Bootcut and Low Rise: Race, Nationalism, Holocaust Revisionism, and Men's Fashion in the 2000s

I.

 

I read Angelo Plume's journey through the history of the past 14 years with great interest, not only because his impressions of the 2020s and the 2010s mirror my own, but because his journey ends at the same destination that many people in the movement have found themselves at: at the end of the line. In keeping with most ideological polemics written by those in the movement today, Plume's essay takes a negative and pessimistic view of the present and the future, and while that view is not one that I disagree with entirely, it is one that ought to raise the question, 'How on earth do you expect it to attract a following?'.

 

If we are to look to the history of politics since the beginning of recorded time, we see that no political movement has won power with the message that life is bad today, that life will be worse tomorrow, and that there are no answers. Experience shows that politics relies on simplicity and that it seeks simple solutions to difficult problems. Take Marxism, for example: life in Europe in the 19th century in the works of Marx is portrayed as hell on Earth; but fortunately, the way Marx tells it, the answer lies close to hand, and the misery of the working class will be resolved in the fashion of a 19th century comic opera or melodramatic novel; that is, there will be a happy ending. Today, the communist movement lacks that certainty, but so does the 'Alt Right' or dissident Right or white nationalist movement.

 

Some in the white nationalist movement project apocalyptic, millenarian, chiliastic futures, but others are smart enough to know that Western man has lived through the 'end times' many times - just look at European man at the time of medieval Europe - and they know that eschatology has every time come to naught. In any case, I do not think that apocalypticism, the breakdown of civilisation, and a reversion to Darwin’s 'survival of the fittest' accord with human nature; if we ever did see the breakdown of civilisation, and the end of electricity, gas, running water, sanitation, shopping malls, and supermarkets, then women would make sure that men had all these up and running again in no time. It is women's nagging men that drove men to devise these luxuries in the first place.

 

To return to Plume: Plume's problem relates to what we moderns call the 'standard of living', the 'quality of life', and what Aristotle called the 'Good Life'; and the doctrine of vitalism, associated with Nietzsche and Shaw, comes into it as well.

 

To explain how it is that these doctrines relate to the present, I will point to today's media. Every day, I check the news. And unlike my boomer parents, I do not read newspapers; instead, I look at websites. On my morning reading list can be found over two dozen conservative sites and under ten dissident Right sites. They serve up a diet of endless bad news, so much so that I have taken to calling my morning news the 'bad news bulletin'. Are the journalists writing this news portraying real life? No, says Nietzsche: no individual can sum up the value of Life with a capital 'L'. These journalists are portraying life as they see it, however, and that puts me in a difficult position. When reading the bad news bulletin, I do not disagree with the facts as presented, but I do ask myself, do the facts entail that life in the Anglosphere as these journalists see it is worth living? Judging by the articles, the answer often is no. The writers will make the rejoinder: 'No, what I have written for this week's column does not sum up my attitudes towards Life; when you read me, you caught me on a bad day'. Besides which (and this is the conservative writer speaking), 'All of America's problems will be resolved once we re-elect Trump'. My response is: perhaps, perhaps not, but it seems singularly unwise to stake the future of your country and the future of yourself on the election of one man.

 

Having said that, the coming to power of a distinguished leader can mark a turn towards the Good Life. Hitler was once quoted as saying - and I cannot find the origin of the quotation - 'We National Socialists have proved that Germans can live, and live well, without the Jews, and this is the hardest blow we have struck against them'. That quotation, if genuine, shows that Hitler valued 'living well', Aristotle's Good Life; and in part it explains the continuing appeal of German National Socialism eight decades later.

 

We can think of other societies and nations in other historical epochs that valued the Good Life, and among these is the Roman. For centuries, the Romans lived lives of refinement, as we have seen from their architecture, their houses, their clothes. Not every Roman approached the standards of the Roman upper class, of course, but any falling short hardly mattered; it was only the overall standard that mattered.

 

So, when considering overall standards, the question we in the West in 2024 ought to ask is this: is there any time in the recent history that we have overall, like the Romans, followed a certain standard that entailed the Good Life? And if we are no longer abiding by that standard, why? And surely any obstacles that stand in the way of our reaching the Good Life can be overcome - any difficulties smoothed over, ameliorated, if not resolved altogether, by politics?

 

The inspiration for this essay came to me in the lockdown years, when to pass the time, I watched past episodes of a long running daytime American NBC TV drama. In one episode from 2006, two of the heroes were sitting in a bar drinking a beer while ‘deep house’ music blared in the background. Both characters were played by men who were in their fifties but who looked young for their age and who had not let themselves go to seed. They were reasonably well-groomed and were dressed in the casual clothes (including the bootcut jeans) that were fashionable at the time. And I saw in later episodes that the two men's wives were equally as well-dressed and groomed; that the two couples lived in middle-class homes; and that the homes were well-furnished, clean, and full of light and air. Now, all this sounds unremarkable, and so it is; but you must consider that at the time I was viewing the show, simple pleasures such as drinking with friends in a bar were denied to me. And because of the closure of barbers, hairdressers, beauty salons, gyms, and retail clothing outlets at the time, it was quite easy for one to enter a state of dishevelment and hence self-degradation, the outcome sought after by our Covidian masters, who would arrest you if you had the temerity to walk outdoors without wearing a surgical mask. So, I envied these characters on my TV screen, and I wondered at the fact that once - in the America of 2006 - living the Good Life was the norm. For people in the years 2020 to 2022 had become quite deranged, and even though I liked to think in those years that I was holding myself aloof from the madness, gradually the madness came to infect even me, and like them, I began to lose touch with reality; but ironically, my contact with it was restored by my watching an old American TV show.

 

After the experience, I set myself the task of coming up with answers to two questions: what is normal? and what is the Good Life?

 

II.

 

The politics of the 1990s has been written about many times, and most of the writings revolve around the themes of the 'End of History' and the 'End of Politics', as we see in this Travis LeBlanc piece here. In America in the nineties, Far Right politics travelled along the same road as mainstream politics; both preached the doctrine of the 'End of Ideology' and 'End of Politics'. The white nationalist movement, the militia movement, the survivalist movement, all eschewed politics and participation in civic life, and the members of these movements isolated themselves in compounds and camps, the most famous being William Pierce's compound in rural Virginia, there to await the end of the world, which would occur in the year 2000 perhaps. 

 

On the Continent, the decade saw the slow rise of Far-Right populism. Interesting possibilities presented themselves after the reunification of Germany, and liberal observers feared a resurgence of German nationalism, but they need not have bothered, because whatever 'Neo-Nazi' movement there was in reunified Germany was overtaken by the skinhead movement, which was as apolitical as could be.

 

Far more interesting a subject than nineties politics or the lack thereof is how people lived. Were white people better off in the nineties? We could give the rote answer that our dissident Right ideology compels us to give, which is yes, the residents of the Anglosphere were far better off because while the Great Replacement was occurring in that decade, it had not yet picked up steam; in the case of Australia, the annual intake of immigrants would not reach the hundreds of thousands until the following decade.

 

On the other hand, one answer to our question, and one stock standard white nationalist answer, would be no. The Dukes, Metzgers, Pierces, would point to Jewish power, which to them seemed especially pronounced in the nineties. Even worse was the fact that little awareness of the Jewish question and the question of Jewish power and influence existed. For one thing, the Internet was barely in its infancy, and hardly any respectable person had heard of Holocaust Revisionism, much less accessed forbidden works online; in those days, if you wanted to read a book by a nationalist or a Revisionist, you had to write overseas to some publisher of forbidden books. The result was that in the nineties the proponents of Holocaust Exterminationism and anti-Nazism had free rein. The Jewish party line on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, the National Socialists, the events of WWII, the founding of the State of Israel were spread all over the culture. The Holocaust and WWII stories had gotten their start in the seventies and eighties and became reached their peak in the nineties; most likely the turning point was the release of Schindler's List (1993), which at the time was acclaimed by all and sundry as a moving and truthful account of Hitler's persecution and extermination of the Jews.

 

But let us put these dissident Right views to one side for the moment. If we are to evaluate how good white people had it in the nineties, we must consider how they lived. And when I look at that period objectively, I must admit that were I transported to it in a time machine and made to relive it, I would most likely be bored and frustrated. For one, I would be forced to live without modern conveniences such as the smartphone and high-speed broadband Internet, both of which we today take for granted. These luxuries, especially the Internet, have become necessities, and they are no longer luxuries; we can no longer imagine a life without them any more than we can imagine it without electricity and hot and cold running water.

 

How do we transport ourselves mentally to such archaic times? To gauge a bygone epoch, your best course is to watch its TV. If you look up '1990s men's fashions' or '2000s men's fashions' in a search engine, the results will bring up photo after photo of garishly attired rap and boy band performers; you simply will not be able to find pictures of what ordinary men wore. It is only TV that can return you to your past. During lockdown, my positive experience of revisiting the past through watching old TV shows prompted me to obtain compilations of late-nineties episodes of a popular daytime American ABC TV drama; and in these were included all the advertisements that accompanied each broadcast. This complete package, to me, proved to be revelatory; watching the TV shows and the ads from a bygone age is the closest thing we have to time travel; when you see an actor wearing a particular article of clothing, all of a sudden a vivid memory can thrust itself up into the forefront of your consciousness; you are reminded of owning that shirt or that raincoat with that exact colour and that exact pattern. In addition, the advertising brings back memories when it promotes the popular TV shows and movies of the time: when watching the ads for these, you remember with a jolt that you had seen that TV show in your living room and that movie in the cinema at the nearby mall. (Back in those days, you had to visit a cinema if you wanted to see a new movie, and you frequently did want to see that movie; for movies were more popular and significant then than they are now).

