Strength Through Joy

2,327 words

German translation here ^[2]

When I was younger and things were getting me down, I used to have spontaneous little epiphanies that would instantly lift me up. I would hear a song on the radio. I would look across a field when suddenly the sun emerged from behind the clouds. I would peer over someone’s fence and see a rose blooming. In these moments, I had an experience difficult to put into words. The reason for this, partly, is that the experience did not consist of any words running through my head. It was not a logical process; no verbal conclusions were drawn. Instead, it was as if in a single moment I was transported beyond my cares and knew – suddenly, and with absolute certainty – that everything is right, and that all would work out in the end. Bound up with this, as you might imagine, was a sense of my own destiny – that I was moving toward something, and that it was good. These epiphanies were accompanied by an emotion I can only describe as joy.

These little events helped me get through difficult times. But as I got older, things slowly began to change. My spontaneous epiphanies happened less often. It was only recently that I began to reflect on this, and to ask myself what had happened. Part of the explanation is simply that I’ve gotten older. When you’re in your twenties it’s a lot easier to become suddenly suffused with a sense of positive destiny; of your whole life spreading out before you and leading to some ultimate good. When you’re approaching fifty and you realize that your life is more than half over, it becomes a lot more difficult.

In fact, however, I don’t think aging is the primary cause for this change. I think that the real agent is knowledge. As I have aged, I have learned more and more about the world – and most of what I have learned is so negative that at times it is simply overwhelming. Sometimes I stop to catalogue in my mind all the things that are wrong with our world today, and the experience is dizzying. There is not a single area of life today in the West that is healthy and flourishing. I don’t need to make a list of what I am talking about, because readers of this website know exactly what I mean.

We are living in the topsy-turvy world, where everything is the opposite of what it should be. Everything has been twisted and perverted. No matter where we turn, we find evidence of the rot. It reaches into every corner. It is as if some demonic force has taken hold of the world and inverted all values. And the most sickening and oppressive thing of all is the dishonesty. Everything today is pervaded by its sickly-sweet stench. Everything is lies, lies, lies. And all men – or almost all – are liars. The truth is that my awareness of all that is wrong has made it increasingly difficult for me to see any good, anywhere. It seems some days that literally everything reminds me of why this is the worst of all possible worlds.

I walk out of my apartment and see a group of attractive, mostly blond college-age types talking and laughing as they board a bus. Instantly, I X-ray their heads and see the straw inside, stuffed in by their professors. In a twinkling I imagine myself revealing my thoughts to them, and I see the incomprehension, the horror, and the cowardice on their faces. Strong, healthy bodies (everybody in their twenties today looks like a muscly department store mannequin); souls a kind of thin gruel. What is it like to be them? To be humanoid?

On the side of the bus is an advertisement for a new television series displaying the faces of its multi-racial cast. The strongest faces, the ones that show the most toughness and determination, are the women, while the men looked lost. There’s no escape from this kind of thing. I still go to films, and watch a few TV shows. I try as much as I can to just overlook the propaganda, if there’s enough reason to like what I’m seeing. I feel like a Soviet dissident.

The bus leaves, and I turn a corner, narrowly avoiding stepping into the gooey remains of a squashed tomato that’s obviously fallen out of somebody’s grocery bag. “Organic or genetically engineered?” I wonder to myself. And then my mind leaps to the story I read online about how scientists speculate that one day we may be able to eliminate the gene for racism. But why bother? So few of the men in our movement can get laid anyway. Suppose that real men (and women) are simply bred out of existence, and the white race is eventually composed entirely of humanoids perfectly adapted to the modern world. Whites who have no sense at all of group solidarity – as well as no spirit, no fight, no desires that go beyond the satisfaction of physical appetites, and greed for money and possessions. “Then,” I think as I dodge the tomato, “it’ll really be over.”

I make it to the corner convenience store, almost colliding with a tall, clean cut young white guy and his Asian girlfriend. I select a bottle of red wine and stand in line behind two skinny homosexuals in Armani frames, one of whom carries a baby girl in a kind of papoose dangling against his chest. The baby is cute and has the most beautiful pale skin with ruddy little cheeks. But I think, “Wait till it grows up and brings Rufus home.” (The “parents,” of course, would be delighted.) As I wait, I glance at an Entertainment Weekly interview with Daniel Craig, who says that he thinks the next James Bond should be black. When it’s my turn at the counter, I exchange the wine for the largest and cheapest bottle of vodka they have.

I decide to take the long way home, through the park. There’s a stretch that reminds me, very dimly, of part of the Appalachian Trail I hiked years earlier. And I remember a story I read a few days ago about someone calling for a reduction in federal funding to national parks, unless the parks do something to pull in more non-white visitors. I cut fairly close to the Metropolitan Museum and remember that I haven’t been there in almost three years. In my mind’s eye I see the long sculpture hall with the skylight. And then I see it all in ruins. Who will keep it going, after all? I see all the Rodins shot to pieces like Arno Breker’s sculptures at the end of World War Two. The museum, the opera, the library. Art, music, literature. Kiss it all goodbye.

This, gentle reader, is a taste of my daily life, and what it’s like to live with me. I am single, by the way.

