POLITICAL THEATRE
From Salvation to Self Harm
This is an essay about the meaning of our culture. Culture is made, not begotten, these days.
What is it made of, and why, is the question I ask today, as I examine how the story that animates our civilisation has changed from salvation to self harm.
OUT OF CONTROL
A consumer economy makes virtues of vice. To make Line Go Up, our self control must go down. In this system, prosperity is delivered by impulse buying. So is the meaning of life.
The removal of personal restraint - and its direction into the product lines of the Regime - is foundational to the stability of the system.
It is secured by the promotion of instability.
TWO FORMS OF TRAGEDY
Shakespeare’s tragedies begin with a sign that the time is out of joint, and end with the natural order restored. Is something rotten in our state, as it was in Hamlet’s Denmark? Yes.
The absence of balance in the international order allowed the US to go mad. Israel, which the US cannot restrain, is the most insane and despised nation on the planet.
It is openly committing genocide, funded by the master of the Liberal West.
Our tragic drama has no moral today, and that is the tale of our times.
Thanks to people like Martin Esslin, our tragic drama tells a different story. It is based on the belief that human life has no meaning, and that all our virtues and noble ideas are simply illusions. To accept this is liberating - and funny - say the absurdists.
Esslin, whose family fled Hungary, wrote a book about this in 1961. Called “The Theatre of the Absurd”, he defined the recognition of the absurdity of life as
The inevitable devaluation of ideals, purity, and purpose.
If you seek his monument, look around you.
Esslin said this was inspirational.
In the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.
Compare his tragic vision with that of Shakespeare. To the nihilist, there is no order to be restored. In fact, the order to them is the problem.
To be liberated is to annihilate order completely: morally, socially, universally.
CULTURE IS DOWNSTREAM OF BELIEF
This is what culture is when it is not downstream of God, but schemes.
The absurd is not a reflection of life. 1950s Hungary or 1960s Britain saw violent change, but neither was the spectacle of normless sensation we see in mass culture today.
It is a curious fact of the normless age that it is shaped by powerful taboos.
The explanation for the 1956 Hungarian Uprising is a case in point. We are told it was an “Anti-Communist” revolt. According to the Hungarians who carried it out, it was a revolt against the tyranny of Jewish Bolsheviks1.
Hungary 1956 was a “pogrom”.
The example of Hungary 1956 shows how history is “retconned”, as the cool kids say - changed to produce “retroactive continuity”.
You begin with the the end and work back to the beginning when you tell this sort of story. This too, is political theatre.
This is the sort of script we inhabit - an art of tragedy, at once ideal, ideology and instance. Our history is rewritten back-to-front.
This is a practice which is widely applied to explain a social process, and also to promote it. Social processes are examples of procedure. How do these things proceed?
This practice replaces choices in time with a sense of the inevitable - there is no alternative, says the condition of the absurd - this is all there is.
This practice is not intended to make society perfect.
It is another dimension of the prison of liberation.
With no morals, no boundaries but the mandatory taboos, history is policed into a path with no alternative. We have to do this or else.
THE SELF-HARM PRINCIPLE
It is a curious fact of our time that heroism is identical with self harm.
The myths of the 20th and 21st century are not only harmful, they valorise self inflicted injury - and death.
This narrative of self destruction as noble sacrifice, of mutilation as liberation, and victimhood as the ultimate victory is a perversion of the natural order.
If that is too strong for you, consider the story it replaced.
In the story of Christ, a man, who was also God, died so we could all be saved - and live forever.
Whether you believe this is true or not, this is the essential promise of Christ and the meaning of His sacrifice.
In the trans cult, people mutilate themselves in order to approach Peak Victim status. It ruins you, but you get to feel powerful. For a while.
In the cult of World War Two, being dragged into wars which bankrupt and destroy your homeland is the noblest act of national sacrifice. It ruins your nation, but you get to feel good about that. For a while.
In the cult of race grievance, reparations are demanded for having been time travelled without consent into civilisation. Forever.
The debt is repaid with a licence to commit crime.
SUICIDAL CULTURE
All these cults confer a licence to commit crime. War crimes, sex crimes, property crimes, violent crimes, and the nameless crime against the truth and the very facts of the matters which shape our minds towards this vast ruling myth of the nobility of self harm.
This produces suicide as the pinnacle of virtue. All the policies of progress promote a sort of suicide. They consume their friends as much as their enemies.
