Escape from the Dark Forest

Dave the Distributist’s OGC Conference Speech

Dave delivered the following speech at the Old Glory Club’s “The Road Ahead” Conference in May.

I wanted in this talk to give a summary of the various themes and the various things going on here in the OGC, but before I started, our friend Yizz also said that she liked so much the joke that I told at last year’s Conference that she wanted me to start with a joke again this year. I realized that I did have a joke that was somewhat appropriate, so here it goes:

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Little Billy is the star student in Mr. Smith’s high school social studies class. It’s been going on for an entire year, and Billy has been at the head of his class. He’s completed all the homework. He’s done all the extra credit. He’s aced all the pop quizzes. He’s gotten As on all the exams. Then finally it comes time for the final exam, covering all the material from the entire year. Of course, Billy is very prepared, but his classmates are a little bit worried because there is just so much material. So then Mr. Smith says, “All right. As a way to help people out, I will allow all the students to carry into the exam one index card where they can summarize the material from the textbook that can help them out. It will be an aid on the exam, and it will also be a way that you can study. Furthermore, as an additional bonus, you’ll turn in your cards to me afterward, and for the card that has the least number of words on it — the most succinct summary of the class material — I will give that student 15 more bonus points.”

Now Billy, he has to be perfect, so he says, “I’ve got to get the most succinct summary of this class’s material that I possibly can.” He goes home for the weekend. He takes out the huge social science textbook. He reads the entire thing cover to back. Then he meditates, he thinks, and he summarizes it and gets 15 pages. Then he takes those pages, and he summarizes it again, only taking the most valuable pieces of information. He gets it down to one page. He does it again. He summarizes it to an index card. Then slowly, he reduces the size of the index card down to five sentences, one sentence, and then he realizes that all the material in the entire class can be summarized in one word. It’s easy enough to memorize one word. Why do you even need an index card?

So he memorizes the word, and then he goes in to take the final exam without an index card. Bad luck. He gets into the exam. He receives the paper. He forgets the word. He immediately starts panicking, sweating, staring into space. Mr. Smith can see that he’s quite distressed, the best student in the class. He comes over and asks, “What’s the matter, Billy? Did you forget your index card? Did you leave it at home?”

And Billy says, “I don’t know, Mr. Smith. See, I did a really, really good job of summarizing the material. I made the summarization of this social studies class so succinct that I got it down from one sentence to one single word. One single word that I could memorize and use it to ace this test.”

Mr. Smith skeptically shakes his head and says, “Billy… that’s ridiculous. You expect me to believe that the entire course of social studies could be summarized by one word? That’s bullshit.”

“That’s the word! It’s bullshit! It’s all bullshit!”

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So how does this correspond to what I want to talk to you about tonight? I guess the lesson only is this: it’s very easy to summarize and characterize the nature of many things in our society that are bullshit. Bullshit can always be summarized by bullshit, and it can always be elaborated on by adding more bullshit. But substance requires more thought to capture.

Welcome

This is the fourth of these speeches that I have given, although it has been three years since our parent organization, the Old Glory Club, was founded, and two since such a conference has been officially affiliated with our group. And I have to say, I never thought we would get here, from a loose online group chat to a genuine real-life organization. Really, I never thought we would get here.

Of course, whingeing about politics online is familiar enough. Pretty much everyone does it. Even making a YouTube channel or a blog to talk about esoteric political philosophy, culture, and the problems with modernity is more or less par for the course, at least for certain types of autistic Millennial men like myself. And naturally, as is the course of all Internet communities, people talk about doing things in real life. That’s the narrative, at least in every comment section and every Discord community: “The Internet is just step one. Soon, we are going to form a new movement and bring these ideas to the real world.”

And almost every time, it’s total bullshit. The point of most Internet communities is to stay on the Internet, and complaining only leads to more complaining.

The talk of “doing something” almost never works… until it suddenly does work, and then you find yourself in the real world, putting your ideas into practice, making plans, rubbing elbows with other like-minded people, putting into place a real community, and, as the reality hits you, a sudden, violent sense of vertigo rises up in your gut. You look back on the last ten years, and you ask yourself, like the Talking Heads: How did I get here?

How Did We Get Here?

I mean, it didn’t seem that long ago, maybe ten years, that things seemed normal, at least somewhat. There was a plan, there was a middle-class life, there was an understanding of American life; and even if you could see cracks around the edges (assertions that weren’t true, and systems that couldn’t sustain themselves), the world of the 20th century seemed real enough and permanent enough to contain your entire existence, the problems and contradictions and lies would remain simply theoretical, no more consequential than a nagging philosophical pebble in our existential boot, a small barrier to our destiny to live like our Boomer forebears in sensible moderate bourgeois hedonism.

