New Atheism was a Christian Form of Unbelief

/ geotrickster / 6 Comments

I have no idea if it is random chance or something in the aether, but recently I have seen many post-mortems on the ‘New Atheist’ movement of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Some of these offer insights. More do not. But one thing I have noticed is that they are as likely to reduce the ideological diversity of atheism just as much as the New Atheists did, replicating many of that movement’s initial problems and ultimately creating a shallow critique.

The problem with New Atheism that has gone unaddressed by so many of the modern commentariat is precisely that it could not escape its Christian roots. Because of this, it was unable to create the intellectual freedom it claimed to be making.

Before getting into this I would first like to explore what the New Atheist movement was and my own interactions with it when it was new. 

Pope Dawkins declares a crusade.

New Atheism in Context

In hindsight, the 2000s seems to us today like the last gasp of organized religion’s outsized influence on public and political culture. It did not feel this way at the time. The Bush Administration was openly theocratic in its approach to both domestic and foreign policy. And in the brief window of the unipolar world there were no alternatives to moral panic neoliberalism, save global jihad. While Islamic radicals tried to expand their power in the Middle East with what was effectively a terror-for-media-coverage campaign, the United States played into their trap by doubling down into crusader rhetoric. While Bush waged what he claimed was a divinely sanctioned war abroad, he oversaw a homophobic moral panic at home which may have succeeded in securing his re-election. The government was staffed with Liberty ‘University’ graduates as political appointees and U.S. aid policy to Africa was subordinated to an ultimately doomed quest to tie programs to abstinence-only education. Most insulting of all, there was a concerted push by right wing culture warriors to push teaching creation science in public school science class. If anything, this last was the issue that really forced a strong backlash from an intelligentsia that had too eagerly jumped on the establishment bandwagon after the rally-around-the-flag effect of 9/11. 

Enter the Four Horsemen: Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Though by no means starting as a coordinated effort, the very obvious open void created the space for the publications of these four individuals (and many of their imitators) to make an outsized splash on the cultural milieu by not just opposing evangelism on the defensive, but by stridently attacking it. Religion was not just a tool used by the powerful to deceive the masses, it was the mark of a foolish person. A willing dupe. And someone who stood against good government and a rational conception of civil society. 

Another aspect of this ‘movement’ was that it was not just a rejection of theism, but also a rejection of postmodernism. The postmodern left, which in the pre-Occupy neoliberal era was the unquestioned  left mainstream (arguably it still is, albeit increasingly more identified with center-left professional managerial class types) rejected anything incompatible with a totalizing relativism. Postmodernism could not say that creationism was inferior to science or even wrong, it could only equivocate. Another aspect of this was the left’s (still existing) bizarre fetishization of Islam, a value system that could not be more hostile to the one they profess, but which they allow a leeway of tolerance they would never give to their domestic Christian enemies (likely out of the bizarre belief that it thwarts U.S. foreign policy objectives to be publicly sympathetic to a religion that was once committing the same kind of ideological expansionism and cultural gentrification as the present American empire).* It has always been a funny irony that the world view that upholds relativism as its ultimate ideal is so often championed by people so hostile to nuance and prone to moralistic binary thinking, but I digress as, we shall see, the postmodernists would hardly be alone in this error.

So we had a new movement that dumped on the pieties of the politically correct left while stridently attacking the evangelical political establishment of the era. Both of those things were necessary and welcome reliefs from the trends of the time.  They were a breath of fresh air in a stultifying political era where self-censorship was normal and the avenue for dissident expression was narrow. It was bracing and fun. I confess that I myself once (and thankfully only once) made the conscious choice to be seen reading The God Delusion on the train to test the waters. 

But even early on, and despite all the fun, I had my doubts. The same kind of doubts that let me shed my religious beliefs in middle school were reappearing in my later college years. I owe this early turn against New Atheism to my dedication to the study of premodern history. This was something that kept me grounded and aware that what might seem like an inevitable trend could just be a fad. It also made me deeply skeptical of the core concept of New Atheism: linear progress. I remember upon concluding The God Delusion that it was ultimately a form of cathartic entertainment, but hardly a work of philosophical rigor. It contained many bizarre assumptions about humanity’s proclivity for rationality that were easily dispelled from historical knowledge. I would go on to find many of the works of Harris and Hitchens in a similar vein. 

A Neconservative Handmaiden 

It was actually Hitchens, the most charismatic and entertaining of the four, that would turn me against his ilk first. Hitchens was a die-hard Iraq War supporter, proving the hypothesis of ex-Trotskyists becoming neoconservatives correct in a very public way. His defense of that dismal operation on explicitly democratist grounds utilized many of the same rhetorical tricks and sloppy assumptions that the alliance of Evangelicals and Zionists he was supposedly opposed to made use of. A culturally righteous society had the duty to remake the world in its own image. To bring the others to heel for the crime of holding it back from its unified destiny. Not only was the world filled with cultures who were theorized to be destined to clash according to ideology, one of those cultures (the enlightened North Atlantic) was ultimately correct. And it seemed obvious to this freethinker that faith in the social engineering power of the United States military was a logical corollary to bring about what really was a missionary ideology. Needless to say, even 15 years ago I was always going to pick realism over atheism if forced to choose between them in an artificial binary. 

These were the elect. The City of God against the pagans. Special praise was given to nations that were seen to have ‘defected’ and joined the club of enlightenment-by-conversion. Dawkins loved Israel, seeing it as the Enlightenment’s version of a neo-Outremer, as well as his recent declaring himself to be a ‘Cultural Christian’. Harris dreamed of an apocalyptic Revelation-style war with the Muslim hordes. All of them viewed many East Asian countries as joining the club of ‘civilization’ when in fact they had always had their own civilizations filled with inventiveness and innovation. In fact, the justifications for many modernization projects in the non-western world were often explicitly nationalistic and even anti-western. And even in the Middle East, outside of a few spoiled rich kid failsons and radicalized losers who wanted to die for a cause, the Muslim world never ‘hated us for our freedoms’. They actually hated us because we were interventionists. 

There was also an inexplicable fear of China’s development and growing power on the world stage shared by the New Atheists. Here was an explicitly secular, even atheistic, state that had overseen the largest and most rapid  reduction in overall poverty in human history all while taking an assertive role against global designs promulgated by evangelicals and jihadists alike…yet it was disdained and even feared by the Enlightened Gentlesirs.

Why? Because the real point of New Atheism was to support weaponized liberalism. And to do this the history of atheism would have to be rewritten to be one solely of liberal-humanism.

The Christian-Liberal Teleology

The liberal world view puts undue emphasis on personal and individual reactions to moral stimuli. Ceremony and group-affirmation ranks quite low compared to the singular unit, whose journey is (ideally) constructed to be one of personal growth. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but it is not how any society on Earth has ever worked in practice. Sure, societies can be liberal and this can bring certain benefits, but it is always in addition to something else- a pre-existing collective skeleton which the rest must be built upon. 

Societies, in turn, are regionally divergent adaptive mechanisms meant to increase survival. This is done through resource surplus and strategy. When done well, it has little to say about moral progress. Any group that lives long enough to cross multiple eras will inevitably become unrecognizable to its past self. This pragmatism is actually a sign of success, as pure stasis would almost certainly mean death. In a world where everything is changing and chaos reigns, there is no final moral arbiter, no ‘right side of history’. There is only survival, and, if lucky, a brief period of thriving before an inevitable decline. We are no more entitled to eternity than the dinosaurs were. And they are still far more successful than we are in terms of sheer longevity. 

If one does not believe in an ultimate moral arbiter, as it should be very clear that I do not, then why would one still believe that a secularized society should be guided by a universal mission? Especially a mission related to the spread of a singular type of civil society across the globe? Surely, the freedom to think outside of teleology means that one is liberated from the colonial quest of messianism. Once can cut back their efforts of conversion and focus instead on the real and material benefits of building and exploring. The diversity of the planet’s cultures (including political and ideological cultures) is actually a boon, not a curse. It means the blind spots of one society are not overlooked by the entire species. That the mistakes of one need not be the mistakes of all. If something goes right somewhere it can be reproduced elsewhere, but if something goes wrong it can be stopped before all of humanity is afflicted.

But to the militant liberal, as was the case for their Abrahamic forebears, a society can only be legitimate if it meets a certain credo. The Augustinian dedication to dividing societies into legitimate and illegitimate based on ideological grounds is done to impart a sense of universal mission to civilizations. That this will inevitably lead to hostility and warfare with all who disagree is irrelevant because righteousness will sort out the End Times/ End of History. This religious impulse has been with liberalism since Kant and Rousseau and New Atheism was a (probably unintentional) attempt to bring it back for a younger and more secular crowd.** Its media elevation at least implies neoliberals and their friends in the media understood that the many failures of the Bush Administration were causing the winds to blow against their Reagan Era alliance with political Christianity.

The making of a better human through moral effort merely changed from a spiritual cause sometimes supported by the state to a state cause supported by a new spiritualism. The problem with these arguments is that they rest on the work of Stephen Pinker and others of a similar outlook who effectively rely on the logic of ‘line goes up makes world more gooder.’ 

The problem here is that Pinker’s data is itself highly selective and suspect. Much of the improvement in living standards come from non-liberal societies. Other dollar based metrics fail to account for subsequent rises in living costs in places where average wages grow. Meanwhile, the flagship liberal society, the United States, has been seeing a steady decline in its standard of living for years. If there be progress here it is unconnected to liberal promises or simple linear narratives. Every order so far gets a rise sure, but they all fall too. It is a bizarre act of presentist faith to believe the current one will be any different just because we are the ones experiencing it now.

I believe it is this fear that anything can be undone by irrational circumstances, often beyond anyone’s direct control, that motivates a strident faith in enlightenment. But history is replete with periods where knowledge was lost and living standards declined. Oftentimes, it was true believers seeking to make a better world that played a role in this loss. 

History is not progressive. Nor does it adhere to any unified set of human values. It was New Atheism’s fatal flaw to adopt Christianity’s worst and most Platonic assumptions about how the world works. You can invert the values on topical issues all you like, but the philosophical edifice is still the same rot of morally redemptive protagonist syndrome all the way down.

John Gray’s True Skepticism

Why should disbelief in God presume that humanity can be rational in the first place? After all, humanity felt the need to invent communing with the supernatural to compensate for something. Whether or not this is a vital social glue (and it is to many), it is not a rational behavior. If anything, humanity is the least rational species. A kind of ultra-performative ape which is the only one we know of that must invent elaborate rituals and justifications to get along existing. Something other species do just fine without such pretense. If I had to create a list of words to describe the human experience, ‘rational’ wouldn’t be anywhere on it. It is a nice idea, but an idea it remains. Perhaps open to rare individuals in some scientific and scholarly fields, but never to the whole of the species or a particular civilization.

The philosopher John Gray is himself an atheist, and began to rise in prominence in the 90s. Being one of the rare non-leftist scholars who took a decided anti-neoliberal and anti-end of history tone after the fall of the Soviet Union, he scorned claims of a rational destiny. He was lambasted for (correctly) predicting the eventual collapse of international democratic capitalism as the guiding policy lodestar of the future. He then turned against those who assumed Al Qaeda was a reactionary backlash by pointing out it was in fact one form of a hyper-aggressive modernity. His book, Straw Dogs, was the formative moment in my own journey away from whatever vestigial shreds of liberalism I retained. It was, interestingly enough, recommended to me by someone who challenged me to articulate my own world view. I confessed it was cobbled together from historical knowledge and not a preexisting philosophy. What I proceeded to describe was then responded to with ‘that sounds like John Gray’. Up until that moment I had never heard of him.

