The White at The End of the Tunnel

Hope for a Lost Generation

I probably don’t have to inform any of my readers about the new Compact article making the rounds in the right-o-sphere, Jacob Savage’s “The Lost Generation,” but for those of you who missed it, it can be summed up in brief. Beginning with his own experiences as an aspiring screenwriter, he details the post-2014 ascendancy of woke throughout the professions, though he focuses mainly on the media and academia. His thesis is that straight white men were systematically shut out of careers in those fields, a process that only accelerated with the St. Floyd Mostly Peaceful Riots, as outlets and companies climbed over each other to demonstrate fealty to the Current Thing, stuffing stale pale males into a giant rainbow wicker man and igniting it as an offering to MolDEIch. The people performing the holocaust were Boomers and established Gen-Exers, along with their coloredful cast of properly gender-creative new ‘talent.’ White Millenial men- who hit 30 in 2014- thus spent a decade in exile, their dreams, as a POC poet once observed, deferred and dead.

There is much to recommend this article. Savage has done the research and writes eloquently about a real problem, one that many people overlooked or pretended didn’t exist when it mattered. There are recriminations flying around social media as I write, with people accusing one another of being collaborators of commission or omission, so far as I can tell, largely confined to rightist spaces. I understand on one level why this article resonates with so many on the right, given that it neatly encapsulates the great anger at both the situation and its lack of prominence in the public sphere. But at the same time, I think it reveals, yet again, a problem at the core of the rightist experience- the nature of our relationship with the neoliberal order.

By way of background, I am a very late Gen-Xer, born in 1979, and being 35 in 2014 I was thus exactly midway between the people who were '“established” in media careers in Savage’s account and those like him who had yet to break through. My experience was quite different from his- community college followed by nondescript state school, over a decade in the service industry, and in 2014 just starting a career as a secondary school teacher following a stint as a third shift security guard. Growing up, I can’t recall knowing what Princeton was, nor would it ever have occurred to me to orient my life toward the goal of attending there if I did. Thus, to some degree, the world the author inhabits and the expectations inculcated thereby are quite foreign to me, but I think that perspective as an outsider gives me some insights others may have missed.

I can recall reading this book, and Lewis describing all the authors he read as a kid being tutored, and my shock and shame that I’d hardly heard of any of them. I realized then, in my early 20s that I’d been greatly deceived by the world.

Or perhaps not. Jeremy Carl (who went to Yale) seems to get what’s wrong with this take:

His is the lament of the intellectual dark web (IDW) —the so-called “homeless liberals” —people who at some level still believe in the elite system and refuse to give up that belief even in the wake of overwhelming evidence that it has betrayed them. But it is far from clear that such a belief is either clear-headed or admirable. Savage and his subjects can be quite self-critical at times, but at others they seem to shrink back from acting on the logical conclusions of their observations. Savage, like his IDW contemporaries, seems content to fish in the Rubicon rather than to cross it and travel to terrain that would mark him to the establishment not just as a critic but as an enemy.

To be fair, while many people on the right are reading this as the sort of critique they are used to and themselves produce, it’s not at all clear that Savage is a rightist himself, and the impression he conveys is that of a perhaps slightly conservative (inasmuch as he’s even willing to entertain the notion of anti-whiteness) but largely comfortable with the basic liberal power structure of the media world. The conclusions he should draw from his experiences are rightist, but he doesn’t seem to be there yet. But that in turn should prompt some reflection on the right regarding how readily this mode of thought finds purchase among us.

Above: The ideal life of many an internet rightist.

There is a kind of schizophrenia on the right. On the one hand, a big part of the general critique of modernity on the part of rightists is that the neoliberal world is systemically broken, that we live in an managerial state run according to an ideology of profoundly antihuman humanism, and that all of the degeneracy we see around us- the feminism, the gender-queering, the materialism, the reign of quantity, the multiculturalism, the whole globohomo GAE package- is the product of, or at least heavily exacerbated by, that system. And yet, time and time again, we laud tweets and videos and essays because they make the point that, “SEE, SEE, THEY’RE BEING UNFAIR TO US BY NOT GIVING US STATUS!!!!” We tell ourselves that the system is evil, and lambaste it for not including us; indeed, we marvel that it wouldn’t want to do so.

A lot of the more general anti-boomer rhetoric functions along the same lines. They had things easy; they walked into jobs and bought houses when they were 20 within a functioning society- and also they screwed everything up for everyone else. But there’s no rejection of boomer mores as such- their indifference to tradition, their reflexive liberalism, the very abundance of their lives flowing directly into a politics of indifferent, exploitative greed wherein socialist hippies become tax hawk Reaganites before morphing into bobo social security sponges drinking Margaritas at their spot in The Villages, served by an illegal, complaining to their friends about young people being lazy. It’s a disgusting (if a bit un-nuanced) phenomenon, but an even more uncomfortable truth is that many rightists don’t really reject this- they’re really mad because they themselves can’t live this way.