 

A sociologist would find the advertisements to be of interest because they give an insight into American life. The ads hawk the usual products - snack food, medicines, household cleaning liquids, toothpaste, etc. - and, to my surprise, medicines, remedies, hygienic items, and enhancers for everything that takes place below the belt. The brutally frank treatment of intimate subjects blows out of the water the notion that Americans are prudish about their bodily functions.

 

In the current year, we are a little wiser, and we can say that most of the worst of the afflictions suffered by everyday Americans in the nineties - afflictions such as heartburn and constipation - came about because of the American diet, which is atrocious. And the subject of diet brings us to another staple of American life in the nineties: the fat man. In the eighties, most male actors, even the middle-aged ones, looked thin, and alarmingly so. The overweight actor, e.g., John Candy, was a rarity and usually a comic figure. But by the nineties, all that had changed. We saw more and more of the chubby character, in TV shows, movies, and advertisements; first we saw him as a background character, then as a lead. Towards the end of the decade, the balding, overweight, middle-aged, usually wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of baggy shorts, came to epitomise the American male. He is a pathetic and comic figure, and he is a slave to his appetites, a plump buffoon who dances ecstatically at the thought of eating a box of Pop Tarts or a Rice Krispie bar.

 

The countervailing force is the stock-standard nineties action hero - the muscle man who usually wears a trench coat and a mullet. The latter signified the hero's strength, power, and virility. Nowadays, it seems gauche. And so did most of nineties men's fashion, which wanted to revive some of the worst items of fifties men's fashion, e.g. the big, loose, and baggy suit. Perhaps the nineties man liked the baggy suit because it hung on his frame comfortably, and perhaps he disliked the eighties suit because it clung tight; eighties suits were made for skinny and runty men.

 

The nineties mimicked the fashion of the fifties but forgoed the staidness of the fifties. A word that springs to mind when contemplating the popular culture of the nineties is: disorder. An underlying zaniness and freneticism, a furious energy, exists, and when you are on the receiving end of it for hours and hours, it becomes intolerable. In the nineties, if I wanted to get away from it all, I would go bushwalking with my friends, because in the tranquillity of the bush, I would be completely isolated from nineties pop culture, politics, and civilisation.

 

A conservative and harmonious side to American pop culture at the time does exist. In certain of the TV ads, we see American life being depicted as a life of comfort, ease, and serenity. See this commercial for Folger's coffee, starring country singer Randy Travis. He wakes up in the morning on his tour bus, looking improbably well-groomed and good-tempered; not for him the early morning dishevelment and hangover. Naturally enough, the beaming Travers, wearing a mullet and resplendent in a pristine white t-shirt and a pair of tight jeans, bursts into song, and he sings the praises of the Folgers brand; and you the viewer cannot help but find the music pleasing and reassuring. I am tempted to call this commercial and the hundreds of others like it implicitly white, perhaps even explicitly white, because the advertising men, knowing their market, wanted the audience to associate the product with whiteness and Americanism. And on that level, the ad men succeeded.

 

III.

 

I, like millions of other non-Americans in the Anglosphere, once found American popular culture to be seductive and enticing; now I do not. And today many popular culture afficionados who are devotees of American movies, TV shows, and comic books agree with me.

 

Some blame the politicisation of pop culture that occurred in the 2010s. The narrative goes that Hollywood and other mass producers of American popular culture had in the 2010s been infected with the new creed of Social Justice; that Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) infiltrated the American entertainment establishment and turned it 'woke'; that, using the same methods of communist infiltrators, the SJWs snuck into the great institutions and subverted them.

 

I am in broad agreement with the critics of SJWism, and one would be foolish to deny their thesis. After all, it is confirmed every day by the latest announcement in the entertainment news that a white character from a beloved franchise is being turned black, that he is being replaced by a female, that he is being turned into a homosexual, and so forth. The SJWs now parody themselves, and worse, they behaved in such a flagrantly provocative fashion that they have drawn attention to themselves - the attention of the entire world. As such, they have made American pop culture a laughingstock.

 

But what strikes me as being most important is that popular culture no longer entertains as it once did; it no longer approaches the old standard. The American entertainment industry in the old days worked like a factory, pumping out a product of a certain quality that the world came to respect. Take for example Hollywood in the years of the Silver Age, when it worked under the now maligned studio system; it churned out movies every year that were often A-grade, sometimes B-grade, but never C-grade. Audiences came to expect their entertainment to be somewhat dull but always robust; they could count on the studios to serve a meal that was satisfying and nutritious. My father, a boomer, once confessed to me that he never refused to see a Clint Eastwood movie because, in his words, 'You know what you're going to get'. But now, the rug has pulled out from under that faithful audience, and the media / entertainment complex turns out a shoddy product.

 

Thanks to the Internet, today the longtime fans of a franchise can assemble on a message board and immediately comment on a new instalment. They tend to dissect it, and they strive to work out where it went wrong and how it could have been made right. One YouTube commentator came to my attention when he suggested a brilliant fix for the movie, The Force Awakens (2015), a flawed movie that was the first instance of 'Disney Star Wars', 'SJW Star Wars'. This way the fans write better stories than the screenwriters themselves; the screenwriters, who are generally incompetent, almost have their job done for them. Fans of a franchise will take it more seriously than the writers, directors, and producers who work on it. This close attention to past and present of a franchise is needed, because the studios today seem largely indifferent. A strange apathy pervades the media and entertainment complex, and this is conjoined with a lack of professional standards and pride in one's work. My reaction whenever I encounter a shoddy instalment is to ask myself: how difficult it could be to devise a piece of escapism that is up to the standards that we all held to only two decades ago? In those days, the men who wrote the movies, comic books, and TV shows, produced decent work with little effort. But today any delivering of a good piece of work strains the capacity of we moderns, thus proving the dictum that a good artist will make the act of creation seem easy, a bad one will make it seem hard.

 

IV.

 

When remembering the decade that followed the nineties, most of us would prefer not to remember it at all; it is a decade most of us would prefer to forget. Bush, 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the War on Terror: many good things may have happened in the 1960s, for instance, but no good thing happened in the 2000s - that is the consensus.

 

What of the politics; what was it in the 2000s that benefited the dissident Right? Unquestionably, the growth of the Internet proved to be a boon; it facilitated the spread of racialism, Holocaust Revisionism, WWII revisionism, Far Right nationalism, across the West - a spread that Jewry, liberals, the Left, the Antifa were powerless to stop. Activists of the dissident Right could now communicate with ease, through message boards, mailing lists, email, and social media. Old-time hands such as William Pierce, who had been part of the movement since the 1960s, took to the new media like ducks to water, and his incendiary American Dissident Voices talks were broadcast on Internet radio every Saturday every week of the year. And those who were new to dissident Right ideas could now devour the classics online; you could read Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium (1948), Pierce's The Turner Diaries (1978), George Lincoln Rockwell's This Time the World (1961), and the key works of Holocaust Revisionism, in addition to a great many other forbidden books.

 

The idea of a decentralised network that facilitated the untrammelled free flow of information outraged Jewish organisations such as the ADL and AIPAC, and if we are to look closely at the 2000s, we can discern in it the beginnings of the end of the conventional narrative of WWII, the Holocaust, and National Socialism - the narrative touted by organised Jewish groups, American conservatives, American leftists, and all the other political groupings. Hard as it is to believe today, YouTube hosted clips that explained to viewers 'How to spot a Jew'; in a crash-course in Jew-spotting, the viewer's attention would be directed to aspects of Jewish physiognomy, including the famous Jewish nose.

 

After the advent of the modern Internet, the attention span of youth shortened, for modern youth is not given to reading; it prefers sound bites, short film clips, and memes. But even though these fragments possessed little by way of written information, they sufficed enough to shatter the belief in the Holocaust. Belief in Hitler's gas chambers slowly and almost imperceptibly became 'uncool', and over the course of years only the fuddy-duddies, the boomers who read their morning newspapers religiously and beheld Holocaust epics such as Sophies Choice (1982) and Schindler's List (1993) in rapt wonder, held fast to the Holocaust tale. Jewish organisations such as the ADL and AIPAC looked at these trends with an unease and disquiet, an anxiety that grew into a panic when they realised that punitive measures against Revisionists such as Ernst Zündel were not working; how to stamp out the unbelief?

 

Because the Holocaust is nothing but the Jewish religion. As we know from the Bible, the idea of a Holocaust, a burnt sacrifice to Yahweh, a burnt sacrifice that is in the words of the Bible of a 'sweet savour to the Lord', forms the cornerstone of Judaism. Cain murders Abel for this reason: Abel offered up dead animals to Yahweh, and Abel's offering met with Yahweh's acceptance, Cain's offering did not; for Cain offered crops to Yahweh, who, not being a vegan, wanted animals instead; and so, Cain grew jealous of Abel and killed him. The account of the offering to Yahweh, and the stipulation of the right sort of offering, lays the foundation for all the Jewish history that came thereafter. A denial of the supreme efficacy of burnt sacrifice, whether that sacrifice be of animals or human beings, flies in the face of Jewish belief, and it is tantamount to heresy. 

