But what happened to my previous account, you ask? I’ll let the images I shared there + text transcription of them tell the story. And if you’re not totally over Instagram yourself, if you even have an account, please, give my new account a follow and maybe help signal boost some of these posts.

Thanks!

First post:

I’ve been locked out of @theory_underground for two months. I lost access to the double athenticator app when my phone broke, and fixing it requires Instagram access I don’t have. Hence the new account. Anyway, WELCOME

I’m using this photo of me because it’s the last one I uploaded to the old account. It’s from one of the European legs of the TU International Tour, when we were visiting Ljubljana

Over the last several years I have traveled the world on a shoe-string self-funded budget to go out and meet people from the internet. Why?

Because I believe in the underground ethos of hardcore: say what you mean and mean what you say, no excuses, don’t ask for permission, just go to the people, build it and they will come. What’s this have to do with theory though?

“Theory” got captured. In academia, the attention economy, and in activist circles, “theory” became the same thing as “progressive liberal left theory” - or else it oriented itself that. “Lefter than thou” leftism is just as captured.

When I felt the squeeze of self-censorship shutting down the possibility to think and speak in these institutions and spaces, I left to work at Amazon. I would rather stow in a warehouse than capitulate. That’s where I discovered that workers with earbuds have more intellectual freedom than academics.

But freedom without direction is just slavery to the whims of one’s own impulses, or to the whims of market forces. The question is, what did I do with that freedom?

I surveyed the relevant literature that nobody has time for (or access to) in graduate school. I craved an intellectual community that was neither left nor right but instead committed itself to trying to understand the situation.

I realized that what I needed was a proper school for theory. Beyond post-left, it would be dedicated to understanding how the duopoly gerrymanders us at the level of dispositions in what I call the post-class fractured mass. PCFM

I want to go on, but is Instagram really the place for this kind of thing? Shouldn’t I be maximizing for clicks? Well, at this point, I think I have six followers. So I can kinda do whatever I want, actually. However

I’ve run out of room anyway. So if you are one of the rare people who made it to the end of this post, and you want to hear more of this origin story, click the heart button. Maybe repost this. It’ll take a while to build back. With your help, I’m going to do so deliberately, brick by brick.

https://www.instagram.com/tuthoughtsatwork/

Hannah Arendt gave us "natality" as the human capacity for genuine beginning, the fact that new people are born and can start something unprecedented. But Arendt takes this figuratively and employs the term in a political theory as opposed to what I'm doing with natality, which drills back down to the ontology of dasein. What I'm theorizing starts with the reason why her word even has any metaphorical force in the first place: the literal sense of the word in all its primordiality.

New beginnings resonate because children are actually born, families are actually formed, soil is actually cultivated and passed forward — or we live in the world buckling under the deficient modes of all these realities.

Natalism is just about birthrates, whereas natality, in its ontological sense, starts with the fact that every single one of us was born by a mother who was either loved by a man who was committed to her—or else we live in the shadow of that lack. They either loved one another and deliberately chose to bring you into the world, or you arrived unbidden, as an unplanned interruption.

Whether they were mentally, emotionally, and financially prepared or not, and regardless of whether the broader society uplifts, supports, and equips young parents, you necessarily ruptured what came before. You were the newness that no amount of preparation could have fully anticipated. With this in place we can now ask the question about the shadow cast over the rest of your life: they either honored that and worked with, tended to, cared for, and nurtured you, or you are living out the aftermath of their failure to do so.

Natality, the fact of being new, but also all it brings in the sense of formation or the lack thereof, is thus the thrown condition of each and every human existence. It provides a standard for measuring any and every social order.

My formulation holds the literal and the figurative together at the level of what Heidegger calls the “existentiale” (not a logical category but rather an existential structure). Natality as an existentiale weaves Arendt's beginning with Levinas's ethical rupture brought into the order of being by the apriori ethical imposition of the child, Postman's critique of formative environments (mediums), Berry's agrarian communities rooted in the nurture and stewardship of soil, MacIntyre's virtue through acknowledged dependence and community as the third term missing from an emphasis on families or large impersonal social institutions, not to mention the two practical halves of cultivation: Salatin's regenerative praxis and Wise Bauer's classical education as a way of life.

Each of these contributes something indispensable while nonetheless remaining at the ontic level. What I am theorizing is the ontological structure they all presuppose: natality as the condition under which human life renews itself through formation. This is not reducible to natalism, genes, or biology. It also does not stop at Arendt's figurative abstraction — which has recently been popularized by Jennifer Banks in her book titled Natality. My employment is both literal and figurative because they all stem from the same thing, moment, experience, condition, and event.

When readers encounter pieces of my Castration Culture series and walk away thinking the argument is "we need more babies," they have heard "natalism" where the text says "natality." Because self-professed "anti-natalists" are a thing on the internet, and some of them are quick to get embroiled in hysterics, I've had a few angry commenters calling me evil and fascist because they think I'm telling them to have babies. Personally, so long as they are like this, I hope they do not procreate. I feel the same way whenever someone says they are too selfish to have children — Good, please don't. We have enough selfish parents who neglect the needs of their children while shutting themselves off to the natality that calls for the work of nurture and formation.

I said in a previous post that my “Natality Pill” had received unexpected backlash from the anti-natalists and that I would not be responding to them, ever, or at least not soon. The fact is, not a single installment in my Castration Culture series has addressed the anti-natalists, nor have I attempted to theorize them. I am uninterested in the theory of people who have thought themselves into that corner, and I have little interest in having deep conversations with them at this point, much less in trying to persuade them of their error. I feel similar to their existence as I do Black Israelites, radical feminists, incels, or any other niche culture of grievance online. However, I'm writing this piece because it's not just reactive commenters online who confuse natality with natalism; it extends to a number of my more sophisticated readers.

Included in their ranks is , a theorist in his own right with clear philosophical training. Kampara frequently references the likes of Dostoevsky, Simone Weil, Heidegger, Hölderlin and Nick Land—and I consider him a charitable reader. Yet he still arrived at the conclusion that my case against the rebel priest class (RPC) and the liberal rumspringa it administers is about declining birth rates and whether intellectuals should tell people to have more children. He did so despite my signposts saying this was "not a population decline argument" and "the point is not the gene seed." The issue is that the conflation is not a reading failure on his part. It is the predictable result of a cultural condition in which the ontological dimension of natality has been made invisible.

This is where some might point out that the conflation is convenient for a rebel priest class that has no interest in distinguishing ontological renewal from demographic policy. However, I have a much simpler and more honest explanation: I have not been explicit enough in the development of the theory itself. I'm making it too difficult for even my sympathetic readers to follow me where this is taking us, something not helped by making it easy to mistakenly suppose that it’s so friendly to Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, the Collins, and the Chinese billionaires having hundreds of babies via surrogates in the U.S. that are then raised like orphans (by nannies as total stand-in for actual parental relationships). In other words, I've allowed what goes without saying to indeed go without saying it: these tech-futurist natalists know nothing of natality.

The issue is that the distinction between natality and natalism has not been theorized until now. If it wasn't for the fact that I've spoken to Malcolm Collins on my channel, I suspect people wouldn't be so quick to confuse what I'm doing with what the Collins' are advocating for. But it shouldn't be too hard to recognize we're doing something different: they don't read Arendt, Levinas, Postman, Berry, et al. They think in terms of genes and memes, whereas I think in terms of timenergy, dasein, the medium, and formation.

My sister recently reminded me that fifteen years ago I told her nobody should be having children because of climate change. I don't remember saying it, but I wouldn't be surprised. It felt original at the time, I'm sure. In fact I was parroting a position with deep roots in the developed world's long project of undermining working class reproduction and replacing it with immigrant labor. Somewhere between then and getting into philosophy, and then becoming something of a left populist from 2016 to 2020, I abandoned that position. But it was during that same stretch that I started talking regularly to a committed anti-natalist, the same Liam I wrote about in “The Natality Pill.” Over the next decade we logged hundreds of hours of conversation. Those exchanges were among the most formative of my intellectual life. They are also what convinced me that anti-natalism, at bottom, is less a philosophy than a rationalized pathology, a way of dressing up foreclosed possibilities as principled refusal.

But here is what matters more for this argument: the pro-natalists are not any better off. A civilization can be loudly pro-natal at the level of ideology, even literally producing children en masse, and still fail the pro-civ test at every level. Tech futurists commissioning hundreds of surrogate babies raised by nannies are technically (and sometimes loudly) pro-natal. Conservative Christians claiming a monopoly on family values while offering no structural analysis of why families are failing are also pro-natal. Neither understands natality.

Both sides feed into the vicious loop of the duopoly, each spurring the other on: the way pro-natalists currently present themselves is part of what makes anti-natalism look reasonable to people who don't want to be like that, and the anti-natalist position is part of what makes reactionary pro-natalism look necessary. The culture war between them is a vicious cybernetic feedback loop. Natality theorizes a position capable of judging both, because it asks not whether you are having babies but whether the civilization you are building can sustain the loop of regenerationality that makes those lives worth living.

The lacuna between Arendt's figurative natality and the pro-natalist movement's demographic natalism is where my work thrives. The theoretical work that fills it has been developing across this series and will be completed in the book. What follows is the most explicit and hopefully both clear and succinct statement I have yet made of what natality actually points at in this framework, organized around three dimensions:

First, natality is the precondition for all other values, not one value among many. Jean-Michel asked why the series insists on natality when it could address the dissolution of any traditional value, custom, or institution. The answer is that without natality there is no dissolution to worry about and no renewal to hope for. Traditions require transmission. Transmission requires someone to transmit to. Institutions require intergenerational continuity. Communities require people whose commitments extend beyond their own lifetimes. Every traditional value Jean-Michel might name, such as ancestor worship, communal ritual, or embodied practice, presupposes that someone is being born, formed, and integrated into the chain of generations. Natality is not an instance of the deeper issue. It is the deeper issue. Everything else is downstream of it.

