That's So Default

I’m trying to improve my lot with women. This is difficult because I am very shy and inexperienced with women, probably mildly autistic, and so on. Fortunately I’m very smart, able to be charismatic sometimes, not bad looking, and eager to grow as necessary. Thus I’ve decided to take the one path that seems remotely likely to net me the experienced skill and sexual market exposure required to win a quality girl: Day Game.

I’ve read a good chunk of Krauser and Heartiste's work, and it seems sound. To the extent that I've had the balls to apply it, it seems to basically work. Today I had a surprise opportunity that ended up going way better than expected. Allow me to relate the story:

After spending a hot summer day in the cafe programming and watching cute girls walk by, kicking myself for my inability to approach, I made myself some dinner and wandered over to the graveyard to read in the evening sun. No intent to interact with anyone; I was looking for distraction-free isolation. Cute girls don’t prance around in the graveyard, thought I.

A few minutes in and what do I see but two cute Korean girls. My mind was somewhere between “I’m not here to talk to girls” and “damn I wish I had the balls to stop them and chat”. I resigned myself to read my book.

But then they escalated to literally prancing around taking pictures of each other. I struggled but eventually decided that I simply must approach. I walked over to flip the stone and see where it would go.

Attempted standard Krauser situational opener, heavily bastardized by nervousness and lack of confidence. “Do you speak english? I saw you girls over here having all sorts of fun and just had to come see what you are doing. Where are you from? Tourists?” etc. By the time I had got there and opened, there was only the semi-cute one, absorbed in taking pictures of her very cute friend who was prancing around farther away. Between my unimpressive demeanor, her lack of confidence with english, and her absorption in taking pictures, she could only find the attention to mumble out a few semi-answers and then ignore me. I rolled off, which is code for “awkwardly stood around for a few seconds, and then lost all confidence and dignity and walked away”.

I wandered back to a comfortable grave and sat down again to read, all while furiously running state control, congratulating myself for having taken any action at all, and assuring myself that I just had to keep it up and the successes would come. I ignored the girls and reabsorbed myself in my book, thinking that was the end of it and it was time to move on. A few minutes later I glanced up and they were walking over to where I was sitting. Nope, time for round 2.

"Hello again", says I, with a big smirk. I forget the rest of the conversation, but I was basically a duck; acting smooth and calm sitting against a grave on the surface, while frantically scrambling to keep the conversation going smoothly under the water, so to speak. Stories, assumption stacking, jokes, open ended questions, anything to fill time, racking my brain for bits of Game wisdom to apply. Harrowing, but fun. Keeping the intent to number close in mind helped to guide it. It was surprisingly non-awkward, and total time in set was maybe 5 minutes.

The cuter one was much more talkative, with better English, and seemed genuinely interested. It turned out she lives quite close to me. So when they expressed some desire to end the conversation, I suggested that we hang out again, and asked for her number.

I had to write it down on my bookmark with a piece of grass because I had left my phone at home to isolate myself, and did not carry a pen. They thought my creative solution was pretty funny, and she seemed somewhat enthusiastic to have met. We’ll see where it goes.

Lessons learned:

• Just fucking do it and you will be rewarded by Gnon.

• Carry an implement to record numbers at all times, to avoid having to resort to less reliable and more embarrassing creative solutions.

• I got lucky and this is not going to be a representative sample. Still it confirms the hypothesis that I can actually do this.

Gnon, the reversed acronym of Nature or Nature’s God, is the quasi-anthropomorphic reification of the natural law and teleology of our universe, whether supernatural or emergent. Gnon tends (“tends” being the important operative word in teleology) overall to favor forms most able to optimize for their own continued existence and spread, and of course to favor the universal tendency to entropy. Or rather, these things tend to happen for the usual reasons, and we name that tendency “Gnon”. The study of Gnon is to the highest level of abstraction (teleology) as the study of physics is to the lowest level of abstraction (mechanistic physical law).