And then somehow everything changed, and each of us, in our own ways, became rebels against the very order that made up our former lives. And it’s hard to remember how this transformation even occurred.

I know a lot of people say that Gamergate was the turning point, or Trump, or the “Great Awokening,” or something else like that. But gamer or not, Trump supporter or not, Blue Stater or Red Stater, Zoomer or Millennial, we all had a very similar experience.

During our early lives, we had been fed a passivizing Soma drip of pleasure and reassurance. Then suddenly the pleasure machine broke, only momentarily, and we saw the dismal future that was in store for us and our children, and after we saw that, we couldn’t go back — at least some of us couldn’t go back, all of us here.

Of course, many people did try to go back. The vast majority of the people who were “woken up” by rising chaos just hit their snooze sentinel, found better distractions, resigned themselves to lower-quality entertainment and relationships, and then went back to sleep. They made peace with an illusionary Boomer reality that was slightly less believable. Then they joined an Internet hug box echo chamber that convinced them that they were good people for following their liberal preconceptions and not believing their lying eyes.

We all had the choice to go down this path, and we rejected it and instead found some tradition of rebellion to follow, perhaps what we mean when we say the red pill. It’s a rebellion not necessarily against any particular political class or bad actor, not necessarily in preference to any particular vision, although many have found their own in the process.

Our rebellion was just the pursuit of the real, to meet the challenges of the world head-on, rather than trying to convert them into an entertainment product; to see the evil of the contemporary world as it is and not as it should be, and to meet, in real life, to try to fight against the evil of the time.

Which brings us here, today. And as we take stock of the situation and how far everything has come in less than a single decade, there is a question that I know you are all asking yourselves, even if we don’t want to admit it. It’s something I ask myself a lot when I start getting sentimental about things: “Why, oh why, didn’t I take the Blue Pill?”

Just think about it for a second: Of all the online meta-political rabbit holes you could have stepped into, you had to step into the rabbit hole that was actually real, the one with the maximum amount of work and minimum amount of pleasure?

Just think about it: What are you doing here? When you could have just done the easy thing and joined the left and doubled down on the Civil Rights bullshit? Gotten rich being a cultural hallway monitor, while indulging in woman-worship until your coom-brained audience memed you into becoming one?

Just think, even if spiritual and literal castration is a little radical for you, you could have just joined the centrist crowd, the people still butthurt that the video games don’t have tits in them anymore, who organize their lives around complaining on Discord, circulating safe-edgy opinions, and whose highest aspirations are living in a simulated re-run of the 1990s!

Or perhaps, if you really wanted to fight back against The Man, in a safe, PMC-approved way, you could have joined our friends in the normie-conservative world, the Charlie Kirk world, uttering the thoughtcrimes only when the optics are right, recognizing reality only when it becomes too embarrassing to deny what’s in front of your nose, and then only when the political establishment has indicated that it won’t crush you for your heresy.

No, you all could have taken any of those easy paths, but instead, you all had to be here, sticking your necks out, talking about difficult questions that neither progressives nor conservatives can come to terms with, searching for complicated answers considered unwholesome by the Boomer Truth Regime, and taking risks by actually doing things.

Why on earth would anyone do this?

You don’t get rewarded for speaking truth to power, and any Boomer who tells you otherwise has never actually spoken truth to Power. This isn’t a stock option. You don’t get credit for being an early adopter. And more often than not, the mainstream voices that you’re trying to bring reason to will actually try to destroy you AFTER they see reason, because they don’t want to be reminded of their cowardice and stupidity in hindsight.

No.

The reason why we are here is that we have to be here, for the future, for our families, and for our children. We owe it to ourselves and others to look at the situation honestly after the Boomer scales have dropped from our eyes.

But, what is that situation?

Borrowing a line from one of my favorite movies, I could dress this up with bullshit, but let’s just speak in plain English, so that I can tell you what the fuck is actually going on here.

As of this moment, the party is over. The music has stopped. The postwar consensus is dying.

The 20th Century Is Over

For the last 100 years, we in the West have been living in a bubble brought about by the monopoly on power that the Global American Empire has enjoyed. The GAE controlled every side of the deal, so it could win every single interaction, and in winning every interaction, it could tell a story about how it owned the future and would win forever onward.

But the 20th-century political order doesn’t own the future. And the GAE can’t even acknowledge the present.

