Social Matter

This week, I’m going to do my best to tie together a few of the threads I’ve been working with recently: anarcho-tyranny, resistance, and the right to bear arms among them. To kick it off—and in an act of contrition for my uppity contentious clickbait last Thursday—I’ll lay some groundwork in classic neoreactionary style, i.e. philosophically dense assertions made at rapid fire. Deep breath. Here goes:

Anarcho-tyranny is war on the middle by the top. It’s not totally accurate to say that it’s war on the middle by both the bottom and the top, because only the top is waging a conscious, goal-directed campaign, whereas the bottom is simply tending towards the disordered state that one would expect entropy to tend towards. High time preference, low IQ, HBD, etc. However, were the middle, which has the necessary population size to dominate the upper class and the necessary level of social technology to dominate the lower class, able to comprehend its predicament, it could extricate itself by force fairly easily. Thus the top corrodes the fighting will of the middle by propagating progressive memeplexes that make the middle question the moral legitimacy of its own survival. And the top corrodes the fighting ability of the middle by disrupting any attempts at organized resistance. It does the latter through media messaging, which paints all dissenters from the system as kooky conspiracy theorists or “extremists,” and through the ongoing construction of a direct surveillance panopticon, which has a pronounced chilling effect on potentially subversive activity.

Ok. I’m out of breath already. And I’m not intellectually spry enough to keep up that pace anyway, so I’ll just focus on the tail end of that argument and unpack what I mean.

A major conceptual failure of NRA-type approaches to the 2^nd Amendment is that they only focus on individual ownership of guns. This is something I alluded to a couple weeks ago. They ignore the social aspect of the amendment, the “well-regulated militia” portion, and hone in entirely on the right of each and every American to bear arms in a state of splendid isolation.

It’s not that gun ownership is completely worthless at the individual level. Not at all. Hunting game, for instance, is one step towards disconnecting yourself from the large-scale food supply chains—factory farm to processing plant to refrigerated truck to grocery store—that feed most of the country. And disconnecting from those supply chains, in turn, is one step towards becoming resilient to any number of collapse scenarios, whether they’re slow burn or fast, whether they’re of an economic or and infrastructure variety. That’s worthwhile.

Individual gun ownership is also worthwhile when it comes to defending yourself. That’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s true. Could be a robbery. Could be a home invasion. Could be a pack of unarmed and innocent Trayvons who decide to culturally enrich you with the soles of their immaculately clean sneakers in a Kroger parking lot. In any event (and these are off chances, admittedly, for many places in the country), having a firearm and knowing how to use it is a good way to look out for yourself and those under your care. I’d recommend it to every adult male.

But if you back up from these small-scale, discrete applications, if you look at the big picture, what good is it? What good does it do middle America that you own a gun? What good does it do the people of your city, your state? Sure, it may help you provide for your immediate family. It may help you protect your immediate family, too. But it doesn’t budge any of you one inch out from under the influence of a government that has all of your worst interests at heart. It doesn’t change things. That footwear on your neck certainly isn’t an Air Jordan, and it’s not even a jackboot; it’s a cap-toe balmoral. The folks calling the shots are in tailored suits, reclining their upholstered leather chairs in Washington and on Wall Street. What can you do to them?

The 2^nd Amendment, as I’ve argued before, is a dead letter. But the insight behind it, the idea that the surest check against tyranny is a populace that can credibly threaten a tyrant (or a tyrannical system)… well, that’s something you can still bank on. It’s an observation about politics that transcends whatever legal agreements happen to be in play in any given age. In contemporary America, however, there is no way to credibly threaten the system on your own. It’s too big now, too multi-headed, too firmly entrenched. So, while your right to bear arms might benefit you personally, for the right’s originally intended purpose it’s impotent. It’s a non-starter. Purely symbolic.

Trying to remedy that is where you meet the limits of intellectual critique. If you want to follow the well-regulated-militia path of resistance (Maybe you’ve got a better idea. I’m open to suggestions.) to an overreaching government, you have to engage in the messy details of interacting with live human beings. The abstract thinking’s mostly done. I mean all a “militia” is, of course, is an organization of armed men united in defense of their shared interests, entirely independent of government oversight. As an idea, it’s simple. As a reality, especially in an America of over three hundred million, it’s pretty dauntingly complex. Nevertheless, there are people out there with the necessary expertise to run shows like these. Nevertheless, there are some networks already in place. And there are probably a great mass of folks city- or state- or nationwide like you, fed up and angry but currently rudderless. So the question really isn’t “What needs to be done?” We know what. We need to start bringing these elements together, probably at the community level and then aggregating upward from there. The question is “How?” That’s the thorny one.