The Lovecraftian Cosmic Perspective is the horrifying realization that the interests of a natural, emergent Gnon overall do not coincide with those of man, and that man is vastly outgunned. The correct response to this knowledge is a sanity-cracking fear, followed by a frantic and blasphemous search for a way to defy or capture Gnon. A useful model of Gnon thus becomes a prime research objective.

Within Gnon in the context of sociological happenings here on contemporary earth, we can identify a few semi-distinct subprocesses, each with their own characteristic tendencies. Their sum is Gnon, but their individual tendencies do not always run parallel. We have given the most prominent of them names from various mythologies, to help illustrate and remember:

• Azathoth. Death. Evolution. The blind idiot alien god that shapes our biological nature and guides our genetic destiny according to who lives and who dies. Contrary to popular belief, the telos of evolution is not progress to more “advanced” forms; it will ruthlessly twist organisms for a few points of inclusive genetic fitness, and abandon “important” features of an organism (eg. our intelligence) as soon as they stop being critical to fertility.

• Cthulhu. Pestilence. Hosted Evolution. Memetics. Epidemics. The tendency for popular forms to be those most able to propagate themselves by capturing transmission institutions and getting repeated. Contrary to popular opinion, the “marketplace of ideas” does not select for truth and good, but virulence. Truth/good selection only happens if the mass idea-propagation systems structurally favor truth and good, which they often do not. The current result being that "Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he only swims left."

• Mammon. Famine. Capitalism. Techno-Economical Optimization. Production. When a form succeeds by exploiting a technological resource-use opportunity, that is Mammon at work. Thus we have an efficient and recycling biological ecosystem, and human capitalism has driven the creation of great works of technology. But Mammon will ruthlessly recycle forms not contributing to the cutting edge of production, including us and our society.

• Ares. War. Conquest. Empire. Agricultural Civilization won not because it was “better” in our sense, but because 100 malnourished toothless peasants with sticks beats one of even the healthiest and best trained tribal warriors. War is computation with weapons, and the truth thus revealed is simply which sociomilitary group is stronger.

And then there’s us. Man has his own telos, when he is allowed the security to act and the clarity to reason out the consequences of his actions. When unafflicted by coordination problems and unthreatened by superior forces, able to act as a gardener rather than just another subject of the law of the jungle, he tends to build and guide a wonderful world for himself. He tends to favor good things and avoid bad, to create secure civilizations with polished sidewalks, beautiful art, happy families, and glorious adventures. I will take it as a given that this telos is identical with “good” and “should”.

Thus we have our wildcard and the big question of futurism. Will the future be ruled by the usual four horsemen of Gnon for a future of meaningless gleaming techno-progress burning the cosmos or a future of dysgenic, insane, hungry, and bloody dark ages; or will the telos of man prevail for a future of meaningful art, science, spirituality, and greatness?

Shifts in power between competing components of Gnon is nothing new, and neither is the view that the triumph of man in this struggle is possible and desirable. The Enlightenment, which previously took this position, failed, but the lesson of the 20th century is not that the goal was bad, but that we were naive and that this is harder than we thought. The horsemen are more insidious and powerful than ever. Still, give man a clear understanding of this process it is fully plausible that this could go either way. And either way, Gnon overall will be satiated.

Each component of Gnon detailed above had and has a strong hand in creating us, our ideas, our wealth, and our dominance, and thus has been good in that respect, but we must remember that each can and will turn on us when circumstances change. Evolution becomes dysgenic, features of the memetic landscape promote ever crazier insanity, productivity turns to famine when we can no longer compete to afford our own existence, and order turns to chaos and bloodshed when we neglect martial strength or are overpowered from outside. These processes are not good or evil overall; they are neutral, in the horrorist Lovecraftian sense of the word.