In its preferred myth, the leaders of the West told themselves that liberalism had solved politics and made the reality of the old pre-modern world irrelevant. As the story went, particularism, tradition, and ideological division could only exist within states where information was limited. History and real politics weren’t natural, something that organically emerged out of the human condition; it was something that was derived from old regimes of censorship and restriction. Once those traditionalist fixtures were torn down, the victory of the modern 20th-century liberal order would be assured.

All that was needed was freedom of information.

In reality, the real reason for the dominance of the liberal GAE was its control over information brought about by its mastery over the technology of media entertainment propaganda, which no one else could rival. As such, liberal Americanism remained the default winner of all local systems’ degenerative collapse that might be brought about by its sudden introduction into modernity by global mass media.

Of course, no world leaders really believed the bullshit about freedom of information, at least at first.

But the story was almost irresistible because it allowed the ruling class to associate the ascendancy of their political system with the natural tendency of all human social and moral systems to degenerate. We aren’t spreading a new imperialism across the globe to replace people’s traditional ways of life; we are just giving people free access to information, and they naturally decide to align with our worldview. But now this process has completely stopped.

The Internet Is Decaying

Perhaps the apex of the liberal understanding of the 20th century was the emergence of the Internet itself. Finally, this was the technology that would TRULY make information, and therefore liberation, available to everyone; this would provide the liberal empire with its final victory. And whatever the Internet could do with information would then only be augmented by social media, the connection of all people to all others.

With such a technology in place, the world was just one step away from being united in liberalism, at least if you consulted any cell phone commercial from the 1990s.

But strangely enough, the technology didn’t work out that way.

Rather than coalesce people around a common liberal moderate political perspective, the Internet fractured people politically as it loosened the liberal mainstream media’s control on the narrative frame. Furthermore, social media didn’t make people more social, but more atomized and distrustful.

The impossible had happened: the Global American Empire had installed the ne plus ultra technology of weaponized degeneration, and it had degenerated its own basis of power and control, made irrelevant by its own efforts.

We have had the consumer-grade Internet for 30 years, most of my life, and we have had social media for 20. And we are now only just realizing what it is.

On the surface level, it’s all information, and we had assumed that, with the open exchange of information, we might replicate the essential components of human interaction, social connection, organization, authority, community, reliability, and trust. All of those essential human qualities that seemed to be disintegrating across the 20th century could now be pulled down digitally from social media platforms, from real people around the world.

What we didn’t understand initially, but now see plainly, is that social media doesn’t replicate these real elements of human social interaction at a distance; it FEEDS on them, like a parasitic bug devouring a fish’s tongue only to replace it. The social media network is installed on top of a group of humans who already have an understanding of value, trust, and social hierarchy, and then slowly absorbs its energy, replacing the organic human organization with its own algorithm and then optimizing that algorithm for profit.

Eventually, the social media service’s optimization degrades the social pattern of its own user base, it devours the trust upon which it had relied to attract users, and the platform becomes just an algorithm after destroying the purpose of the very human relationships that it was designed to facilitate.

As such, Reddit, the model of objective conversation, becomes a left-wing echo chamber. Facebook destroyed countless personal friendships and strained relationships with people who should otherwise be close. Dating apps ruined the dating market, and Xitter immediately turned into slop, the second it became an open platform.

All of this is just accelerated with the advent of A.I. The Internet will die, social media is destined for the dustbin, and as much as people like myself — who have built something of a presence on social media — are remiss to admit, this is all going to zero. They are all going to crumble. And the imaginary castles and respect we have built on these distance servers will be little more than hot air and hubris written on silicon brains.

And when we look back at this whole social media age, the only product that will really have been produced is degeneration. Pessimistically, the degeneration of things that we thought were essential to human existence. But, optimistically, perhaps also the degeneration of false systems of control. But social media as it exists cannot be the foundation for real human solutions, even for solutions to the problems that it created.

And it’s incredible that none of our leaders, either on the left or the right, seem to realize this. They are all locked in the same illusion of the 20th century, that more information, qua information, solves problems. That intelligence itself somehow fixes real political differences, and that all human issues, all organic issues of war, can be managed through the process of technique.

None of our leaders seem to understand that real thought cannot exist without the act of will, that will cannot exist without an implicit moral system of interweaving values. And so the problem of wielding this new technology, either social media or A.I., just becomes a flat circle, a long series of elephants trying to stand on each other, a network of experts all trying to obtain validation and avoid accountability by pointing at each other, never wanting to be individually accountable for actually making a decision.

Almost everyone can see this problem at a fundamental level. They pretend they don’t. They pretend that they have some cute plan for restoration. Each one of their mainstream political groups now has this bizarre cope whereby some unnamed process will imminently return the system to dead center, with them conveniently in charge.