 

To clarify: 'Holocaust' means 'burnt offering to God'; the word 'Holocaust' appears 13 times in the apocryphal books of the Bible, and 'burnt offering’ 243 times in the Old Testament. After the Bible comes the Talmud, which is a lengthy commentary on the Old Testament; and in it can be found the prophecy that six million Jews will be put to death in giant ovens by the non-Jews, all as a sacrifice to Yahweh who will, as part of his end of the bargain, restore to Jewry the lost State of Israel. By a miracle, the six million, according to the prophecy, will be resurrected, and the survivors of the Holocaust will go on to reclaim the land promised by Yahweh to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Thus, the covenant between Jewry and Yahweh will be fulfilled.

 

Judaism = Zionism = Holocaustism. Once we understand this, we can understand the fury of Jewry, the extreme anger of Jews, directed towards Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, and Robert Faurisson. These men were persecuted mercilessly because of religion: viewed from a higher plane, the struggle between the political minions of organised Jewry and the Revisionists reproduces a religious conflict; a secular Zionism does not exist.

 

But that struggle, a metaphysical one, takes place at a level far above that of the consciousness of the 'normie'; the 'normie' could not give a tinker's cuss about either Holocaust Revisionism or Holocaust Exterminationism. So far as the 2000s is concerned, I am more interested in the 'normie' consciousness than the Jewish: so, I ask the question, how did people live?

 

V.

 

This article, which features many photos, covers some of the deliberately awful fashion choices made by the characters in the quintessential nineties TV show Seinfeld (1989-1998). Deliberately vacuous, blithe, complacent, and postmodern, Seinfeld, which proudly billed itself as the 'Show about nothing', embodies the nineties spirit. The article highlights some of the more grotesque of the men's apparel of that period, and perhaps by emphasising the abnormal, it neglects the normal; that is, if we are to pay too much attention to some of the weird and attention-grabbing pieces of men's clothing, we will overlook the day-to-day outfits worn by Jerry, George, Kramer, Newman, and the other male characters. And these day-to-day outfits were representative of the time: I argue that Seinfeld is typical nineties fashion and nineties aesthetic. I also argue that, going by Seinfeld, nineties menswear - and nineties men's style in general - is to be summed up as: functional but ugly.

 

Something that stands out is the typical nineties men's shirt worn by Jerry Seinfeld; it is a billowing and flowing affair, the sleeves slowly inflating like hot-air balloons before terminating in tight cuffs. It resembles the classic pirate's shirt (worn by Prince and other eighties stars) but without the frills at the front, and it recalls the shirt worn by the men of the Californian hippie and counter-culture folk in the late sixties, e.g., the men of Californian bands such as the Mamas and Papas.

 

Seinfeld, a comedy, prefers light to neutral colours, but most TV shows and movies of the nineties were dramas and inclined to the gothic and the Romantic. As such, fashionable women used makeup that made their faces look pale. In the time of the nineties, the makers of film and TV dramas wanted the dark as much as possible, and they filmed in shadow, the result being that the dramas looked as though they had been filmed in a cave or gothic mansion. In accordance with the dark and dingy atmosphere, actresses often were clothed to look frumpy and dowdy.

 

Why did artists make these choices? If we are to take up the method of the economist or the sociologist, we can trace the gloom or the optimism of a certain epoch back to that epoch's degree of economic expansion or contraction. Art that uses bright colours and tones matches a period of growth; art that uses dark colours and tones matches a period of recession. In other words, economics determines art, culture, life. But that model, which is a simple and reductionist one, does not fit the nineties. To ascertain this, let us make use of one measure that I have touched upon in previous articles: the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) divided by the price of the gold. Without going into detail, the DJIA is the most important stock market index of the 20th century, and to determine the Dow’s worth at a single point of time, we should use gold, which is the only true measure of an object's worth. If we assess how much the DJIA was worth in terms of gold throughout nineties, we will discover the following. In January 1990, the DJIA was worth 6.31 ounces of gold; in December 1999, the DJIA was worth an astounding 40.62 ounces. Never had the DJIA attained such a height and never since.

 

Some observers contend that the nineties ended not in December 1999 but in September 2001, the month of the 9/11 attack, because often the spirit of a decade will carry over a few months or even a few years into a following decade. For example, the argument could be made that the fifties ended, and the sixties began, at one crossroads: the month of JFK’s assassination.  

 

So, if we are to identify the end point of the nineties as being September 2001, what was the DJIA's worth in gold in that month? The answer is: 31.22 ounces.  Compared to today's, the value of the Dow then is extraordinary. I leave it to the reader to look up today's gold Dow for himself.

 

We should note that these valuations of the DJIA being worth ten, twenty, thirty, or forty ounces of gold reflect an estimate by investors of the future worth of America's capital stock. In their assessments, the markets are always looking ahead; they are not interested in the past; they are not even interested in the present; they are discounting to the present, that is, calculating the future worth of an asset and comparing it to the present worth. Accordingly, to judge by the absurdly high valuations made in the nineties, the future looked bright indeed.

 

So why then was the popular culture of America, and the Western world, so gloomy, weird, and gothic? Hazarding a guess, I surmise that the cultural arbiters of the nineties were reacting to the norms of the eighties; if we are to look back to the eighties, we remember that its colours were bright and pastel and that its spirit was relentlessly, even maniacally, optimistic. If you want an example of the eighties Zeitgeist, listen to one-hit wonder John Parr's St Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion). But the producers of culture in the nineties decided that as great as the decade of the eighties was, it had to be rejected and cast out.

 

This is the only explanation I can offer for the dark turn that the culture took. I remember reading a nineties music magazine and coming across an interview with the Jewish rock band Kiss; the lead singer Gene Simmons complained that the grunge bands took a too gloomy view of life. He agreed that yes, a band's first album could be expected to reflect gloomy tendencies, but after a band had gotten that first album out of the way, if a band experienced success, it should drop the affectations of doom and gloom. Simmons said, 'I don't understand these grunge bands: the economy is doing great, and they have all the p*ssy they want, so what is there to complain about?'.

 

VI.

 

I am not deprecating the pop culture of the nineties, because for the most part it sought to entertain, and that is laudable. When I am looking on YouTube at some of the best TV shows and popular songs from the decade, I feel, as many others do, exaltation, the cultural productions of the decade at their finest stand for pleasure, beauty, and life. The entertainment industry felt obliged to deliver something that was gratifying and pleasing, but that contradicts the ethic of the present age. Today's artists want to deliver something that is politically edifying, and the politics are always of the Left. And even when they are not being political, they want to deliver something that is not attractive but repulsive. Perhaps today's entertainers are motivated by the same desire as the practitioners of the Expressionist school of art a hundred years ago: both groups want to smear the world, tarnish it, make it hideous, and sap the will to live.

 

Having said that, with the passage of time come different views. In the 2000s, I thought that the reality show Jackass (2000-2007) was the most degenerate show on television. The show chronicled mad and self-destructive 'stunts', and the worst of these, in my view, was a dive by one of the Jackass 'performers' into a pool of sewage. When watching that episode, I thought to myself that America had reached the same level of depravity as Germany in the Weimar age. Twenty years on, I no longer feel the same response. The makers of Jackass wanted to shock, but today I can think of something worse than puerile shock effects, and that is the production of a piece of entertainment - whether it be a TV drama, a movie, a popular song, or whatever - that leaves us feeling flat and dull, demoralised, depressed.

 

When we are weighing up Jackass and other cultural confections of the 2000s, we must acknowledge the truth that in every epoch are to be found aspects of the good and the bad. For white men, especially Europeans, the worst decade of the 20th century was undoubtedly the 1940s. And even Americans, the winners of the war, spent time in misery after the war was over. The post-war gloominess gave birth to the film noir genre of American movies, a genre became famous all around the world, and copied, and finally, parodied. Looking back on the 1940s, I can say that I am glad that I did not live in it, and many of my contemporaries would agree. But can something good be said for the 1940s, especially the 1940s of the film-noir period? Yes, and that is this: the men and women dressed extremely well. Even at their lowest ebb, whites retained a sense of style. In the Anglosphere at least, that perhaps would have compensated for the post-war unemployment, inflation, rationing (which in the UK lasted for years after the war), recession, and so forth.

 

In summing up a particular epoch, we must acknowledge complexities, and again, that entails the acknowledgement of the existence of both the good and the evil. For now, when it comes to the 2000s, let us focus on the good.

 

As a starting point, look at men's fashion. A brief survey of a TV series such as Seinfeld reveals that there are two basic male body types, both of which were dressed in clothes that were in keeping with the spirit of the age. The tall, skinny, gangly Jerry Seinfeld body type opted for billowing shirts, tight pants, and belts with a large buckle; this fashion, as noted before, resembled the fashion of the 1960s; Jerry Seinfeld, when wearing his typical garb, looks like one of the frontmen of the Mamas and Papas. As a sort of contrast to Jerry, we are presented with the short to medium height male who is often overweight and who has a pugnacious temperament; think of the actor who plays Seinfeld's father. The type prefers mock 1950s clothing of a sort that is usually best suited for warm weather (Seinfeld's father lives in Florida).