Second, natality is the site where desire is politically contested. The Marxist argument holds that material conditions drive culture and that changing the economics would change the outcomes. This is backwards at the level of political agency. People have to want a different world before they will demand one, and if they do not demand one, no policy can deliver it. Natality is where this becomes most visible because it is where the biological, the cultural, the economic, and the existential converge. The rebel priest class does not simply tell people not to have children. It reshapes desire so that people do not want the conditions that make family formation possible: long-term commitment, rootedness, intergenerational responsibility, the binding of one's freedom to something that will outlast oneself. The attitudes fostered and the ideologies sold are either opposed to the necessary conditions, or else they bracket them while reducing them to just another consumer choice among others. This is what must be countered before any structural change becomes politically possible, which is why I consider my work pre-political (not just “post-political”). You cannot legislate demand for something the culture has taught people to disdain or, at best, simply not to want. (My upcoming “No War But Culture War” piece takes this argument to another level, but we'll leave it here for now.)

Third, and this is the dimension that the conflation most effectively erases, natality involves retrojection. The forward rupture of newness, the Arendtian beginning, the Levinasian encounter with primordial obligation and radical otherness in the face of the child, requires roots in the past. Natality can only be formed with a basis in tradition, with cultivation and stewardship that draws on what came before while projecting forward. Without that backward dimension, natality produces nothing but more unrooted and unformed individuals thrown into the world with no worthy second nature to receive them. This is the Gehlenian point: human beings have an incomplete first nature that requires second nature. My theory of natality goes the extra step by making explicit what Gehlen left implicit: some social constructions serve our second nature better than others, and we can measure that on the basis of the pro-civ test.

The pro-civ test measures what I call regenerationality: the capacity of a civilization to regenerate itself across generations. This is what the natality/natalism distinction ultimately delivers. Natalism counts births. The regenerationality of natality asks whether the civilization can sustain the loop that makes births actually matter. The test has four levels, which should not be confused with a linear progression. They are not four stages that proceed in sequence to an end. They are four parts of a single self-constituting virtuous cybernetic feedback loop. When the loop runs, the civilization regenerates. When it breaks at any level, the levels above it begin to buckle and, eventually, to collapse.

The four questions go like this.

Is it binding: does it survive the moods of the parties who made it, or does it dissolve the moment someone gets bored or pissed off with someone else?

Is it regenerative: does it work with the grain of nature rather than against it or in romantic submission to it, does it receive the inheritance that made it possible and hand it on renewed, or does it monocrop natural tendencies into their opposites while calling it progress? A regenerative farmer does not let the field grow wild, but neither does he force the land into something it cannot sustain. The same applies to human formation: there are versions of masculinity and femininity that are pro-civilizational and versions that are destructive, and the work of cultivation is pruning the vine rather than uprooting it or letting it grow wild.

Is it intergenerational: does it span generations and reach across the actual population that inherits it, does it teach the young to enter into a living relationship with the canonical works and discoveries that precede them, does it put people in contact with birth and death and elders and children rather than sealing them in age-segregated peer groups, or does it select for a narrow dispositional band and abandon everyone else?

And last but not least, is it formative of virtue: does it build a civilization whose members are capable of self-control, reason, judgment, of intergenerational nurture, of love, of self-defense, and of helping its neighbors?

So to restate it, the four moments of regenerationality are binding, regenerative, intergenerational, and capable of forming virtue. Each moment's output feeds into all the others simultaneously as inputs while simultaneously constituting the conditions of possibility under which those inputs can take hold, germinate, and grow. E.g. formed persons do not simply make commitments, they are the ones who renew, who reach, who form the next round. Binding does not merely enable regeneration, it is the soil in which regeneration, intergenerational reach, and virtue formation can root at all. I say all this just to make it painstakingly clear that the loop is not sequential. It is ecological. Each level is simultaneously output, input, and habitat for the others. The loop is self-constituting because it produces the very conditions under which it can run again.

The vicious version of the loop is castration culture: deformed persons cannot bind, unbound arrangements strip-mine rather than renew, stripped inheritance squandered on niche dispositions cannot reach across generations at population scale, and the degraded habitat resulting from all of this produces persons more deformed than the last. Anti-natalism fails all four levels. The Liberal Rumspringa fails all four levels. The rebel priest class, as the shock troops of capital's culture of castration, is structurally disposed to promote arrangements that break the loop at every point.

A world without natality in the Arendtian sense is a world of total enframing: a world where nothing genuinely new can begin because everything is already ordered as standing reserve, calculated, optimized, and available for use. This goes way beyond a mere replacement crisis at the level of birth rates. Even the children born in such a world are not natal in the meaningful sense because they are immediately captured by institutional machinery that processes them as future labor units rather than receiving them as genuine beginnings. The system that de-skilled the advanced workers and mothers simultaneously de-skills the capacity for the kind of beginning that is capable of receiving legacies and doing anything that matters with them. We're talking about enframing applied to the human condition itself: the human reduced to a standing reserve of labor power on call to the machine.

The large and reliably repeatable blocks of time-with-energy (timenergy) that formation requires are less desirable when the rebel priest class has made them undesirable. These architects of desire reshape wanting so that fewer and fewer people fight for the timenergy, rootedness, and the long-term intergenerational commitment that formation requires. They tell you that wanting those things is reactionary, that the wound of not having them is actually freedom, and that if you insist on talking about natality you must be talking about natalism.

I don't think the conflation is deliberate. I think it is the necessary result of the structural conditions this series has been theorizing. Yet this is no reason to back off of pointing out the ways that the rebel priest class serves inoculating us to the melting of everything into air. Each wound is a wound and the ones who tell us it's not have no respect for those who fought and died to get us here, much less a future orientation worth fighting for today. They are the merchants of luxury beliefs which, as I said in the previous piece, are costly specifically because they harm everyone except for the few who are insulated from their (anti-civ) outcomes. I may have not used the best examples in that last piece, and have plans to correct that later. For now, I just wanted to get this up while it's fresh. I wrote this while on a long car ride with my wife, son, and puppy.

It wouldn't have happened without their loving presence, as well as the thoughtful engagement of my more charitable readers, like Kampara, making it clear that it's not just reactoids online who thought I was just saying the “have babies” thing. For the love of all things beautiful, unless you're in a good place to do so and you're going to commit to their natality, please don't have babies.

Thanks for reading.

In the previous piece, I explained what the PMC is, why it matters, and yet why I am not anti-PMC. The Professional Managerial Class is a historical development, like the assembly line or the internet. It emerged from specific conditions in response to specific (working class) pressures. It’s silly to hate a class formation any more than a weather pattern — it’s old man waving fist at sky behavior. The PMC is simply a development that must be studied by anyone who wants to know the waters in which theory is swimming. The rebel priest class is, however, a different matter entirely.

The rebel priest class is the cultural outgrowth of the PMC that has inverted the Kantian categorical imperative: instead of only willing what would work toward a harmonious society if everyone were to do it, the rebel priest wills whatever flatters his own exceptionalism and then justifies it on grounds that have nothing to do with where we actually live, what people are actually like, or what happens when the oddest people in society try to normalize their preferences for everyone else.

Environmentalists blocking traffic so that workers cannot get to their jobs is the rebel priest class in action. Anti-natalism dressed up as personal philosophy while the civilization that produced that ideology cannot replace itself is the rebel priest class in action. Polyamory preached as liberation by people who have never had to raise a child on a shift worker’s schedule is the rebel priest class in action.

The PMC is how you end up with a class of clueless specialists who reify the meritocracy. The rebel priest class is the part of that stratum that resents the populace to such a degree that its sacraments of the Liberal Rumspringa, if mainstreamed, would result in civilizational collapse. Is that worth hating? I’m not so sure, hate is a strong word after all. But as far as classes go, the priests who go their own way, who refuse their radical responsibility to the good of the whole, all while functioning as the shocktroops of capital’s culture of castration, are perhaps least deserving of our sympathies.

Iconic Predecessors

Søren Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841, even though he loved her. By all accounts, she loved him back. Yet he ended it, because he believed his calling required a sacrifice that marriage could not survive.

Kierkegaard spent the rest of his life writing about faith, irony, and the impossibility of authentic existence within the institutions of his time. He never married. He never had children. He died at forty-two, collapsed on a street in Copenhagen, estranged from his family and his church.

Friedrich Nietzsche proposed to Lou Salomé in 1882. She said no. He never proposed to anyone again. He spent the next six years writing the most explosive body of philosophy in modern history, and then he also collapsed on the street, after which he was never again himself. Nietzsche spent the final eleven years of his life in the care of his mother and then his sister, unable to feed or dress himself. He never married. He never had children. He died at fifty-five.

Though many who attempt to fill the burgeoning ranks of the modern rebel priest class have never heard of Kierkegaard or Nietzsche (they’re increasingly unrooted and illiterate), I take these two philosophers to be the exemplars who have most shaped both Christian and atheistic modernity for individuals who put their personal opinions before responsibility to others.

They were two of the most brilliant minds of the 19th century. Both childless. Both radical individuals. Both ended in isolation. One was a Knight of Faith whose theology was too good for any actually existing church, whereas the other was a prophet of a new mankind that has only ever arrived as tragedy or farce. Both, in a sense that matters for everything that follows, were essentially protestant.

I don’t mean Lutheran or Calvinist. I mean protestant in the sense that Durkheim identified in Suicide: the product of a culture that prizes individual opinion formation, personal conscience, and doubt over communal belonging and inherited authority. The protestant subject is the one who must work out his own salvation, his own meaning, his own relationship to truth, without the scaffolding of an institution to whose authority he is willing to submit. This is the modern individual in its purest form. It is also, as Durkheim showed, the form most susceptible to isolation, despair, and self-destruction.1

So, even though they would have never signed off on what they inspired, I take Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as the archetypical symptoms of what I am calling the rebellious priest class.2 Not because they were bad men or because their work was without value. They are two of my favorite philosophers and I think theorists who try to bypass them are wasting their time trying to understand the world. However, they indisputably embodied a new kind of figure: the priest who goes his own way. The path they carved, which was extraordinary and unrepeatable in their own lives, became over the next century and a half the default aspiration of an entire class of people who put their own freedom of opinion before the calling to care for, tend to, and uplift the lives of the masses.

Zooming Out and Brushing Broadly

This account will be deliberately overly simplistic. The goal is to paint a pattern you can see through, so that once the image is burned in you cannot stop noticing its trace.

