3,446 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here)

We’ve already mentioned Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment,[1] and The Golden One unpacks this as someone who “blames the misfortunes of himself on someone else.” I think this is a slightly different concept,[2] but you can see how it exemplifies the same basic attitude: the fixation is not on what can I do to solve my problem, but on people and circumstances outside oneself.

This of course brings us to Master Morality vs. Slave Morality. These can be helpfully understood in terms of the concepts and scenarios we’ve just gone through: a morality focused on what someone is, and the man of ressentiment’s desire to find someone to blame for his failure or inadequacy:

The aforementioned ignoble man, who views fitness advice as a criticism of himself, probably wants to have an aesthetic physique. However, on an instinctual level, he believes that he cannot achieve it . . . therefore, he must rationalize to himself why he does not want to attempt the sculpting of an aesthetic physique. Perhaps he says to himself that he does not have time, because he has better things to do; if this excuse does not convince him, he will use another method — saying that physical beauty is actually bad. The main point to keep in mind is that those with a slave morality view bad things as morally good or virtuous — or rather, they reframe these bad things into good things and good things into bad.[3]

Fortunately for all of us, TGO escaped these traps. Here he brings together these moral considerations with his magickal mindset:

I have possessed a master morality since long before I was even acquainted with the concept. As long as I can remember . . . , I have wanted to impose my will and vision on the world.[4] Since I have approached the world and life with a master morality mindset, I have been able to attain success — success in using my influence to spread a good message, for example. Had I approached the world and life with a slave morality mindset, I would instead have rationalized to myself why it was impossible to do things and, indeed, why achieve those things would not even be desirable to begin with.

And, since as within, so without:

In a similar way, there are two approaches to the survival of European civilization. Those with a slave morality will seek to either reframe the struggle as useless — thereby rationalizing their own inaction — or they will rationalize why the fall of European civilization would be a good thing — saying that it is too degenerate, for example. Those with a master morality, on the other hand, will not attempt to rationalize but instead, being true to their desires, work towards their goal — in this case, the survival of European civilization.

Lowering his sights a bit, TGO applies the same model to a national struggle with new relevance today – Ireland — again distinguishing “two spirits”:

One style of Irish “Nationalism,” guided by the Lower spirit, s about being against the British. The style guided by the Beautiful spirit leads to actual Irish Nationalism, which is centered around a love of Ireland and the Irish, as opposed to an aversion against the British. [The former] will . . . turn a blind eye to mass immigration from non-European countries [since these] are seen as fellow Lowers that can be pitted against the Higher. A true Irish Nationalist, imbued with the loving Beautiful spirit, will stand against forces detrimental to Irish bioculture, regardless of whether they are British or otherwise.

The Lower spirit is also present, perhaps even more so, in the Irish Americans, and TGO goes on to discern the same pattern in the United States in general: the “elder Anglo-Saxon spirit of adventure and enterprise” versus the “younger Ellis Island spirit of the ethnic Other,” epitomized in the “wretched refuse” eulogized in the poem later attached to the Statue of Liberty.[5]

But TGO adds here an important caveat to all this talk of master and slave morality:

The hard work of the Ellis Island immigrants and many of the success stories from that time are worthy of admiration. The issue arises when being tired, poor and wretched becomes a prerequisite for being [worthy of praise as] good.

He takes this up again at greater length in considering Christianity and slave morality:

Christianity, during the first few centuries after Christ, was the religion of the Lower and the Other [which] sought to reframe traditional Roman virtues into something negative and sinful.

TGO grants that “the Romans could indeed be cruel,” and that Christianity “appealed to the large non-Roman population of Rome during its waning years.”[6] This is understandable, and striking back against the Empire might even be admirable, but the problem arises when Christianity goes beyond “defending the weak who are unjustly oppressed” and, as we’ve seen, begins “exalting weakness” as “a sign of election and . . . glory,” becoming a system that values weakness itself:

The Higher — the beautiful and healthy — must serve as the ideal for the entire society. . . . This does not mean that the weaker elements should be treated without dignity; on the contrary, Nationalism means loving your people, and a loving leader will endeavor to make life better for all his people.