Straw Dogs is effectively an anti-enlightenment mood piece whose philosophical similarities draw more from Taoism than any western tradition. Just seeing such a thing in the early 21st Century Anglosphere was a bracing gateway to explore something new. Black Mass, arguably Gray’s best work, traces how religious apocalyptic thinking, especially that of the messianic religions, influences assumptions about the world from many secular ideologies and especially neoconservatism. The Silence of Animals drives home the centrality of irrationality in the human experience and the dangers of forgetting our true biological origins. These books questioned philosophical progressivism without being a knee jerk reactionary. Importantly, they were written to be accessible to a general audience. His most important book for this topic was Seven Types of Atheism. You can read my full review here, but the key thing to keep in mind is that he laments how New Atheism stripped away all of the varieties of preexisting atheism and tried to replace them with a single progressive-liberal vision in the popular imagination. Gray is mostly interested in reminding the world that atheism is a negation, not an affirmative ideology. As such it contains multitudes. Many of those alternatives fly contrary to the claims of New Atheism…and many of these, in turn, are the ones who actually broke more successfully with established religion’s dominant culture. A large proportion of the covered world views are indifferent or even hostile to liberalism. 

Tellingly, many of Gray’s conservative fans, who glowingly reviewed so many of his prior works and who were probably primed for 7 Types seemed to have passed over this book in silence. I believe this is because the book critical of modern atheism was actually the most strident of all Gray’s works when it came to criticizing Christian ethics. Gray’s disdain for messianic teleology was the real fuel of his points on atheism- something the cultural right could not face.

This point should be so obvious as to be trite, but it goes to show how little ‘Freethinkers’ often move away from how they were raised. By definition atheism can never be a unifying project as it is merely the disavowal of a kind of belief. There never was going to be ‘an atheist community’ in the style of the pretentiously named ‘Brights’ or ‘Atheism+’. People who wish to be active in something communal should look at something else as the basis for organization (more on this later).

Besides, if your point is simply to register displeasure with the dominant theology of our times (spiritually or not) the devout are far more bothered by a rejection of their values than they are a rejection of their god. If you disdain Yahweh they assume you are simply mistaken, to be punished later or to come around in an act of redemption. But if you reject the very values associated with their tradition you are proof that their concept of light vs dark, good vs evil, is itself something that can be lived without. Villainous antagonists they can understand. Indifference or opposition to the very idea of moral melodrama? That wasn’t part of the prophecy.***

Where are they now?

The upcoming inauguration of President Incel_Sniper1488 in 2028, formerly Gary Wentler, President of the University of Wisconsin’s (Eau Claire campus) Secular Humanist Club from 2010-2013.

New Atheism’s attempt to become explicitly political in a ‘positive’ sense broke whatever unity it might once have had. The current soy male and legbeard womanchild nerd vs (equally unmanly) mens-rights neckbeard-chud-nerd divide that has poisoned younger Millennial/older Zoomer culture actually began from the (religious) schism forced upon the community by clans like Atheism+. It turned out that without Rick Santorum and the Moral Majority breathing down their neck there was nothing but divides. In other words, New Atheism spawned Gamergate, and Gamergate spawned the first round of the still ongoing post-Boomer culture wars. 

So where are these people now? They have proven just how Christian their form of unbelief was considering the nature of their sectarian split by being divided between Catholics and Protestants. 

In the case of the Catholics this is quite literal. Becoming a reactionary Catholic is the next phase in hipsterdom. The ‘alternative lifestyle’ (which never was anything of the sort) of the now is no longer loafers-with-no-socks, electropop-meets-southern-hip-hop, it is the ‘universal church’. This makes sense when you consider angry nerds clearly need an impersonal structure and sense of mission and belonging that they are often unable to get through the more natural social interactions they struggle with. Considering the incel culture of much of Gen Z, this is probably going to continue for some time before moving on. Kind of like New Atheism and hipsterism. These kinds of people are often urban and very terminally online.

The Protestant branch are the wokes. Though I have made this point many times before, I am hardly the only one who has noticed. Rather than seeking institutional authority, this branch simply seeks personal power by the vector of social media canceling campaigns. In this way they live in a perpetual position of re-enacting the Cromwellian Commonwealth and the Salem Witch Trials, individualism fueled by sanctimony to build the Kingdom of God on a new Earth. Ironically, they are fond of the phrase ‘we are the daughters of the witches you didn’t burn,’ while proving both by their demographics and their attitudes that they are in fact the descendants of the witch burners themselves. These types are more suburban/university campus but are also the most aggressively internet-brained of all demographics around today.

There is, of course, a New Atheism descended center too. These kinds are the Stancil-Yglessiai of the precocious up and coming professional managerial class. They all look the same, sound the same, and reference Pinker constantly. Their priorities are grand narratives of human development, though their cultural impact is nil. I personally suspect they may be a future febrile recruitment ground for strange cults and social movements once their vicarious causes end up going south. 

There are two things these very disparate groups still have in common. One is that they come across as Reddit users (and this is the most damning thing I can say about them), and the other is that they ended up on paths that mirror the Christian upbringing most of them had. As it is, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who advocates for a ‘Christian Atheism’, and, unsurprisingly, seems to be undergoing a clash of civilizations/neoconservative rebrand, serves as a living example of what little common threads remain in a once much stronger movement. 

Why, aside from historical knowledge, did John Gray, the speculative realist philosophers, or myself end up so different from these people? It is because we were completely different from Zizek. Almost diametrically opposed, in fact.

Pagan Atheism

I was an atheist long before the rise of New Atheism. I am still one long after its decline. Its impact on my life was that I could be less cautious about my unbelief in public around unvetted company. But this came at the cost of being associated with philosophically shallow cringe in the popular imagination.

Atheism is, as implied before, a negation and not an affirmation. The only thing that can be rooted in it is skepticism. This is a most noble virtue. But it is only one. The point of being free from universal morality (itself an artifact of moralism and Platonic idealism) is to accept that a variety of societies are free to diverge over values without necessarily threatening each other, and that others who share your position on religion may also do the same in divergent directions at the individual level. Therefore, this is not a principle I believe in organizing around unless a shared threat such as theocracy or an attack on the secular state arises. However, if one was to suggest the necessity of non ‘New’ Atheists having a common culture I would recommend this: learn from polytheism. 

New Atheism was as monotheistic a world view as a non-religion could be. It saw freedom of will under a unified and moral universe as its lodestar. It saw a Pinkerite future for those who could only seize the power to become the new Enlightened Elect and usher in a world free from irrational superstitions. It saw humanity itself as a god.

Why not do something totally different? Why not seize on determinism, fate, and humanity as one aspect of nature among many? Why not recognize the very reality of a world of devouring food chains where mankind may be high but is not the highest? Values clash because there is no overarching moral truth outside of the objective material stage we all must share (and that stage itself is still of vital importance, being nature), and situational context and the ability to wield power will ultimately decide a variety of outcomes along divergent paths. This will be so in the future as it has ever been so in the past. No order lasts very long in the end. An explosion of cultural diversity awaits in the future as it did before. Deep time itself proves that the quest for teleology is a false one. But the quest for ritual, belonging, and to define both what one is and what one is not is eternal. The modern humanists may have lied about the possibility of changing human nature with ideals, but the reality of living in the real world exposes this deception constantly.

I am a proportional rather than absolute thinker. I believe atheism is most likely the correct philosophical position when it comes to the nature of reality. But it’s not exactly fun. By cutting itself off from a cultural context of mythic analogy, terrifying monsters, and powerful heroes it becomes easily infiltrated by halfwits and consumerists.**** It should not be so hostile to religions that don’t require faith or evangelism but rather inspire fortitude and courage. It can ally with religions that don’t seek to homogenize the world or care how many followers they have but rather seek to bring that irrational animal mind inside every human skull to revel in the uncanny of nature and fate.

I may not believe in the literal truth of Susanoo, Coyote, Dionysius, Apedemak, and Qetzacoatl, but in their clashing elemental forces and chaotic struggles I see a far truer reflection of the world as it truly is than in the sterile moralism of Levantine monotheism or the naive euphoria of liberal humanism. The world is ruthless and rudderless and it will sweep away us all, especially those too frail to face the bracing reality of its callous but freeing indifference to human concerns. But in the chaos lies endless creativity and a bracing fatalistic acceptance of the dynamic tension inherent in the natural world. 

I love it so.

*It never occurred to these people that one could oppose regime change wars and sanctions on Middle Eastern countries without having to look like a fool by being sympathetic to such a religion. The fact that I was someone who both protested the Iraq War and took part in Draw Mohammed Day seemed to break many brains when it really shouldn’t have.

**If you ever need a perfect example of both Christianity and liberalism openly merging around cultural supremacism, please explore the literature around Just War Theory. It is a tiresome subject where various types of idealists attempt to give moral justification for chickenhawkery based around ideals rather than interests. In my experience in academia I found that the vast majority of people who do this are people who are both Christian and liberal.

***This is also why Satanism is extremely stupid and cringe. It is the acceptance of Christian cosmology but just with the values inverted. The anti-liberal equivalent to this is probably getting really into Russian Orthodoxy and ‘esoteric’ politics.

****I am reminded of the time Richard Dawkins waged war on children’s fantasy literature, creating a divide with his friend the author Philip Pullman. I met Pullman once when I was a very young child (and his biggest fan), he signed my copy of The Golden Compass with the line ‘to Christopher who asks all the great questions.’

The Progressive Betrayal is Complete

/ geotrickster / 2 Comments

Today the House, in the fully bipartisan way it often endorses the worst ideas, voted by a large margin to continue and expand mass surveillance and the funding of two foreign conflicts which are unnecessary to any rational and non-ideological definition of the national interest.

Every single Democrat, with no exception, voted with our street preacher tier evangelical neocon Speaker of the House to give endless amounts of money to Israel and Ukraine. The Speaker himself cited his faith as a reason to make this corrupt bargain. In an inversion of the world I grew up in, the only votes of dissent against the foreign policy of the Book of Revelation were by Republicans. Democrats, who hold themselves up as the resistance to the worst of the far right, were rooting for a Speaker who probably thinks the world is 5,000 years old as they worked together on this abomination. Remember this next time they come to demand that anyone who is not conservative vote for them as a lesser evil. Remember this also when the legions of liberal anti-fascism experts give a carefully curated list of what they define fascism as, while omitting one of the single most relevant ingredients: a death drive for endless expansionism abroad. It is not hard to see why this particular part is so commonly overlooked by our esteemed extremism experts.

I never want to hear about how the Democrats protect anyone from the worst excesses of the Republicans ever again. This sellout is proof that a two party system is just a more dysfunctional version of a one party system. One where competence and reason are suppressed and an illusion of choice is given by differentiating two basically identical camps with a false choice between two increasingly extremist culture wars. But on the matters of true power and import (finance and foreign policy) there is no real choice. There is only an empire of for-profit contractors and missionary ideologues working together to perpetuate a particular and declining class’ dominance over the rest of society.