In every human society that has ever existed, there are people who are gifted in the ability to shepherd souls. They go by many names across many times and places: elders, shamans, monks, priests, rabbis, advisors, intellectuals. They are the people who mediate between a community and its highest commitments, between the living and the dead, between what a society is and what it ought to be. In the smallest society, this might be a few elders. In a civilization, it becomes a class — or “the first estate” in the old sense.

I use the word “civilization” to mean a certain level of complexity in human relations where many societies coexist within, between, and because of the more complex division of labor that makes such coexistence possible. Civilizations lose the immediate trust of small tribes as they grow in scale.

The trust that holds a civilization together is abstract: no longer based in knowing everyone personally, but in institutions, laws, rituals, and norms that bind strangers to each other across distances and generations. The priest class is the one called to maintain those norms while mediating between the common mass and the rulers. Its function, then, is to tend to and care for souls uplifted to and measured against pro-civilizational standards that allow trust to operate at scale. This requires holding itself, power, and the mass accountable in reference to standards that transcend the immediate pressure of social necessity or nature.

When the priest class performs its job well, power has a check, the people are shepherded, and civilization holds. When it does this job badly, trust erodes, relationships sour, and raw power is free to exploit and abuse without conscience or repercussions. When the priesthood, as a class, refuses its radical responsibility entirely and begins actively working against the pro-civilizational norms it was charged to maintain, you get what we have now.

The priest class takes on as many forms and appearances as it does times and places. Any priest class can become corrupt in various ways. Ours, today, is more corrupt than most. I hope it’s obvious that I am not referring to literal Catholic priests or Jewish Rabbis. I am referring to the modern priest class, which is always also an oxymoron.

“Modern priest class” is a contradiction in terms because “modern” here refers to a certain kind of subject, an individual, considered equal and exchangeable to the rest. Priests are neither equal nor individuals, but rather serve a particular symbolic function that must be separate and apart from the other members within the given society. The priest class of every time serves its flock, congregation, parish, etc. — until modernity, at which point the mass got replaced by an aggregate of exchangable individuals.

From the Radical Responsibility of Mediation to Going Their Own Way

Priests went from mediating and representing to going their own way. It started with academic philosophers, paragons of truth and the good, modeling a viciously rational form-of-life supposed to be for all mankind. Immanuel Kant summed it up in his What is Enlightenment?: the idea being that each person would become responsible for his own immaturity, applying himself to learn and grow in understanding without recourse to authorities, tradition, or institutions.3

Yet then Kant became an authority, as has every great philosopher since. While the ideal of modernity was that we all become like Kant, its prevailing tendency was instead for people like Kant to assume everyone else would have to become like him. But unlike the rebel priesthood, Kant still believed in duty, moral law, and the categorical imperative that binds all rational beings. To his credit, his rebellion only extended to ecclesiastical authority, not against the idea that rules exist and apply to everyone. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche went further. They rebelled not just against the church but against the very idea that the exceptional individual owes anything to the rules that govern ordinary life.

The Last Responsible Priests

Weber, in “Science as a Vocation” (1917) and “Politics as a Vocation” (1919), tried to articulate what a responsible modern priesthood would look like. Assumign that God is dead, the enchanted world is gone and is not coming back, yet knowing science cannot tell us how to live, he concluded that the honest intellectual accepts this and equips people to make their own decisions without pretending to make those decisions for them. The political leader operates by an “ethic of responsibility” rather than an “ethic of ultimate ends,” weighing consequences rather than pursuing utopian visions regardless of cost.4

Weber himself was haunted by the suspicion that modernity would not produce people capable of living up to the ideals articulated in his vocation lectures. The closing pages of The Protestant Ethic are where that suspicion finds its most devastating expression:

“No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’”5

That is the prophecy of what the PMC would actually become once its modern liberal ideals were stripped away and only the institutional machinery remained.

Weber’s lofty vision was one on which all good progressives from the era agreed. W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Talented Tenth” essay is a beautiful articulation of a responsible academic calling for his race to do as all the other progressives coming out of Ivy Leagues at the time advocated: separate from the unwashed masses, get organized, come up with a plan, become the best possible, and then bring that back to the people.

Du Bois knew better than most the difficulty posed by anyone trying to actually achieve this vision. In The Souls of Black Folk, he tells the story of a man who comes back to uplift and organize his people, only to find that they no longer trust him.

When I first listened to Du Bois while stowing product in an Amazon delivery warehouse, the section that most stuck with me was his “Of the Coming of John.” As Du Bois tells it: John Jones was a young black man from a small Georgia town who left for college. He was the town’s great hope. He went north, got educated, and absorbed the progressive intellectual culture of his time. When he returned home to teach, the John who came back was not the John his people remembered. He had been formed by institutions that gave him knowledge but also what Bourdieu would call habitus: a way of carrying himself, a set of assumptions about what matters and how to talk about it that was legible to his professors but alien to his people. He tried to teach and his community resisted. The white power structure shut him down. The tragic story ended in violence and death.6

Du Bois knew that the Talented Tenth strategy contains a trap: the very process of becoming educated enough to lead your people can make you unrecognizable to them. The priest who leaves to be trained as a priest comes back speaking a language his congregation cannot understand.

What happened to Du Bois himself confirmed this. Norman Finkelstein documents the end of the story in I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It: when the U.S. government came after Du Bois, the Talented Tenth he had called into being abandoned him. Of the fifty presidents of Negro colleges, every one of which he had known and visited, only one publicly professed belief in his integrity before the trial. The responsible priest was betrayed by the very class he helped form.7

Du Bois himself eventually abandoned the Talented Tenth framework and moved toward what he called the “Guiding Hundredth,” insisting on group leadership rather than individual elitism. He saw the trap in his own model. The question of how to lead without alienating the people you serve remains unsolved.

From Responsible Priests to Rebel Priests

Du Bois and Weber were the last serious attempt. What came after was not a better version of their aspiration. It was an inversion of it.

Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment anticipated this logic decades before Nietzsche’s most radical works. Raskolnikov is a brilliant, impoverished former student who convinces himself that extraordinary individuals are exempt from ordinary morality. He murders an old pawnbroker to prove it. His theory was that some men are Napoleon, and Napoleon does not answer to the moral law of shopkeepers. Yet the reality of what Raskolnikov had done was something he could not live with. Crime and Punishment follows his disintegration. He eventually confesses and goes to prison in Siberia. There, an inmate barred in the frozen wastes, he begins to recover while reading scripture. He is saved not through philosophy but through love and submission to something larger than himself.

Nietzsche’s Übermensch is Raskolnikov’s theory without the novel’s corrective. Dostoevsky saw where this was going before Nietzsche got there. The credentialed intellectual who believes his sophistication exempts him from the rules binding ordinary communities together is Raskolnikov seeking a tenure-track (or lucrative influencer) position. Raskolnikov at least cracked under the weight of what he had done. The modern rebel priest is insulated from that reckoning, because his ideas don’t immediately result in death and misery before his eyes. For me, as someone seduced by both the rebel priest class and the culture of castration it administers, it took the natality pill to realize how antithetical to everything good and just my own assumptions had become.8

The PMC cultivated within the structures established by progressive managerialism at the beginning of the 20th century laid the foundation for a universal meritocracy, where the deservingness to lead, represent, and influence is based in how well one did vis-a-vis one’s “peers.”

The school peer group, in this context, is one that has been age-segregated into artificial peer groups abstracted from real communities, intergenerationality, practical life, and also a genuine relation to the liberal arts fields as a way of life. Instead of the arts or a life of practice, students stand out on the basis of how well they pay attention, sit still, memorize, and flatter their teachers, or they find some other way to become distinct.

Middle school onwards becomes an increasingly savage competition to make for oneself an identity. The priest class were often made up of those people who have special qualities, who were, with proper formation within legitimating institutions, looked up to despite their inability to fight or rule; they were looked up to despite their inability to fit the standard cookie cutter path for starting a family. In PMC schooling, such people find themselves competing against frat boys and sorority girls, the people who would have, historically, never been in the ranks of the priesthood.

The incentives to go one’s own way only increase with time as progressive reforms change the nature of this class. Instead of being looked up to by the rank and file citizenry, those who would have been spiritual or intellectual leaders find themselves looked down upon, because universal education has made everyone think he is the priest, mediator, representative, judge.

Everyone has access to the same education, everyone knows how to read, and so everyone thinks he or she knows what goes into the life of the mind and the work of the spirit. Of course this is not true, and every special kind of person who would have been in the ranks of priests or advisors in past societies, now finds the role of leader called for by Du Bois or Weber an implausible path forward.

Dark Apostles of Modernity

The tendency for the rebel priest to get narcissistically taken with his own reflection, mediating his own life instead of that of a community, becomes an increasingly greater temptation the further along the forces of capitalism develop.

The rebel priest is, much like Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, a radical modern liberal subject. Owing nothing to nobody, thinking on behalf of the enlightened few who “get it,” there is no serious thought given to the rules that could actually scale to, and function well at, the civilizational level. Instead, the rebel priest has formed against the mainstream, resents the masses, thinks that everyone would have to become like him, or else deserves whatever comes their way.

Like monks, nuns, and priests across time, the priest is an odd exception to the general human condition, finding fulfillment in abstractions and their contemplation rather than in the raising of a family. Throughout all time, such exceptional individuals respected the general rules, the family and community structures that serve to make life a little easier for those who raise families. The priest is supposed to be the one whose family is the spiritual morale of the community, so that the families of the community can grow in health.

Instead, what we have today is a rebel priest class who has taken its exceptional status as the path for all mankind, foregoing marriage and children to pursue a calling. Except now that calling is dictated by capital, the state, and the institutions that serve both capital and state interests. This means turning every individual into a self-optimizing reserve of labor power in pursuit of commodity consumption, i.e. the wil-to-pleasure.

Rob Henderson calls these luxury beliefs: ideas and values that confer status on the affluent while imposing costs on those further down the class ladder.9 The rebel priest class generates luxury beliefs and the working class absorbs them. Anti-natalism is the clearest case. An intellectual bohemian adopts anti-natalism as a way of pushing back against the priority of family, the constraints of tradition, or the right-wing appropriation of these things. The position is usually expressed as merely personal, not meant for everyone. But that personal position is a representation of an intellectual and creative class whose way of life, even when genuinely earned through spiritual or artistic calling, gets dressed in the language of the Liberal Rumspringa, which has no ceremony of return. It sets ordinary people up for failure. The bohemian who chose childlessness for real reasons and the twenty-four-year-old barista who absorbed it through Instagram are not living the same life. One made a sacrifice. The other was sold a counterfeit of that sacrifice and told it was freedom.