To become a victim is to secure a state of exception.
The arc of history bends around you. The law prefers you. You are exempt. This results in lawlnessness, which now victimises us all, at home and abroad. Israel is a Victim State. The grievance factions confer citizenship in a borderless State of Exception. These people live alongside you in a parallel culture which knows no bounds.
Actual suicide is now promoted as a moral duty if you are old, useless, unproductive. If your expiry date is up, you are to remove yourself from the product line.
A story of salvation has been replaced with a heroic narrative of self destruction.
Whose ends are served by these means?
THE ISLAM OF THE WEST
Western culture was settled by the Catholic Church between the 9th and 12th centuries. This is not a controversial fact, because it is too far behind us to matter to the masters of mindlessness.
For centuries, our culture was downstream of the Church and its teachings. In the history of ideas, and that of political thought, it is not controversial to say Liberalism is Christianity absent Christ.
To go further, the Liberal idea is Whiggish2 in its origins, being rights-based, and secured by the violence of Scottish Presbyterians.
If you like to court controversy you might say the Islam of the West produced the Liberal idea, through iconoclasm, puritanism, and military force.
Whether you believe in Christ or not, what is the difference between sacrifice for salvation, and self harm for its own sake?
This is the difference which splits. There is no halfway. It is all or nothing, and the hallowing of self harm is leading us into the void.
MALICIOUS WOUNDING
Our civilisation has replaced looking up with levelling down. The wound of Christ and the precious blood which redeems is replaced with the wound of Amfortas3, speared by destiny, never to heal - leaving the wounded incapable of childbearing.
All the cults of liberation open wounds which are intended never to be healed.
Tellingly, the wound of Amfortas spoke4.
The trans cult is one of surgical and chemical self harm.
The race cult is one of rage and civilisational vengeance, as is that of the supreme victims - antisemitism.
The cult of the planet is openly misanthropic - a march against all human life, for the sake of a globe that is only a home by virtue of the human family which inhabits it.
This is the worship of untreatable wounds. All these harms are the holiest of holies to their True Believers, who will believe in anything but the truth.
This is an essay about the power of belief, in which I hope to have explained something about the power of 20th century mythology. These lies are told to start a revolution, which will deliver justice for all.
The revolution is here. Like all of them, it is a war.
These myths are the breath of the ghost in the machine, whose appetite is to devour everything it is not. We do not worship life but death, a revolutionary replacement in a war of substitution to replace the beginning of the story of our civilisation with its end.
I am clearly guilty of every thoughtcrime imaginable, and have probably invented some here that will surprise my Bolshevik prosecutors.
If you would like to infect others with the virus of sanity, please share my work.
You can support me in my quest to be isolated and neutralised in the manner of Osip Mandelstam by transitioning your money into my wife’s current account.
This will not improve her brutal treatment of me, but a brief smile will play upon her pitiless face should you do so.
This is an outrageous claim but one fully supported by the evidence. I will make the case for this, and more on Esslin et al., in my book.
Samuel Johnson said “the first Whig was the Devil”. The word comes from chuig an bothar - “away down the road [with you]!” - a Scots-Gaelic phrase transliterated to “Whiggamore” in English.
Cromwell would probably have lost without the Scots.
Once again, Frank's kickin' ass and taking names (as we used to say in the old neighborhood).
Dear Mr. Wright, thank you very much! 1956 was a counter revolution! But in 1990 told us it was uprising. This was, and still is, the narrative legitimizing the regime change. But 1956 was the last heartbeat of Hungarians... In 1526, there were 4 million Hungarians, just like the English population in England. In 1848 the population of the Hungarians Kingdom was 10 million, of wich 4 million was ethnically Hungarians. In 1867 according to the Austro-Hungarian agreement 1,5 million Galician immigrants had to be given Hungarians citizenship. Thanks to this, the country's population increased from 10 to 13,6 million by 1869, of wich 4 million were still ethnic Hungarians. In 1920 only 3 million, etc... The first population exchange program in Europe was in Hungary (in 1867). Plus, in November 1956, after the counter-revolution was crushed, legal abortion was introduced. Since then, about 7 million children have been aborted. During covid, 70% of the population was vaccinated, while only 14% of Romanians were. In general, someone is either a Christian or a suicide. And this is as true of nations as of men...