There is at least resistance in the Republican side, if hardly enough. But the fact that there is none, not one vote, against this spending abomination from the Democrats is truly something to behold.

I was recently thinking about how I was lured out from a decade of not supporting any national level candidate from either of the two major parties by the potential of something worthwhile in John Fetterman…Only to end up getting the equivalent of a Mossad spokesman in the senate for my trouble. I think its safe to say that baring some kind of extremely unlikely and unforeseeable event, I will absolutely never hold out even rhetorical support for a Democrat at the national level again.

It is not parochialism or even that made up Cold War Era nonsense word of ‘Isolationism’ to ask for that money to be spent (or saved) at home. As the proponents of these spending bills so love to remind us, most of it is just going to our own defense contractors anyway. You know, those companies with increasingly terrible ratios of cost efficiency and slipshod production who are no doubt going to use much of that money to re-invest in lobbying for more terrible unwinnable wars. It is an understanding that a country that willingly deindustrialized itself cannot re-industrialize through circular defense speculation alone. That its true strength lies in reshoring, yes, but also reinvesting in infrastructure and meritocratic social mobility. That the U.S. has the geographic and resource power to be extremely competitive…so long as it can give up the mad and ultimately doomed quest for hegemony. Ironically, it is this quest, not a ‘lack of resolve’ that weakens it abroad. Over-expansion, as anyone who has critically examined macro-historical trends can tell you, is the ultimate death of great powers. By fighting constantly they fritter away their will and resources and wither in proportion to their out of touch bombast. Turns out that the further you go from the core, the more expensive the operations become and the more skeptical the public is to what it has to do with them. There is no world-cause that has yet to override the inherent territoriality of states.

It should surprise no one that the modern day Democrats have become the Republicans of 20 years ago to a tee. I tried to warn people of this. The values on the culture war might be inverted, but the overall marriage of moralistic and teleological world view with an accelerationist militarism represents the same model: distract at home, bluster abroad. This is the point of the two party system…whatever the trends are of the day, the neoconservatives and democratists can pivot effortlessly between two supposedly opposed camps for whatever the best allies are for their project.

It behooves those of us who are opposed to them to show the same pragmatism. Preferably, a greater level of it. Here’s hoping (from my very non-conservative perspective) for a long and productive career for Thomas Massie in government. And here is also hoping that we can finally put the myth of lesser evilism in a two party duopoly to bed for good amongst the people of our society still capable of critical thought. While I personally prefer many parties to few overall, I do believe the honesty of a one party system may be preferable to the dishonesty of a two party one. They are both functionally the same, but even the low-information voters know who to blame for problems in the one party state. In the two party state, most people can be bought off by the political equivalent of jangling keys in front of their face and pointing at their neighbors to cast blame rather than their rulers. And that is what these progressives, many of whom originally ran explicitly to oppose neoconservatism, have done.

The only real lesser evil in the foreign policy debate is that of elevating those who know the limits of their national capabilities versus those who see no limits and stumble ever onwards towards self-imposed decline.

Lieberman is Dead. Gaming Still Lives

/ geotrickster / 1 Comment

The first politician I ever hated and the first non-Presidential political figure I ever knew the name of where one and the same person. Joe Lieberman was that man, and he is now dead. No matter how far back in time I go looking for an image, he did always look like the Crypt Keeper. As Lovecraft put it, ‘That which is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons, even death may die.’

What Tipper Gore was to music, the evangelicals to role playing games or sexuality, or Adam Schiff to national security, Joe Lieberman was that for gaming. When I was a middle school kid who just wanted to frag to take the edge off my increasingly hormonal and frustrating existence this guy would always show up in the news to create some moral panic and have all the adults freak out about a form of entertainment and, yes, art, that made life a little more fun. Despite the fact that movies and board games had failed to make humankind more violent, Lieberman just needed some tail-end Satanic Panic energy to set him apart from the pack. This would go on to become his brand and one of the centerpieces of his career. Of course his real lasting legacy would be to become immortalized in Postal 2.

Lieberman would continue on to become an internet censorship advocate and a voracious neoconservative ideologue along with his BFF John McCain. His path down the hating on gaming to chickenhawk war advocacy pipeline would soon be followed by Hillary Clinton. It seriously begs the question at the societal level, why do so many warmongers fear depictions of fictional violence? Why is the view of the dangers of make-believe so existential and hyperbolic for the same people who spare no thought to the very real world consequences of military interventionism, sanctions, and escalation? I don’t have the answer to this question, but I feel like it is an issue worth exploring. Looking at so many of the safteyism-coded issues of the day, its easy to see how they appeal to the messianic mentality and the insecure.

It is also worth noting that I, a kid who loved the color black and playing Doom, Quake, and Postal, ended up an advocate for foreign policy restraint. This wasn’t in conscious reaction to Lieberman when it happened (he was already old news by that point), but it goes to show just how if there is any relationship here, it is in the exact inverse of how ole Senator Droopy Dog imagined it to be. I even got to talk about him and his delusional calls for war with Iran on a radio show a few months back. But now he is dead, and gaming still lives. It is positively thriving. I am going through my second playthrough of the Resident Evil 4 remake right now, and heads are popping all over the Spanish countryside even as the real world continues to sour on the schemes of our endless war-loving elite.

Anyway, I like to imagine the last thing he heard before we was dragged down to the fiery pits and forced to play Quake III deathmatch for eternity against Iraqi pro gamers previously killed in the wars he championed was the Postal menu music.

Leftbook and the Birth of Contemporary Social Media

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments
The social media avatar vs the person behind it.
  • 2003: ‘No Blood For Oil.’
  • 2013: ‘The 99% vs the 1%’
  • 2023: ‘Date Me, Bigot, Or I’ll Have You Cancelled.’

I think its worth having a brief but honest reckoning of where this process of degeneration actually came from.

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of President Obama’s fear of Occupy Wall Street and how most of those pick-me gifted kid nerds that made up his administration quite possibly saw it as the most threatening challenge they faced. Occupy was the one and only time the Millennial generation had a chance at doing something effective and meaningful at the structural level, but it went nowhere in terms of actual change. What is undeniable is that there was a conscious pivot away from left wing activism that prioritized class and economics and into activism that prioritized culture, identity politics, individual frailty, and victimhood after the failure of Occupy. Whether the state and Fortune 500 companies had something to do with this, I do not know. But they certainly benefited from it. And once they saw they benefited they switched to outright supporting this pivot to ‘social justice’ at an institutional level in an attempt that has at least partially succeeded at making this the defining ideology of the professional managerial class today.

After Occupy was the hermetically sealed lunatic asylum known as Tumblr banning porn, driving most of its mentally unstable coomer audience into twitter, where they could demand safe spaces on a site known for being a public free for all. Because journalists, those bastions of intellectual rigor and critical thought, get their entire world view from twitter, this led journalists to add to their already lengthy list of stenography-related iniquities by adopting this apparently tumblrified culture. Soon all of social media was dominated by censorious and ostensibly left-wing scolds attempting to re-enact The Tipper Gore Experience for a new generation.

Nothing in this conventional narrative is wrong, but its timing is all off. It is missing a critical ingredient. Namely, that the rise of puritanical hysteria in media and nerd sectors of society predates the Great Tumblr Migration by at least five years. Kony 2012 and Upworthy came first, and failed spectacularly. People back then could still mock the low-information activist openly as a common position. Yet the bizarre spectacle of younger people and more left wing people becoming more and more pro-censorship, pro-safteyism, and evangelical continued on anyway even before the events attributed to it later.

I believe I have the missing piece to this timeline. Though it requires citing things I no longer have links and screencaps of.

Late 2000s and early 2010s Facebook was the best of the mainstream social media sites. It was very freewheeling and easy to separate into more private and public spheres. Nowadays, the website is a hellscape of badly targeted ads, ranting cable news-addled Boomers, and an algorithm that will bury interesting posts from people you actually know in favor of half forgotten acquaintances from decades ago sharing pictures of their poorly prepared food and mewling children. A kind of Millennial-Xer version of ‘Bless This Home’ knitting hanging in an Iowa kitchen. But back then it was actually fun to use.

It had a dark side though. Well, probably more than one. But one I, to my great misfortune, became aware of personally in the wake of post-occupy disillusionment with Obungler and the libs: Leftbook.

I never got sucked in directly myself. But I knew enough people who did. All of a sudden I had all these friends of friends with anime girl ushanka avatars who would shriek at anyone and everyone who deviated from whatever the ever-shifting dream cosmos of the day was. People, including myself, were accused of being ‘self-hating racists’ by people who were entirely white. Cancellation campaigns raged across public groups for the tiniest slights with zero pushback considering the echo chamber like culture that reigned. Rumors became facts in the minds of true believers. Meaningless power struggles broke out over zero stakes. None of these people seemed to live anywhere but online. Most of them, I suspect, were agoraphobic losers rotting away in some kind of hoarder-home whose only chance at ever feeling the tiniest bit of power in their life was through internal policing by serving as a kind of Red Guard for postmodern gender theory and the 1619 Project. The reddit neckbeard but on Facebook.

Some specific memories: There was a Portuguese lunatic of ever-alternating pseudonyms who clearly wanted to start his own cult who constantly postured as the most morally pure person in the world and a ‘philosopher king’. Australian Catholic-Leftist furries, activist groups that had ‘matriarchal coups’ to remove males from moderator positions en masse, and my personal least favorite of them all: A sociopathic Manchester University anime girl avatar sporting student who worked for years to amass some kind of online clout through endless slander of others only to ghost the entire internet one day after what I presume was one too many witch hunts gone too far finally brought the knives out. I would be informed later that this person’s radicalization had occurred after being booted from multiple safe for work anime forums for spamming hentai constantly.

Real Savonarola hours up in here.

No one without a direct window into this was aware of it really. It was self-contained. It either disappeared from FB or I blocked (or, more likely knowing me, antagonized others into blocking) most of the people taking part in it so I came not to see it anymore. But it really spawned what became mainstream online left-activist culture in the past few years. The timing is just a bit too perfect of a fit. Considering their love of extremely cringey nomme de guerres, I wonder how many of the random reply guys and schitzoposters you see out there on other more trafficked websites today are these people in their new form. They are the missing link in the timeline of how the Anglo-left went from the least bad faction in society to people I wouldn’t trust to change a lightbulb.

A culture of weakness and frailty begets performative virtue signaling based on victimhood. The concept of slave morality made manifest. While such people exist among all stripes of life, when they are the ones demanding to be the protagonists of human civilization it becomes even more hilarious. The advocates for violent revolution and direct action unable to go outside, cook their own food, live without amazon, and quaking in fear from words spoken to them or written on a page. They remind me of the Max Boot neocons but for domestic policy. Chickenhawks of the revolution that will never come.

The irony is that the governments these people admire would have committed them to asylums by force. And in many cases, rightfully so. Its interesting to note how much of this could have been contained if not for Reaganism and the deinstitutionalization of society in the 80s and 90s. There may have been a lot of abuse and neglect in the old asylum system, but it was undoubtedly a superior option to letting these desperate and unhinged types of people roam around public transportation, public parks, and now the internet. Foreign visitors to the U.S. in the past used to marvel how there were no random psychos everywhere like in other cities. Now those psychos rule the discourse. And in so doing, they give ammunition to a right wing backlash far more than they contribute to anything constructive. It turns out the Lumpens were politically engaged after all. At least the past political lolcows like Frances E Dec were funny.