In The Natality Pill, I wrote that the Liberal Rumspringa expects you to “never go back except as a dark apostle of capital; instead of converting souls for a heavenly kingdom, you are to convict faith in institutions.” This is what the rebel priest class does. It occupies every position of cultural authority: the professor, the therapist, the journalist, the HR department, the public school teacher with the robot baby. It administers the Liberal Rumspringa. Not by conscious conspiracy, but by doing what its training and incentives and institutional position have prepared it to do: professionalize everything, pathologize tradition, treat the family as an obstacle to individual optimization.

The old priest initiated people into an intergenerational community. The rebel priest initiates people out of one. The old priest’s celibacy was a sacrifice made in service to the community’s families. The rebel priest’s childlessness is universalized as the rational, sophisticated, liberated choice for everyone. The old priest taught that the rules binding ordinary life were sacred. The rebel priest teaches that those rules are oppressive, outdated, and beneath anyone who has truly thought for himself.

The PMC is the class formation. The rebel priest class is what that class formation does to culture. Capital needs atomized, childless, flexible labor units. The rebel priest class translates that need into values, attitudes, and aspirations that people adopt as their own. That is how the institutional logic described in “Castration Culture” reproduces itself.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche Didn’t Want This

Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche wanted their path universalized. Kierkegaard wrote explicitly that the Knight of Faith was an exception, not a model. His entire philosophy depends on the distinction between the ethical (the universal, the communal, the rules that bind everyone) and the religious (the singular, the exceptional, the leap that only the individual can make). He sacrificed Regine because he believed his particular calling demanded it, not because he thought nobody should marry. The whole point of Fear and Trembling is that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is terrifying precisely because it violates the universal ethical order. It is not a recommendation. It is an abyss.

Nietzsche, for his part, never stopped writing about breeding, vitality, and the future of the species. His contempt was for the “last man,” the comfortable consumer who wants nothing, risks nothing, and blinks. The Übermensch was supposed to be a creator, not a consumer. Whatever else Nietzsche got wrong, he would have been horrified by a civilization of people optimizing their sexual capital on dating apps while refusing to reproduce. That is the last man, not the Übermensch.

Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Du Bois, Weber: each of them saw more clearly than the class that claims them, and the followers took the most convenient reading and discarded the rest.

This has led to what I have been calling castration culture. Not a population decline argument, though the decline is real enough. Castration culture is both figurative and literal, and it operates at every level of human life: the individual who gets a vasectomy at twenty-three, the mother who was never taught to breastfeed, the community that replaced its elders with institutions, the nation whose education policy produces compliant labor instead of competent parents, the civilization that persuades its own working class not to reproduce and then imports a more exploitable workforce to replace them. As I wrote in the previous piece in this series: ‘What kind of civilization designs a program to simulate its own reproduction as a nightmare and then deploys it across the majority of its schools?’ It is castration culture all the way down, all the way up, and all the way across.

The point is not the gene seed. I am not a pro-natalist in the Silicon Valley sense, counting births and screening embryos. The point is the formation. What kind of people are we producing, and what kind of people are we failing to produce? A culture that neuters its boys and girls, that structurally undermines the conditions for long-term commitment, that forecloses the possibility of binding yourself to something that will outlast you, is a culture that has cut itself off from the only source of genuine renewal available to a civilization. Children are not an exceptional lifestyle choice. They are how the world gets renewed; they are the demand that breaks you open, that forces you to become someone who exists for something beyond yourself. A culture that structurally forecloses that possibility has not just failed its children. It has sealed itself shut.10

Once that realization lands, it’s impossible to see this as anything other than a system that churns out entire generations that are, in general, not thinking seriously about or preparing to start families, much less take radical responsibility for their formation. Now the normies are trying to be bohemian radicals, and it has become normal to scorn the idea of children. Yet when I think of Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, I don’t think of happy men. I think of childless individualists who died in sad isolation and, in Nietzsche’s case, the very dependency that he had bracketed out from his theory of life. What worries me is that this is becoming the path for more and more people.

Kierkegaard at least had a theology that made his sacrifice plausible given the times. Nietzsche at least had a vision of human greatness that, however flawed, pointed beyond comfort. The rebel priest class of today has neither. It has credentials, student debt, an Apple TV subscription, and the vague sense that it is too smart for the life its grandparents lived. It has traded the old priest’s sacrifice for the consumer subject’s convenience and called it liberation.

So what do we do about this? Not at the level of individual choice. Not “just have kids.” What must be done at the level of culture, desire, and political demand? If the rebel priest class has successfully reshaped what people want, then no policy can save us. You cannot legislate demand for something the culture has taught people not to want. The contestation of desire itself has to come first. This is why the next piece in this series is called No War but Culture War. Against Lacanian, Deleuzean, and Marxist tendencies in the world of theory today, I will share the most neglected yet incredible contribution from Heidegger’s Being and Time that helps us understand the gerrymandering of dispositions and what this, in turn, shows us about what must be done.

This piece and the ones before it are chapters in two books I am currently writing. The first is Castration Culture. The second, co-authored with , is Post-Left Theory. In both, the argument goes further than anything I can develop in a Substack post. The current chapter goes on to develop a critique of the revolutionary subject as it has existed for both the Old and New Left, proposes the subject I take to be most serious and worth our time going forward, and addresses why the most visible reaction against the rebel priest class, the trad Orthodox turn that I’ve become sympathetic to yet am certainly not myself a part, inverts the problem without solving it. If you want the full argument, those books are where it will live.

In the meantime, the next piece in this series addresses the relationship between ideology, desire, and political change. If nobody wants what we are losing, then we have already lost it. The question is whether the wanting can be contested and the answer is one that refutes the old class reductionist cry for “no war but class war.” If you want to see that you better subscribe.

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Thanks for reading.

This is part of the Castration Culture series. Part 1: The Natality Pill. Part 2: Castration Culture. Part 3: Why I Am Not Anti-PMC, as well as The Breakup Liturgy and Relationships Aren’t Colonized Enough, Actually part 1 and part 2.

If you want to attend an IRL event where we will be talking more about Castration Culture and Post-Left Theory, then check out TUCON26 and consider attending this August 27-29.

If you want to support this work and get special access to behind-the-scenes seminars that are the source of the theory, then consider becoming a member at theoryunderground.com/subscribe. If you want a sneak peak at the kind of stuff going on there, reach out direct via the direct messaging function here and ask. I’m happy to share a couple of recent sessions of the seminars and courses so you can get a sense for what it’s like.

2

, "Did Populism Start A 21st Century Anti-Clerical Revolution?" (Substack, 2021) was formative for my thinking here. Nagle uses the term "clerisy" to describe the secular moral teaching class that accrues power through producing and maintaining ideology, and frames populism as an anti-clerical movement against that class. My concept of the rebel priest class is indebted to her analysis while situating the priestly function within the material context of the PMC as described in the previous piece, and extends it into the phenomenological territory of desire, habitus, and the inversion of civilizational rules that Nagle's political-economic frame does not address. See also her "First As Tragedy, Then As Farce."

Angela Nagle's Newsletter

Did Populism Start A 21st Century Anti-Clerical Revolution?

I had often read the term clerisy used in today’s context to describe the NGO-media-academic-professional activist class, and thought of it mainly as a propaganda term. Now that the dust has settled…

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5 years ago · 125 likes · 24 comments · Angela Nagle

In part one, I introduced “the poly canon” (the cluster of books that start with and follow from The Ethical Slut) and I critique it with my concept of “timenergy” (which, in short, signifies large and reliably repeatable blocks of time-with-energy). I showed how this precious resource, timenergy, made scarce by the culture of capital’s reduction of our life’s purpose to labor power, is further jeopardized by polyamory as a lifestyle ideal. I introduced the virtuous circle between solitude (genuine being-with-oneself) and solicitude (genuine being-with-others), which is already a hard-won achievement in our busy lives. How much more difficult is it to achieve when we are in a committed loving relationship? Love introduces a new dimension of solitude (genuine being-with-one’s-significant-other) and solicitude (genuine socializing-with-one’s-significant-other). Polyamory not only undermines all of this, it also feeds off of the breakdown of the virtuous circle that is best understood through Heidegger’s vicious cycle of falling: ambiguous and non-commitally curious (therapeutic) idle chatter.1

That should be enough of a recap for you to continue on, but if you want to read Relationships Aren’t Colonized Enough, Actually pt. 1. it’s here:

Poly as the Logical Fulfillment of Big Romance

When the poly advocates point to the failures of monogamy, the high divorce rate, the serial relationships, the disillusionment, they are not wrong about the symptoms. But they are wrong about the diagnosis. What they are reacting against is not monogamy. It is what calls “Big Romance”: the modern model of partnership organized entirely around individualistic happiness, mutual fulfillment, and big feelings of love.2 Big Romance tells you that the purpose of a relationship is to make you happy. When it stops making you happy, it has failed. When the passion fades, when the reality of living with another human being reveals itself to be difficult and grinding and repetitive, the relationship has served its purpose and you are free to move on.

Just think of Ted Lasso’s wife in the popular Apple TV show Ted Lasso: the whole reason she keeps crying to him on the phone is that she doesn’t feel the same about him as she did in the beginning of the relationship, she’s just lost that special feeling for him.3 She “fell” out of love, and, good liberal progressive kind of guy that Lasso is, he just politely ushers himself out of her life by listening nicely and encouraging her to be true to herself, even though it’s obviously wrecking him — and more importantly, what about their son? As Them Before Us makes clear, one of the biggest issues with modern liberalism is how much it places parental rights and their will-to-pleasure ahead of what’s most important for the children.4

Serial monogamy is not the failure of monogamy per se. Rather, it is the necessary extension of Big Romance. Polyamory, or what they call “ethical non-monogamy,” is not the critique of Big Romance, but is simply its logical fulfillment. In a sense, we could just say that poly is serial-monogamy-maxxing. If one partner can’t make you happy, maybe three will. If exclusivity limits your fulfillment, remove exclusivity. If commitment forecloses possibility, keep all possibilities open forever. The poly framework is Big Romance with the last constraint removed.

