Last week, I went over the extensive case against right-wing activism. It predictably drew a lot of attention. I deliberately left out the case for alternatives, which I will now outline here. Much like the term “activism” really refers to an umbrella of similar and related activities, the alternative to activism is an umbrella of activities that we call passivism. You learned what not to do last week— what will get a right-winger beaten, arrested, jailed, imprisoned, exiled, and killed. Remember that being beaten, arrested, jailed, imprisoned, exiled or killed is not a victory—it is a loss. I’ll come back to that later, since a lot of people seem to be convinced that this sort of losing is actually winning.
To begin with, let’s be clear about what passivism is not. Passivism is not pacifism. It sounds similar, but that’s a quirk of the English language.
Passivism is not “do nothing.” Passivism is a command not to do anything to try and gain official power. Passivism is not a command not to do anything to gain power. Passivism is a command to ignore and avoid the official political system, on the grounds that the official political system is a screwed-up, dysfunctional, evil and corrupting mess that needs to be removed in its entirety from the outside—a system that is so deeply flawed and cancerous that it cannot be fixed from the inside.
Also note that activism does not mean “doing something” and passivism “doing nothing.” Per Google the definition of activism is “the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change.”
Activism is participation in the official political process, which the Brahmins at Google have found fit to define as “campaigning to bring about political or social change.” Passivism is not “doing nothing,” it is non-participation in the official political process.
Why does campaigning work for the Left? Because the Left already controls the official and semi-official state. When a leftist gets beaten, arrested, jailed, imprisoned, exiled or killed, that leftist becomes a martyr and the other countless leftists galvanize with state permission. Then the state grants the leftists a Bureau of Diversity here, or a Foundation for Equality there—perhaps just an initiative or lucrative consulting pay-off, but a victory nonetheless. What happens to a rightist? They get beaten, arrested, jailed, imprisoned, exiled, killed—and then? They are memory-wiped from everything but horror stories. This is not even an anomalous system, this is the very nature and purpose of the state. It’s just too bad that leftists got hold of it.
The official political system includes all the boards, parliaments, legislatures, congresses, bureaucracies, bodies, news agencies, universities, film studios, non-profits, courts, NGOs, PACs, activist groups, etc. that make up the organs of management of public opinion and the execution of state power.
These countless organizations are not neutral institutions that have been co-opted by the Left; they are institutions that were built with faulty structures and flawed reasoning that made them susceptible to leftist entryism, and that have since been made totally unusable for any purpose besides advancing leftism. At one time they may have been salvageable, but that time is long past. Attempting to appeal to these organizations will result in an unceremonious crushing. That these institutions do not necessarily describe themselves as left-wing is not a bug, it is a feature.
Everything is lost! No, not quite everything, but almost everything. Fixing Western civilization in 2016 is almost like reviving a corpse—almost, but not quite. At the moment, the corpse is being buried in an avalanche of foreign migrants, but there is still time to pull the body out and pray to the Lord for mercy—there was at least one resurrection in canonical Christian history. Hell, there might even be a little life left in there. Such a Hail Mary is at least more likely to succeed than jumping into the grave with chemotherapy equipment, and that makes all the difference.
So what should you do?
Build a cabal. And to build a cabal, build a Männerbund, as outlined here.
When the problem is the entire official political system, the solution is not to participate in that system, but to build (or rebuild, depending on your viewpoint) a new, better political system. That is Step One of the Procedure: become worthy.
Are Ivy League millennials really the worthiest rulers? Not by some theoretical historical standard, but if nobody has replaced them yet, then yes, they are. That is not an indictment of passivism or Moldbug’s theories. It is an indictment of our civilization. You must become worthier than our current rulers. That does not just mean personally being healthier and more virtuous than they, it means, as a group, being more capable of good government—more capable of providing order, justice, law, virtue, truth, and glory.
Besides the current Cathedral-State, is there anybody out there with functioning institutions for determining truth, disseminating the official viewpoints, organizing mass social life, and providing lucrative careers and safe families for competent young men? You may dispute the use or definition of the word “functioning”—and there is much to dispute—but where is the Harvard of the Right? Where is The New York Times of the Right? Where is the Department of Justice of the Right? Where are the courts of law of the Right? Unless you have an obviously superior replacement to Harvard, nobody is obligated to stop listening to Harvard, stop trying to get into Harvard, or stop singing Harvard’s praises. Any criticism of Harvard will be just that, and a moot point to boot.
Perhaps the rising Harvards and NYTs, etc. of the Right were unfairly crushed by the state at some point in the past, which explains their non-existence. That is probably mostly true. That is, however, also not an excuse. What did you expect to happen when you openly threatened an existing competitor?
There is no point to being open or public before you can win openly and publicly.
If you can provide more order, justice, law, virtue, truth, and glory than the competition, you will eventually win. And since the main political problem in the West is a lack of order, justice, law, virtue, truth and glory, you’ll be achieving victory every time you provide an instance of any of these. You cannot bring back order by lobbying the corrupt political system designed to quash it.