I still have very left of center views on economic redistribution, class inequality, the need for a secular state, and the importance of environmentalism in our future. I am thoroughly Turchinpilled. But never in a million years would I claim to be ‘left-wing’ so long as I live in an Anglo-country. Political factions are not determined by Platonic ideals but rather by how something manifests in reality in a practical sense. And the Anglo-Left of today are the children of Leftbook, who are in turn the children of Increase Mather and Judith Butler as channeled through an amount of mental illness so large it really should be its own anthropological subset. They exist only to turn real life into their sad little fear-soaked internet presences. In the end they want nothing but for everyone to be as maladjusted and miserable as they are.

At least we can be assured that for all the irritation and deleterious impact of their presence when culturally pandered to, they will never amount to anything when it comes to hard power. Having concrete goals and wielding hard power, I’m sure, is ableist.

Book Review: From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane

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Peter Jackson’s From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane: The Reawakening of Mongol Asia was something I got the second it was released. It has long been my assertion that English language works on the Timurid period are rare enough. Much less ones also covering the post-unity Mongol prelude that led up to it. Sure, there are specific academic works about certain places or kingdoms in this period, but seeing the process of Mongol decline and Timurid rebirth all at once is an important and overlooked aspect of these two states. Indeed, as Jackson asserts, they really aren’t two different states at all. Or, more specifically, the Chaghatai Khanate (the Mongol successor state in Central Asia) and the Timurid Empire are the same state, but simply domestically usurped. You wouldn’t say the Napoleonic Empire was not a French state would you? And unless chroniclers of the time were refering to Timur as in an individual specifically, they usually referred to his state and army as Chaghataiid.

A brief overview of the rise of the Mongols and then a focus on their post-unity decline and various fates of the successor states give us a full and meaty text. We then see the intermediate period of full Ilkhanate and partial Chaghatai state failure and fragmentation and then, only in the third, final (but most substantial) book subsection, the rise of Emir Timur with a short final chapter on the fairly rapid fall of the empire. Jackson does not deny the differences in the periods at the start and end of his work, but emphasizes continuity in many places which are often overlooked. We get citations from numerous contemporary historians to all kinds of aspects of this period, such as attitudes towards various peoples, how rule was legitimized, the large amount of the nomadic people that retained shamanism even after official societal conversion to Islam, and the courtly public debates between Chinggis Khan’s proto-constitutional Yasa (eventually called Tore) and Sharia law. There are also numerous asides about rival dynasties that emerged in the political vacuums that arose in the post-Mongol world. (If you would like another great book on this subject do check out Patrick Wing’s The Jalayirids.)

I cannot emphasize enough how useful as a reference and source this book is to those into Turco-Mongolian history. We get chapter by chapter breakdowns of these empires and how their histories flow into each other. How Timur rose from relative obscurity into a local warlord, then greater Samarkand bigwig, and then finally a warlord ruling through a puppet Chaghatai Khan. An extreme respecter of the Mongol experience before him, Timur married into the Chaghatai family to merge dynasties for his descendants, but never declared himself the head of the state even though he was by all definitions its sovereign. His descendants would end up claiming the joint heritage, most famously Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire (itself named as a Chaghatai term for the more nomadic of the Central Asian lineages still connected to the Mongol invasions).

Many historians have posited that Timur wished to restore the Mongol Empire, but Jackson disagrees. The author sees the Emir as a usurper/restorer of the declining Chagatai state. Giving one of the less successful long-term successor states of the Mongol period a moment to outshine the others and go from least important to most important. A major part of this was the economic reorientation of Silk Road trade from its more northerly line through the Kipchak Khanate (Golden Horde) and into Yuan (and then Ming) China and back into its pre-Mongol Central Asian focus. There was a level of regional patriotism here too, with the plunder and tribute from abroad fueling Timurid building, art and science patronage, and, I believe, a sincere attempt to recover an economic dynamism for a region that had been declining ever since the Yuan and the Kipchak Khanate had ended up as the much more successful of the Mongol successor states than the Chaghatai and Ilkhanate were.

Jackson and I agree on all of the above. Indeed, I even wrote about the Timurid period as one of a strong example of a core vs periphery form of imperialism (World Systems Theory) rather than one based on constant territorial annexation in my own book. There is, interestingly, one point that only comes up in the end where Jackson and I disagree though. Jackson believes that the reason Timur was the last of these truly Eurasia-spanning successful nomadic army warriors (though others like the Aq Koyunlu and Dzungars would have some strong moments to come) was because of the state and military mobilization changes made to mixed regimes like Muscovy and the Manchu Qing dynasty. I completely agree that this played a huge role, and that the 17th Century was really the period of Manchurian military domination, but to make this point Jackson disavows that economic changes reorienting Eurasian trade towards the oceans had yet to play an important role. I believe it was both. Granted, this would not yet have been apparent at the time and is much more of a hindsight argument, but the Manchus and Muscovites and Safavids all were beginning to grow their connections with the more maritime parts of the world in addition to reforming their armies to take the best of both the settled and nomadic worlds. After all, the Timurid army itself was one of the first of these mixed armies (though much more tilted in the nomadic direction than these later states) but was already clearly acting in a way that implied fear of global trade networks moving away from in inland heartland. Nevertheless, this is a point where reasonable people can disagree and my quibbles in no way change my view of the book overall.

The book is both accessible to the non-academic but also rigorous and citation heavy and well worth your time.

In the meanwhile, enjoy a traditional-style but modern song in the Chaghatai language about Timur:

The ‘Liberal Media’ is Not Ready for a Multipolar World

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A real game changer.

Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Vladimir Putin has touched off a firestorm of criticism in the Anglo-American press. An interesting turn of events considering that the United States and its allies are not officially at war with Russia. It was once the case that journalists would have jumped at the chance to interview the leader of a rival state, but now it seems to break message unity with the establishment on foreign policy is to commit an act of unofficial treason. Never mind that the interview is hardly being seen as an undisputed success in Russia. It is worth examining why this circling of the wagons has become the case.

The establishment press is majority liberal. Not necessarily in the sense that it is used in U.S. partisan domestic discourse, but in the philosophical sense. It is primarily made up of people who believe that an individual making choices in a marketplace of ideas and goods is the core unit of society. This usually comes with a set of assumptions- that history is teleological and linear with clear-cut right and wrong sides, and that economic development will cause political and economic convergence between different societies. Such a world view leads to an attitude which is akin to that of the missionary: If liberalism is a universal good, it must be expanded by any means. 

It is in this sense that much of the North Atlantic’s foreign policy focused press is also liberal. Regardless of if the author or publication is left, center, or right in official inclination when it comes to domestic issues. There is a kind of monoculture based around seeing the U.S.-led alliance network as ‘values based’ forces of light, against a nefariously defined ‘authoritarian’ alliance of darkness.

The multipolar world we are entering, however, is not an abstract choice by policymakers. It is an inevitability. The existence of a roughly three decade long interregnum of an unchallenged United States being able to imprint itself on as many parts of the globe as possible is coming to an end. Not because anyone lost their moxy or gumption, but because there are more countries, great and middle powers alike, that are much stronger now than before. The United States in the 1950s had almost half of the world’s industrial and economic power, today it is roughly a quarter. Its power is real and still unsurpassed, but the proportions vis-a-vis the globe have shifted dramatically.

The double standards between the rhetoric and practice of the “Pax Americana” have always been there, but recent events coupled with the diminishing ability of Washington to hold itself up as the global gold standard make them all the more glaring. Even the concept of human rights, itself the darling cause of a liberal press, is ultimately dependent on unipolarity in order to have any kind of globally applicable definition. As viable rival power poles continue to multiply in different regions of the world, causes such as these will see a multiplicity of values replace what was once assumed to be convergence. Whether one celebrates, laments, or is indifferent to this state of affairs, to accept this inevitably is to acknowledge the increasingly undeniable. 

But can the liberal-internationalist media foreign policy complex do so? This press culture has grown accustomed to two generations of constant self-validation building off of the fall of the Soviet Union- an event that fades ever more distantly into the past. Long flattered by the expatriates of their own profession (who share similar class backgrounds) who originate from less free countries and who seek better opportunities abroad with affirmations of loyalty to a democratic ‘west’, it is worth asking if this field as a whole is even capable of understanding that some societies may now want to pivot away from, rather than towards, the world view of internationalist liberalism.

Long used to not being challenged by different values or divergent interests, it seems quite possible, even probable, that the liberal press will have to run into the reality that not every foreigners is a poor oppressed drone with an inner American yearning to be liberated from the shell of their circumstances. Regionalism and nationalism are more likely to drive domestic pressures on the foreign policy of many states than the quest for political globalization. When journalists actively pine for a free world guaranteed by liberal hawkishness, they do so from the perspective of their concept of freedom dominating all others. The long-held ability to monopolize the media discussion on other countries by manufacturing conformism on issues related to human rights abroad is rapidly deteriorating in the face of growing distrust from the general public. 

As U.S. power diminishes in a relativistic sense towards most of the world, will the reporting on foreign affairs be able to psychologically adjust? The question is worth asking because the way in which this reporting is framed can often impact the general public discussion. Even simple adjustments such as taking the old Wikipedia’s policies on scouring ‘weasel words’ (i.e. value-saturated adjectives meant to tilt the reader’s perceptions included in supposedly unbiased reporting) could meet with pushback from journalists citing such small steps as ‘selling out to tyranny’ or ‘endorsing oppression.’ This means that as more regions of the world come into their own concept of statecraft priorities much of the press will actually increase its agitation for sanctions and military operations even as the capacity for the liberal states they are based in to engage in such interventions decreases. Will necessary cordial relationships with countries with different domestic values be too baffling to comprehend for a professional class so tied to a universalist worldview they see international relations as an extension of domestic culture war? Would a breakdown in relations between two liberal states precipitate an existential crisis among the commentariat? Most importantly, would diplomats be constantly hounded for doing their jobs in a sober and prudent fashion by a press that demands purity, leading to opportunistic politicians running against the practitioners of statecraft itself in order to court favorable press coverage?

These factors, if not addressed, pose a very real danger when the majority of the foreign policy press attempts to shape liberal discourse over a world that is unquestionably realist- where divergent interests, values, and capabilities must be taken as they are in an ever-changing and vaguely cyclic world. So the question remains, can a profession that has spent decades giving itself over to the missionary impulse adapt to a world where the hard compromises of diplomacy inevitably reign? And what happens if it does not?

Courage to Stand, Bafflement to Recline

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Geotrickster’s Note: Self-serving politician memoirs, particularly of failed Presidential candidates, has been a running gag in a circle of friends of mine for years. The book held up as the iconic example by us in this ‘genre’ (for some reason) has long been Tim Pawlenty’s ‘Courage to Stand.’ Pawlenty’s 2012 campaign had the dubious distinction of being hyped as inevitably nomination-clinching by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who had previously predicted that the 2008 race would be an inevitable showdown between Rudy Guiliani and Hillary Clinton. This eventually culminated in me giving my friend and now four-time guest contributor Brandon a copy of this book as a gag gift when visiting him in 2021. Of course, none of us ever actually read any of these things cove to cover…until now. With the recent predictable and hilarious removal of Meatball Ron from the oven of being a presidential contender (see two entries ago for my eulogy of that) it seems it was finally time for Pawlenty to get his due.