As with all ideologies, we have to ask for whom is it most convenient. The answer here is cowards and sociopaths. Poly is convenient for people who do not have the courage to break up because that at least requires difficult decisions and even harder conversations. Just never break up and insist the other is being selfish if he or she is not ok with you being with others. It’s even more convenient for sociopaths and the one dimensional personalities who go along with them, but we’ll come back to that.

Lasch’s Professional in Your Bedroom

Decades before any of these poly books were written, Christopher Lasch wrote in Haven in a Heartless World (1977) that as social science “experts” intruded more into family life, the family’s vital role as a moral and social cornerstone disintegrated. The helping professions, in the guise of a “nurturing mother,” invaded the family, took over its functions, and undermined its capacity to provide for itself, thereby justifying the continuing expansion of the very services that had weakened it. “Public concern for the plight of the family,” Lasch wrote, “has commonly masked efforts to subject the family to new forms of outside influence.”5

The poly canon completes this invasion. What Lasch saw the helping professions doing to the family from the outside, the poly framework does from the inside. It replaces the family’s internal logic, i.e. commitment, sacrifice, hierarchy of obligations, deference to something larger than individual happiness, with the logic of the therapeutic marketplace, i.e. processing, negotiation, optimization, the primacy of individual fulfillment.

The Decolonizing Love account’s Relationship Agreement Generator is just the latest instrument of this invasion. The coaching session is the helping professional seated in your bedroom. The Jealousy Workbook is the social science expert telling you that your feelings about your own marriage are symptoms to be processed rather than signals to be heeded. They’ve essentially turned cuckoldry into a commodity, and if you care too much about appeasing their big (Left) Other, you just might be their target demographic.

The Natality Pill

The Natality Pill rearranges all of this. I wrote about the moment it hit me: the deep urge to start a family that nobody warned me was coming for me too.6 This deep urge is something people commonly say will hit most women as they approach their thirties. I had no idea it was also coming for me, a man. Nothing prepared me for the natality pill, which led to serious complications.

The natality pill made me realize that Big Romance, and the life I had built in its pursuit, is shallow. Of course happiness matters, but there is something more important than individual happiness. Sex is not the main point of an intimate relationship. The child is. Figurative or literal, it’s that nurturant self-sacrifice of the self-othering totality-rupturing future that you can only build with a spouse.

I asked earlier, What about the Lassos' son? The show never answers, because Big Romance has no answer. It has a vocabulary for how the adults feel and nothing at all for what the boy is owed. So their kid, Henry, becomes some aside in the plot rather than the priority around whom the plot would actually pivot. He is just prop for the egos of the adults, someone whom they relate to but never to such an extent that it would change their behavior in any substantial way. The idea of sacrificing for Henry cannot be taken seriously when sacrificing for the sake of Big Romance is the priority. What we see here is not a writing failure but the most transparent report of a framework in which the relationship exists to make the adults happy despite what is best for the child.

Natality, at the literal and not just figurative level, gets at the fact that we are called to love the child brought into existence through love. It’s the most amazing thing possible and capital’s culture of castration denigrates it while selling us the lie that we’ll never really want it anyway. Cultivating soil for intergenerationality is thus reduced to just one expensive consumer hobby choice among many others.

The figurative kind of natality that both Jennifer Banks and Hannah Arendt write about is based in the literal kind, but is the condition of spiritual fatherhood or motherhood, as well as our sense that the radically new can come from the seemingly self-same.7 Literal and figurative natality creates a rupture in being and turns upside down the horizon of the individual subject whose life is otherwise totalized by the will-to-pleasure. The emphasis of Big Romance on personal satisfaction and freedom, its false liberation that refuses anything that looks like binding oneself to others, is not necessarily against procreative natalism, but it is against natality in its much more noble sense that obligates oneself to self-sacrificing stewardship.

Real Needs

The poly advocates say they are just honest about how no one person can meet all your needs. But the “needs” they mean are sexual fantasies, not real needs. The real needs of life, care in illness, reliable partnership in child-rearing, someone who will be there when you’re old, someone who shows up when it’s not convenient, cannot be met by a polycule with a shared scheduling app to organize the lives of obsessive-compulsive negotiators.

Real needs don’t require you to have sex with the people who meet your more ordinary needs. You don’t have to sleep with your friends — in fact, you’re better off not doing so. Thank God we don’t have to sleep with our community. We need others, and they need us, in registers that have nothing to do with the erotic. What matters at the levels of family, friendship, and community are the networks of giving and receiving that make a life possible. Throwing sex into the mix obviously complicates things, which is part of why rich civic fabric forms only where there are hardcore parameters put around eros, in the defense of the kinds of relationships that can form in what I call “eros-free zones.”

If you want to know more about eros-free zones and why they’re essential for civilizations that help humans rise beyond the mud and living hand to mouth, and also beyond mere self-defense and conquest, but to actually empower humans to live lives of virtue, then you’ll want to subscribe because that chapter is coming later. You can also support this Castration Culture book project by pledging on the website, which is coming soon.

Thanks for reading part two of Relationships Aren’t Colonized Enough, Actually. Next I will take apart the move that makes the entire poly canon possible in the first place: the quiet redefinition of hierarchy as domination, structure as control, and any boundary you did not personally consent to as violence.

Notice what the protagonist of Ted Lasso is never once permitted to do: he cannot say stay. He cannot say you promised. He cannot say this is more important and I am not giving it up. In the moral universe of the show, a claim on another person is indistinguishable from the oppression of toxic masculinity. So Ted is performatively generous instead. This is how the culture of castration dresses up a man who has been neutered of his ability to bind himself.

The poly advocates' redefinition of binding and priority as oppression does almost all of the work. To this day, nobody has taken it head on. Doing so requires calling into question certain sacred idols of progressive left-coded spaces that are supposed to go unquestioned but that, if left unchecked, result in the kinds of confusion and harm perpetuated by the ideology of polyamory. If you want to read it, make sure to subscribe so it lands in your inbox.

Subscribe now

P.S. I don’t make more than coffee-funds from Substack subscriptions. Those are appreciated immensely. However, if you want to truly support this work and get involved at Theory Underground, I have two ongoing courses and a seminar you might be interested in: Intro to Theory, The Philosophy of Stewardship, and my personal seminar called the David McKerracher Seminar. These, as well as a back-catalog of past courses, are available to members at TU. Become a member here: https://theoryunderground.com/subscribe

Notes

has now published two obituaries on the “post-left” within a year’s time. The most recent installment was ’s “The Obsolescence of the Post-Left” a couple weeks ago.1 Its argument: the post-left was a Twitter reaction to the failure of Bernie’s Our Revolution, and its whole content was “PMC bad.” Now that the PMC critique is being weaponized by the right and the center against Mamdani, the thing has expired. Past its sell-by date. If you’re still doing it, you missed the memo.

Cool. If the post-left was just a social scene from the early 2020s, a bunch of internet commentary, in-group shibboleths, and calling people “PMC” while missing the point of the theory, then I agree that it outlived its moment. As I’ve always been clear, using PMC as a slur was wrong all along.

The problem is, that scene was never the “post-left” in the first place. It was one loud wagon caravan mistaking itself for the territory.

As I put it this week:

“If you have a frontier that opens up, and all these wagon caravans that are moving into it, and you have this one wagon caravan of these people who react all the time and they’re very loud on Twitter, then they think, at the end of their exploration, that was the whole thing. They did it. They were it. What they don’t realize is that there were other caravans. There were other lone travelers. There were and continue to be all kinds of people out here in the wild wild west of this post-left frontier. And they’re trying to say, oh, nope, it’s dead, it’s buried, it’s gone... And I’m saying, no, the frontier is wide open.”

Tony and I just recorded this episode for 1Dime Radio. It was an opportunity to respond to the Compact obituary, promote a special IRL event, and announce something that ties all of this together: we’ve written a book on this very theme, and it’s coming out this fall: Post-Left Theory.

Most of it is unpublished material from both of us that converges on one theme, in print and audiobook. In this episode we give many of the themes a gloss: why the post-left is not an ideology, not a brand, not a political program, and why nobody who uses the term as a slur can define it.

We’re not just talking about being put out by the left, we’re talking about no longer being able to affirm the framework that the term champions in the first place. We’re not doing a “lefter than thou” socialite posture to put pressure on liberals or leftists, and we’re certainly not trying to resuscitate an Old Left.

“Remember why most people don’t take communism seriously, and the whole meme about ‘that wasn’t real communism’? Well, that applies here, too. What about actually existing leftism?... Where is this real Marxism? Where is the old left? What does that even mean, to be an old leftist today? That sounds pretty fucking conservative, if you ask me.” — Tony Chamas

My answer to the “that’s not left though” crowd is that they are appealing to an institution that no longer exists. The Second Workers International is gone. The material conditions that produced it are also gone, and by being gone, they render the whole Old Left ideal impossible. Reading books from 120 years ago does not give you the authority to speak on behalf of a dead church — all it does is cloud your perception of what’s going on now. It’s a weird kind of academic nostalgia, and using its own precious term, it is pure reaction.

Which is why the last stretch of the conversation goes where I think post-left theory has to go: through Marx, Heidegger, Bourdieu, Lacan, and Baudrillard, and beyond them by way of Lasch, Chesterton, MacIntyre, Illich, Postman, and Wendell Berry. We’re pushing it on towards the third term that both the nation-state worshipers and the family-values crowd are missing:

“No political big Other is going to come in and save you and give you community. Nothing that you vote for, and no party that could possibly ever do anything against capital or the machine, can give you community. Because community is made up of those relations of giving and receiving and dependency that necessarily cannot be mediated by some abstract institution without a face, or without an actual pulse... It has to be wrested from the jaws of capital by you, in your idiosyncratic and singular humanity.” — David McKerracher

The elephant in the room of “okay, if not left, why not right?” gets addressed in the Backroom on Tony’s Patreon. My short answer is: that’s just the other side of the duopoly. The duopoly runs on each supposedly mutually exclusive side being in total dependency on its other being its worst version of itself. Both sides get off on egging the other to be worse. Neither side has ever laid out a plausible path beyond the impasses of our moment. No political side, movement, party, or plan that we have encountered can hold water, much less hold together a legitimate mass in these times of fracture.