It’s like that movie Elysium, but with old people, and Matt Damon would be Jimmy Buffett.

The sort of person who goes to Princeton and moves to Los Angeles is one who is content to play by the rules of team blue; to acquiesce to its values and seek reward within that system. Well, as it turns out, the rewards are ostracism, contempt, and having to watch diverse mediocrities hold up awards on TV for anyone out of favor with the regime of the month. And these rules weren’t new. They didn’t suddenly appear on tablets carried by a Jew descending the Hollywood Hills in 2014. Hollywood was a censorious yet degenerate place back when Andrew Breitbart was criticizing it back in the 2000s, and indeed, long before- perhaps always. If you didn’t object when they were tossing the headshots of conservatives in the trashcan, you have no right to complain now that the Eye of Soros has shifted its gaze. Live for the Current Thing, die for the Current Thing.

I know what you’re thinking, but on careful observation you’ll see that that’s a smartphone rather than a tablet proper.

This pick-me-ism on the right is especially bizarre because I can’t think of a single person who doesn’t recognize that the fields Savage described are and have been- as the kids would say- pozzed. This is true in a very literal sense. Vox Day has compared progressivism in the workplace to cancer; if so, it’s Kaposi’s Sarcoma, metastasizing lesions brought about as the result of an autoimmune infection, the body’s own defenses turning against it. We inhabit a cultural AIDSgeist.

To see the manifest truth of this one need only look at the areas of employment Savage laments didn’t give him and those like him a chance. Perform this thought experiment. Imagine Savage had gotten a writing deal from a Hollywood studio and gained the opportunity he wanted. In the first place, do you think this article ever would have seen the light of day, even if he were to watch scores of other white men denied the chance he’d been given? But aside from that, given existing circumstances, consider what his career would have been like- abasing himself on a daily basis to progressive shibboleths, censoring his (apparently normielib) views on an increasingly large range of subjects, and having his creative output put through the filter of critical studies slop theory such that what emerged onto TV was vegan sausage excreted into 22 minute long tubes of colon casing by a writers’ room that hated him for the crime of existing. All for what? To be able to produce the show he always wanted to produce that they’ll never actually let him produce?

Another ten years, and we’ll let you punch up the script on gems like this.

That’s what he wishes he could have been a part of, and why the ending of the piece comes off as such a letdown. For all he went through, he’s not even mad at the people who excluded him from the career he wanted. He’s just sad. But mad or maudlin, he still, after all that, on some level, wishes he could have been a part of that world that despised him. There are guys online as I write this who just know that if it wasn’t for all the haters, that e-girl who he sent all those superchats would totally be in love with him. His problem as he sees it, is that some injustice prevented him from connecting with his true love. It never occurs to him that his affections were improperly oriented in the first place.

If you do well writing for The Acolyte, you can work your way up to scripts for OnlyFans porn shoots.

I had thought originally I might link to other individual comments on X and Substack around this article and point out further instances of where I saw (from my point of view) misguided rage at being excluded from a system that was in any case set up to emasculate, deracinate, and lobotomize exactly the sort of people mad about being kept out. But I thought better of that; it would only come off as judgmental and unfeeling. Perhaps it would be best to simply note my own feelings on the issue and my experiences trying to make it in that world. It may be that someone might find in my perspective a way to move forward in light of current realities.

As I noted, my horizons as a young man were very limited. I always knew that I wanted to live the life of the mind, long before I had heard the term or had any notion of what it really meant. I was a kid who went to a terrible high school fully enriched with vibrant diversity. My refuge was the library, where I spent every lunch period. But I had no real specific thoughts of college and none of the habits of a scholar apart from a love of learning. I lacked discipline and cultural awareness, and thus had no means to navigate into the future I wanted.

The SAT saved me. People knock standardized tests, but without my score I never would have gotten into college. Were I nonwhite it would have gotten me into Harvard; today it wouldn’t get me into a Mississippi juco. I was just happy to be learning, working my way to that professor job I wanted. But because I still had no real idea what getting there would really entail, it was all very abstract. I suppose on some level it was so unreal a dream that I never really expected it would happen, and thus I wasn’t really crushed when it didn’t.

But then, being a professor wasn’t really the goal; the goal was always the life of the mind. I read books in class; I read them in the break room at my server job at the hotel where I spent thirteen of my most productive years, toiling for scraps. But I kept reading. I bought a Greek textbook at Borders (I miss Borders) and went through it sitting at the golf course clubhouse bar when shifts were slow. I read Peter Brown’s Through The Eye of a Needle at my desk working security in downtown Atlanta at 3:00 AM.