This is an important point, apparently too subtle for many so-called nationalists to grasp. There’s a lot of crap-Nietzscheanism on the Right — inspired, admittedly, by Nietzsche himself with his a-historical ramblings about “blond beasts” and idolizing psychopaths like Cesare Borgia. The notion that “The Romans were vicious bastards, and we should be too!” accepts the Christian portrait of the Romans; it is both historically inaccurate propaganda and is unlikely to appeal to many today.[7]

Chapter Six extends these moral reflections to a wide and varied range of cultural works, from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground to Warhammer 40K. Dostoevsky’s novella is an expose of the Lower, the man of ressentiment, while in the post-war world this type has mutated into the “anti-hero” and is held out for our admiration.[8]

TGO specifically discusses what some — including myself — have called the Slobs vs. Snobs film genre: “These stories tell of a revolt of the Lower against the Higher in a familiar setting,” but “reality looks a bit different. The downtrodden one is often the mean one, and the popular and athletic one is often the just and moral one.”[9]

This inversion of reality is typical of the Leftist Moral Narrative: actual bullies tend to emerge from the Lower, “seeking to ventilate their own inferiority on weaker victims,” but in these films — and the subsequent obsession with “bullying” in schools, businesses, and even on social media today — it is always white males exploiting their supposed “privilege.” What these “oppressors” actually do, as TGO points out, is “one type of bullying, if one can call it that, that can serve a good purpose.”

Perhaps a better word for it is “social pressure” — a type of bullying that serves a productive purpose. Bad bullying, which is done solely as a way for a maladjusted child to get a sense of power, is not productive. Bullying that serves to crack down upon certain behaviors that are detrimental to the group, however, can be productive.

This leads me to recall someone commenting online, years ago, about the movie Mean Girls, insisting that the titular girls were merely trying to instruct the new girl in how to stop being a weirdo and fit it; nothing could be less politically correct today.[10] In the morally inverted world of the Leftist narrative, weirdos are a protected class, free to develop into socially isolated incels and “consoomers of next product,” their subsequent neuroses dealt with by means of pharmaceuticals and surgery, while normal kids and parents are targeted by the real bullies.[11]

Speaking of schools, TGO thinks that “despite the slave morality aspects” of the Harry Potter franchise, “the good aspects of the books” — “a healthy injection of European mythology and folklore,” along with a hero’s journey trajectory — “outweigh the negative ones.”

Also outweighing the negatives are the contributions of homosexual writers as a group; they provide a perspective that is outside society’s norms, but not a hostile one, unlike certain verbally clever ethnic groups proud of their “outsider” status:

Authors from ethnic Others write from an outsider perspective — an outsider looking into the mainstream society. In the case of homosexual writers, they can be said to write from an insider-outsider perspective; which means that they are in society — of the same ethnicity as the dominant group, for example — yet at the same time outside of the cultural norms.

Of course, this is truer of authors from the “bad old days” before so-called “liberation,”[12] and indeed the only example he discusses is Oscar Wilde, where he suggests that Lord Henry is the real protagonist (and a stand-in for Wilde) in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and that his verbal skirmishes in high society ballrooms provide an interesting comparison with the imperialist adventurers of the aforementioned Great Game.[13]

TGO also discusses many other more recent examples of popular culture, some I have heard of but never read or seen, such as The Witcher; and some are completely new to me, such as Roma Sub Rosa by Stephen Saylor (presumably not Steve Sailer) and C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake Series, all of which, based on TGO’s recommendations, I will have to add to my list of “must reads.”

TGO ends his discussion of The Witcher with some remarks on the sexual themes therein, which provides a natural bridge to the next chapter, which is devoted to “Men and Women,” a topic about which “much can be said, and much has been said.” Since TGO’s views are fairly “traditional” there’s nothing here that will surprise Counter-Currents readers, but they will appreciate seeing sound views presented in TGO’s attractive style.

TGO suggests that “the best way to view a marriage is to envision a ship with the man as the captain.”

The woman comes along on the journey. She will certainly have a say in the direction of the ship[14] and she can certainly make sure the ship is functioning to the best of its abilities… The captaincy, however, must remain in the hands of the man.

Such a man must be “as well-equipped as possible… respectable and solid,” perhaps benefiting from reading this very book. As the literary examples of Captains Bligh and Queeg suggest, there is likely to be a connection between incompetence and unyielding authoritarianism.