But this is all a delusion. This is all cope. And the modern world will continue to crumble under its own involution, its lack of contact with reality.

The End of the Boomer World Order

What waits for us on the opposite side of delusions of liberal order is the simple problem of politics, real politics.

Everyone understands that something politically has gone wrong, but few people understand the solution, because they don’t appreciate what politics IS.

Politics isn’t the solution; it’s the problem that we are solving for, and it’s a problem that we have to solve without appealing to any of the comforting illusions about technology or historical inevitability that the Boomers relied on to build the modern world. And we have to start with the truth about politics.

The Dark Forest

The truth about politics is that politics is war. Politics is chaos.

It is a taste of the Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes, and the response of any government system is not so much to manage the political form, but to suppress it, to contain its excesses, and chain it for the greater purpose of life.

Hence the civilizational cycle:

We have to chain the beast of chaos, one way or the other. Initially civilizations do this through deep organic means, an appeal to primal spirituality and ethics, but men are weak and fail, and so the only solution is to construct systems of control and government until those governments crumble under their own weight, kill the life-force they were initially designed to protect, and the beast of chaos reemerges and find ourselves locked in what many have called the “Dark Forest” of civilizational winter.

Here, of course, we are borrowing the “Dark Forest” concept from speculative fiction and natural science, describing an ecosystem in a state of chaotic deadlock. Within the “Dark Forest,” an environment is gripped by some threat that poses a catastrophic danger to all other organisms. As such, life exists only in a type of Hobbesian stand-off: larger, ostentatious behavioral patterns and large-scale systems are a death sentence for their participants, and therefore, only smaller, more discreet systems survive as they bank on lower-order micro habitats of trust that can be shielded from the larger malevolent forces that would otherwise crush them.

To this date, a lot of people have discussed a multi-polar world or post-Internet cultural space as a “Dark Forest.” And sometimes, people think this is a rather catastrophically bleak description. After all, there is no malevolent demon or alien entity looking to destroy humans living in a scaled-up society. There is no Attila the Hun or planet-destroying asteroid that we need to take cover from, locked away in our more sheltered local enclaves.

But the real threat created by the modern Dark Forest is spiritual, not physical. It is modernity itself, in all its facets. It is the myriads of forces that prevent human civilization from being generative and sustainable collectively and intergenerationally. It is the system that kills the continuation of the culture, the birthrates, and the race to feed its own purposes. And those conditions certainly pertain in the early 21st century.

Not only are cities an IQ-shredder;
The Internet is a trust-shredder,
A.I. is a meaning-shredder, and
Modernity is a spirit-shredder.

All of these things are necessary for human existence, and they are being destroyed at scale by the forces that rule our world; and as such, modernity is like an eldritch horror, consuming humanity piece by piece, first in spirit, then in body.

Can modernity exist without destroying the human populations participating in it?

So far, the answer is no, and there are no solutions, and to the extent that there are, they all would require smaller and distributed systems, a retreat into the Dark Forest where the essential things cannot be ruined, and where real human vitality can be rediscovered.

And this isn’t just theoretical. This isn’t just something that is being realized on our corner of the Internet. Everyone sees this problem.

Everyone Notices

In the previous decade, our enemies waged a war on noticing things. But this decade, most people have already noticed. You can just open the New York Times and see the high-brow super liberals talk about the things that until recently were only in right-wing circles. For instance, the New York Times readers have all noticed the separation of men and women politically, and how this is probably in some sense driving down the birthrate, which in turn has something to do with the declining trust in institutions. Everyone acknowledges the reality of these things. These trends aren’t going anywhere, and anyone who grapples with these understands that this is part of the same story.

DECLINE, DECLINE, DECLINE.

Everyone sees it. Everyone talks about it. And NO ONE HAS ANY SOLUTIONS because solutions cannot be furnished by technique, or debt, or even raw intelligence, at least in the way that Silicon Valley understands intelligence. Our problems can only be understood as human problems, and they require human solutions. And no one, at the global level at least, understands how to create human solutions anymore.

What Is Missing?

But what does a human solution even mean?

The very fact that there is no good, explicit technical language to describe the issue makes the question thorny, but you can get an idea about how these types of things are talked about in ordinary speech.

For instance, I remember one time in my professional life, I heard a superior saying something to the effect that he really wanted someone to “be accountable and take ownership over the project,” but not to manage it; yet he said, “I still couldn’t really define what ‘ownership’ or ‘accountability’ meant.”