The reason I experience my little epiphanies less often now is that they were always occasioned by a sudden “openness” to something that I saw momentarily as good in itself: blondes, a beautiful song, a rose, a beautiful painting or sculpture, a sunset, the forest, etc. But as I’ve gotten older and learned more about what is wrong with our world, everything has become tainted by negative associations. Now I can’t look at a sunset without thinking of Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

As I think you’ll agree, this is an unhealthy situation. First of all, it’s psychologically unhealthy. I often think that if I keep going this way I’ll wind up crazy, and wander the streets having arguments with invisible opponents. (And I really don’t think I’ve got far to go: see the very first essay ^[3] I wrote for this website.) But more than this, it’s also morally unhealthy. This claim may surprise you, but it’s the more important of the problems, and the real point of this essay.

You see, in the past those little epiphanies were what kept me going. Long before I discovered “the movement” I had other priorities in life, and faced various obstacles. My little “Zen moments” helped me overcome pessimism and dejection. But then at a certain point, as has happened to us all, I had my political “awakening,” and suddenly everything else seemed a lot less important to me. Suddenly I had a cause that was really worth fighting for – one that demanded I devote comparatively less attention to things that had once been my be-all and end-all. But the more intellectual ammunition I acquired, in the name of the Cause, the more hopeless I began to feel (quite in spite of myself, because I’ve always maintained that we must hold on to hope, or our defeat becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy).

Those little Zen moments dried up and blew away. And with them went the spiritual fuel that kept me going. Do you see now why I consider this a moral problem? Nothing is more important than the survival of our race and our culture. Whatever hinders me in advancing that cause is bad. Whatever helps me carry on is good. In order to be effective for the Cause – and, again, nothing is more important than this – I realize now that I must work to put the joy back in my life. But how exactly can I do this?

What I didn’t mention earlier is that years ago, once I had begun to actually notice and reflect upon the fact that I was capable of having these epiphanies, I figured out ways to make them happen, rather than wait for them to happen. Basically, this consisted in a deliberate shift in attention. I would, if possible, change my surroundings to someplace I was less familiar with, and one that provided sources of positive stimulation. For example, I would take a walk in a public garden, and then I would look at the flowers while simultaneously willing all other thoughts to stop. I was generally successful, to some degree or other, in inducing the sort of experience I was looking for.

It’s harder to do that now, but not impossible. One thing that is necessary is to challenge the negative thinking that prevents me, for example, from even enjoying nature. (“What if they close the parks because blacks have no interest in them?”; “What if they destroy nature with genetic engineering?” etc.) Nature is actually our chief respite from the lies. Before I moved to New York I used to go hiking and camping, and I’d often hug a tree or two and think, “Whatever lies they may tell, you are real. The lies can’t change you.” I have to get back to that.

It always delights me when I discover something new that’s genuinely good. Like Breaking Bad. Because the fact of the matter is that not everything is in ruins. There is still a good deal of genuinely valuable work being done. There are the novels of Tito Perdue ^[4] and Andy Nowicki ^[5]. The porcelain of Charles Krafft ^[6]. The poetry of Juleigh Howard-Hobson ^[7] and Leo Yankevich ^[8]. The paintings, writings, and oratory of Jonathan Bowden ^[9]. The cultural commentary of Greg Johnson,  James O’Meara ^[10], Derek Hawthorne ^[11], and a host of other writers. The philosophical and religious writings of Collin Cleary ^[12]. And these are just individuals who we can claim for our “movement.” There is good music, film, and fiction being created today by people who have no particular ideological bent. (And, yes, there’s even good art that gets created now and then by avowed liberals.) I must focus on these things, and fill my life with them.

And, again, there is nature. Sunsets and sunrises. Mountains. Ocean spray. All the great plethora of species, from the sublime Bengal tiger to the gawky ostrich. So great in their variety and baroque excess that no thoughtful person can attribute it all to complete “chance,” or fail to feel awe in its contemplation. And every species is ultimately subject to the eternal cycle of life that the lies cannot touch – the life mystery that refutes the lies, with its inequality, its hierarchy, and its pitiless test of the fittest.

It is our worldview that is in accord with all that is truly, vitally alive. We own the sunset and the sunrise, and all the stars in the sky. We are real, and true, and good. Through us speaks the voice of nature, and the voice of the timeless ideal. And it is only we who are capable of experiencing genuine joy. Those who live with a censored reality cannot experience full, deep emotional responses.

Have you ever noticed how false and forced the emotional reactions of liberals are? They must suppress their own natural responses; they must censor them according to their ideology. And then, through disingenuous mental gyrations quite beyond my ability to understand, they produce the “right” response. “Look! It’s an interracial couple with their nappy-headed spawn! Send signal to mouth: crank corners up into forced smile. No! Smile bigger. Hold it. Hold it. There, someone noticed. Whew! Relax mouth.”

So, I have to reclaim the joy in my life – and I would imagine so do quite a few of my readers. Not only does joy give us the spiritual fuel we need to keep on working for the Cause, joy also gives us an immediate intuition that victory will be ours. In moments of joy – in my little Zen epiphanies, whatever – we realize our connection to what is true, and right, and natural. For there is no real joy except in connection to these. And against these, the lies simply cannot hold out forever.

We have to restore the joy to our daily lives, and live in the knowledge that tomorrow belongs to us.