The nice thing about this image is that is also encompasses that fact that in addition to a competent partner a woman, like Ishmael, “wants to be taken on an adventure,” which “does not mean trekking across the Andes but rather adventure in the emotional and creative sense – things are happening.” This creates a bit of dialectical tension; the competent man may prefer “a steady routine,” but a woman may find this ultimately unsatisfying.

After several sections devoted to mate selection, marriage, child rearing and the social aspects of promiscuity, TGO ends by reminding us, if we need reminding, that “sex is something good.” However, like water, it may be “almost always good” but “it can, in some circumstances, be a force of destruction is not controlled properly.”

On a personal level, those who do not have the discipline and strength to subdue the inner dragon (one’s sexual energy”) will be instead become its slave. Those who do have the discipline and strength to subdue this dragon will harness a highly potent power. [15]

And, since as within, so without:

On a societal level, if the sexual energy is properly controlled and harnessed, it lies at the very fundament of society — a sexless society is a doomed society. Similarly, when the sexual energy is let loose without any guiding principles, this, too can spell disaster.

Speaking of power . . . Chapter Eight addresses The Runes, which are “a good way to understand the Gods and how they can aid the quest for power.” Such seems to be a contractual obligation for any dissident Right author. Frankly, I usually tune out during the initial discussions of the origin and meaning of the various “futharks, futhorcs, and futhorks.” Of course, others’ mileage may vary, and the reader is invited to explore these interpretations for himself.

TGO concentrates only on the so-called Elder Futhark, and eschews any pretense of historical or scholarly “accuracy” in favor once more of a unique, more “pragmatic” approach based on his own experiences in life and in the Gym; for example:

Thurisaz can be seen as a direction of Uruz. A practical example of this is to view Thurisaz as the Rune of martial arts and Uruz as the Rune of the Gym. They are not the same, but they are related. Thurisaz can become stronger by Uruz — just as a punch will be harder the more momentum is behind it, or just like a grappler whose techniques are all the more potent thanks to the strength he has built in the Gym.

TGO suggests that “a good way to create a personal understanding and relationship with the Runes is by meditating upon each Rune for a week or nine days”:[16]

The first meditation of each Rune can be to visualize the stave-form of the Rune in a vivid manner. Just focus on what the Rune looks like and try to keep the focus on that image.

This is very much like Neville’s aforementioned method, which involves creating an image of your desired outcome and visualizing it until it takes on “the tones of reality.” By visualizing a rune one can take on its nature oneself, a far more effective method than merely reading about various interpretations of them (not that there’s anything wrong with that).[17]

Notes

[1] Nietzsche used the French word because he liked to think of himself as writing in the tradition of the French moralists, and because German lacked a suitable term. English, however, already had “resentment,” taken I suppose from the French, so I don’t know why people insist on carrying it over into English translations.

[2] TGO says that “these individuals view life as a zero-sum game; one man’s success can only be possible by another man’s misfortune. [Thus] the only logical conclusion would be to blame others for one’s own misfortunes.” The mention of “zero-sum game” brings to mind Wallace Wattles, a famed New Thought writer of the turn of the last century who contrasted the endless abundance available through contacting the One Mind, to the Malthusian/Robber Baron/Social Darwinist mentality, that there was only a limited amount of stuff around, so grab what you can and to Hell with everyone else. Interestingly, he therefore became a socialist (running for various offices, without success), not at all what TGO would have predicted. New Thought’s political implications are still in limbo. In The Miracle Club, Mitch Horowitz said that “New Thought at its best and most infectious celebrates the primacy of the individual. Seen in a certain light, the mystical teacher Neville Goddard, the New Thought figure whom I most admire, was a kind of spiritualized objectivist. Or perhaps I could say that Ayn Rand, the founder of philosophical Objectivism, and an ardent atheist, was a secularized Neville.” See my review: “Evola’s Other Club: Mitch Horowitz & the Self-Made Mystic.”

[3] One can’t help but think of certain “leaders of the White Nationalist Movement” who podcast from their basements between epic sessions at Golden Corral, while disparaging weight training and exercise in general as “just for the fags.”

[4] “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” — The Departed (2006).

[5] TGO doesn’t go into this, but one can find the two spirits in the statue, entitled “Liberty Enlightening the Nations” (hence, the torch and the outward-facing placement of the statute), thus meant to encourage other nations to work to find their own liberty, while the poem lauds the “wretched refuse” as morally worthy of praise in their own crapulence.