It took every ounce of will I had not to pipe up and say that no one knows what ownership or accountability is exactly, except that women love it when they see it from a man, and hate it when it’s expected of them.

But joking aside, you see this coming up in serious issues of the age. Take, for instance, the perennial question of birth rates, the most important issue of our age.

At first, it’s easy to believe that the reason the mainstream can’t fix the problem is that it is blinded by its priors. They point to things like social programs to support parents, and money, and now even A.I. as fixes, even though those obviously won’t work, since it is obvious to anyone who looks at the data that the causes are social and deeply related to things like religion and relative roles of men and women in society.

All right, so we are all sober-minded right-wingers, so there is no way that we can’t solve this problem, right? Certainly, you can narrow down the real causes with the right direction. And sure enough, very recently my friend Johann Kurtz took on just this issue, looking at the qualities that bring men and women together and make them want to procreate. Through all of his excellent analysis he came up with one very clear answer: The question of birth rates comes down to one thing: status.

It’s status that makes women want men.

Status that makes women want families.

And the status of families that make other younger single people want to repeat the process.

And certainly that’s brilliant, succinct, enough for me to say for a while that the problem of birth rates was solved. But then, shortly after, I brought this answer to my friend Kevin Dolan from the EXIT Group who runs the Natal Conference annually, and he simply pointed out the obvious: status isn’t something that’s well defined, and attributing low birth rates to status is equivalent to attributing low birth rates to everything.

The Presence of Power

Sure enough, status is real. We can all see it. We can all feel it. But it is not technically well defined. We only know it through its markers. Moreover, the attempt to mimic these markers, or adopt them in pieces, usually backfires; you mimic the system and remove its critical energy, you destroy the organic nature of the thing by trying to replicate it.

Content creators of a certain age on the right will understand this, especially in the context of young men asking for advice about women.

What attracts women?

Well, that’s simple. It’s confidence. It’s poise. It is, once more, status.

We all know what these things are when we see them. But you’d be amazed how difficult it is to give specific examples, especially to people who are, as we say, “on the spectrum.”

For instance, a confident person holds his shoulders back or talks in an assertive way, and then watches the younger guy walk in a contorted exaggeration and speak like “Macho Man” Randy Savage.

It isn’t any one thing; it’s everything. It isn’t about form; it’s about essence. It isn’t about technique; it’s about spirit.

It’s a spirit contained not in the technique of the Fox but in the will of the Lions, as Machiavelli described.

The Qualities of the Lion

This is the man that everyone is looking for, a person who can solve problems and be the person who stands and takes ownership of a collective. All throughout the 20th century, our leaders said that we didn’t need this person, and we spent the last 50 years actively trying to banish these men from the public square. And now, at this late stage, everyone is trying to capture the Lion’s energy, or at least to simulate it with the help of the Fox’s technique.

But this is impossible, because there can be no technique for spirit, just as there can be no technique for ownership. The Lion’s spirit cannot be replaced by a soulless automaton.

It’s this Lion-like spirit that is necessary in order to make people TRUST systems with their loyalty, not just to tolerate their outputs.

It is this undeniable spirit in the individual (and in the collective) that brings the masculine and feminine together and forges the desire of procreation.

This is what Ibn Khaldun described as asabiyyah, the life force, the essence of poise and manliness, the seedbed of conviction; it cannot be wholly contained or controlled.

Yet it is the thing that we are all here to rediscover. In this moment, we need to become Lions.

I say this, of course, as a lifelong Fox, as the math geek in high school, the person who liked to think of himself as the nerd in the Revenge of the Nerds.

However, times are changing. The Fox is unsuited for the Dark Forest, and can only seek to hide from its dangers.

The Fox’s realm is technique. He thrives in the public square regulated by rules. But there are no more rules, and there is no more public square in the Dark Forest. And we can’t confront problems with technique because there are no non-degenerate technical solutions.

Instead, the foundation for the future must be built, the rock bottom with a primal and masculine approach to power. And we have to learn what this means.

Immediately, I know people will ask: How are we supposed to learn the spirit of something that, by my very description, cannot be formally described in language?

And that’s a good point, but I think we might start with experience. And seeing what works, we might understand what is needed, like following the clues of its form like breadcrumbs, back to the origin.

Stridency of Dissent

And, although this might sound strange, perhaps anger is the place to start?

I know Wrath is a sin after all, and certainly there is nothing more unproductive and harmful, even dehumanizing, than blind rage. Still, there is a necessity for a feeling of stridency. A certain disapprobation is the reason why we are all here to begin with. We cannot be passive witnesses of our age’s self-destruction.