If you want to hear us go in depth into this book and get your hands on some early copies, come to TUCON at , August 27-29. will be there presenting on his new book coming out this year from TU Publishing: Dreaming Wide Awake: Christianity, Buddhism, Psychoanalysis.

There will be live podcasts, the official launch of with early collectible cards, and presentations from fellow travelers. It’s all happening on a certified organic regenerative family farm in the woods. Camping is booked out, but the lodges and Airbnbs nearby are not. Tickets at canontcg.com/canonfest.

Thanks for reading.

1

Compact’s Substack

The Obsolescence of the Post-Left

During the plague years of 2020 and 2021, I was a participant in a sub-realm of Twitter, made up of a mix of “facephag” and anon accounts and spread out over any number of overlapping group chats, that came to be known as the “post-left.” Fellow veteran Oliver Bateman has…

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a month ago · 171 likes · 56 comments · Geoff Shullenberger

This is a part of the Castration Culture series. If you’re new here, that’s ok because each piece stands on its own. If you want, you can read the others here: The Natality Pill, Castration Culture, The Breakup Liturgy, and Relationships Aren’t Colonized Enough, Actually.

The Slur

“PMC” has, for some people, become a slur. Because of this, there are those who presume that I use it in that way. They are mistaken. I have never been anti-PMC. The term is only considered so spicy because of the way others use it, and such uses are generally employed without any real knowledge of why it matters in the first place.

What I do hate is the rebel priest class (RPC) which you can read about in the sequel to this piece.

The PMC, on the other hand, is simply a big reason old organizing theory and practice has become null and void.

“PMC” stands for “Professional Managerial Class.” This term helps us understand what became of modernity when its phase characterized by industrialization entered a new phase characterized by an anti-regular working class managerialism that institutionalized nearly every aspect of human life.

My decade spent studying in and organizing as a part of the “Left” opened my eyes to many things, chief among these being the existence and relevance of the PMC.

If you care about large-scale structural change that would free up energy and time for families, communities, and culture, then you need to understand how the existence of the PMC changed things forever when it comes to basic organizing for working class power. All of the weird stuff activists get into, the weird ways they talk, the super polarizing, exclusive, and niche issues they “center,” all of this is a feature of the PMC, not a bug. People who either went to college or who wanted to all sounding like therapeutic H.R. legal teams is merely the tip of this much greater iceberg.

My idea of class used to be the same old basic “there are those who own everything and then the rest of us, more or less the 99% who own nothing but our labor power that we sell to capitalists if we don’t want to be homeless.” The PMC thesis complicated that for me and, slowly but surely, changed how I view everything. I have to add that the change it had on me was true despite the fact that its popular employment by podcasts like Red Scare or What’s Left (Aimee back in the day, not the new one) is counter-productive and confusing.

In an attempt to make clear the difference between a theoretically rigorous and principled employment of the term, I launched a public and free lecture series taught by myself and Elton L.K. on January 11th of 2023.

The title of that course was PMC Consciousness & Ideology.1 None of the people who should have watched it did so, but a lot of people who were averse to using the term (including many of the writers and speakers associated with Sublation Media, Platypus Affiliated Society, and Compact) have since accepted “PMC” into their lexicons — while at the same time tending to miss the point.

Those who adopt the term frequently misuse and abuse it by lumping “PMC” together with the term “petty bourgeoisie.” This only compounds the confusion, because the petty bourgeoisie signifies a totally different, though often overlapping, class formation.

The petty bourgeoisie is made up of small businessmen, who either were wage-earners who saved up enough to then start a business or, in many cases, are indebted to banks or larger investors. Small businesses matter (in fact, they are one of the few remaining good things left in America), but they are not in the same position within the relations of production as credentialed professionals.

Such college-educated specialists work for massive institutions. They are the products of both state and corporate funding to research and develop technology and functionaries that are then used to make corporate or state power more competitive.

The small business (or ppetty bourgeois) interests rarely align with big corporate interests, but thanks to the Republican party for the last forty years, both the American left and right assume that those interests do, in fact, match up. PMC intellectuals who lump the PMC together with the petty bourgeoisie may as well be saying that my dad, who used his saved wages to start his own one-man appliance repair service operation, is in the same class as a tenured professor at Yale, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, or a lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Of course, the PMC is a broad grouping that includes a lot of middle and lower-middle class people who will never see the inside of such elite institutions. It includes nurses and teachers.2 This is beside the point.

Where people go wrong with the PMC discourse is in making it about privilege and identity, basically a workerist identity politics. What actually matters is 1. what the change in class composition did to undermine older theories of social change, and 2. habitus formation, i.e. the cultivation of assumptions, attitudes, and a certain way of projecting oneself forward upon an institutionally captured horizon of possibilities.

In the latter sense, what I am getting at is that the mode-of-life unique to the PMC functions as a serious blockage to understanding or being understandable by the working class. This is why most issues “centered” by the PMC feel removed, or even opposed to, the concerns of regular working people.

Suffice it to say that there’s been a lot of confusion by people who assume they understand how I use the term “PMC.” It does not help that many second generation political theory educators who were against its usage have since adopted it. In doing so, they only confuse things more.

People hear go off on the PMC in her polemic Virtue Hoarders or related podcast appearances, such as her repeat appearances on ’s Doomscroll, and then they assume that we agree and are, in some way, cut from the same cloth.3 Not only are we cut from very different (class) cloth, but we also do not agree on either the diagnosis, solution, or strategies for achieving social change. Liu is a renegade PMC doing important work in an attempt to speak truth to power and reform the Left of which she considers herself to be a part. I say more power to her, and you should definitely read her — with that said, I am not interested in reforming the Left, nor do I think the PMC term is most meaningful when used as a slur.4

As much as I enjoyed Virtue Hoarders and have gleaned some important insights from Liu, I go a different direction with all of this, one that is more theoretical than polemical while simultaneously being informed by my working class experiences, commitments, and mode-of-life. There’s a kind of anti-PMC spirit that really just hates intellectual things and, with it, theory, and those people are just never going to get it — they probably won’t even make it to the end of this piece. They think they’ve already got everything figured out and that theory is not needed.

People who don’t read me, who are allergic to the usage of “PMC” or who use it in the dumb way will assume that I am “anti-PMC.” This has served as a reminder that I should clarify my position. I can’t expect everyone to have read my piece from 2023 called “Lefter Than Thou” in Underground Theory Volume I.5 I have the choice to either stop using “PMC,” or to correct the misperception. I’m going with the latter.

Let’s take a moment here to lay out what’s really going on with the PMC.

Why It Matters

The idea is that in the olden days of early industrial capitalism it seemed likely that the two new classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, were going to replace all of the other classes. Eventually the majority of the peasants, monarchs, aristocrats, the middle class, and the priest class, would get “proletarianized.”

They believed that once basically everybody was de-classed, then class war would become simply a matter of the few wealthy and incompetent factory owners vs. the overwhelming industrial proletarian majority. Then, since the proletariat had its hands on the levers of power and was already so well disciplined, it would go beyond mere trade unionism and, through socialist organizing, force capitalism to birth a communist society, i.e. one wherein no classes exist and everybody who is able to help can get everybody whatever they need to survive and thrive.

In the times of Charles Dickens we can see where Marx and Engels were coming from in their Manifesto of the Communist Party. Putting my biases out on the table: I’m sympathetic when it comes to 18th and 19th century leftism, but here, from the privileged heights of hindsight and the fresh air of the pine forests of North Idaho, I can say that I am significantly less sympathetic when it comes to the 20th Century Left, both Old and New. “Less” does not mean “not at all,” but my 20th Century sympathies are always for tragic figures torn between bad and evil, where “evil” was, much like it has become today, defined more by one’s fundamental disposition, position, and usually a lot of ignorance and bad information (more on that later).

By the time Lenin was trying to force the revolution in Russia to birth a proletariat, it was because he, like Stalin after him, believed that Marx had cracked the secret code of history: the revolution to end all wars must come from an industrial proletariat. Because that revolution wouldn’t come from the “comfortable” proletariat of the more developed world, he concluded (conveniently) that it would only spark from an anti-imperialist under-developed country like Russia. Since Russia lacked a proletariat at the time, the Bolshevik solution was to force one into existence.

Lenin’s attempt to do so required using terror and torture in an attempt to forever destroy long-standing traditions, superstitions, and other more primordial relations tied to family and place. I get that Russia was torn by war and an oppressive regime, which is why I said 20th century figures are always tragic, choosing bad vs. evil. The problem with “necessary evil” was that it created and justified the counter-revolution — which helped birth the final boss of the workers’ movement: the PMC.

Counter-Revolution Birthed the PMC

To reiterate, the 19th Century idea was of two new classes becoming dominant, the proletarian one being much more well-organized, large, and powerful vs. the bourgeois one becoming smaller and having nothing going for it but its ownership of capital. But working class struggles developed their own contradictions, and the ruling class responded in ways unforeseen by 19th Century revolutionaries.

Chief among these changes was the parallel rise of managerialism with a new political movement called progressivism.

Progressivism was embodied in Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Though from different parties and bitter rivals, both were aligned on reforms that co-opted radical energy by easing worker grievances (e.g., child labor bans, compensation laws) without yielding to socialist demands like public ownership. This weakened movements like the Socialist Party, whose support waned as those progressive gains came in.

Word on the street is that Roosevelt was more charismatic and interventionist in labor disputes, while Wilson was more repressive and idealistic. But despite their differences, both opposed European revolutions spilling into the U.S., and sought to preserve elite power by fragmenting class unity.

Notably, Woodrow Wilson sent U.S. troops to aid the allies against the Soviets in 1918. Progressives were not sleeping on working class unrest but were, in their entire approach, aiming to appease, co-opt, or crush grassroots organizing. In essence, the indirect collaboration of Roosevelt and Wilson turned reforms into a counter-revolutionary safety valve that forever changed the way the two parties operated.

Managerialism was the other major 20th Century current that. combined with progressivism, came through intellectuals like Frederick Winslow Taylor (Principles of Scientific Management), W.E.B. Du Bois (“Talented Tenth”), and Edward Bernays (Propaganda). I don’t see them as the founders or creators or conspirators, the point is that they were the most successful versions of the emerging tendency. Reading them is reading the self-narration of a class selling itself to power as a final solution to the Worker Question.

