In this part on my series on how to overthrow the government, we consider one man’s attempt to seize the memes of production.
The Restoration Bureau is the name attached to some of the most striking propaganda I have ever seen. You may have noticed TRB memes in some of my recent posts.
This propaganda is the work of a man who rejects Satanic modernity and suggests we replace it with a better near future. His art style, developed from Weimar Germany and illustrations of Tolkein, is a striking vision of a sane and possible civilisation which he says can be reborn from the ashes of our own.
Today I bring you an interview with the man behind The Restoration Bureau. I will litter this post with examples of his outstanding work, which is as good as any I have seen in researching my study of modern propaganda, “Capturing the Western Eye”.
If you would like to read this series and have no money to subscribe, email me and I will send you a free link.
Contents
Foreword - Why Propaganda Matters
The Restoration Bureau - Cutting the Dark Age Short
Afterword - Practical Wisdom from the Past
Why Propaganda Matters
Propaganda works. Its aim is to attach feelings to symbols in order to sell products and policies on a mass scale. It is the example of a reality which may not even exist, but nevertheless is widely inhabited. Propaganda defines the default.
What people believe, what they think good and just and wise, and what they think they want to have and to be are all informed by propaganda.
With a largely captive mass media promoting one product line - and permitting no alternative - what is left for those who disagree? Despair is the product of rejection.
The Envision Thing
TRB recognises that “propaganda can either smear things or build them up”. He says that there is a propaganda of the true and of the false. His aim is to “capture the loss of the forgotten” in order to realise a near future in the minds of the young, to help them “envision a better thing” -and then make it.
“A lot of young people are seeing flashes in the mind of things unformulated.”
But once it is formulated - they can move towards it.
They see that image and they want to grasp it”
TRB sees the power in framing the possible. It is a similar power to the discovery of a new word - he is crafting the concepts which make change necessary - and practical.
The Future is Now
Despair is a theme which is marked by its absence from the work of the Restoration Bureau, which is radiantly optimistic about the future.
What is more, as its creator says,
“You do not have to wait. You can start living in your new reality now - as far as you can”.
This began for him with the realisation he did not know any of his neighbours. Living in the “heart of darkness” of the boroughs of New York, he nevertheless persisted to realise his idea of a
“local restoration building a kind of local kinship” - by “talking to, drinking and eating with “ his neighbours.
“I think the building of kin groups starts forming a restoration”
- he says. Now he runs “basket weaving” groups - a tongue in cheek cipher for discussions which forge community cohesion - and foster the transmission of “dreams that worked”.
“You have to start creating things that will survive as the regime falls apart.”
For TRB this means strong human bonds, of family, friendship, community - and nation. He is focused on imagining and fostering the future now.
“If you can get the youth to start going to the old folks home..you can preserve the intergenerational wisdom to spur a better community”
His own example shows how this is not a thing to be awaited, but to be done.
To Cut The Darkness Short
TRB compares the current situation to something more of an eclipse than an extinction event.
This is the message of the best dissident propagandist on the internet. His mission is simple
“To cut the darkness short”.
TRB is inspired by the critique of modernity he sees in Tolkein’s work which he says applies to any modern industrial society. He speaks of the young Tolkein’s pain, when as a boy he saw some cherished old trees cut down. Yet the loggers did not use them. The once-magnificent, aged trees were simply left where they fell.
He sees in this the symbol of our times, and there is something - he says - of every industrial society in this. A habit of waste - of what has grown over centuries.
He says we can do better than ruin and rot.
Escaping Escapism
TRB is a social missionary. “I am a practising Catholic”, he says, speaking with the cheerful ease of the unaffected. “It’s important to remind people to get outside of themselves, to remember the world.”
He says his work began with a real life response to “atomisation”.
“I realised I did not know my neighbours. So I started to talk to them, meet with them, drink with them”.
This process led to him leading regular get-togethers - which he calls “basket-weaving”. What is woven at these crafty events is not mere reeds, but the strong bonds of present and future community, which he sees as the basis of any sane civilisation.
“I try to bring people - younger people - into contact with ideas that have worked well in the past.”
“The ideas they see now are not working. Ours is a system which has reached its limits. It has forbidden the past, and progress has slowed almost to a halt”.
He says that without a sense of history and no vision of the future all our current regime offers is despair - and a retreat into the self.
This, he sees, is part of the Liberal trap. It cannot deliver on its promises of liberation. The desires it promotes are sales techniques for utopian politics and products that disappoint equally.
“It’s not working. Nothing works anymore. We have a crisis of competence as a result”.
So what next? This messenger of rebirth hopes to foster a renaissance he seems to practice just as well as he preaches it. He wants the youth to look beyond mere consumption, and to foster in in place a flourishing current - of the aristocracy of the human spirit. He teaches people to look up as they learn to look forward to the future.
Classically Illiberal
The message of the Restoration Bureau is treasonously optimistic, and is informed by its creator’s use of the wisdom of the Greek and Roman classical period.
TRB is a young American professional who seeks to connect his peers to the best of things to come, by means of the best of things that came to pass.
“I want to remind people that their forefathers did glorious things”
-he says, with a diffidence which only magnifies his magnanimity.
TRB comes across as an exemplar of Aristotelian virtue - a great-souled servant leader who seeks not fame but to keep the flame alive, and to pass it on.
“The Anglo Saxons were the first to envision the ruins of their own culture”
he says, recalling how the architect of the Bank of England included a depiction of it in ruins with his draft.
This, he says, recalls the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons into the ruins of the Roman Empire. Their civilisation emerged amidst the relics of another, infusing the Anglo-Saxon mentality with the knowledge that civilisations have their seasons, too.