Yes, Wrath is a sin. But Complacency, or Sloth, is as well. And Complacency is by far the sin that more thoroughly traps our age.

After all, think of all the millions of people who know something is wrong and complain about it all the time. How many are doing anything? They spend money on products and distractions (even products and distractions that are based on their own fear of alienation). But they are inert; they cannot find the will to do anything that involves a risk. Worse yet, they know that something needs to be done, but they are terrified of upsetting the status quo.

You see this kind of preference for stasis, among some women and almost all leftists, especially Boomer leftists. If you talk to these people in an intimate environment, many times, they will acknowledge that your complaints have merit; they will notice things are getting worse, and that “something needs to be done.” However, the moment that it sounds like you ACTUALLY want to do something (particularly if there is a note of masculine disapproval in your voice), they get scared and immediately try to shut everything down.

Complaining is acceptable, as long as it’s impotent. Noticing is licit, as long as you acknowledge that the bad things are impossible to change; injustice can be denounced as long as there is no indication that you want to rectify that injustice. And of course, never ever be angry. These people are only comfortable if discourse is reduced to a certain type of futile complaining that never moves forward.

It’s not that I think we can bring the old world back. In fact, I despise nostalgia. The future is for the living. But, it is impossible not to notice that the conversation is being cordoned off into an intentional futility. Problems go from being too “small to be important” immediately to “too large to stop,” and then once it’s clear that no one’s going to do anything about the uncomfortable problems, all objections can be dismissed as “whining.”

I am not “whining” when I say that I want a future for my child, for all of our children. I am not engaging in futile nostalgia when I notice how bad things have gotten, and at some point, not feeling anger at the modern world’s lack of response is just to become complicit in your soul’s own castration.

And although it’s a meme, do we remember what they took from us?

A high-trust society?

A nation for our children?

A connection to the spiritual?

Hope?

“Vanity of Vanity, all is vanity.”

There is one part of my favorite book, Dante’s Divine Comedy, that I am fond of referring to, periodically. As everyone knows, the first part of the poem, the Inferno, concerns the protagonist being led out of the Dark Forest by the poet Virgil, down through a tour across Hell. At first, as might be expected, Dante is confused, and horrified by the torturous punishments of the damned. However, as our hero learns more and descends further into perdition, his attitude changes. And by the time the pair arrive at the heart of the inferno, frozen in the futility of evil itself, Dante has started to share in God’s disdain of sin, and in turn the sinners there. This is the hell they created. This is the hell that they are perpetuating. And, in these circumstances, anger and hatred are appropriate.

I always think that the lesson here might be simply put:

Just as Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, Hatred of Evil is the beginning of vitality.

And if we cannot embrace these feelings, use them as a mooring, we haven’t taken the first step towards action.

And that brings us to the immediate next question. The question of action itself.

The Power of Action

The action is precisely what we associate first and foremost with the spirit of the Lion.

I think people are realizing this more and more, in the beginning months of 2025, that the problem of action has been key to many of the issues of modernity. Modern Man is constrained by fear and prohibition, but to a very real degree, these constraints are artificial; they rely on our over-socialization to enforce compliance. We fear shame, we fear awkwardness, we don’t want to be the bad guy or just “that guy,” and so we hold back and wait for perfect conditions.

And so nothing gets done.

But as many men are realizing, especially after Trump, these constraints are almost entirely internally imposed by our own participation in the modernity myth, and once we psychologically break from the liberal norm, action becomes possible again.

And… it turns out that you can just DO things. And that indeed is the spirit going forward, everyone. Cancel culture is waning, and people are beginning to look at the problems of modernity in a different way.

Do you want a new right-wing community? Just get organizing.

Do you want to repair the infrastructure in your community? Just get building.

Do you want a new homeschool co-op? Just put on your Professor Hat, and chances are, you can make a positive difference.

Why not write your own book, create your own movies, and build your own professional networks?

You can just do things.

But there is also a danger here as well. Generally speaking, action is always stronger than inaction; but it’s also more complicated and more dangerous. And every action comes with a reaction, from society, from nature, and fate, including possible backlashes, infighting, and political retaliation. There is inherent weight of action, and I am not sure that many young people are caught up in the burst of optimism in these early days of the second Trump administration.

But action is not simply an inversion of inaction. All modes of inaction are fundamentally equivalent and also correspondingly safe, at least in the short term. But real action comes with real risk.

Sure, just do things. But you can’t meme yourself to victory. It’s not just about vibes. And if a proper moral sense doesn’t guide you, if you fail to build the appropriate friendships, and develop maturity, then everything could collapse suddenly. Our enemies are watching, and they will punish us the second we stumble in our efforts here.