Managerialism emerged as a parallel anti-worker strategy, designed to neutralize revolutionary potential by deskilling and displacing the advanced, skilled workers most capable of organizing strikes and leading class struggles.

The height of working class power in the days of industrialization was achieved, in large part, because advanced workers knew how to do everything and had built trust relationships with everyone else in the factory. Advanced workers were a force to be reckoned with. Progressive managerialism replaced them with college kids and left the regular rank and file workers with no real horizon for meaningful competence or advancement. The explicit goal of modern education, as articulated by Woodrow Wilson in 1909:

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”6

When you think of “professionalization” you should think of Taylorism, i.e. Taylor’s Scientific Management that broke complex jobs into simple, repetitive tasks under strict managerial oversight.7 Taylorism rendered workers interchangeable and reduced their bargaining power, explicitly to curb deliberate slowdowns and union influence.

In the “Talented Tenth” Du Bois proposed the formation of an educated racial elite to lead and uplift the black masses through higher education and professional roles. In practice, this fostered a managerial layer that could co-opt radical demands under the banner of racial uplift. Enlightened leadership got prioritized over mass worker empowerment. The cooperation seen at the end of the previous century was consequently sidelined as the racial divides both parties had used to undermine those movements became the main issue of the century.

Bernays, the “father of public relations,” openly marketed himself as developing a science of propaganda to manipulate public opinion and herd instincts. Propaganda was developed as a science used to, in part, undermine labor movements by framing unions as threats, or engineering consent for corporate interests.

Taylor, Du Bois, and Bernays were not a part of a conspiracy or team, nor were they operating alone; they were early members of the new 20th Century PMC, a class whose role and function was to divest from advanced workers the skills that would be hoarded via formal education. If you read their works, they are not writing to the public, but to their class peers or the bosses of capital like the Rockefellers and Carnegies. They sold themselves to capital as the solution to the labor problem.

Professionalization combined with progressive reforms created a buffer class of managers and leaders that displaced skilled worker-leaders, atomized the proletariat, and integrated potential revolutionaries into the system, ensuring capitalism's stability as class tensions rose.

However, a couple of presidents and some intelligent writers do not a new class formation make. The managerial-progressive nexus is a direct response to the Reconstruction Era populist unrest where black sharecroppers, white miners, and factory workers across the U.S. said “neither left nor right” by rejecting the Republican and Democratic parties. Without that unrest, the presidents and authors of progressive-managerialism would not have received the financial support they did from the billionaires of their time.

This unrest took several forms. The Readjuster Party in Virginia (1879-1885) united black and white workers to challenge debt peonage and elite control. The Farmers' Alliance and Colored Farmers' Alliance in the South and Midwest (1880s-1890s) saw millions of black sharecroppers and white tenant farmers organize against monopolistic railroads and banks. The Knights of Labor put on massive interracial organizing drives, peaking with the 1886 Great Southwest Railroad Strike. The Populist Party's 1892 Omaha Platform fused labor and agrarian radicals in a third-party challenge.

These movements terrified emerging elites by threatening to dissolve racial divides that propped up exploitation, prompting violent suppression (e.g., the 1898 Wilmington Massacre targeting biracial fusion governments) and the strategic pivot to managerialism and progressivism to rechannel dissent into controlled reforms.

My two favorite reading recommendations on this shadow-banned yet absolutely essential moment of American history are in Judith Stein’s “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others: The Political Economy of Racism in the United States”8 and Thomas Frank’s The People, No.9

Follow the Money: Carnegie and Rockefeller Influence in American Public Education

Carnegie violently crushed unions, most notoriously in the 1892 Homestead Strike. Then he turned around and donated over $350 million (equivalent to billions today) to libraries, universities, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The "scientific" education and efficiency models he promoted aligned with Taylorism, all of it suited to training a compliant workforce and managerial elite. Through it all, he opposed government intervention and union power.

Carnegie advocated “useful” (practical, vocational) knowledge over broader liberal education, which he saw as potentially harmful by instilling “false ideas” and a “distaste for practical life.” He said, “If you want to make labor what it should be, educate yourself in useful knowledge.”10

The Rockefellers had a huge role to play. John D. Rockefeller Jr. was notorious for the 1914 Ludlow Massacre that killed striking miners and their families. But on the less flashy though even more powerful side, his father had established the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913 with $100 million to start. It funded public health, education (via the General Education Board), and "industrial relations" programs. Those programs pushed company unions and employee representation plans designed to preempt genuine organizing.

When we think of the PMC, we’re not just talking about a “class” or a social group, we are talking about the institutional-matrix that arose in the 20th Century. It was a massive project funded by billions spent by Rockefeller and Carnegie, to get presidents like Roosevelt and Wilson to put their vision for public education into action. The Rockefeller General Education Board put the vision of this progressive managerialist schooling system best:

“In our dreams... people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops, and on the farm.”11

This vision for public education is what birthed modern schooling as we know it. The model where children are not truly taught to think within the fields of the liberal arts, but are instead measured on how well they can sit still, pay attention, memorize, and regurgitate, is something that goes back to the progressive-managerial strategy to undermine working class agency.

The changes in the schooling system that have made it less disciplinary and hierarchical are not better and are, in some ways, worse — but whether your schooling was the more authoritarian or permissive version, it ultimately boils down to socialization into a particular kind of meritocracy that separates the deserving from the undeserving on the basis of, basically, how well one attends meetings. In this sense the term “professional” has more to do with showing up, paying attention, and playing along than it does with the actual kinds of competence demanded by almost any practical or theoretical endeavor.

Why the PMC Matters for Social Change in Particular

Universal education was always a working class demand. What are we to make of the fact that this “demand” was met by some of the greatest enemies to the working class?

First of all, we have to accept the fact that they won. The existence of a distinct new mediator class between the regular workers and the owners of capital is the story of the 20th Century. Mission accomplished.

Taking the PMC-pill means giving up on old Marxist or Leninist solutions of self-organizing proletarian masses or small cadres of professional revolutionaries somehow harnessing the power of the state to lead to a higher stage. This does not mean giving up on any or all large-scale structural change, it just means that we are foolish to act as though the 20th Century did not happen.

Some kind of new political formulation or strategy for taming the forces of both capital and the state might be possible, but any experiments in that direction will only prove a waste of time if the intellectuals, theorists, influencers, organizers, and leaders continuously fail to get the memo that the times have changed.

This means having a sober assessment of why mass movements and cadres are destined to fail. The advanced workers are gone and have been replaced by college-educated specialists presumed to know what must be done. They don’t, and even if they did, they wouldn’t know how to communicate it without alienating everyone.

There is a mode that is cooked up within PMC activist spaces that I think is self-defeating and harmful, but there is nothing wrong with belonging to the “Professional Managerial Class.”

PMC critique can indeed turn into a really superficial form of identity politics, but at its best it helps activists remember their position in the relations of production, the responsibility that comes with that, and more importantly, the differences between their common sense and the people they supposedly represent.

If the previous piece in this series, “Castration Culture,” showed what happens when this class formation is applied to motherhood and family life, this piece has tried to show where that class formation came from and why it exists. The de-skilling of advanced workers and the de-skilling of mothers are not two separate stories. They are the same institutional logic applied to different domains, bankrolled by the same foundations, built by the same class of professionals, and oriented toward the same outcome: a population dependent on credentialed expertise for things it used to know how to do for itself.

Though I am not “anti-PMC,” I most certainly find it aggravating when would-be PMCs act as though the PMC changed nothing and continue to get their marching orders from a bygone era (18th Century radical literature, for instance). It also sucks to see working class people internalize the PMC’s representational obsessions and self-congratulatory social change theories.

The PMC reproduces itself culturally through schooling and the medium. It functions as a kind of secular priesthood, except that where the old priesthood initiated people into an intergenerational community, this one tends to initiate people out of one. How that happened, and why almost every bohemian cultural vanguard of youth over the course of the last seventy years of counter-culture since the Beats has functioned as anti-family shock troops of capital, is the subject of the next piece in this series.

Thanks for reading.

This piece is a part of the Castration Culture series. Other parts you can go read: The Natality Pill, Castration Culture, The Breakup Liturgy, and Relationships Aren’t Colonized Enough, Actually. NOW AVAILABLE: Why I hate the Rebel Priest Class. I will also be back with a piece that goes beyond the PMC and the Rebel Priest Class by showing how these are mere pieces of a more fundamental puzzle that I’ve theorized as the “PCFM” (post-class fractured mass) — but that’s later this year. Just make sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss all this.

I figured there’s going to be a bunch of over the top anti-patriotism in this little niche of the world we call “theory,” so I’m doing something different. I’m going to offer something of an apology in the classical sense, but the real thrust of this piece is a vision for the future that does not renounce the urban and developed world, but which insists that what I’m calling Based Neo-Jeffersonianism provides a kind of ground humanity needs if it is not to lose its footing as we move into the cyborg era.

The anti-founder sentiments are common fare these days — we could even say it has become something of a cliche. Last year, while on a trip out to Polyface Farm in Virginia, I took my wife and mother both to Monticello for a tour of Jefferson’s estate and, even there, the whole tour of his epic grounds revolved around the fact that he did, in fact, own slaves. Who knew? I think at this point, we all knew. In fact, that might be all we know.

Expunged from memory are the real reasons that it matters, the significance of which gets lost on people, both in terms of his actual ideas and the context in which they intervened. Worse still, all of this functions to cover over and naturalize our own material conditions that sit atop and sustain relations of production that are certainly less than free — for reasons that would not have been lost on Jefferson or a citizenry with a basis in the kind of education he hoped we would have all gained by now.

Hope you enjoy.

I. The Vision

The Jeffersonian vision is best understood as a dream about staying free. Freedom for Jefferson had a material precondition: a man who grows his own bread cannot be bought. That single conviction organizes everything else, including the relationship between work and education.

