too early, too superficial, and too ironic. But the feeling behind it was very real. That which will replace the digital nomad has not yet taken shape, but will be something like an analog pioneer.

The analog pioneer will not be a beflanneled, bearded, secular Matt Walsh, but rather a man committed to physical and moral excellence who has leveraged his skills and knowledge to place himself in an economic and social position where he can live authentically. The goal will not be financial wealth as such, but to build- to create a home, to center a community, to found a school, and within them reverence the real. He is a man of something rather than a man useful for something. His life has an end value beyond the material.

He will surround himself with things, not the toy collection of fandoms, but goods as signifiers. His furniture will be inheritable, his clothes worn for a lifetime, his books framing a room that represents an entrance into his mind. There will be a sense of permanence to it all, not of the items themselves, which will turn to dust like all things, but of what they signify, an enduring commitment to generations to come. The authenticity of the physical world he inhabits serves to remind him of the eternal. But even bereft of things, even if he is forced to endure poverty or exile, he will still have that inner strength born of that truth that man does not live by bread alone.

Gilgamesh swam the Apsu sea to find thst which would renew his life. The physical mortality he sought through the magic plant was claimed by the snake, who shed his skin to be born again. The king of Uruk’s triumph over nature was only temporary; in the end, it reasserted itself, as it always will. His attempt to extend his earthly life met with failure because it was artificial. But paradoxically, in facing his own death, he gained immortality, as we still read about his deeds across an ocean of time. His sacrifice and love for his friend made him authentically human. Our mortal nature lulls us to sleep. Our higher calling awakens us. Become worthy. Live authentically. Be real.