 

All that disappeared on the 1st of January 2000. As soon as the 1990s finished, the style changed, and it is remarkable how quickly, judging by the TV shows and commercials that were broadcast in January 2000, the change took place.

 

It was as though a new edict came down as if from high, and that was this: you must, whether you be male or female, look good. When watching my favourite 2000s American TV dramas during lockdown, I was struck by how almost everything on the screen was chosen for its pleasantness and aesthetic appeal; every piece of decor, every couch, lampshade, bedspread, cushion, pot plant, was used in the same way that an Impressionist painter used colours on a canvas. The artistic choices blended in a harmonious whole, and the whole was pretty. And speaking of tones, the foremost of these were gold, bronze, and copper. The skilful use of these produced a pleasing and soothing effect that was to cross over from TV and into real life. In the cafés and bars that I frequented, one would see stained wooden floorboards and wall panels, purple or red painted walls, dimmed lights, and framed posters that were copies of posters from the Europe - usually France - of the 1920s. All of it conveyed stylishness, good taste, and evoked a distant and fondly remembered past. The same aesthetic impressed itself upon the interiors of upper-class houses, apartments, cafés, restaurants, bars that we saw on American TV. The stylistic choices sent a message understood by all, even if only subconsciously, and the message was this: it is permissible to relax, to let go, to enjoy yourself in pleasant surroundings.

 

Wearing nice clothes formed part of the new sensibility. What is notable is that men's fashion came to the forefront; we can speak of a new awareness of the value of men’s dressing well. The man's vintage tee made a comeback; manufacturers in the 2000s produced t-shirts that were in their design inspired by the t-shirts of the 1970s; these were conscious recreations the t-shirts that would have been worn at a Rolling Stones concert in 1973. The designs were of a cut that emphasised the good side of the male physique and made the wearer seem slim and healthy. Generally, the designs were flattering and could even transform a man; a good outfit would make a fat man appear thin and an old man appear young. For the hundred years prior, men's clothes had been dour and restrained, and perhaps that came about because of American influence - American men's fashion was influenced by America's Puritan and Yankee heritage - but now the stringency and restraint of the past was dispensed with; now the bright colours and pleasing designs of men's shirts allowed a man to preen himself like a peacock.

 

The new sensibility could be detected in the popularity of the reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-2007). The premise of the show was that five homosexual hairdressers, fashion experts, interior decorators, et al., would call upon an unwitting man of normal (that is heterosexual) proclivities; they would then rebuild his life from scratch; they would give him a makeover and the interiors of his house a makeover as well. Usually after the makeover, the man's marriage would improve, or if he was single, his romantic prospects would improve, and this was because – and so the argument went - the makeover had given the man a new lease on life. One could dismiss it all at as homosexual propaganda, and so it was, but the intentions were benign; the show's producer averred that the heterosexual man following the advice of the Queer Eye gang would make him so attractive to women that he would need to 'beat them off with a stick'.

 

The show's underlying message, one that was never openly expressed, was a racialist one. It was this: white man, enjoy yourself, enjoy your wealth, enjoy your life, make use of your white privilege. I would watch the show every week with my housemate, and both of us would be impressed by the transformation of the straight guy by the end of the episode; but my housemate reflected that the good life depicted in the show lay outside the bounds of possibility for the both of us; after all, the recipients of the Queer Eye makeovers were comparatively wealthy and established; they were, and I quote my housemate, 'cashed up 30 year olds'.

 

Nowadays we can laugh at the quaintness of it all. But at the time, I took Queer Eye seriously. It served as a wakeup call for me and hundreds of thousands of other male viewers. For years, I had neglected my diet, my clothes, my hair, my skin, my home. The last of these, when I compared it to the post-makeover homes in Queer Eye, was dirty, messy, and ugly. I had let it go in much the same way that I had let my hair, clothes, and every other element of my physical existence go. Acknowledging my shortcomings, I resolved henceforth to turn over a new leaf. My friends, who at the time seemed far more sophisticated than me, perceived my desire for self-improvement, and they gave me advice. They could not recommend good choices on interior decorating, but they could steer me on the way towards good choices in clothes and diet. In retrospect, I was retracing the path of the men of previous epochs – of men at the time of the Renaissance, for instance, or at the time of the Roman Empire - who had made the conscious decision to live life and live it well.

 

But if we want an example of that good living, we need not go back as far as the Renaissance. As we can see from one of the best TV shows of the 2000s, Mad Men (2007-2015), American males in the 1960s paid an extraordinary amount of attention to their appearance; they went to the barber, had pedicures, and wore suits and casual clothes that were elegant and slim fitting. It was not until the 1970s that men began dressing like bums; then they let standards slip, and chaos reigned.

 

Contrasting against one another in the photo below are two sets of protesters; one group is protesting the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, and the other is protesting the Israeli-Palestinian War of 2024. When you look closely, the men in the former group wear smart casual clothes, and the trousers, jeans, jackets, blazers, shirts, give evidence of good taste. Particularly striking is the fact that in this group men all chose good footwear. As for the fashion choices of the other group of protestors, the less said, the better.

 

As for women's fashion in the 2000s, there is not much to say. Women, unlike men, have always bestowed a high value upon looking good; they have always paid scrupulous attention to clothes, hair and skin care, and what other women are wearing. Having said that, an examination of the magazines, TV shows, movies, of the 2000s will reveal that women did seem a little more well turned out in the 2000s than in the 1990s, and for one women's casual wear had much improved. But one ubiquitous article of women's clothing elicits controversy, and that is the halter top, which was to the 2000s what the mini skirt was to the 1960s. I call the halter top the Lindsay Lohan maternity dress, for it does look like a sort of maternity dress and it should be associated with 2000s fashion icons such as Lohan. On a well-proportioned and healthy woman, the halter top looked good; on an obese woman, it looked bad. And another significant fashion challenge to woman was presented by the popularity of low rise jeans. A slender woman with wide hips and a flat stomach would look good in them, but the wearing of them took work, because staying slim in the 21st century took work. Fortunately for men, men's clothes had an almost magical slimming effect: a vintage tee and a pair of close-fitting bootcut jeans would make a man look as skinny as a member of Led Zeppelin.

 

As to what put an end to 2000s stylishness, the answer is obvious: the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. Spengler writes that in the history of the Western or Faustian Culture, the transition from one epoch to another always takes place with great drama. The 21st century, so far, demonstrates this. The nineties came to an end on September 11, 2001; the 2000s came to an end with the financial meltdown of late 2008 and early 2009; the 2010s came to an end with the onset of the Covidian monstrosity in March 2020.

 

But let us dig deeper. It is true that fashions, tastes, appetites, ways of doing things, pass, and pass with the shifting sands of time. Who, after all, remembers the Emo subculture of the 2000s?

Emoism flourished for a time and then disappeared, going the way of disco in the 1970s. By the 2010s, Emoism was usurped by Hipsterism. History, Spengler writes, is irrational, and none of its shifts come about as a product of design: its mutations are as random as the bubbles that form and burst in boiling water. But I think that the ceasing of the 2000s-era style and beauty occurred because of a conscious decision - by women. Simply put, looking like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Avril Lavigne, and Jennifer Love Hewitt every single day was asking too much. Women in the 2010s found it far easier to take on a new persona: the frumpy, overweight, tattooed, blue haired Social Justice Warrior female with the horn-rimmed glasses. And men, too, in the new decade took the less demanding route, and ceased shaving and waxing themselves; following the way of the Hipster, which is the way of a quasi-Beatnik, they grew more hirsute. Statistics show that sales of men's razor blades plunged in the 2010s.

 

VII.

 

I wrote before that the economist or sociologist believes that economics determines art, culture, life. We live in a time that pays too much attention to the economic and the monetary, and it is natural when we look back at the 2000s and see how well people lived - or appeared to live - that we will assume that all these sleek, gleaming, happy people must have lived in a time of great prosperity; we surmise that the presence of money entails the good life, and that the absence of money entails the bad.

 

This hypothesis was disproved by the 2000s. In the first half of the decade, US markets did well, much better than they do today; but in the second half, which was Bush 45's second term, markets fell and fell hard. In February 2005, the month after Bush's second inauguration, the Gold DJIA stood at a respectable 25.43 ounces; but by February 2009, it had fallen to 7.42 ounces, and it had further to fall - by August 2011, it had fallen to 6.36 ounces. It goes without saying that all the other markets around the world, including the Australian, followed the same trajectory. Worldwide, the gains that had accumulated since 1990 had been wiped out in a replay of the crash of 1929 and the crash of 1973. What made the 2000s crash unique was that markets descended to the bottom slowly. If we are to trace the descent of the gold DJIA, we see that it moves like a tobogganist riding slowly and gently downhill. And so, at the time, one could ignore the weakening until it became impossible to ignore.