Without further ado, the following words are that of Brandon Hensley alone. Amazing how we went from gaps of years between his guest postings to gaps of weeks:

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Memoir, in general, is my least favorite book genre.  Two of my favorite women in all of history are Lucille Ball and Cassandra Peterson. I own both of their memoirs and I have never read either of them. I simply don’t have a great deal of interest in the private lives of celebrities, even ones I happen to particularly like. This might have something to do with the fact that I have somehow managed to avoid developing weird parasocial relationships with Youtubers or Tiktokkers, as well. But then, I was also able to quit smoking without blinking, so maybe there’s something genetic there.

Conversely, I’ve always been weirdly fascinated by the Presidential Primary Candidate Political Memoir. This is not a genre that Amazon or the New York Times recognizes, but they absolutely should.

A political memoir is simply the memoir of a political figure that narrows its focus from the broad biographical details of one’s life to the politically-salient biographical details of one’s life, and probably provides some sort of policy recommendations by the author.

The Presidential Primary Candidate Political Memoir, by contrast, is exactly the same except it is conveniently published conspicuously close to a Presidential Primary. It’s almost like a trunk novel that a politician has been carrying around for a while and tweaking every so often to keep it relevant until it becomes necessary to throw it into the marketplace and see how it helps the straw polls. Or, in the absolutely shitfacing hilarious situation of Hillary’s “Hard Choices” (2014) and “What Happened” (2017), the memoir bookends the election she lost. (“What Happened” also has the dubious distinction of having the question and the answer [in the form of the author’s name] prominently displayed on the front cover, gracefully saving people from wasting their money or time on it)

The reason the PPCPM is so interesting, however, is because it does what no other act of speaking on the record can do. It provides a single reserve summation of a political candidate’s moral character, fitness for office, and proposed manifesto. There is no amount of NYT article digging, CNN interview searching, or internet archive campaign website recovery that will amount to the convenience and cohesiveness of a PPCPM. If a candidate says one thing on CNN and then another on FOX, it’s a gaffe. If they’re quoted as saying something in the New York Times that they later say was taken out of context in the Washington Examiner, that’s just media spin. But what was committed to paper by them is a whole other story.

A couple years ago, Chris (yes, the owner of this very blog!) gifted me a PPCPM as a joke. Up to then, Tim Pawlenty was widely regarded as having run one of the worst Presidential campaigns in history. He barely raised any money, barely registered in polling, and, like current Vice President and 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris, dropped out of the primary before a single vote was ever cast. Having just finished Dianetics a couple weeks before Ron DeSantis stole Pawlenty’s crown of glory, it made sense that now was the time. Time to stand up and read “Courage to Stand: An American Story”.

There are two problems with a PPCPM that is now twelve years old and about to celebrate becoming a Bar Mitzvah.

  1. Nothing in it is that relevant; and
  2. Even if it can be mined for “ha ha, look at this hypocrite!” points, they’re all points that have already been made.

So I settled on option three: make fun of Tim Pawlenty because he has clearly never heard the word “recliner”.

I am not fucking joking.

“Grandma Rose always had cookies or treats at the ready. It seemed as if the measure of her love for others included how much food she could force into every one of us. Mostly sweets, of course, unless you were there for lunch or dinner, when you’d get some form of potato, or some form of sausage or other affordable meat. And she dispensed matronly advice with every plate.

“Some days I visited her by myself. I’d sit in her oversize grandma chair with the reclining feature, where you could pull the lever and get your feet up in the air.” (emphasis mine)

I am not making this up. He uses twenty-one words to describe a recliner, including the word for reclining. And it’s not the only time. He repeats his performance:

“It’s funny how the simplest things can leave the deepest impressions. Like when Dad and I watched television at night. I remember the two of us setting up those rickety old television trays to eat something and watch some show. I can’t even remember what we watched. … He’d sit in his La-Z-Boy with the leg-up option, and I’d sit in my chair, and we were the kings of the world!”

Again! He cannot bring himself to use the word “recliner”. He’s not even consistent with his failure to understand that a word exists to describe the thing he is talking about. It’s either the “reclining feature” or the “leg-up option”. I’m surprised that he didn’t borrow some sort of Seussian neologism in the process.

But it’s not just his inability to articulate the derived noun from the root recline that’s bothersome. He makes a really strange biographical point when recounting the passing of his mother.

“I later learned that in her very last hours, she pulled my two brothers and two sisters together around her hospital bed and told them directly, ‘Whatever you do, you get Tim to college.’ She made each of them promise to follow through. It was her dream for me, a dream she had instilled in me herself. She could not go peacefully without knowing that her dream would be fulfilled.”

I am not one to make light of a dying woman’s wish. Having watched my own mother die in a hospital bed, I am not a stranger to just how powerfully emotional that event is. And I was in my thirties when my mom died. Tim was only seventeen. But what’s weird about this is the way it’s phrased. It sounds as though she could give a shit less about her other four children. Only Tim gets to go to college. Fuck the rest of them, right? Partly this might be Tim’s own doing—he doesn’t actually say much about his siblings, but he especially doesn’t say if they went to college. Perhaps they were already in college? Who knows? Tim doesn’t say. But then, knowing that his mother’s dying wish is that he go to college, he says in a later chapter:

“But first, I had another important decision to make—whether to follow through on my mother’s dream that I would go to college.”

What a fucking turnip. Again, based entirely on what he has told us, we cannot be sure that his mother put this same premium or emphasis on his siblings. It is entirely possible a sister or a brother forewent the opportunity to ensure that Tim got to go. And here he is dilly dallying on whether or not he’ll go. Asshole!

Oh wait. Immediately after this he tells us precisely how many of his siblings got to go to college:

“No one in my family had earned a college degree before, (though Dan [a brother] attended classes briefly), so my family had no institutional memory on the subject.”

ASSHOLE. ASSHOLE. ASSHOLE.

Also, he was clearly an idiot asshole student for never having spoken to a counselor about how to apply:

“What colleges were even an option? How would I find out about financial aid? What did a year’s tuition cost? Would I have to live on campus, or could I commute? Was my GPA good enough? Was there testing? Where did I apply?”

But this also somehow feels entirely on brand for someone who doesn’t know the word recliner. If those passages above about the RECLINER TIM. IT’S CALLED A RECLINER! seem long just to make a point about how Tim doesn’t know what a recliner is, it’s not because Chris is paying me by the word (though I am open to the possibility), but it’s because this faux dopey Leave it to Beaver quality of Pawlenty’s “salt of the earth”, “son of the soil” shtick actually feels very genuine.

Remember that one of the defining qualities of the PPCPM is that it’s establishing the candidate’s bona fides. This includes their “authentic American patriot YEEHAW!”-ness, even in a Democratic Primary. Just look at Joe Biden from Scranton PA, even though he moved to Long Island briefly when he was four and then moved out of Scranton forever when he was ten, so the most formative years of his life where the bulk of his adult personality and remembered experiences occurred happened somewhere other than Scranton. Delaware, the home of the American insurance industry, doesn’t scream “working class” quite like Scranton, even though nobody in their right mind would look at someone who spent their entire lives from 11 onward somewhere else. Anyway, I digress.

Biden’s insistence on his working class bona fides is because the idea that Americans are by default a hardworking, labor-friendly civilization is hardwired into how we understand ourselves and our country. Or at least, it used to be. The entire façade is crumbling around us and most young people have completely fucking checked out of the myth that bootstraps are something you can actually pull on since we’re too broke to own any in the first place. But regardless, the legacy media and political establishment—and the vast majority of voters, by the way, since millennial angst expressed on the internet is not the summation of human accomplishment no matter what my LiveJournal claims—still subscribes to this political myth.

And so, every election cycle, every candidate for the highest office in the land tries to put forward whatever piece of their background speaks to that essential story.

In Pawlenty’s case, it’s entirely genuine. He was born and raised in South St. Paul, Minnesota, and didn’t leave until after college. He was a commuter student and only left when he and his wife got swanky law jobs in the Twin Cities. Unlike Biden, when Pawlenty says he’s from South St. Paul, he actually is.

“The meatpacking plants and stockyards that once thrived along the western bank of the Mississippi—once the biggest stockyards in the entire world—are gone.

“What used to serve as the center of employment and life for so many residents of this town was swept into history, seemingly overnight, at the dawn of the 1970’s. It’s something anyone in America who lives in a one-industry town, whether it’s an auto factory town or a shoe-manufacturing community, can relate to. When that one industry starts to close up shop, it leaves decades of unease and heartache in its wake.”

As a result of actually being from the place he claims to be from, Pawlenty speaks with a frankness about what de-industrialization did to South St. Paul that Biden can only ever pantomime. This is in part because Biden would not have been old enough at ten years old to understand what was happening as America offshored its industry and eviscerated the working class, and also because Biden is just so old that he moved out of Scranton while the Golden Age of the Middle Class was still happening.

As a quick point of reference to Biden’s age, the Boomer generation only lasted twenty-some years. Yet we had Boomer presidents for well over thirty. The first non-Boomer we got wasn’t some younger Gen-X model, but an even OLDER Silent Generation model. It’s like driving a 1988 Toyota Camry until it’s literally falling apart in 2019 and then upgrading to a Model T, not because you’re a Model T enthusiast, but because your Aunt Becky is convinced that buying a 2020 Prius will literally end democracy as we know it, so you can only drive a Model T or you’re a fascist. So you buy the Model T just to get her to shut the fuck up already but she won’t stop DM’ing you about it because there’s a chance the 2024 Prius will have a chance in hell at bringing this overwrought metaphor to a conclusion. If that’s not enough, remember that Kamala is still technically a Boomer and is one heart attack away from restoring that generation to the throne.

Pawlenty’s genuineness is important for two reasons. One, it actually sells him as a politician and probably has a lot to do with his success in Minnesota state politics. Secondly, it does for the rest of his memoir what that genuineness does on the campaign trail: it sells the policy. And this is where it becomes impossible to point and laugh at out of touch Republican talking points about the economy.

In any other case, pointing and laughing at Republican deficit hawks cutting taxes and then bemoaning deficits is pointless because we know they’re cynically doing this shit as a way to justify cutting down on business regulation. Republicans know they’re causing the deficit. But they also know that Democrats are cowardly shitgibbons when it comes to running defense, so they’ll cave every time and thus offer no reason for Republicans to stop. However, in Pawlenty’s case, that genuineness that he carries around with him suggests he actually believes it is sound policy based in reality.

There is not one drop of self-awareness on Pawlenty’s part when it comes to the relationship between taxation and spending and balancing the budget. He brags about cutting taxes as House Majority Leader, and then is surprised that there is a multi-billion-dollar hole in the budget projections he inherits once he’s elected governor. Time is linear for everyone except Tim. There is no rational connection between these things. He never addresses the connection. He just talks about cutting taxes in the State Legislature one moment, and then is GASP! Surprised that there’s a giant fucking hole in the budget once he’s in the governor’s mansion.