[6] Actually, I would think it appealed to the considerable number of Romans who were not members of the aristocracy, who we could think of as not unlike today’s “One Percent.”

[7] Contrary to the Christian (and Jewish) trope that “We taught the Romans about morality,” the Romans in fact praised compassion, and even emperors cultivated such an image. Indeed, part of the appeal of Julius was his famous clemency toward his enemies, leading some to surmise that the Jesus myth was based on the other JC; see the material discussed in my “Better Call Saul: Christian Romanism as the First Psy-Op, Part Two,” reviewing Creating Christ.

[8] I’ve referred to this as “cockroach literature”; Colin Wilson was particularly opposed to this tendency among the “Angry Young Men” of the British ‘50s: see my “The Plot Against the Hero: Colin Wilson’s Absurd Magick.”

[9] I briefly discuss this, and note its perhaps surprising presence in the Mad Men series, in ““This is a shirtsleeve operation”: Judaic Crypsis in the Final Season of Mad Men.”

[10] This might usefully be recalled alongside his earlier remarks on chivalry, etc. True compassion seeks to improve the weaker, not make weakness an ideal.

[11] For example, “Schools now routinely carry out anti-bullying campaigns that specifically seek to protect LGBTQ students. Many young people are fleeing to the trans identity because they are generally socially awkward and are looking for shelter.” Morris van de Camp, “The Tragedy of the Faux Boys.”

[12] As the late Alistair Clarke wrote in 2006: “After the 1967 de-criminalization in the UK, homosexuals faced a choice between re-integrating with European civilization in a way not possible for 1,500 years (i.e. since the Jewish heresy of Christianity infiltrated the Roman Empire), or siding with the Marxist, Maoist, New Left enemies of European civilization, the ones who brought “Gay Liberation” from Manhattan to London. Instead of taking up our traditional responsibility of defending and glorifying our civilization, as did so many homosexuals in the past like Frederick II and von Humboldt, we supported of those who would destroy that very same civilization. It is poignantly ironic that gay men were tricked by multiculturalists into allowing successive waves of monotheistic, Abrahamic fundamentalism into Europe, such as African evangelist churches and Islam, just as gays were escaping from under the dead weight of the corpse of Christianity.” “Paris Shockwaves,” Aryan Futurism, August 26, 2006.

[13] The Golden One finds portrayals of male beauty to be “good and natural,” and not necessarily homoerotic; indeed, he finds the book itself “not particularly homoerotic.” This may be true of the commonly reprinted book edition, but Wilde considerably toned it down from the magazine version, where his original manuscript had already been heavily edited; the “uncensored” text was published by Harvard in 2011. In the latter, we read the magazine’s editor writing to his boss: “Rest assured that it will not go into the Magazine [sic] unless it is proper that it shall. In its present condition there are a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to. But I will go beyond this and make it acceptable to the most fastidious taste.”

[14] This is not a slave ship, after all. Indeed, one could extend the metaphor to connect the “shanghai-ing” or impressment of sailors against their will, to such infamies as “shotgun weddings,” “white slavery” or grooming gangs.

[15] For more on the value of controlling the dragon, see  my “The Power of Positive Fapping: Napoleon Hill, Salesman & Sex Magickian,” which reviews Mitch Horowitz’s The Power of Sex Transmutation: How to Use the Most Radical Idea from Think and Grow Rich (New York: G & D Media, 2019).

[16] Nine days being the length of time Odin hanged himself to acquire knowledge of the Runes.

[17] Neville presented his teachings as interpretation of the Bible, of which he had acquired an encyclopedic command, allowing him to reduce any skeptical clergyman to tongue-tied confusion. This made sense in his day, when he could assume the Bible to be familiar and authoritative among his audiences. Today, however, few seem to know any parts of it, other than a few passages from the Book of Revelation. (See the data in Jason Kessler’s “Christian Nationalism Has Made Me Agnostic.”) Given TGO’s command of the doctrines of mind-metaphysics, one hopes he might someday revisit the runes and find those doctrines encoded therein as well. I find a hint of this already with the Isa rune, which he interprets as “a Rune for complete focus. . . . Many meditation practices aim at training the mind to focus on one thing. This is especially good in an age where the mind is being bombarded with constant stimuli. This ability of clearing the mind to focus fully on the task at hand can be of vital importance.”