I have been thinking a lot about this, and I have come up with an acronym that I have been using to describe proper actions.

The Qualities of Proper Action, or A-P-O-C

The qualities of proper action are being: Aligned, Productive, Owned, and Concerted.

Probably the first two properties are the easiest to explain: Productive and Aligned.

Productive

First, actions need to be Productive. They actually need to advance your cause. Pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised how many times people forget and simply indulge in dramatic cathartic self-destruction. The question we always need to answer is the one that Yarvin famously introduced in 2021: “Does this action make me more powerful, more able to achieve my desired outcome, than before?”

Because we are spending power when we take action, we need to make sure that we are getting a return on our investment.

Everyone thinks they understand this, but we always make the same mistakes. A classic example is making enemies and going after people in public over disagreements that ultimately don’t matter. People forget that enemies are expensive. And humans have a tendency to remember public slights.

Threatening people with consequences you can’t carry out is almost always a bad move. The only reason you really want to be going after people online is either that they are lolcows, in which case their mockery is an educational experience for their followers, or that you are trying to eliminate bad actors, in which case you need to do it as quickly and quietly as possible.

Always ask if your actions are productive.

Aligned

Perhaps a little more advanced is the quality of Alignment, which is simply to say that in order for an action to be productive for a cause, you need to have a cause to begin with. You need a moral compass. The alignment of a greater belief, a greater purpose, and a greater mission.

This is probably the most basic and also most challenging, but the only action that matters is that which is directed, and directed consistently towards a spiritual vision. A group of men who have this spirit will rule this planet. Those that don’t will end up, in one way or another, in the dustbin of history.

That is why this is a War of Belief.

Because no one will join a fractured movement, a house divided against itself cannot stand. Everyone knows that men can have only one master. And the men who only serve themselves are simply leading their followers to oblivion.

I know this is a challenge for a group as diverse as ours, characterized by rejection of modernity, more than a very defined spiritual common vision. Still, I think there is room for us to grow into this larger spiritual vision as long as we are men of good faith, and men who possess a constancy of character.

Ownership

And this brings me to my next essential quality, that of Ownership.

Here, by contrast, I think we have the real advantage on the right. The modern world is full of people who take action. But they never seem to own the consequences. Our leaders, despite their dedication to “change,” never change anything, and instead just carry along on a wave of trends to techno capital and late 20th-century progressivism. And to the extent that they even hint that they are breaking from these trends and going in a different direction, it’s obvious that they are fake.

Again, this is the greatest utility of the right, despite being relatively powerless, despite being small. We are who we are. We are comfortable in our own skins. What you see is what you get. There is no pretension. And we fight for the things we actually love. And to the extent that something is ours, we can be trusted to protect it, we can be trusted to fight for it, because the cause is ours. It belongs to us. We belong to it. And if it is lost, we are lost as well.

This is the great difficulty of the left, the thing that everyone hates about it. It is not that progressivism is diabolic — I mean, it is diabolic — but more importantly, in modernity, the left wing is fake. It has no spirit. Whatever devil once occupied this progressive golem has long since vacated the premises, and now it remains an empty idol. And there is nothing that mankind hates more, or SHOULD hate more, than a dead idol.

We live in a world of progressive idols that no one believes in anymore:

Equality?

Unending Progress?

Anti-Racism?

John Lennon’s “Imagine”?

Gender?

These are false gods, ready for the flames. Everyone secretly wants to see the progressive world burn, not least the progressives themselves. And our task is to expedite the process of the modern lie’s devout desire for self-extinction, not because we hate them but because the existence of the lie is hateful in itself. As all lies are hateful to God.

Concerted/Brotherhood

And where does that find us here today?

Perhaps pursuing the last necessary element of proper action, the ability of our effort to be Concerted, unified, and collective. The thing that can only be expressed as the virtue of brotherhood, fraternity.

This, of course, why we are here today.

To find direction, to find strength, to find a vision forward, not apart but together, the only way anything was ever accomplished, through the collective will of dedicated men.

And no man is an island, even though that’s what we’ve been taught and taught to expect throughout all of our education. How many times have I heard it. How many times have you heard it?

We are all just individuals. It’s all about what you can do for yourself. The greater good, the larger callings, those deeper bonds don’t even exist.

Of all the things that they took from us, this is the greatest jewel that they stole: the feeling of brotherhood.

And what is brotherhood? Brotherhood is love. PHILIA. True connection. And brotherhood is strong. The strongest thing in the entire world. It is the thing that shatters empires, burns idols, builds temples, wages wars, brings peace, and praises God. It is the seedbed of all will.