 

While the commodities, finance, and real estate sectors boomed - as these sectors often do in a time of inflation and depreciating currencies - none of the other sectors did; the expansion benefited the few, not the many. And yet, with only a small outlay, a woman could dress like Lindsay Lohan or Hilary Duff, mimic their hairstyles, use their brands of wax and moisturiser. Likewise, a male could buy a decent wardrobe quite easily, lose weight, use skin cream, get a decent haircut... Nothing prevented him from vacuuming his apartment and investing in new couch cushions, lampshades, and bedspreads. The good life, the easy life, was within reach. After all, did men in the 2000s experience the same penury and hardships, the same scrimping, saving, and rationing, as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the 1930s and 1940s? No, they did not. Materially, they lived in better circumstances, and potentially, they could afford to try different ways of living. A man makes choices every day when he decides to shave himself and shine his shoes, and in the 2000s, he could decide to put some grease in his hair and pull on a pair of Robert Plant jeans and don a smart blazer. He need not do these things, but in the 2000s, he operated under a set of rules, a paradigm, that in effect forced him to do these things. The same pattern compelled TV producers; if they were to set out to write and shoot a drama, they should do their utmost to make the clothes, actors, sets, look beautiful and not plain and ugly.

 

In contrast, today's media and entertainment fails to do its job, and it no longer makes a product that is aesthetically pleasing; that so much we have established. What is surprising and alarming is that the media and entertainment complex no longer wants to do its job. In the old days, people became involved in entertainment and the arts because they wanted to make a living doing something that they loved, and they wanted to become part of an artistic tradition that they honoured and revered. As a youth, I wanted to work in movies or theatre or literature or comic books, but I lacked the talent, opportunity, and drive, and now I thank my lucky stars that I did. What intelligent person would want to work in today's Hollywood? Imagine the self-loathing of the 'creatives' who are forced to labour on Disney's Star Wars.

 

The SJWs who have infiltrated the media and entertainment complex have been accused of hating whites, hating the Western Culture, and so forth. But not everyone who works in the field is a seasoned political activist who is striving to achieve 'representation' for 'LGBTQ+ folks' and 'People of Colour' (POC), although it may seem that way. I think apathy more than anything else explains Western Man's turn away from beauty and style. And in a way, this is more concerning; for feelings of numbness and indifference are worse than feelings of hatred and Nietzschean ressentiment.

 

VIII.

 

At the risk of stretching a metaphor, we can outline a difference between the worldviews, Weltanschauungen, that are inclined like capitalist economies to either expansion or contraction. We see the division when we look at the 2000s and the 2010s and how people deported themselves. It goes without saying that not every young woman in the 2000s dressed like Lindsay Lohan and not every young woman in the 2010s dressed like a pink-haired, overweight, bespectacled SJW; but as it was in the days of the Roman Empire at its height, what matters when gauging the style, mores, ethos of a period is the overall standard. And so, when looking at representative samples, we can say that the fashion and aesthetics of the 2010s mark a step down. When comparing the 2000s to the 2010s, we conclude that in the one decade morale expanded, in the other, it contracted; in one it grew, the in the other it declined. It is no coincidence that the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon appeared when it did; America gave birth to it at the time of the weak economic recovery in the Obama years; and because of their limited economic prospects and their myopic world view, young Americans felt an instant attraction towards it.

 

One irony presented by the young's newfound affiliation with the Left is that Americans were more better off in 2011 than they were in 1981; but perhaps this is not an irony when we consider that in the early 1980s, America was situated on the upward curve of the slope of economic expansion, and in the early 2010s, on the downward. But individual choice does matter, and economics is not everything. Western Man chose to ditch metrosexualism for hipsterism; he chose to grow a beard, wear rimmed glasses, don a flannel lumberjack shirt, and allow his belly to bloat - perhaps all that craft beer was to blame - and become hairy.

 

The political controversies of the 2010s are still with us, the main difference being that they have changed their aspect; we see different emphases and weightings. I do not want to discuss these here at length, because that would detract from my purpose, but suffice to say that the two most controversial ideologies, Zionism and Russkiye Mir, both of which turn up in our news feeds now more than ever, do fit into the expansion versus contraction model.

 

What is interesting is that American conservatives tout both ideologies every day, and that both these ideologies run counter to the natural American conservative tendency towards growth, expansion, enterprise, the spirit of can-do, the American Way. Americans on the Right like these things, which is why they like leaders such as Reagan and Trump, leaders who are indefatigable optimists. So, it is strange that, when considering the ultimately self-destructive tendencies of Russkiye Mir, conservatives regarded Speaker Johnson's forcing through of the passage of funding for the Ukrainian war effort as the ultimate betrayal; and that they took a dim view of further funding. A Breitbart headline reads: 'Show me the money!!! - Never enough $$$ for 4-eva war - Zelensky reveals US and Ukraine 'working' on scheme for 10 years of military aid'. Of course, Putin's efforts to keep Russia’s war going '4-eva' are never disparaged.

 

 

And then we come to dear little Israel. American conservatives treated the pro-Palestinian protestor encampments at American universities as a national emergency; the colleges must be cleansed of this 'anti-Semitic' vermin; Jewish students must feel safe; the Western Journal thunders, 'Let Jews Carry Guns'; to paraphrase Samuel Roth, 'Jews must live'.

 

We must ask, how do the ideologies of Zionism and Russkiye Mir advance and improve life? Russia reduces Ukrainian towns to rubble and makes the land as desolate as the plains of Mordor. Ukrainians are not elevated thereby. As for Israel and Zionism, Americans - especially American boomers - like to pat themselves on the back for being on the 'right side of history': the 'Nazis' were 'evil' for 'gassing the Jews', ergo, the Americans who fought against them were 'good'. But it is possible that the WWII Holocaust story is false, and in any case, it does not help; it does not, to borrow from the jargon of economists, add value.

 

The American boomer conservative Ward Clark writes that the pro-Palestinian demonstrators are 'useful idiots who are protesting in favor of violent, misogynistic, racist Bronze-Age barbarians'. I chortled when I read this, and I asked to myself if Mr Clark had ever read the Bible, which is full of 'violent, misogynistic, racist Bronze-Age barbarians', the problem for the likes of Mr Clark being that the 'barbarians' in question are Jewish. Animal sacrifices, burnt offerings, sacrifices of human beings to Yahweh - which is what the Holocaust story is all about - are barbaric and atavistic. A butcher's manual, the Book of Leviticus instructs, in scrupulous and exacting detail, how to kill, prepare, and burn animals for sacrifice to Yahweh. One must ask, how does obeisance to strange, backward, and dark rituals advance the welfare of the American people? In the Jewish tradition, sacrifices of animals - and children - are made in exchange for tangible benefits. Jewry won the State of Israel in 1948 in exchange for the sacrifice to Yahweh of the six million; and what did Americans get? Did the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 boost American economic growth, did it assure Americans a higher standard of living...

 

But if we speak too long about Jewry, Israel, and Zionism, we run the risk of digressing. To close our discussion of the topic, let us look at some of the books of the Prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea - and mull over the threats that they contain; Yahweh, speaking through his mouthpieces the prophets, promises violence, desolation, famine, despair to both the Jewish people who have betrayed him; he even threatens to rape the Jewish women. In the last of books of the Old Testament, Yahweh wills the destruction of the twin kingdoms of Judah and Israel because he wants to punish the Jewish people; and the last books chronicle only Jewish defeat and failure.

 

Inspecting the final book of the Old Testament, the Book of Malachi, Steve Wells records the final utterance by Yahweh: 'The Old Testament ends fittingly with these words: "Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse"'. One cannot say that Judaism is an ideology of expansion; rather, it is an ideology of contraction. And prolonged exposure to it lowers a man's vital energies; the man who takes it up is turning away from the Life Force.

 

IX.

 

Throughout I have been using the language of Nietzsche and Shaw. Nietzschean and Shavian rhetoric broods and mediates upon the themes of life denial and world rejection; but perhaps this mode of thinking, which was most famous over a hundred years ago, fails to match the ethos of the modern age. A postmodernist would ask, what is life, what is the world? Perhaps these do not exist; instead, we only have 'codes', 'signs'.

 

Postmodernism here counts because one of the foremost of the postmodernists, Baudrillard, writes on the same subjects that I am discussing: movies, advertising, fashion, beauty, clothes, diet, fitness. He accords the same importance to these as I do; and these, according to Baudrillard, in the modern age have taken on a religious dimension.

 

In the consumer package, there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other--and even more laden with connotations than the automobile, in spite of the fact that that encapsulates them all. That object is the BODY. Its `rediscovery', in a spirit of physical and sexual liberation, after a millennial age of puritanism; its omnipresence (specifically the omnipresence of the female body, a fact we shall have to try to explain) in advertising, fashion and mass culture; the hygienic, dietetic, therapeutic cult which surrounds it, the obsession with youth, elegance, virility/femininity, treatments and regimes, and the sacrificial practices attaching to it all bear witness to the fact that the body has today become an object of salvation. It has literally taken over that moral and ideological function from the soul.

 

Unremitting propaganda reminds us that, in the words of the old hymn, we have only one body and it has to be saved. [Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970]

 

The above was written over fifty years ago but could have been written today. Baudrillard made a reputation for himself as being one of the worldliest and up to date of the French thinkers; after all, he was the only one to admit to watching television. His contemporaries, men such as Foucault and Derrida, gave the appearance of wanting to shut television and cars, aspects of the modern world, out. Baudrillard does not celebrate the phenomena of the modern world, and as we can infer from the tone of the above passage, he takes a dim view of them. But that view is belied by the passivity and acceptance that we detect between the lines; and these traits of Baudrillard’s make themselves felt more and more in the books written after Consumer Society. And indeed, what the devil is wrong with beautiful models and fast cars? In 1970, and even more so in 2024, are these not 'Life', 'The World', and is it not the case that the turning against these is the turning against 'Life', 'The World'...