A couple of passages that really illustrate this complete lack of understanding is fairly standard for boomers writ large, but helps exemplify the fact that Pawlenty really does live in a Norman Rockwell painting:

“While I hate to reflect on it like some old man reminiscing about the good ol’ days, the world just seemed to work [in the 1960’s] in a way that allowed the people of South St. Paul, my family included, to live a pretty great life.”

And

“From everything I saw as a child, the city of South St. Paul was a place where neighbors mattered, where family mattered, where church mattered, where respect for things mattered. Everywhere you turned, you saw hardworking, fun-loving people, doing whatever they could to get by, most all of them living by the rules and trying to do the right thing.”

I wrote in the margin, “Pepperidge farm remembers!”

Boomers love to harp on contemporary complaints about working multiple jobs and not being able to afford basic housing or food. “Back in my day!” Well, no, you fungus, that was not back in your day. That was back in your parents’ day when there was an acute memory of what happens when billionaires rape the people who generate all of their wealth, and so they put into place an entire policy regime designed to minimize the power of the billionaires while funneling as much money back into people’s pockets as humanly possible. It wasn’t perfect, and was absolutely racist as fuck how the uneven distribution played out, but it was partly because of exorbitantly high taxes on the business class and regulations designed to keep them from dismantling and moving out on a whim that the 50’s and 60’s were even able to play out the way they did.

The reason boomers love to hate on taxes is because the current neoliberal regime has shifted the tax burden so severely off of businesses and onto people. Meanwhile the regulatory environment surrounding the business and its shareholders has become so disgustingly incestuous that shareholders will literally sue the board of directors for trying to give their employees raises during a global pandemic (Full disclosure: I am a former employee of NVI and a former shareholder, but did not purchase stocks during the period in question and sold the last of my shares in EYE prior to the lawsuit being announced). Boomers have a false class consciousness, where they think their interests and the interests of business owners are the same and so have unrelentingly supported this idea that releasing the shackles of business will usher in another golden age, whereas every single time we move further in that direction everything gets worse for everyone with more and more of the tax burden falling on individuals.

So hearing deficit hawks reminiscing about how great their childhoods were is always a special kind of special, since they are the ones pushing it further and further out of reach for their own children and grandchildren. Which makes the fact that Tim Pawlenty is a classic pre-Trumpian deficit hawk, and one that probably genuinely believes it without any irony whatsoever, so much more fucking grim.

It’s poetic, then, that he chose to run for President at the exact moment that the Reaganite Republican consensus was starting to break down.

The Tea Party rose to prominence beginning 2009 as a response to Obama’s election. Whatever their motives or unconscious racial bias, the Tea Party represented for the right what Occupy Wall Street did for the left—a disenfranchised, disillusioned, downwardly mobile popular mass expressing its frustrations at decades of bipartisan government mismanagement.

The difference between right populism and left populism (at least between 2009 and 2024) is that the right populists were willing to hold the government hostage to get their way, whereas the left populists have always bent the knee at the last instant. So the left populists have never understood that the entire point of gaining power is to wield it as effectively as one can, and to use every available means to do so. The Tea Party was so effective at this in the early days that it caused an institutional back lash within the Republican Party that eventually saw the isolating of some of the Tea Party’s most extreme members of Congress in the Freedom Caucus right up until Donald Trump and MAGA reinvigorated it.

Had Pawlenty played his cards differently, he maybe could have had a fighting shot at the 2012 nomination in place of Mitt “I have Binders Full of Women” Romney. Whereas Romney was widely viewed as out of touch and elitist, Pawlenty had genuine populist leanings that could have been flexed had he read the moment better. Instead, he came in third in a straw poll just before the Iowa caucuses and dropped out. And now I’m going to mathematically prove that Pawlenty is a fucking idiot for doing so.

The Republican primaries have only been run since 1976. Prior to that, the Republican Party chose its own nominee for President and didn’t let people directly influence that outcome. Since 1976, ignoring incumbent candidates, Iowa has only chosen the eventual nominee twice in 13 presidential primaries (including 2024 because we all know Haley isn’t going to win). In 2012, that was twice in ten. And the first place winner of the straw poll that made Pawlenty pack up shop wasn’t even the eventual winner of Iowa. It was straw poll fourth place winner Rick Santorum, which suggests that Pawlenty actually had a fucking shot at winning Iowa.

I’m just spitballing here, but New Hampshire has a tendency to seek a middle ground when it comes to the primaries. We saw this in the 2024 New Hampshire Primary’s lean toward Haley over Trump. Given Pawlenty’s “Aw shucks!” version of deficit hawkery, I would be willing to go out on a limb that a win in Iowa would have really boosted his chances in New Hampshire, and had he managed to pull off both of those, it would have given him a pretty decent betting chance at actually getting the nomination over Romney.

Would Pawlenty have stood a chance against Obama? Actually, yeah. Obama’s one and only success while in office was the Affordable Care Act which made healthcare more expensive for everyone. Romney couldn’t attack it since it was lovingly referred to as Romneycare due to its copying of Romney’s healthcare law while Governor of Massachusetts. However, Pawlenty could have attacked it and would have attacked it authentically. The ACA of 2012 was a paragon of government spending gone horribly wrong. The website was buggy, the open enrollment periods were (and are) nightmarish, the marketplace was difficult to navigate, and it required the hiring of thousands of new government workers to staff the phone lines which also routinely crashed.

Pawlenty would have had a field day!

Alas, it wasn’t to be.

The idiot who doesn’t know how to say “recliner”, whose four siblings forewent college educations so he could go, and former Governor of Minnesota read an informal, internal GOP poll that said the loser caucus that can’t pick a winner wasn’t going to pick him and dropped out.

In reading this, it made me think what is the benefit of reading a twelve year old memoir of a failed presidential candidate? There is no part of the reason why it was written that translates into the reason to read it now. Pawlenty’s political career in office is done. He is currently a lobbyist as near as I can tell for the Financial Services Roundtable as near as I can tell. His Xitter is just boomer small business dad, so, incredibly on brand. There’s no reason to pull out quotes from his book and yell “gotcha!”

Instead, I think the point of reading these is probably something to do with being able to look at a specific political moment, remember the specific partisan battles and the claims that these elections are too important to do anything other than vote for the centrist or else democracy will end and…maybe something deeply poignant about how the average American voter’s political memory is shorter than a goldfish?

Here are some other hilarious Pawlenty bits and the commentary I wrote in the margins:

“My family was eating breakfast one morning, discussing Greece and its financial trouble because it was in the newspaper. Mara, my then-thirteen-year-old daughter, completely unprompted, with simplicity and clarity, looked at me and said, ‘That will be America soon.’” [STFU Tim she did not say that]

“Whatever happened to the power of Enough? the power and the guts to say, ‘No’?” [Foreshadowing]

“It’s no longer okay to look backward, unless it’s to find inspiration or recognize the errors of the past so we can be certain we don’t repeat them.” [Woke!]

“The courage to say, ‘No’ when everyone else says ‘Yes’—because we know it’s the right thing to do.” [Say no to yes; say pizza to drugs]

“Stockyards and Stability” [by Jane Austen]

“My simple act of offering pro-Reagan brochures was viewed by many on campus as politically intolerable. People shouted at me, and one student actually spit at my shoes!” [This was actually because he was a giant fucking nerd; nobody actually cared about Reagan]

And let us close with the afterglow of the knowledge that Tim Pawlenty almost accepted a job for Rudy fucking Giuliani:

“[I] actually got as far as receiving a job offer from Bracewell & Patterson (now Bracewell and Giuliani), a well-respected law firm” [LOL]

What do you say…Shall we challenge him to another?

Faded Blue Ball of Wonder

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Neptune was the name the Romans gave for their version of Poseidon, the God of the Sea. Appeals to him were meant to ensure safe travel aboard ships as if his wrath was stoked, he could turn placid water into tempestuous waves. It is also the name of the eighth planet in the solar system. An Ice giant about four times the size of the Earth made up of mostly hydrogen, helium, and methane in a massive weighty atmosphere crushing upon a compressed icy rock core. The vast temperature differences between its frigid upper atmosphere and highly pressured interior create faster winds than anywhere else in the solar system. Neptune has fourteen known moons and a faint ring system and is subject to seasonal changes and dark storms which appear and disappear, some of which could encompass entire rocky planets.

To hear people speak of it recently is to hear tales of woe about how Neptune was struck a blow by astronomers. Its deep blue demoted to just a hue darker than the off-teal cue ball of its sibling Uranus. The differences between the two outer worlds diminishes. Uranus, with its almost 90 degree tilt (which includes the orbital planes of its rings and moons) now seems the more interesting of the two as many lament Neptune’s lost sapphire sheen.

This was all due to decades of compounded human error too. The original photos from the Voyager 2, taken in humanity’s only flyby in the late 1980s, were intentionally heightened in color contrast in order to make Neptune’s wild weather more apparent to the casual observer. This was even noted in source materials of the time, as I distinctly remember the kids’ books in the elementary school library mentioning this on the page. Nevertheless, the planet’s depiction became that of the altered photo to such a degree that we are now shocked to see it portrayed accurately. Of course, anyone lucky enough to see it in a telescope (which I am) knew it was a different sort of blue all along.

The ice giants are my favorite planets. Lonely sentinels of the outer solar system, their freeze-frame Voyager pictures deceiving many from their churning interiors and seasonal weather. They are a glimpse of what might be one of the most common types of major planet in the universe. Their study is vitally important, but the challenges of reaching Uranus and Neptune leave them overlooked for obvious logistical reasons.

Neptune was the one people tended to like more. Now, so many who bet that its particular beauty was not a lie are struggling to cope. In time, I suspect, they will come and see that it is no less the marvel it was before. Teal and its field are among my favorite colors, even if I too mourn the loss of that familiar-looking deep ocean in official photographs. Feelings are temporary, and Neptune (by human standards anyway) is eternal. This reconsideration should keep our views of it steady going forward.

This line of thought brought me back to thinking about the movie Ad Astra, which was released in 2019. When I first watched this movie, I was struck by how awkwardly paced it was, with mood-breaking narration and some odd plot holes. It presents itself as hard sci fi and very much in the NASA-punk aesthetic that Starfield would go on to use later. Despite this realistic look, the movie neglected to depict Mars as having lower gravity than Earth, and depicted a trans-solar system journey as one where a ship would pass directly by both Jupiter and Saturn before hitting Neptune. A gravity slingshot maneuver would require only one of these planets, and the worlds of Sol are not lined up right after each other in a queue like they are depicted in schoolbooks. This I found tonally jarring. It was made even more incongruous when the movie got to the end and had one of the most moving and thought-provoking conclusions I have ever seen in a sci-fi film. One at considerable variant with the normal euphotic nature of the genre.

I eventually figured it was worth seeing it a second time, since the planet Neptune is featured so prominently in the story and it was on thoughts of people reconsidering Neptune’s place in their minds that brought my attention back to the movie. (Perhaps later I will indulge in that other Neptune-focused movie, the far dumber and yet more enjoyable film, the space Hellraiser itself, Event Horizon.) Knowing what to expect on the second try made me enjoy Ad Astra significantly more, a similar effect I had with my favorite solar system focused film of all time, Sunshine.