I inured myself to the knowledge that no one cared long before. I didn’t do it for a career or recognition or money; I had none and expected none. I’d probably still be there save for the fact that along the way I found myself with a wife and children, and thus a need to provide, as well as a more mature awareness of who I was and what I might offer the world. Having learned, I had an obligation to teach, and being unable to have the job I would prefer, I found another way.

The Oxford Cleric is a hero of mine.

Had I somehow managed to find a job as a professor when it might have been possible, I would have just found myself in the same position as my hypothetical Savage with his dream writing position. I would have been forced to either make wholly untenable moral compromises or else walk away from something I’d by then become deeply attached. Looking back, I probably would have failed myself, because I wouldn’t have had the strength that only time spent in struggle had given me. I was too soft to hack it, and I would have been eaten by that system, and as with Savage, for what?

The proper path for a man of the right, as I see it, is heroic struggle for transcendence in the face of a modernity wholly hostile to virtue as such. For some this means war, for others asceticism, and for some it means the daily struggle of navigating a world hostile to a differentiated being. The latter man is Jünger’s anarch, bending but never breaking within the uncertain storm of tyranny. In the Christian sense, it is to be in the world but not of it, a stranger and a sojourner. It is not to seek status and comfort within the acceptable boundaries of liberalism.

I wanted to teach bright young people about all the wonderful things I’d studied; that’s what I do now as a teacher. I wanted to write about the things that moved me- I have my Substack. I can provide for my family and be real, without having to add pronouns to my bio to do it. And best of all, I get to help others with the same vision I have.

I see people from all walks of life succeed here every day, on Substack and other places. At the same time Savage was desperately trying to write for people who were too cowardly to give him the time of day, PewDiePie was earning views on YouTube that any TV producer would kill for. Diverse Disney churns out films and TV shows that are best known as fodder for Critical Drinker. Nerdrotic was a drug addict turned comic store owner who made his channel into the bane of Hollywood sludge. What they all have in common is that they intuited that the system was stacked against them, and that inspired them to make their own way.

I mean, he’s not sane, but he’s not wrong. DO IT!!!

There are a lot of people who are angry at what Savage laid out. They’re not wrong to feel that way. I’m angry too. But I’m not especially mad at the system. What infuriates me is that I ever wanted to be a part of it. I hate my own ignorance and indifference. I despise that part of me that would have accepted what they offered, had they deigned to do so. I’m hurt because I know deep down how hard I would have worked for them, the late nights and long hours of toil of which I know I’m capable, all for them, all for nothing, all to be tossed aside at the first hint of not respecting this year’s trendy new contempt for me.

Apart from that, I don’t have any ill will toward the people who hate me. They don’t have the power to make me feel anything. I want nothing from them; they gave me nothing, and I owe them nothing. I don’t want to be part of whole fields that are simply whitened sepulchers, slowly dissolving the bones of the dead within. The universities, the media, entertainment, all the things Savage mentions, are all collapsing in on themselves, black holes from which light does not escape. I don’t want to tear them down; I want to ignore them. I want take blocks from their ruins and build a great tower from them. There’s all the talent in the world out there waiting for a call, men who’ve been praying for the chance to use their powers for some great purpose. I know, because I was and remain one of them. But I believe in my path I’ve found that for myself. I believe you can too. The way forward is to make new things.

People will perhaps criticize this for its lack of specificity. What new things? What I’m preaching here is that the days of the fixed path are in one sense over, and in another never more clear. I want to disabuse people of the notion that there is a safe way forward, make clear that the idea that men can assume X input will result in Y success in life is simply no longer tenable. But in that uncertainly lies freedom, a space to carve out a new relationship with the world. This will be different for different people; there’s nothing I could say to one that would apply to all, and no sure knowledge I’d be right in any case about any particulars. No one knows exactly what’s coming, but the good news is, no one can stop it either.

You see a lost generation. I see men who haven’t gotten started yet. I see an untried army, a great surging orb of potential energy, a big bang waiting to fill a universe. I see Alan Rickmans and Rodney Dangerfields and Robert E. Lees and Ulysses S. Grants and Harlan Sanders and Owen Barfields and Philip Rivers- men who became legends long after the world said their time had passed. Some will lose, some before they even tried. Nothing is promised in life but our shared fate as humans. But it’s never too late, until it is.

To the white men cast aside by the system, you’re not alone, even when you are. Because behind you awaits a great host of heroes and scholars and poets and sages and men of faith. I say awaits because the hour is here when we can call upon them all again and- once more- revive the culture of the West as our ancestors did, not to recreate Boomerdom, but a vision born of tradition wedded to modernity, transcendent and ennobling. Or you can spend the next ten years hoping for a bit part next to a trans James Bond of color; maybe they’ll give it to you if you’re mad enough. The choice is yours.

This is complete cringe, and I love it. Never doom, never blackpill, never lose hope. Like I said, it’s never too late, until it is.