 

The phenomena considered by Baudrillard are still with us, and we can still squeeze some enjoyment out of them, and so on that point I disagree with the pessimistic, life-denying American conservatives and white nationalists. But to extract the maximum value out of the modern world and all its despairs and joys, we must increasingly look towards the past, even towards a past that is quite recent, e.g., the past of twenty years ago, the past of the 2000s. That past shows us the way towards the Good Life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Way of the Bugman

 

I.  Introducing the Bugman

Beginning in 2020, the Covidians revived a science I call applied or practical political psychology. Of all the ideologies on the Left, Maoism went furthest in applying political psychology, Maoism being the ideology that gave us 'thought reform' and the 'washing of the brain', and this was pertinent to Covidianism, because starting its life in China, Covidianism used many of the brainwashing techniques of Maoism. Cults, too, avail themselves of the same techniques, and both Maoism and cultism operate on the same principle, which is: Change a man's thoughts, change a man. Over the course of three years, we saw the principle put into practice across the globe, and the result of the Covidians' employing it was that millions of people allowed themselves to be persuaded that masking could 'stop the spread'; that lockdowns, shutdowns, forced closure of businesses, forced unemployment, contact tracing, etc., were all necessary to combat the virus; and that the 'vaccines' were 'safe and effective'. Those caught up in the mass hysteria were cajoled by the media, the 'health professionals', the politicians, and the promptings of their own consciences. Most important of all, the last of these was worked to the utmost in a typical cult-like fashion. Cult leaders seeking to indoctrinate a person appeal to his conscience and exploit his natural tendency to persuade and monitor himself. The conscience, when the leader's manipulating it is attended with success, helps the leader tighten his grip on the minds of his followers, and eventually the directed conscience places the recruit under the leader's complete control. After the first round of brainwashing takes hold, the recruit becomes a devotee, and he remains so on his own initiative and without external compulsion. One consequence is that even if he is taken out of the cult environment - to be sent on canvasing and hawking missions, for example - he can be trusted to return to it. Physically he can leave the cult, mentally he cannot. 

One can use methods of auto-suggestion for purposes that are not sinister and destructive; indeed, one can use them to improve one's life. But doing so takes one away from politics, as we shall see. 

The principle of 'Changing a man thoughts, changing a man' is put to beneficial use in pop psychology and self-help; there, the right thoughts can overcome any obstacle, and in the doctrine of Norman Vincent Peale and Mary Baker G. Eddy, a thing cannot be evil, only thinking makes it so. Such a view is far removed from all politics. For in politics, the world is always incomplete, lacking, and while the world exists in this state of privation, it is bad, even evil. To complete it and make it whole, something external is needed - something only the politician can bring about. In order to make the world better again, a politician may propose a Bolshevik revolution, a Greater East Asian Prosperity Sphere, a Third Reich. Today we regard these goals as vague and ethereal, but at the time politicians promulgated them, they were always within reach; that is, they were feasible. And as a matter of course, the canny politician understands the usefulness of practicable ideals. He will posit simple, discrete, achievable objectives, knowing that if he demands the impossible from his followers, they will desert him. (For that reason, the crusade against global warming will eventually fail, seeing that the end goal of reducing carbon emissions and then stopping them altogether can never be achieved). His realism means that Political Man differs from Self-Help Man. It means he differs from New Age Man as well, 'New Age Man' being the type who follows a Rudolf Steiner or Helena Blavatsky. A spiritual thinker, New Age Man desires to comprehend the nature of reality from the vantage point of mysticism. Moreover, he strives to accept reality without qualm. In other words, he wants to make peace with the world as it is. Nothing could be more unpolitical. 

This topic brings us to another unpolitical type: the Bugman. The Bugman is a subset of the 'normie', and like the normie, he approves of the existing social, political,  and consumerist order. When it comes to politics, the Bugman may hold political opinions that he regards as non-conformist, but at bottom these are only commonplaces and half-baked notions. Fundamentally he agrees with the existing order, and this agreement makes him apolitical. 

During the lockdown years, I became fascinated by the Bugman. In the first year, I believed - mistakenly, as it  turned out - that the indignities heaped upon the  normie population would cause it to revolt. And in that time of turmoil, even a Bugman could show revolutionary gumption. But over the course of three years, the Bugman followed the diktats of the Covidians unquestioningly and took all the outrages in stride. In 2020, only one thing excited him: the release of Cyberpunk 2077. 

I must admit that in those years, I envied the Bugman, especially the Bugman who enjoyed his leisure after being made unemployed by the lockdowns and shutdowns. To be laid off from one's job, and then to while away one's time sitting on a couch, smoking dope, eating junk food, playing 'vidya' games: that seemed to me to be a pleasant life, albeit not a virtuous one. 

Moreover, I envied the Bugman's naivete. The contentedness of the Bugman neared the state of those characters in The Matrix (1999) who chose forgetfulness and oblivion over knowledge and truth. In the movie, the 'red pill' gives knowledge and the 'blue pill' takes it away, and those who swallow the blue pill are made as innocent as Adam and Eve before the Fall. 

The question to be considered here is whether or not political psychology holds true for the Bug Man. Does the Bugman confirm the hypothesis of the Maoists, the cultists, and the Christian Scientists in its essentials, that is, does the Bug Man's innocence and passivity come about from his ideas? If so, this brings up the possibility that we ourselves can become Bugmen. To do so, we need only change our ideas to match his. 

II. The Politics of Anti-Politics

I mentioned the game Cyberpunk 2077 because its subject matter does bear upon politics: one of the reasons why I never became a fully-fledged 'National Socialist' or white nationalist was because I liked the cyberpunk genre too much. The denizens of Blade Runner (1982) live in a dark, smooty, grimy Los Angeles in the year of the future 2019, and the futuristic and grim milieu befits the central theme of cyberpunk, which is 'High tech, low life'. In keeping with the anti-natural tendencies of the genre, many characters are cyborgs or (in the case of Blade Runner) artificially-grown human beings, that is, homonculi. Cyberpunk shares a theme with postmodernism, and that is the distancing and isolating of man from nature. Urban living, modern thinking, perception, thought, language - all of these form a wall between man and the natural world, man and the absolute truth, man and the spiritual. As such, white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, and blood and soil ideology must by definition repudiate cyberpunk. Blade Runner is un-völkisch. But as someone who has seen Blade Runner a dozen times and will probably watch it a dozen times more, my response is: so much the worse for völkischness. 

In a time when the term had not yet been invented, I was once a Bugman. In my youth, I was dissatisfied with my own life but well-satisfied with life at large, by which I mean the prevailing political, cultural, and economic order, an order to which no alternative existed, the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc having collapsed a few years before. In that period, I may have disliked certain political parties, journalists, intellectuals, and opinion-makers, and disliked them intensely; but I never questioned the existing order's underlying precepts, rules, and assumptions. In the same way, one may become aggravated by other drivers when caught in a traffic jam, but such a judgment, which takes place during an instance of a temporary and fleeting emotion, does not entail one's rejecting cars and driving in general. The driver abides by the rules of the game, and so does the Bugman. And like the Bugman, when it came to politics, I prided myself on my political insight and sophistication, but I held opinions that were only a confused heaping of fashionable Left and Right ideas, neither of which I committed to. In the last analysis, I was, just like the Bug Man, apolitical. 

The question is whether or not apoliticism is itself political in a covert and subterranean fashion. It may be that, perversely, the act of choosing not to choose constitutes an political ideology in itself. Carl Schmitt thought so: see Political Romanticism (1919). 

This intellectual attitude of mine, which was akin to political romanticism, was reinforced by my reading a textbook on the contemporary postmodern age. The book was divided up into three parts: the first was written on art history, the second on the French post-structuralist thinkers (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Baudrillard, et al.), and the third on postmodern culture and life. The third section struck a chord with me. It resonated, because it held up a mirror to my life. The author here made mention of Blade Runner, Robocop, Silence of the Lambs, Total Recall, and other famous films of the period, and also Nike sneakers, Madonna (then in her 'Vogue' phase), virtual reality, Disneyland, McDonalds, karaoke. The author deplored all of it, but I found his depiction of modern popular culture, capitalism, and postmodernism to be wonderful: it captured the essence of what it was that made life worth living. For every weekend, me and my friends would pile into a car, commute to the city, and drive around without pause, and on those trips, I felt a tremendous sensation of freedom; I understood what it was like for an Eastern European who had lived in a communist country for forty years and who all of a sudden was allowed out to travel and shop in the West. In those fast-paced, frenetic years, I spent long hours at the nightclub, the shopping mall, the fast food restaurant, the petrol station, and the 24/7 convenience store, and I treated all these abodes as though they were sacred, that is, houses of worship.  

My exalted feelings in response to this 'capitalist' and 'postmodern' existence may have only been a preference of mine: they may have been only feelings, and as such, merely subjective. But perhaps they owed their origin to a distinct intellectual idea. The ideas of Thomas Hardy, which are gloomy, fatalist, and pessimistic, hold much in common with those of Schopenhauer. Even though it is uncertain whether Hardy had ever read Schopenhauer, it is certain that Schopenhauer could have supplied the intellectual justification for Hardy. In the nineties, I asked myself if there was a philosopher who could give a voice and a name to the feelings that I had - feelings that were as positive as Hardy's were negative. 