This paragraph is full of spoilers, so be warned. Decades before the start of the film Major Roy McBride’s father was leading an expedition out to Neptune, where no one had yet been, to set up a space station that would survey the galaxy for sentient life. He disappeared and was assumed dead. Then, in the present day, Earth starts to get bombarded with periodic antimatter waves causing wanton destruction. Secretly, the government determines McBride’s father’s station is the source, likely due to malfunctioning equipment. As he begins his complicated and at times almost tragicomic journey out to find his father and destroy the station, Roy learns that his father has gone mad, killed most of the crew, and in the battles with the mutineer’s damage has been done to the station causing it to create the emissions. The crew had wanted to abandon to mission after finding no signs of sentient life, but McBride senior, a religious fanatic obsessed with his mission, refused, and even sabotaged their attempts to return home, bringing about the events that would leave the station damaged and himself the only survivor on board. McBride finds his intimidating and uncaring father as a husk, dejected. He would rather kill himself in space than give up. McBride salvages the planetary survey data, plants a nuke on the station, and escapes back to Earth.

This is a bare bones summary that does not do justice to the themes of the film, which include using faith as a crutch against reality and the complex relationships between authority figures and the people they command. But what struck me both the first time I watched it, and this second viewing was at the very end, when McBride is going through his father’s data on the way back from Neptune. We see glimpses of high-resolution photos of all kinds of lifeless worlds surveyed by his father and scorned for not meeting his goal of harboring sentient life, their colors shining out of the blackness of space like stained glass lamps. Then, the one time the narration adds to the film kicks in.

‘He captured strange and distant worlds in greater detail than ever before. They were beautiful, magnificent, and full of wonder. But beneath their sublime surfaces was nothing. No love or hate, light or dark. He could only see what was not there- and missed what was right in front of him.’

Ad Astra’s embrace of nature’s true neutrality, its existence for its own sake above and beyond arbitrary human values, is my favorite part of the film. It is a speculative realist movie at its core, where the very physical realness of things is upheld as its value totally apart from moral meanings humanity often feels it is necessary to impart. When we look at a hostile and indifferent universe, we should not retreat into cope but embrace it as it is because it is ours all the same. If we keep exploring space, and I hope that we do, we should never be put off by what we fail to find out there because all that matters is that we keep finding what is there, whatever it might be.

It this world view I try to inculcate in myself when I need a sense of distance from an issue or subject matter. Right now, it could certainly be applied to those finding an idealized portrayal of something stripped away from them. Perhaps like the appearance of Neptune itself. A perceived color change does not change its amazing wonders, moons, or the fact that its extreme interior might create diamond rain that falls for unfathomable depths before striking the core.

Circling the sun at the utmost extremity, this churning orb of superfluids spins oblivious to the judgement of anyone. A remarkable example of nature’s indifferent power, Neptune will dance around its parent sun for eons, outlasting the inner worlds who will eventually be engulfed in Sol’s coming red giant phase.

In Alastair Reynold’s novel Inhibitor Phase even the backdrop of a species-exterminating interstellar war between decaying ancient machines and an endangered human race cannot take away that the true thrilling climax of the story. This is the descent of a spaceship into an ice giant in a quest to find a lost ancient weapons cache. The awesome crushing forces and ever-increasing temperatures of the planet has a power and danger not even the existential conflict raging above can rival, putting one of the most advanced spaceships ever built in the far future into the greatest peril it has ever faced. It is telling that before the descent this random planet is referred to by the protagonists as mundane and unremarkable. Something barely worth logging in an astronomical survey. The kind of world you could find in any system that no explorer would give a second thought. But up close, it is the engage with its power is to embark upon a trial of immense courage and risk.

In such a way are all worlds well-named when called ‘Neptune-like.’ For, like the god the name derives from, the ‘waters’ can go from still to tempestuous based on the nature of the journey and the whim of the genus loci. And those currents certainly run deep.

Please Clap for Meatball Ron

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Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSanctimonious, Ron DeSanctus, Meatball Ron, and my personal favorite, Ron DeSpectrum. He was built up to be the The Man…but he was not the man.

Unlike the many terminally online over-paid tradcath mutants on his campaign, I saw this from the start. Indeed, before he even declared he was running I knew he would be an abject failure. The reason? GOP voters want Trump sure, but more importantly, this interview: That face. The smug hubris immediately crumbling into deer-in-the-headlights-soyfacing the second an unscripted question appeared. You can complain all you want about politics and how they should be substance over surface and yet someone still has to be the public face of a campaign. And surely it couldn’t be…that face.

‘Folks, folks. I never called Meatball Ron “Meatball Ron.” I would never call him that. I call him Ron DeSanctimonious, the Florida Virgin. Just look at his face! It’s a meatball! That screaming rictus, no good. Very bad!’

His official rollout on XXXtwitterXXX was a technical flop and embarrassment, immediately and easily parodied by the Trump campaign. This bizarre behavior wasn’t just shaking of the national spotlight adjustment problems and would continue throughout the campaign.

A cope phrase you will hear from DeSantis fanboys is that ‘well, he was a good governor.’ I’m not a rightoid so I can’t say if I am fit to judge here by their standards. But what I can say is that I do think his tenure as governor must be at least overrated. Everything seems to have been targeted from the start to pander to national culture war headlines. His state was effectively a laboratory for clickbait. And it didn’t even work most of the time because even when he rightly went after the special Chinese-Concession-Port-like legal exemptions of Disney, he still got his ass beat.

DeSanctimonious really lived up to his name when this opponent of cancel culture decided to attack what little independence educational institutions have by instituting pro Israel cancel culture. This hero opposed to affirmative action took it upon himself to impose affirmative action for Jewish students. Partisan hypocrisy is always off the charts in election cycles, but the timing and obvious attention-grabbing of these policies are craven even by the low standards of the trade. So craven even republican primary voters could see through them as transparently pandering and two-faced.

While not personally invested in the Republican primary, I was personally invested in seeing DeSantis’ strategy fail. Had he succeeded, the horrible Woke Era would have been replaced by an equally horrible Anti-Woke Era and the endless cycles of media driven grievance identity politics would have continued forever. This may still happen, but it won’t be with its flagship pioneer at the helm. I think many politicians on the right are misreading the long-overdue rebellion against puritanical progressivism by thinking it means their form of religious fundamentalism allied to 4chan phrenology is in the ascendant. In actual fact I think (and hope) it means culture war itself is on the way out for the time being. The two factions of elites sought to distract everyone with these obnoxious parlor games while they continued to pillage the country, let infrastructure rot, and continue to bloat the military industrial complex for use in endless and unwinnable wars. But it is impossible to ignore.

Trump and Biden have both been failed Carter-esque Presidents. Nikki Haley is the demonic reincarnation of John McCain. And DeSantis was the harbinger that maybe people want substance over style. He set himself up as the substance, but he was only the style. And what an awkward style it was, too.

So Please Clap for Meatball Ron. Maybe Trump will make him Secretary of Transportation. It seems to be the holding tank for failed overhyped presidential candidates.

EMDR and Dianetics Compared

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Geotrickster’s Note: The following is the third guest post by Brandon Hensley, who previously gave us such book review posts as ‘The Centrist Manifesto‘ and ‘Hope Never Dies.’ All other words are his.

———————————————————————–

Dianetics, Revisited

A thought experiment. You are in need of some mental health therapy to help mitigate the triggering responses of some traumatic event. They have intruded upon your day-to-day activities and you’re tired of it. Pushing open the door to the Therapeutic Center for Mental Health, a lobby with two doors greets you. Above the first door is a sign: “Modified abreaction therapy with a licensed practitioner who will recuperate the cost of licensure by billing you for the treatment.” Above the second door is a sign: “Modified abreaction therapy delivered via a convenient self-help manual.” Which door do you choose? (And we’ll clarify what is abreaction therapy as we move along.)

In the ever-expanding world of mental health destigmatization and expansion of therapeutic access, choosing a practitioner can be troublesome, and that’s before you even begin the journey toward treatment. And then, once you’re embarking on a course of treatment, there’s plenty of room to criticize the underlying theories of some of those treatments. Which door, in this period of late capitalism where the advancement of costs of living annually outpaces advances in wage growth, does one choose?

Enter Dianetics Therapy. Or really, re-enter. The second door in the lobby of our hypothetical Therapeutic Center for Mental Health contains a copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s 1950 best selling self-help book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.

A famous Scientologist, Hubbard was also interested in alternatives to lobotomies and electroshock therapy—both popular treatments in 1950—for the promotion of mental health. In fact, it was this interest in mental health treatments that led to the publication of Dianetics in the first place, and only later (1952) did Scientology become a thing. While it is impossible to discuss Dianetics or Hubbard without also mentioning Scientology, for the purposes of this review it is also important to remember that Hubbard did not start out the head of an alleged cult, and Dianetics was published with the intention of promoting a novel psychotherapeutic treatment, not to be the foundational text of an allegedly predatory cult. 

It is precisely because Dianetics gets all the flak of Scientology’s alleged abuses while predating it and being patently uninterested in religious trappings for the first two years of its life that I have always wanted to read it. But, much like my interest in Hillary Clinton’s Masterclass (If you know, you know), I never wanted a penny of my own money going to the people who stood to profit off my purchase of a new copy (If anyone has a login to Hillary’s masterclass they’re willing to sell for $3.99, let’s talk).

Having spent my $3.99 on a used copy of a book which has a listed MSRP of $4.99 from 1986 (about $15 in today’s money according to an internet inflation calculator) I immediately dug into it and was…honestly, surprised.

The first few chapters are startlingly reasonable. Hubbard argues that the fundamental dynamic of human life is to Survive! (bold formatting Hubbard’s), and that all life processes are driven toward that one goal. He introduces some concepts that I don’t think are particularly relevant for this brief review, such as the tone scale and the four dynamics—these things are all readily available on Wikipedia—before getting into what I think is the meat of the theory.

According to Hubbard, we all possess two minds: the analytic mind and the reactive mind. The analytic mind is what we are aware of when we are conscious. Because life processes do not stop when we are unconscious, Hubbard’s explanation is that that is when the reactive mind is active (this is important). He describes the analytic and reactive mind in computational terms. The analytic mind is responsible for processing memories and experiences so that we as individuals can react and behave appropriately. The reactive mind, however, is responsible for collecting sense data and making quick associations that help feed relevant input into the analytic mind. The problem is that the reactive mind cannot analyze, and so it fills up with associations that lead to aberrations.

The example given by Hubbard is of a fish that swims into some brackish water to feed on shrimp. While feeding, he gets knocked on the fin. Startled, the fish flees the brackish water. The startle is a moment when the analytic mind shuts off momentarily and allows the reactive mind to take over. The reactive mind takes in all the sense information—brackish water, shrimp, knock on the tail—and files it away under the heading “startle” (he actually spends a lot of time discussing filing and cross-filing, but we’re keeping this simple). Later, the fish returns to the brackish water because the analytic mind remembers that there was plenty of shrimp to be found. However, just as soon as the fish enters the brackish water, the analytic mind pulls from the files related to brackish water and discovers important information about being startled. Suddenly, the fish develops a minor twinge in the tail which triggers the reactive mind’s associations in this regard, and the fish, without ever getting to the shrimp or being knocked in the tail decides to avoid the brackish water.