And we are building this strength, right here.

Can we trust each other? Can we truly create a sense of camaraderie that will, in time, grow into true brotherhood? Something real whose seeds were found on that center of fakeness that we call the “online world”?

I believe we can. Otherwise, I would not be here. I am here because we are going to win.

We Are Going to Win!

I say this now as someone who has been known for his pessimism more than anything else during my career in blogging.

And now in 2025, we are in a temporary period of optimism.

However, darkness is coming. The systems that America is built on are unstable, the order of the late 20th century is falling away, soon the hammer will drop, and Sauron’s Eye will fall on us, attempting, even in its dying throes to destroy what it perceives as its replacement.

The vibes are with us now. But they won’t be later, least not when we need them. But we have something better. We have spirit, we have a vision, and we have the bonds we have built with each other.

A lot of people here, including myself, are fans of Italian Elite Theory, the 20th-century thinkers inspired broadly by Machiavelli, whose overarching slogan might be summarized as: “The organized (elite) minority always wins; the disorganized majority always loses.”

But I think that, increasingly, we as modern people don’t really internalize these lessons properly. We focus on the elite, the dark elves, the people who have obtained status in the eyes of the modern world.

But historically, the people who win aren’t those who cultivate status in the eyes of the very systems which are in the process of dying; they are the people who look for the qualities that the old order has overlooked and denied. They are not elites of social status or technique but of spirit. And it is that spirit, that connection to reality, that unifies us.

Everyone is chasing fake things, and things that, while lucrative, cannot win, not because they lack the power to destroy, but because they lack the strength to hold something delicate and organic with confidence and strength. And the power to lead men is both delicate and organic.

That is what makes what we are doing here special. The spirit we are rediscovering is not unique. But it is rare in the modern world, a sense of aristocracy, in its infant stages, ever so nascent but still strong, still able to grow into something truly worthy to rule.

The world cannot be ruled currently because the world is backwards. It’s fake. It’s confused and disordered. It’s built on systems that are crumbling under their own weight and ruled by men who have no understanding of the power that they wield.

We are the products of this fake world, to be sure. And perhaps, in my generation at least, we will never be free of its poison. But we have to be ready to leave it behind when the reality of something new and life-giving emerges.

For instance, we all got our start on the Internet, and some of us have careers there. But our lives on the Internet are dying, social media is dying, and with it the modern world is dying, whether we like it or not. Everything is imminently going to be buried under a sea of replication, lies, slop, and self-involuting hedonism. Those who have made this modern reality will go down with it. And as much as we might lament what could have been, the people we have lost, the solutions that could have been implemented to save so much from the old world, at some point, we have to walk away from Sodom.

There’s that joke from the 1990s: What if the real thing we get from the Internet is the friends we made along the way?

Although we might have forgotten this over the years, the Internet was all about building something real; we all went on the Internet to find something that could change the world. And here we have the only thing that can really make the world better: Authenticity, Purpose, Brotherhood, Spirit.

And that’s the thing about spirit. You might not be able to define it, but you can’t fake it. That is the great advantage that spirituality possesses: that in being undefinable, it is also unfakable, and it grows only from the experience in the moment, the feelings that are ineffable but also undeniably real, the challenges that we have had to overcome, the stories that we can tell, our dreams for the future and what we are willing to sacrifice for them.

Everything is here, right now. Just look around at your neighbors in this room, here. Each of us has a story, a project, an aspiration, a desire to make the world better, and bring it closer to an ideal, not found in a vision of the past, but in an indefatigable hope for the future.

You will hear some of these stories from our speakers, our club members, and our guests, but this is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg, because the true value is with all of us and the work that we can accomplish together.

We will work together, we will strive and fail repeatedly — most endeavors do — but we will try again, and again. This is our road ahead.

We will win, eventually. For all my pessimism, there is no doubt in that.

Order will win.

Truth will win.

Humanity will win.

God will win.

That is the pattern of existence, of destiny, of providence. Because as horrendous as the dragon of chaos may be, eventually the beast devours itself. Fakeness cannot outlast truth, because the weight of its contradictions eventually grows until the edifice of deception collapses in upon itself. Evil, for all of its unimaginable destructive force, cannot create anything of its own, and the time and will of God’s providence abides in the seeds of brotherhood, sown where we now sit, waiting to spring into life, and banish the Dark Forest in a new Spring.

This is our task, this is our purpose, this is The Road Ahead.

Thank you, and welcome to the 2025 Old Glory Conference.