Instead of the destructive free reign of evolution and the sexual market, we would be better off with deliberate and conservative patriarchy and eugenics driven by the judgement of man within the constraints set by Gnon. Instead of a “marketplace of ideas” that more resembles a festering petri-dish breeding superbugs, a rational theocracy. Instead of unhinged techno-commercial exploitation or naive neglect of economics, a careful bottling of the productive economic dynamic and planning for a controlled techno-singularity. Instead of politics and chaos, a strong hierarchical order with martial sovereignty. These things are not to be construed as complete proposals; we don’t really know how to accomplish any of this. Naive attempts at these things led to most of the horror of the 20th century. They are better understood as goals to be worked towards very conservatively. This post concerns itself with the “what” and “why”, rather than the “how”.

Thus we arrive at Neoreaction and the Dark Enlightenment, wherein Enlightenment science and ambition combine with Reactionary knowledge and self-identity towards the project of civilization. The project of civilization being for man to graduate from the metaphorical savage, subject to the law of the jungle, to the civilized gardener who, while theoretically still subject to the law of the jungle, is so dominant as to limit the usefulness of that model.

This need not be done globally; we may only be able to carve out a small walled garden for ourselves, but make no mistake, even if only locally, the project of civilization is to capture Gnon.

(For those wondering how this is different from the overambitious naive rationalism of the enlightenment, a clarifying follow-up is on the way.)

Seems to me the impressive track record of aerospace progress in the fifties and sixties was largely the work of Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and Swedish-American Lockheed engineer Kelly Johnson.

von Braun’s accomplishments are largely Apollo and the like. He seems to have spent large amounts of effort and social capital to make sure Apollo happened, a few times making ultimatums, but he wanted more. He stopped being the NASA director in 1970, and retired from NASA in 1972, when their vision became incompatible with his.

Kelly Johnson built the Area 51 airbase, the P-80 shooting star (143 days from start of project to delivery), the SR-71 and related A-12 stuff, the U-2, and the F-104 and P-38. He officially retired in 1975, though seems to have continued some work, but nothing impressive.

There’s that date again…

After WW2, when Massachusetts conquered the world, the denazification and such propaganda may have had a significant effect on the worldview of children growing up at the time. 1973 is when the baby boomers, heavily indoctrinated with equality, democracy, revolutionary nonconformism, general anti-nazism, started to replace their pre-war counterparts.

Academics had identified what you might call “Social Germanness” as a major fault that allowed Hitler. Thus they squished it with propaganda. Deliberate destruction of social technology may have had an effect, no?

Also, the soviet culture-war hypothesis. Recently encountered the term “kremlinology”, referring to long-shot inference about the soviet political situation by reading between the lines in Pravda. Did the USA not have spies? DID THE USA NOT HAVE SPIES!?

(Konkvistador comments: “Did the US not have spies? Of course it did. Communist ones. In America.”)

Also, the Frankfurt school. What’s their story?

Basically, some kind of broad multimechanism social aftershock of WW2. Coordination of multiple causal chains to cause a fuckup in 1973 explained by delayed propagation of effects from a single cause: WW2.

"Amazon Customer", almost certainly one of Land’s acolytes, reviews “Fanged Noumena”:

(1 star out of 5)

Stick to Stephenie Meyer, for heaven’s sake!

My 15-year-old daughter Tricia is a great fan of vampire fiction, and I bought this for her from a remaindered book stall, thinking it would be just up her street. The rather childish daub on the cover did make me think that perhaps the book would be too young for her, but seeing as it was priced at 40p I reckoned I could not go too far wrong.

This is possibly the worst mistake I have ever made.

From being a happy-go-lucky Goth with a crush on Robert Pattinson, Tricia has become a ‘post-human nihilist’ who stays up all night listening to the sort of machine music that makes your ears bleed and gibbering about the ‘Dark Enlightenment’.

I have written to the book’s author to complain, but received no reply. I am informed by his publishers that Mr Land has in any case disowned all his previous writing and decamped to Shanghai.

None too soon, in my view – but too late for Tricia, I fear.

That convinces me; I absolutely must read this book.