You must simply build order yourself. Building replacements to the entire official and unofficial government quietly, privately, non-politically without ever veering into activism may seem pretty difficult. It is. These may seem like stringent conditions for victory, but this is a planet with stringent conditions on life. Google “Skull Tower” if you need reminding.
To provide order, etc., you must first have some measure of personal sovereignty. Sovereignty begins with intellectual sovereignty and status sovereignty. To be fully sovereign, you first have to be sovereign over your own mind. You have to be sovereign over who and what gets your attention, time and energy. Only once your attention, time and energy are under your full control can you identify what paths to victory are most valuable, and then pursue them.
Intellectual sovereignty means you read the news furtively, but you read old books proudly, rather than the other way around. Do you control where your attention lies? The Pope does not. Do not let the media choose which battles you fight and which problems you think about. “Read old books” is not a snarky command, but a very serious program to remove the chains of modernity.
When you read enough old books, eventually you will not be living in 2016, but in 1616, and you will have new ideas that were not possible before—ideas that a typical modern simply could not comprehend. Right now, those ideas are by definition incomprehensible, but some of them might be the right ideas you need to win. There is only one way to find them. A good place to begin reading is here.
Status sovereignty requires a Mannerbund. One man alone will be hard-pressed to revive Western civilization, especially if doing the things necessary to do so makes his peers look down on him, or makes him forgo other actions that will raise his social status. Your internal status-seeking system has to be realigned to seek status along traditional lines. To fix this problem, you need to be in touch with other like-minded men, you need to meet them regularly, you need to help them out, you need to exchange ideas and plans with them, you need to build bonds with them—such a small social program will be a small victory in the larger scheme of things, but a good civilization itself is nothing more than a million of these small social programs concentrated in one territory.
Even the tallest tower began with a single stone. If you can’t even build one stone, you will never build the million stones necessary to win. Get building.
A cabal, built out of a Mannerbund, is an engine for right-wing action. Not activism, but action. The cabal is neither public, nor open, nor easy to find, identify or reach. But it has real power. Once the moment is right, the cabal will be able to act. That is Step Two of the Procedure: accept power. Step Three (Rule!) is not a problem that has to be solved right now, since by definition it will be the job of the ruler to solve. The problem that has to be solved right now is how to gain power. The way to gain power is to build it yourself. The way to build power is to build a cabal.
A finely tuned cabal has achieved intellectual and status sovereignty, and is then capable of achieving and defending some further measure of sovereignty—physical, geographic, economic, financial, whatever. The point is that by building a secure cabal, you create the possibility of securing some real sovereignty and power over something outside of the cabal. Without the cabal, you do not have something with which to hold and defend sovereignty. What precisely you have to hold and defend to win is the job of the cabal (or cabal leader) to figure out. All I can tell you is that, without a cabal to begin with, you are not going to get anything else.
The details of building a cabal will vary from place to place. A manual on cabal-building could certainly be written, but it is beyond the scope of this article. What this article should impart to you is that you need to forget about official power, and begin thinking about building your own sovereign system of status within a private cabal of men that can share intelligence, communication, and resources. Done well enough, that cabal will eventually become the official state. Done poorly, it will become a de facto state for the members of the cabal, and that is a small permanent victory already. The official state itself is on an inevitable path to destruction guaranteed by its own mad ideology.
Could you have pulled off Rachel Dolezal better than Rachel Dolezal did? Could you have imagined Germany’s immigration policy in 2015? No individual is as depraved as a headless system, nor can any individual be depraved enough to fathom the next moves of a headless system. So forget it; build your own system and weather the storm.
A cabal does not need to be multi-continental and all-powerful to be successful. If you can build a local cabal of the worthiest local men, who communicate with each other regularly, seek status from each other, and otherwise prepare to act as a cohesive unit when the conditions are right, then you will have won some territory back. A cabal of men is necessary to provide those men with property rights and sexual morality that is not just de jure but de facto. The official government no longer enforces sexual morality, and it is loudly wavering on its commitment to enforcing the few property rights that haven’t been indirectly subverted. The activist may see fodder here for a placard and propaganda slogan, but a passivist sees an excellent opportunity to build a superior machine for providing and enforcing property rights and sexual morality: a machine built out of men—the cabal built out of a Mannerbund.
With enough of these cabals, they can start communicating with each other and building even bigger super-cabals. The web of civilization must be rebuilt, and so must the machinery.
Some broad contours of a cabal can be practically guaranteed: secure communication, high barrier to entry, no public presence, life-long membership, legal activities, etc. Have you seen how most classic fraternal organizations work?
I do not think there is a lack of available tools for us, so much as a lack of men able to understand and wield the tools that we have been given.
That’s not to say things will go smoothly and without fighting. Believe me, I know all about Skull Tower. But there’s no point in lowering your standards from flawless victory.