At first I thought that I had found that philosopher in Baudrillard. Of all the French thinkers, he seem to be the one who was most in touch with the present - what academics called 'modernity'. He did own a television set after all. Unlike him, other French intellectuals seemed mired in the first half of the 20th century, when modernism held sway; witness their obsession with Freud and Joyce. 

Something that could be said in the favour of the French post-structuralists was that all of them repudiated Marx; they held to an anti-Marxism that bordered on anti-communism. The anti-Marxism was symptomatic of the political struggle in French intellectual circles of the sixties and seventies. Then, Marxism rode high, and the post-structuralists sought to prove their intellectual superiority to it. They wanted to make their own thought distinct, and in hindsight, they chose wisely, for after the fall of communism, the Marxists were left looking foolish. 

On closer examination, Baudrillard turned out to be something of a disappointment. In the first half of his career, he wrote on the subjects of consumerism, shopping malls, TV advertising, consumer credit. All these formed part of the experience of someone living in the modern world, and Baudrillard's according these subjects importance gave his thought an air of timeliness and immediacy. But at root, Baudrillard disdained consumerism, he considered it fake and unreal, and he sought after the more honest, pure, natural. In the second half of his career, his work lost clarity. As could be expected from a French thinker, he obscured and mystified. Much has been written on the French intellectual's habit of putting up walls of verbiage, and putting up these walls is what Baudrillard did. Some critics suggest that these walls were built in order to mask Baudrillard's true political opinions. Like the Bugman, Baudrillard's attitude is one of passivity and assent, and perhaps deep down Baudrillard really did approve of the existing order. When he is forced to confront it, he feigns helplessness and passivity; it is all so terrible, but what can one do. 

I moved on from Baudrillard and looked to conservative thinkers such as Hayek. If one affirms capitalism, consumerism, surely one is affirming the market order Hayek speaks of? And in turn, if one does so, one is surely classifying oneself as a neoliberal or (to use the American term) libertarian. But I resisted designating myself as such, and while I recognised the greatness of Hayek's endeavour, I saw Hayek himself as something of a relic. He was a man who belonged to the era of the eighties, that is, of Reagan, Thatcher, the New Right, and the Cold War. 

A prominent conservative thinker of post-Cold War era was Francis Fukuyama, the author of 'The End of History?' (1989) and The End of History and the Last Man (1992), both, unusually enough, conservative and at the same time nihilistic (the 'Last Man' is taken from Nietzsche's Zarathustra). Fukuyama was influenced by the Russian thinker Alexandre Kojève. Years after I first came across a mention of Kojève, I stumbled on Jan-Werner Müller's adequate summarising of Kojève's ideas in A Dangerous Mind. Carl Schmitt in Post War European Thought (2003). My subsequent exploring of the twists and turns of Kojève's thought led me to a paradox worthy of Fukuyama. This was the hypothesis that what I had affirmed in the carefree years of my youth was not capitalism but communism; the truth was that I had been a Marxist. 

III. Kojève

Kojève called himself a Marxist and even a Stalinist, and he was joking, but only half-joking. When the body of his work is considered as a whole, we are tempted to discount his so-called Marxism as a mere instance of his typical Kojèvean irony and facetiousness.  But we would be mistaken to do so. The truth of the matter is that he did promote Marxism, but that he departed from the orthodox interpretations of Marx. 

Before the nineties, this Marxism could have been dismissed as  the doctrine of a dilettante, but after nineties, it could not. For intellectuals had established unorthodox Marxism as the reigning orthodoxy in the last remaining Marxist superpower in the world - China. 

After the death of Mao, the Chinese turned away from Soviet-style Marxism. Whether or not this reflected an expediency, or a growing influence of 'capitalist roaders' in the Chinese Communist Party, or a recognition that Soviet methods simply did not work, or all three, one cannot say. What we do know is that by the late seventies and early eighties the Chinese communist intellectuals were forced to devise, and devise quickly, apologia for Deng Xiaoping's new course. In their attempts to do so,  they undertook the task of squaring the circle. Capitalist and communist policy were being implemented at the same time. How could one argue that this was Marxist?  

The effort led to the re-examining of the now-dusty and moldy works of Marx and Engels; the Chinese intellectuals scoured these in a search for different path to socialism, one that did not terminate in the Russian model. The discussions of what the Chinese call the 'initial stage of socialism' make for some interesting reading, if one finds Marxism interesting, and certain passages of the Wiki summary are striking. One intellectual puts forward the notion that the new Chinese version of Marxism contradicts orthodox Marxism when it suggests that 'History was unilinear rather than multilinear'. 'The problem facing the CPC [the Chinese Communist Party] was that a unilinear view of history meant that China could not adopt socialism because [China] had skipped the capitalist mode of production, but a multilinear view meant that China did not need to adopt socialism because it was not a specific "stage in human evolution"'. 

This implies that a non-socialist country such as China may still qualify either as socialist or as being on the road to socialism. Kojève concluded likewise. 

Marx and Engels wrote their main works in the mid to late nineteenth century, and their writings often seem more bound to that particular time more than the writings of other thinkers of that period; if these works could be said to have an odour - and Nietzsche believe that certain writings had a distinctive 'smell' - then they are redolent of the antiques store. The opponent of Marx must Marx's portrayal of Victorian-era capitalism and in order to use it against Marx, he must choose between two avenues of attack.

The first is that Marxism was not only wrong and it had always been wrong; nothing Marx writes of factory conditions, for example, is true. Conservatives such as Hayek take this route, and this type of anti-Marxist is inclined to revisionism: 'Was 19th century England as bad as Marx said it was?'. 

The second is that Marxism was once right. Marx did describe the social and economic conditions of his time accurately, he was right, but the caveat is that he was right for his time only. This line recommends itself to the anti-Marxist taking it because it presents him with one singular advantage, which is that a good many Marxists agree with him. After WWII, the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School and the New Left asked how it was that Marxism could still hold true. Had not Western Europe moved beyond the Victorian-era smoke-stack capitalism and the attendant phenomena of children being chained to workbenches? Most certainly it had. And so one asks how it is that in such a Europe that Marxist revolution is possible. 

Kojève looks to the same questions in one of the most famous of his post-war lectures, 'Colonialism from a European perspective', which was held at a business club in Düsseldorf in 1957. 

Without naming them, Kojève dismisses the Lenins, Trotskys, Maos, as 'Romantics' who 'distorted the Marxist theories in order to apply them to noncapitalist relations, i.e., precisely to economic systems Marx did not have in view'. This touches upon a salient point, one that is brought up by many a non-Marxist. Communism took root only in agrarian, semi-capitalist, and semi-feudal countries such as Russia and China; industralised countries such as Germany and England resisted its blandishments. But Marx devised his theories precisely for the industrialised countries. This is a leak in Marxist theory, and one that Marxists beginning with Lenin attempted to patch up. 

Kojève proceeds with the 'Marx was true, but true only for his time' line of argument. Expanding upon it, he makes an extraordinary assertion: the greatest Marxist of the 20th century was Henry Ford. 

[The capitalists] rebuilt capitalism in a Marxist way. 

To put it briefly, the capitalists saw exactly the same thing as Marx saw and said although independently of him, and with some delay. Namely, that capitalism can neither progress, nor even exist, if the 'surplus value' produced through industrial technologies is not divided between the capitalist minority and the working majority. In other words, the post-Marxist capitalists understood that the modern, highly industralised capitalism of mass production not only permits, but also requires, a constant increase in the income (and of the standard of living) of the working masses. And they behaved accordingly. 

In brief, the capitalists did exactly what they ought to have done according to Marxist theory in order to make the 'social revolution' impossible, i.e., unnecessary. This 'Marxist' reconstruction of the original capitalism was accomplished more or less anonymously. But, as always, there was a great ideologue here, too. He was called Henry Ford. And thus we can say that Ford was the only great, authentic Marxist of the 20th century. 

Those who lived in the West after 1991 and who shared in its prosperity and comforts were living in societies that were post-Marxist in two ways. The first of these was that we who lived in those societies lived in a world in which there was no Soviet communism; the second, that after the reforms by the likes of Ford, we lived in a political, social, and economic order that had deliberately forestalled the Marxist revolution. 

IV. America as communist

None of the above quite captures the spirit of the post-1991 age, however. 

Marxism traditionally concerns itself with capitalism that has gone wrong, never with capitalism gone right. To use the jargon of economists, it is contraction that preoccupies the Marxists, not growth. Now, Western countries such as Australia and America experienced  contraction in the early nineties, as did the countries of the former Eastern bloc, and the post-communist countries experienced the worst of it after their abrupt shifting-over from communism to capitalism. In Yugoslavia, the currency became worthless, and the resulting economic disruption brought about break-up and war. But unlike the Easterner, the fortunate Westerner in that period could know poverty and at the same time good living; poverty did not bar the way to the enjoying of the fruits of consumerism. 

When we think of consumerism and growth, we think of America; the country seems to embody both. Kojève agreed. In a famous passage in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, we find:

One can even say that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist "communism," seeing that, practically, all the members of a "classless society" can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart dictates. 