This becomes the basis of the engram, or a negative memory with the power to override a normal analytic process. Hubbard’s example is of entering 1+1 into a calculator while also holding down the 7 key. Ignoring that most calculators will either not let you push two keys at once or just produce a bunch of 7’s, we can run with the imagery. You’re putting in 1+1 but getting out 8. Or you multiply 1 by 10 and get 70. The 7 input is the engram stored in the reactive mind associated with the 1+1 program. Every time the analytic mind goes to run the 1+1 program, it reaches for all the files cross-referenced with it and the reactive mind is more than happy to supply a 7.

Hubbard links this behavior of the reactive mind to evolutionary processes and allows for the development of engrams as part of the survival process in an earlier stage of evolution. However, given the state of the human animal in the modern world, it is clear that these engrams no longer serve the purpose of promoting human survival and flourishing and must be cleared out.

The goal of Dianetics Therapy, then, is to clear these engrams so that the analytic mind can operate optimally and promote that singular essential dynamic: Survive!

How does this work?

The auditor and the preclear establish a rapport and trust between each other with the auditor assuring the preclear that they will know everything that happens during the session. The preclear then closes their eyes and enters “dianetic reverie”. The reverie is simply a term used to help the preclear think they’re entering an altered state, however Hubbard does say that optimal reverie will be noticeable due to a trembling of the eyelashes. A “canceller” is installed (basically a form of post-hypnotic suggestion that will be used to end the session) and then the session really begins.

The auditor asks the preclear to locate an incident in the past (Dianetics to a degree treats this like time travel; based on what I’ve heard the CoS treats this as literal time travel) and describe it. The auditor then asks the preclear information gathering questions about what is happening in this incident, to try and get as much data as possible. When the preclear hits a roadblock, the auditor brings the preclear back to the beginning and asks them to start again. This procedure is done over and over again until the session time is run out.

The same incident will be rerun over and over again over multiple sessions until the preclear’s attitude about it becomes positive. This is the sign that the aberration that led to the engram is purged, and the incident’s memory is refiled from the reactive mind to the analytic mind. Going “clear” is when the reactive mind is entirely purged. Focusing on individual incidents and specific engrams is called a “release”. 

All of this can be done from the comfort of home using Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, because Hubbard intended it to be thus. 

At the heart of dianetics therapy is abreaction therapy. “Abreaction Therapy focuses on reliving a traumatic event and going through the emotions associated with them to heal and move forward. Originally created by Sigmund Freud the method gives patients a way to release their unconscious pain and escape from the memories and feelings that have kept them from moving forward.” The mechanism by which Hubbard describes this working is the novelty introduced (along with his biological/physiological claims), which leads to specific claims about why the therapy is needed in the first place. Remember, according to Hubbard, we are full of engrams. These do not promote survival, but instead inhibit it. If we utilize dianetics to get to the state of “clear”, then we can optimize our survival and push human evolution forward. Thus, Dianetics becomes less a self-help book and more a manifesto of personal flourishing. In a way, it is the original Influencer Manual to Selfcare and Glowups (if this doesn’t exist, someone could make a mint). 

Interestingly, ignoring the runaway freight train that is “going clear”, dianetics is regarded as pseudoscientific nonsense despite a very similar treatment being one of the most popular and widely evangelized treatments today.

If you don’t know what EMDR is (Eye Movement Deconstruction and Reconstruction) then you are probably a shut-in with no friends and no internet access. If you’ve had the unsettling feeling over the last 5-10 years that every minor inconvenience is being diagnosed as trauma, you’re not alone. The “traumafication of everything” is a discussion for another time, but it has correlated to the rapid destigmatization of mental health and allowed the proliferation of services such as BetterHelp (itinerate scandals aside) to help democratize access to therapy. Hand in glove with this destigmatization and democratization has been a growing chorus of people championing EMDR.

The following section is indebted to YouTuber Neurotransmissions and his video “A Hard Look at EMDR and its Unscrupulous Founder” . In the interests of transparency, Neurotransmissions and I have never spoken, this is not a sponsored plug, and I gain nothing by pointing people to his channel. However, the algorithm popped this video up while I was in the middle of reading Dianetics and it provided plenty of verified source material that didn’t necessarily confirm my suspicions but at the very least gave credence that I wasn’t imagining the parallel.

EMDR is an endorsed treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder discovered by Francine Shapiro. Discovered is the correct word, since, in her own retelling, she discovered it entirely by accident one day while taking a walk. While thinking about things that generally troubled her, she noticed her eyes moving rapidly back and forth. This caused her to lose focus on what she was thinking about, so she returned to thinking about whatever it was that was troubling her, and she discovered that she didn’t feel so troubled about it anymore. Shapiro decided to test her finding by thinking about something else that troubled her, intentionally moving her eyes back and forth a bit, and then revisiting it only to discover the same result: she didn’t feel so badly about it anymore.

Shapiro went on to more fully develop the theory and promote it as a treatment for PTSD. A general rundown of an EMDR session looks remarkably similar to a dianetics audit:

  1. History and treatment planning, in which traumatic events are identified to be reprocessed.
  2. Preparation, in which the therapeutic relationship between patient and practitioner is established and the process is explained.
  3. Assessment, in which the specific event to be reprocessed is identified “including images, beliefs, feelings, and sensations” associated with that event.
  4. Desensitization, in which the eye movements or other bilateral stimulation is used while the event is recounted internally by the patient. It is during this period that the patient is encouraged to produce new thoughts, images, feelings, and sensations while subjectively rating how troubling the patient feels about the event. The goal is to get this subjective rating to zero.
  5. Installation, in which a positive belief is associated with the event until this belief feels completely true to the patient.
  6. Body Scan, in which the patient holds onto the target event and the installed positive belief while scanning the body and processing any lingering disturbance from the body with bilateral stimulation.
  7. Closure, in which the practitioner helps return the patient to a state of calm in the present moment.
  8. Reevaluation, in which the process is repeated in subsequent sessions.

One of the enduring critiques of this setup is that in controlled trials, the bilateral stimulation (or, according to the EMDR International Association, BLS since BS would have been too accidentally hilarious, probably) did not actually add anything to the therapeutic effectiveness. Neurotransmissions recounts how in the early batch of these controlled trials, Shapiro responded to this criticism by saying the researchers had not been properly trained. So the next batch of trials was done by people who paid for and took the training, producing the same result. Shapiro’s response was to say that they only had Level 1 training when they needed Level 2 training. So the researchers paid for the Level 2 training and so on and so forth. You get the idea.

If this sounds like the ever-increasing “you need more training to do advanced auditing to ascend the Bridge to Total Freedom” costs of Scientology, it’s because it is. If you google “EMDR and Scientology” there’s not a few links to people asking on various platforms if anybody else is noticing the similarities. And when you follow those links you’re greeted with plenty of testimonial from people who underwent EMDR whose lives were reportedly saved by it trying to refute the claim at the heart of the question. We shouldn’t ignore the fact that positive testimonials for dianetics also exist. There is a reason that cults are able to sustain themselves even amidst widespread and consistent allegations of abuse, precisely because they are able to offer something that people find useful or lifesaving. If we can adjust the old adage of “the difference between a cult and a religion is money and time” a bit, the difference between a cult and a religion very often has as much to do with the people at the top. Dianetics and EMDR, both just dressed up abreactive therapy, work. But they work for the same reason that abreactive therapy work, and the additional dressing up of the therapy is just there to help earn a buck for the one who added the accessory. And in the case of Scientology, the additional dressing up has been particularly and uniquely lucrative.

Yet, it is not the point of this digression into EMDR to make the positive case that EMDR and Dianetics are the same thing. I actually do think it’s more a case of parallel development. Dianetics claims to cure many physical ailments and in fact diagnoses things as somatic illnesses that are clearly and irrefutably physical or genetic. This fact alone is enough to dismiss Dianetics out of hand, even if the basic therapy on its own would otherwise be effective. So clearly, EMDR is in the clear on this?

According to the EMDR International Association, EMDR can be used to effectively treat “OCD, chronic pain, addictions, and other distressing life experiences”  (emphasis my own). Oh my. At least there is clinical support to back up the claims that EMDR is at least effective.

Except, as Neurotransmissions points out in his video, almost all the individual studies done on the effectiveness of EMDR that haven’t been dismissed by EMDR’s leadership have been done by practitioners who have a vested interest in seeing it be presented in a positive light. Accompanying metastudies don’t show an appreciable difference in effectiveness from other therapies, such as abreactive therapy or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. However, as he (also a trained and licensed therapist) points out, the cost of EMDR certification is substantially higher than most other treatment certification programs, which only adds the sunk cost fallacy to people’s vested interests in seeing EMDR succeed. So if all the clinical studies around EMDR have potential issues, and the overall form and function isn’t radically different from what is correctly denounced as pseudoscience, then at least a sufficient pile of anecdote lends some credence, right? Well, sure, but only if you extend the same to Dianetics.

What I haven’t bothered to find out is if Shapiro ever uttered the famous sentiment of every cult that ever existed: “Disagreeing with me is proof of concept”. Hubbard, however, does. When discussing the interactions between Auditor and Preclear, he specifically addresses someone complaining about the auditing and questioning its efficacy. Instead of stopping, the Auditor is urged to persist and encourage the Preclear to continue. By stopping, Hubbard says, the Auditor will actually implant an engram that associates the Auditor with sympathy, and the Auditor-Preclear relationship will be shattered. Questioning the efficacy of dianetics is proof of its efficacy, and proof that the Preclear just needs more.

So why spend so much time interrogating the surface-level similarities between EMDR and Dianetics? I bring it up not because I am skeptical of EMDR (I actually am, but that is beside the point), but because of a broader cultural phenomenon surrounding the ascendant moralism of “bettering oneself”, “selfcare”, and “doing the work”. This entire aside connecting EMDR and Dianetics applies just as well to other current personal improvement endeavors from New Age “shadow work” to HR ED&I initiatives. Any of these would have provided for a provocative essay, but few have as many direct parallels as EMDR. They all are based on the premise that outward negative manifestations stem from internal traumas or aberrative learned processes that need to be purged in order to operate like a normal human being (and that’s before we get to people like Robin DiAngelo who insist that the original sin of being of European stock is insurmountable, so the option of going “clear” in anti-racist action for her is off the table entirely). Had Dianetics been written in 2015, we would have seen BLM protestors and veterans of Occupy Wall Street flocking to Dianetics Auditing Centers around the country and championing the purging of their reactive minds. “Decolonize your mind,” indeed.

The unsettling truth is that Dianetics, when you strip it down to its bare essentials, is actually a very reasonable and understandable conceptual framework for treating the postmodern condition, while at the same time avoiding the Victorian, finger-wagging moralism of much of the contemporary moment. In that way it actually holds up a mirror to a lot of the supposed magic bullets being bandied around by today’s enlightened liberal. The underlying technique is still used in therapists’ offices today. So when we get right down to it, the takeaway comes down to this:

Hubbard had a remarkable imagination, and it helps pad out his book to over 500 pages. But whereas you need to spend thousands of dollars to learn how to administer EMDR, you can spend $3.99 to administer Dianetics. I am not advocating this, but it’s there. The allure of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, is because of the controversy surrounding Scientology and because of the alleged abuses and the alleged OTVIII material (of South Park fame). But at the end of the day, Dianetics is little more a boring snapshot of the state of mental health therapies in 1950 and one man’s imaginative alternative to electro-shock therapy and lobotomies.

Good for him.