They are mortal. It is natural they die, but not everything dies in winter.
Against Doom
The predicament of the dissident is disenchantment. So much of “alternative” media and commentary is depressing. This doomsaying is also lucrative, and can also breed dependence. The blackpill is habit forming, and is in my view just another addiction produced by the addiction-economy of consumerism.
Addiction is the struggle to secure individual freedom from responsibility. It is a means of self-exemption. It is to literally identify as a problem, and it grants a sort of emancipation from the wider world, reducing the addict’s view to a single substance. Addicts are the most sincere brand loyalists of all.
As TRB says, “addiction ends with death or intervention”. He intends his work as the latter.
He places a high premium on the transmission of wisdom accumulated outside the current Regime, be that from Classical literature or from those still living, whose memories of a former time can connect the atomised youth to a historical continuity of resourcefulness and resilience.
“My grandparents fled the Communists, only to enter the Great Depression” he says. “Imagine that!”
His cheerful recollection of recipes and resolve from former generations is one which he believes can reinforce a future departure from the Regime norm.
Lockdown broke the continuity of control of the imagination, he argues, with the Zoomers benefiting from a sort of release from the institutional baggage which has burdened older generations.
His work seeks to fill this void, replacing the continuity of Regime narratives with a revivifying connection to a past it would prefer we all forget.
He knows the power of the past, and how its understanding can tame the arc of history, and even shorten its cycles. He shows what a difference one renaissance man can make in the service of rebirth.
It is an example his work inspires us not only to follow, but to learn how to lead in our own lives.
“I want to inspire people to make a political vision rather than formulate one myself”
“I’m not right or left wing - I’m tailwing - I want to keep the bird in flight”
The Restoration Bureau’s mission is uplifting. In a time when the truth is taboo, the Bureau is here to remind you that it is reasonable and practical to demand the possible.
You can see more of his invitations to a better world on his SubStack.
You can follow him on Twitter here too.
Appendix - What Can the Romans Do for You?
One Example of the Value of Classical Wisdom
The Restoration Bureau is run by an architect of the imagination.
His vision is one which makes use of discarded wisdom which has stood the test of time.
The classics are often invoked, but what value do they have in practice? What have the Romans ever done for you? For one, they have taught you of the dangers of a hostile mind, and the benefits of befriending it.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, who cheerfully killed himself, wrote that “we suffer more in imagination than in reality”.
‘We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.’
Much of alternative media and propaganda is the anticipation of sorrow, the reification of defeat. It pays well, because people are addicted to suffering and they will resist any attempt to deprive them of the black pills they crave.
TRB’s work replaces the mentality of resignation with practical inspiration. You can inhabit this new reality now, he says. His images help you to imagine what this entails, whilst his own life reads like a how-to.
He notes the flight of the modern self into itself - and into manufactured desires which annihilate the human spirit.
He says that this is an effect of the failure of “progress” to deliver a utopia. It leads into a trap.
“People start looking to other Gods than progress. They don’t want to look back - because you’re taught not to.
You cant look forward because there is nothing there. So people start to look inward.”
TRB leads people out of this trap with the methods and wisdom of mature cultures - like Christianity and Classical civilisation - which gave birth to the ungrateful manchild that is our own.
Here is a brief insight into how this might apply to your life.
Lori Huica’s piece on the subject of stoicism concludes with a sharp appraisal of how your imagination may be an ally or an enemy:
Imagination can therefore either be a channel for self-improvement and mental strength, or a medium facilitating inner suffering.
TRB’s work makes friends of anyone who can see beyond themselves, and beyond this moment of selfish atomisation crystallised in the repressive desublimation1 of Liberal consumerism. It provides you with the iconography of a new cooperation - between your own imagination and the better world it can build.
The value of classical wisdom in building a better tomorrow - today - is prudent warnings and practical remedies.
Here it teaches a counter to one of the chief perils of hyper-individualism: an isolation in the self which fosters despair.
As Kevin Walker says in his 2019 book ‘Reading the Stoics with Millennials’:
“When we are fiercely independent and self-sufficient, our disappointments loom large because we have nothing else to focus on.”
TRB teaches millenials insights like this, and also goes out to do wider social missionary work. His work is an armature of a parallel culture that his actions are already helping to create.
You can do this too, to the degree that you can. Start by making a friend of your mind. Then befriend those of others. This is the small acorn planted by the Restoration Bureau. Who cares whether we shall sit beneath the mighty oaks that grow from them?
Our children will seek their shade in the summer, and their laughter shall be our reward.
Yes, I am quoting Frankfurt Schoolman Herbert Marcuse here. He went on about this in “One Dimensional Man”.
Together with Adorno and Horkheimer, Marcuse produced insightful work into the Liberal-consumerist manipulation of desire as a mechanism of repression.
This means consumer society manufactures desires to match its products, and calls this freedom. In fact, it is argued, meaning and mankind are dissipated in this project of tantalisation, which “desublimates” (delimits) desire only to frustrate it in permitted avenues of consumption.
It is a process of exhaustion which annihilates, and never satisifies - meaning its fundamental fuel and product is disappointment. Well. Would you look at that.
You’re very right that The Black Pill can be addictive. It’s important to have eyes toward a future we want to see and not focus solely on the broken present.
Great job in showing that propaganda is just a tool to get the most simplified version of the agent's message out in front of the public. As neither inherently good or bad, letting our enemies gain a monopoly on this type of tactic because of "muh principles" is foolish and ideological suicide. The Restoration Bureau has a beautiful style that is perfect for easy-to-deploy messaging.