Ideology is a Spook

Or, Shut Up and Act

Politics are downstream from culture. Culture is downstream from people who make culture happen, whether grassroots or elite. Power derives from the ability to get things done in the real world, and nothing else. The ability to get things done can come from many sources, which all have their own dependencies. Outcomes are the final arbiter of value. Ideas, in and of themselves, are irrelevant unless they either drive action or inaction. The thought-terminating cliché is a popular concept in online discussions, thought we mostly understand this concept from having seen them employed to great effect in the real world rather than online, where our metaphorical mouths are free to explore any idea, good or bad, if we find the right environment. I posit, however, more dangerous and more pervasive in our circles than the thought-terminating cliché is the action-terminating cliché.

Many people have so internalized the darkest elements of our reality — indeed, there is much darkness — that they have been utterly defeated. We’re all familiar with the much-bemoaned boomer observation, “but at least I’ll be dead soon, before it’s even worse.” The same people who decry this self-evidently terrible mentality are quite often themselves dead to the world and have nothing going on. The only thing that will work, they say, is a tidal wave of bloodshed, whether revolutionary violence or total social collapse. Put your feet up and wait for those things to arrive. BAM! What a thinker. What an insightful individual.

This, but dumber

In reality, there has never been a documented case of a society being re-ordered due to “social collapse.” What changes social orders are invasions and conquest by external forces, or civil wars or revolutions supported by elites and highly organized forces under their support and command, reinforced by pluralities of the populace. “Collapse” is a convenient “plan” propagated by antisocial libertarians and right wingers because you don’t have to do anything for your “plan” to succeed. In fairness, there are high-agency responses to this plan which can make one’s life better, but only for the most pro-social people who are mentally adaptable. The spiteful mutant who loses online friends because he polices their posts and group chat comments isn’t going to be a warlord or even a militiaman, he’s going to “BANTTS” which means getting all the gibs he can (caveat: I encourage you to get all the gibs you can, because you paid for them, so long as you are still getting a job and building a life. The time to secure SBA loans is now), embracing the fact that he’s an N and nothing more. You can go online right now and read the obituaries of the very people who advocated this approach and find that they were either misunderstood – because why read all those words and shit when you have the meme? – or were either selling something, acting as cult leaders whether de jure or de facto on the backs of their followers, or were losers coping with their reality, pure legends in their own minds and those who read them, because they never achieved what they advocated, or even tried to do so.

If you find yourself unmotivated to do anything because, why bother, congratulations – you have been defeated. That’s well-understood. However, there is a vast swath of very online people who have internalized a doomer mentality, absorbed over the years of dwelling on this material. They still see themselves as a shadowy intellectual elite who have figured things out, pierced the veil, and so on. If they actually had their fingers on the pulse, they would be elated. They should be ecstatic at their ideological success, at the propagation of the Idea they kept alive like a winter campfire lit by the last match, sheltered from the rain by the very people hunched over it, fed with the rare dry, combustible material to be found, until recently smoldering and billowing mostly smoke, but still burning.

Guess what — you’re no longer a special boy with secrets. This is totally normal stuff now, out in the open, and can be heard — in real life, in public! — in its edgiest form from teenagers hanging out at a park, or still-edgy from a grandmother ringing up your groceries, to very carefully and tactfully from colleagues at a business dinner.

How do you harness this to improve the world for yourself and those to come? Most will say through politics, which I agree with, but slow down, hoss, we’ll get there eventually. Some will say [redacted], that there is no political solution. The very people who hold up interwar Europe as exemplar will tell you there is no political solution, because they do not understand what politics means and they are so demoralized as to be defeated. They have been so trained by the memes and spirit of their group chats that they will not allow themselves to escape such thinking, because why would you try? I mean, why would you support anything that isn’t perfect?

Their purported heroes tried, and tried, and tried again, and explained how they accomplished everything within the context of their realities, as well as the meta concepts that anyone can internalize and thus adapt to their own situations. It’s completely idiotic, but these same people point to the failings they embody in others with different ideological groupings — conservatives, libertarians, or libtards — and have cultivated highly refined action-terminating clichés which wave away alternative perspectives and justify doing nothing.

Why am I rambling about this? Because this is a time of sorting and winnowing, of planting and weeding, of discerned inclusion and deliberative exclusion. Ideology is meaningless if it leads to a discordant, chaotic group who can’t share a meal together, or spend two days together on a campout, or help fix up an old woman’s front stairs. If you can’t subsume the ideal world you imagine to enable you to work with people who want 98% of the same things, you’re not going to succeed. You can pat yourself on your back all you want about how you’re Right, but that means nothing.

In the same fashion, a guy who is part of your community, who desires the same outcomes as you, has the means and social ties to get the ball rolling on those outcomes, but doesn’t have anything approaching the ideological or intellectual “knowledge” you carry, is a hundred times more valuable than someone with all your same ideas but no ability to work with other people or contribute to an outcome. If outcomes are the final arbiter of the value of ideas or action, the ideas or actions which drive the outcomes we seek must be our top priority. If politics are downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from people who make culture happen, it’s time for us to focus our efforts and allegiances upon people who care about getting things done in the real world, and not the ideologues who have internalized their defeat.

That’s more like it