Now, several voyages of comparison made (between 1948 and 1958) to the United States and the U.S.S.R. gave me the impression that if the Americans give the appearance of rich Sino-Soviets, it is because the Russians and the Chinese are only Americans who are still poor but are rapidly proceeding to get richer. I was led to conclude from this that the "American way of life" was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the United States in the World prefiguring the "eternal present" future of all of humanity.

What Kojève is referring to in the last sentence is his notion of the end of history: there shall be no history after a certain point, that is, no great historical events, and thereafter humanity will continue to live in time but not in history. That living will be for the day and not the morrow. 

Derrida attempts to clarify the passage in Specters of Marx (1994). 

Why and how was Kojève able to think that the United States had already reached the "final stage" of "Marxist 'communism'"? What did he think he perceived there, what did he want to perceive there? Answer: the appropriation, in abundance, of everything that can respond to need or desire, the cancellation of the gap between desire and need suspends any excess, any disadjustment, in particular in work. It is not at all surprising that this end of the disadjustment (of the being "out of joint") "prefigures [an] eternal present". 

Derrida here is florid and French, that is, typically Derrida. But we get his meaning. 'The end of disadjustment' implies an end of conflict and the reaching of a resolution. Thereafter, one can appropriate 'in abundance', of everything that can respond to need or desire'; 'the gap between desire and need' has been cancelled. 

Derrida has put his finger on what capitalism is and paradoxically, what communism is. For this abundance, this growth, this 'cancellation of the gap', was promised to us by Marx and the Marxists of the first half of the 20th century. We find these themes in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky, and even of Stalin and Khrushchev. In the form given to it by Kojève, the communist idea may have won me over in my youth. Perhaps, had I encountered it, I would have declared myself to be a communist. 

V.  In conclusion: Hegel and Christian Science

The idea of the reconciliation and the unity of opposites stands at the center of Hegel's philosophy, and I will explain it in non-philosophical language and how it bears on the subject of the discussion. 

In our reading of Hegel, we see that his account of the self, or consciousness, or soul, is a narrative proceeding through stages. In the narrative's first half, the inner self and the outer world stand opposed to one another. That is to say, one is dissatisfied with the world because it does not live up to one's expectations, it does not conform to the ideal one may have of it. But then a change takes place, and the situation improves. Suddenly - and the transition can be quite abrupt - the outer world and the inner become the one and same. One's fond imaginings become reality; the world of one's heart's desire, and the world as it really is, become identical. Thus, the 'gap is canceled'. This is Hegel's Absolute Idea. 

How did the improvement come about? From Hegel, we can deduce two answers, one contradicting the other. The first is that the outer world was brought closer to one's heart's desire by a deliberate effort: one worked to make the ideal real. The second is that perhaps the reality of the outer world matched the ideal of one's inner all along: the outer world does not need any improvement, it has already met one's heart's desire, it already stands there complete and perfect. And we fail to recognise its completeness because our consciousness is defective. Here Hegel begins to sound like Peale and Eddy. 

Now, as stated at the outset, Positive Thinking does not sit well with the politically-minded. In particular, it meets with a violent reaction from the Marxists, who are a perpetually dissatisfied people. To repeat, the political activist is someone who wants something that is not there, that is, he wants something that is missing; he detects a privation in the world and he wants ameliorate it. And the more radical he is, the more completion he wants. He invites his audience to inspect the existing state of affairs and find it wanting, which is why he often meets with the accusation that he wants to induce a state of discontent. 

Usually in the narrative put forth by the rabble rouser a fix can be achieved through a simple means: a vote for Trump, a Marxist revolution. But if the remedy is not close to hand, then one is made to feel discontented and for nothing. One then arrives at the sad truth that lofty goals cannot be attained in this world, only in the next. When the normie realises that he has been backed into such a corner, he drops out of politics, and after the experience, he is a little wiser and a little more discontented than before. 

Under the direction of the demagogue, the masses are to turn away from what little sources of satisfaction there in their lives, and they become worse off as a result. The normie then rues his dabbling in politics and his allowing himself to be seduced by what Spengler calls 'subverters, rhetors, and fantastics'. Perhaps he would have benefited from the ideas of Peale and Eddy. 

The standard objection to Peale and Eddy is that evil does exist in the world and that it exists objectively; it is not a trick played upon oneself by one's own mind. But Peale and Eddy, and Hegel before them, were striving for a mystical insight that is detached from everyday perception. The man who secures the insight stands far above. His view of human existence is (in language of cinematography) a bird's eye view as opposed to a worm's eye. In one of his most famous poems ('Lapis Lazuli', written in 1936), Yeats, after climbing to the top of a summit from which he looks down upon on mankind, acquires the bird's eye view. 

One has to ask if the political activist today can stand on that plane; if the activist can reach that mystical objectivity; and to reach it, if he must be made of the same stuff as a Taoist sage or a Buddhist monk. 

To arrive at an answer, we need understanding of what it is that distinguishes the right-wing mind from the left-wing, seeing that we are on the Right, and that we must know our own politics, for inability to know it could stand in the way of our apprehending the truth, which is  what Hegel calls the Absolute Idea. 

The conservatives who claim that radical leftists are mentally ill (that is, insane - 'mental illness' being a euphemism for insanity) are correct: discontent lies at the heart of the leftist's being, and this is a discontent that makes him unhinged, a discontent that will always be there, a discontent that will always finds it justification in whatever the ideology he comes across. 

Unlike the man of the Left, the man of the Right started off his life as contented, not discontented, and he was fortunate enough to experience only recently a way of life that was good and proper. The life in that past compares favourably to life in the present, for at some point in the recent past society took a wrong turn; now life gets worse every year. Henceforth the rightist devotes himself to the task of stopping the rot and preserving what is good, true, and sane. 

The thought of almost every radical rightist from Hitler to Trump progresses in such a manner. In the time of his innocence, the intelligent and distinguished man who has not yet entered politics may lean towards a nationalism and patriotism that are mundane and everyday. His opinions may be so widely shared, and so ordinary and commonsensical, such that he may define himself not as a radical or a conservative but as a moderate; he may incline towards liberalism, even socialism. But then a catastrophic event intervenes, the old certainties vanish, and the world as he knows it is turned upside down. But while it changed, he stayed the same. And by his clinging to what was once previously regarded as the norm, he is abominated as a reactionary. The Left considers him to be dangerous. 

He could be either Hitler or Trump: Hitler once knew a Vienna that was supreme and good before the catastrophe, Trump once knew a Manhattan. In the first half of the essay, I lauded the past like a Hitler or a Trump would have, and it would be easy to build a conservative, even reactionary, position upon that past, setting off the good past against the bad present. This conservatism would point out the undeniable truth that the West of twenty and thirty years ago compares most favourably against the West of 2023. 

Such a position would be right-wing and reactionary; at the same time, it would be something of an evasion. For the likes of Hegel, Eddy, and Peale reached a mystical objectivity that looms far above the populism of a Hitler or a Trump. 

When faced with a choice between those two perspectives, to which one should we ourselves strive towards: the mystical or the political? Our first instinct is to respond, the political. This is because we find it difficult to escape the prosaic and the everyday; we lack the detachment of a Hegel, who wrote the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) when the French and Prussian armies were coming to blows in Jena a few kilometres away. 

Of course, the privations experienced by Europeans in the Hegel's exceed those of ours. Everyday wisdom says: compare and contrast the bad times against the good, and count your blessings. But platitudes miss the point. According to his interpreters Koyré and Kojève, Hegel understood that a fundamental change had occurred at the turn of the 19th century, a change which, in Kojève's view, was for the better. And its beneficial effects were such that they would not have disappeared one to two hundred years later; that is, they would not have been negated by Biden, transsexuals, Black Lives Matter, wokeness, inflation, Covidianism, LGBTism, and race-swapping Disney movies. 

The detachment of Hegel approaches that of a Buddhist sage, and clinging it to it through circumstances as adverse as those endured by Hegel requires determination and grit; we can infer that Hegel himself practised a daily mental self-discipline and made a habit of shutting out of his consciousness the Napoleonic Era's cholera, starvation, economic disruption, and corpses. 

As profound as it was, the truth of Hegel did not differ overly much from the truth of the Bugman. But whereas Hegel came to that truth by means of logic, the Bugman came to it by dint of his existence. The Bugman  understands Hegel's Absolute Idea only instinctively, and he cannot put it into intellectual form. 

We have, then, come full circle, and if we are to take the Bugman as an exemplar, we must follow Bugman law. We must live according to his precepts. And what are these? Sit on one's couch, play 'vidya', eat junk food, and smoke dope.  Live the life that I did thirty years ago: frequent the convenience store, the fast-food restaurant, the shopping mall, the comic book shop, and treat those places as sacred sites.   

An alternative to the Bug Man does exist, that alternative being the political in Carl Schmitt's sense. Reading between the lines in Kojève, we almost detect Kojève and Schmitt, who were good friends, exchanging views. Here one thinker who is apolitical confronts another who is political. 

In the present, the Apolitical Man stands on top; but Political Man, long suppressed, may erupt to the surface. For now, he stands in abeyance, and if we are to decide between the two, we must come down in favour of the Apolitical. When taking all the evidence of the past three years into consideration, we must render the verdict that the Political has not delivered, and that our hankering after it has caused unneeded mental strife, friction, and turmoil. In order to ameliorate our condition, we must seek something else. And perhaps that something else is the way of the Bugman.