In Query XIX of Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson writes that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”1 His logic goes like this: the farmer who owns his land and feeds his family looks to his own soil and industry for his needs, while the artisan and the wage-laborer depend on the casualties and caprice of the customers. Jefferson argues that this market dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocating the germ of virtue while preparing fit tools for the designs of ambition. In other words, he saw the mass proletarianization that was happening in England and he knew it was a radical departure from the shire-like existence of their past, so he hoped to lay the ground for a new mode-of-life that could make for a freer people not enslaved to the market, state, or even ambition itself. Against industrialization, he said to let the workshops (which were well on their way to becoming factories) remain in Europe. He compared the urban population to sores on an otherwise healthy body. He considered the yeoman the citizen par excellence, due to his economic independence, which makes political independence real rather than nominal. No polity can have a self-governing people made of dependents. That’s a basic contradiction in terms.

We address the more obvious contradiction at the heart (or plantation) of Jefferson’s work below. For now, I want to really just emphasize that this basic vision that gets called “Jeffersonian” is one that people rarely have more than a gloss on. He is well aware that ignorant farmers are not freer than literate urbanites.

Jefferson is where work and education meet, because he insists that self-government is not automatic. An independent farmer who cannot read the laws, recognize a demagogue, or follow an argument is independent in his stomach but a serf in his judgment. So Jefferson paired the agrarian base with an educational architecture, most fully in his 1779 Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, where he proposed dividing the counties into small districts, which he called “wards.”

Each ward would have a free elementary school open to every free child, taught largely through history so that citizens would learn to recognize tyranny. Above that, grammar schools, into which the best geniuses would be raked from the rubbish annually. Thus the talented sons of the poor could advance at public expense.2 Above that, the university would exist for the rarest of talent. The system was simultaneously democratic at the base and meritocratic above it: universal literacy for the mass who must choose their governors well, deeper cultivation for the natural leaders who must govern.

That phrase “natural leaders” points to the half of the vision many people forget. In the great October 1813 letter to John Adams, Jefferson distinguishes the natural aristocracy grounded in virtue and talents from the artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.

Jefferson calls the natural aristocracy the most precious gift of nature for the government of society. The whole problem of constitutional design, as he frames it to Adams, is to build a sieve that elevates the natural aristoi and excludes the artificial ones.3 So perhaps a little like Plato’s Republic, education would function as that sieve. Obviously this is somewhat true today, except that it’s a sieve that squashes talent and virtue while elevating the very kinds of people Jefferson was trying to weed out. Now education serves as a point of (brain drain) extraction for global capital into a pipeline that de-worlds intellectuals, removing them from their place of birth and assigning them citizenship in the rebel priest class, serving as administrators or shocktroops for capital’s technopoly.

The Jeffersonian dream is therefore not egalitarian in the leveling sense. It is a dream of removing the artificial barriers, inherited rank and inherited poverty alike, so that talent distributed by nature across all classes can find its level. The ward school exists to find the genius in the rubbish and the university is where he gets formed.

The wards do double duty in Jefferson’s vision. In his later letters, especially the 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson develops the ward not just as a school district but as the smallest cell of self-rule, a little republic in which every man participates directly in the business closest to him, with a gradation upward through county, state, and federal.4 He took the New England township as his model. The same unit that educates the child governs the adult. Education and self-government are not two programs that happen to coexist. They are the same activity at two ages, learned in the same place. This is what he meant when he told Charles Yancey in 1816 that if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.5 Freedom is a competence, and competence has to be cultivated. I suspect there is little doubt in the mind of anyone reading this that the competence for freedom has long since been lost, if ever it was obtained in the U.S.

You can see how much weight he put on all this in writing his own epitaph, which omits the presidency entirely. Among his greatest accomplishments he lists: author of the Declaration, author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.6 Jefferson wanted to be remembered for what equipped a free people, and the university was the capstone. He designed it as an academic village, faculty and students living together around a lawn with the library, not a chapel, at the head — a deliberate architectural argument about what stands at the center of a free man’s learning.

But, but what about the slavery!?

Now the contradiction. Jefferson’s own integration of the life of the mind with the work of the hands was a fiction at the level of his own form-of-life. Monticello was a slave plantation. The leisure that produced the Notes, the letters, the architecture, the university, was extracted from the labor of roughly six hundred enslaved people over his lifetime.

For Jefferson personally, the balance of work and education was never struck inside one life. It was a division of labor across a hierarchy of bondage: the enslaved did the work, the master did the thinking, and the rhetoric of the independent free yeoman papered over the fact that the philosopher-farmer’s freedom rested on others’ unfreedom. He knew it was a moral catastrophe, and said as much. In the minds of most enlightened Americans today the dream of independence through one’s own labor and the reality of a plantation are considered irreconcilable. I’m going to do more than go out on a limb here and insist that this can, and should, be reconciled.

II. And So What?

People act like Jefferson’s slaveholding is a devastating contradiction, the kind that voids everything he wrote. I don’t think it is much of a contradiction at all. Or rather, it is exactly as much of one as my own life is.

I am writing this on a smartphone. The phone was assembled out of materials pulled from the ground by people afforded none of the privileges that help give intellectuals a hand out of the mud. They toil on the far side of an ocean, separated by hundreds of thousands of miles and at least six figures from those who needed to attend college to design and develop the devices for which their precious minerals are extracted.

The college-educated engineer in one hemisphere, the cobalt miner in the Congo in the other. And I’m over here, on a luxurious regenerative “certified organic” farm in the pristine evergreen pine forest air of North Idaho. I dictate my drafts into this phone while I am doing the most noble work possible. I have machines read PDFs aloud to me while I tie up tomatoes. I have machines transcribe my voice and help me clean up the transcripts while I do the chicken chores every morning and night. The piece you are reading (or listening to) sits on top of a division of labor I did not design and cannot personally undo, and it is precisely that division of labor that runs straight through the products of my intellectual labor.

So when someone tells me Jefferson was a hypocrite, I want to know by what standard. The only standard on offer is an abstract one, a picture of the good in which free people govern themselves, in mutual interdependence, working alongside one another in a free society. That is the standard he fails to live up to. Notice whose standard it is. It is his. Jefferson is the one who raised it to its ideal limit. You cannot call him bad by that measure without first granting that he is the one who gave it to us. Set against the men of his own century, and frankly against most of ours, his picture of the good stands above the rest.

So he painted a picture he was not himself in, but again, nobody was. That is the point. Yes, he had slaves. So what, exactly, do we imagine separates us from him? We have the privilege of distance living in a world on the other side of wars we will never have to fight. And yet we live inside a division of labor whose ruthlessness gets white-washed by the storytellers who frame the past as evil and the present as enlightened. The children of coal miners in the U.S., Belizean sugar cane farmers, and Congolese cobalt miners do not have anything close to the access to education that Jefferson was trying to build for the children of dirt farmers in Virginia. We did not abolish the problem. We just exported it.

The slaves were freed, we say, as if that settles the account. What actually happened to most of them is that they were freed into the market, which is a freedom in name only — for the very reasons already given by Jefferson. The freedom to be exposed to market forces with nothing to fall back on has, in at least more than a few cases, left people worse off. None of this makes slavery anything other than evil. The point is that it makes our modern self-congratulation ridiculous. We are not standing on a mountain looking down at Jefferson. We are standing in a different part of the same valley while supposing we’ve left.

Jefferson’s slaveholding does not undermine what he wrote. If anything it tells you what kind of writing it was. He was not describing the country he lived in. He was writing a country that did not exist yet. He was writing it into existence. That particular kind of act is not simply performative, though it is also that, in the technical sense used by J.L. Austin in How To Do Things With Words.7 It is also a form of hyperstition, but we’ll circle back to that later.

We forget the worldhood of the founders

There is a scene in Good Will Hunting that everyone remembers: the janitor takes apart the Harvard kid in the bar, and the thing he predicts is that the kid will spend a hundred and fifty grand on an education only to end up regurgitating Gordon Wood.8 Later, he uses Zinn to make the point that the U.S. was not radical at all but was, instead, a bunch of white oppressor slave-owners, etc. Zinn vs. Wood tends to be the forced choice in education today, between brands of revisionism that paint the United States with shame or pride. It’s easy for historically illiterate screen-people to see these moments and smile and nod, blinking like the last man at the end of history. What goes over their heads (and admittedly mine the first time I saw it) is the very context given in The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

What Wood reconstructs is how total the old order of rank was. His whole argument turns on a single correction: Americans were not born free and democratic, they were made so by the Revolution. Before it, the social world was not unequal the way ours is, as a matter of outcomes that could in principle be adjusted. Instead of inequality having to do primarily with money, the old world ran on rank endowed by formalized and state enforced order.

That kind of inequality was an order of being. People located themselves not in classes alongside others of like income or lack in ownership, but in vertical chains of superiority and dependence. Each person was conscious of the one just above and the one just below.

“early in the morning arises the postilion … and falls to brushing the clothes and cleaning the shoes of John the footman; who, being drest himself, applies his hands to the same labours for Mr. Second-hand, the squire’s gentleman; the gentleman … attends the squire; the squire … attends the levee of my lord; which is no sooner over than my lord himself is seen at the levee of the favourite … And yet there are scarce two of these who do not think the least familiarity with the persons below them a condescension, and, if they were to go one step farther, a degradation.”9

Occupations did not define one’s status so much as relationships, i.e. blood-ties and titles granted by those higher up. The whole ladder was felt as natural, even divine, a great chain running, in John Adams’s phrase, down to the insignificant animalcules in pepper water. In such a world, Wood writes, it was “inconceivable, unnatural, for inequality not to exist.”10

Listening to a PDF-reader of Wood’s Radicalism a couple of years ago while working, this one quote was forever imprinted on my mind and I think about it all the time:

Yale president Thomas Clap had students show “due Respect and Distance” to superior classes, and the etiquette was exact: a student removed his hat at ten rods’ distance for the president, eight for a professor, five for a tutor. The young George Washington copied a guidebook telling him when to pull off his hat “to Persons of Distinction” and how to bow “according to the … Quality of the Person,” so as to “give to every Person his due title According to his Degree.”11

We can only imagine what that would have been like.

The deepest line of distinction in that world ran between gentlemen and commoners, where it was understood not as a difference of degree but of kind, two orders of being with different psyches and different natures. Wood states its motto in four words that are the photographic negative of the Declaration: all men were created unequal.

Inside that context, the idea that a farmer’s son, much less a whore’s son, might sit in a university beside the sons of gentlemen was not a reform anyone was debating. It was an absurdity, outside the space of things a person could even want. When Jefferson designed a school system to rake the best minds out of the poor and carry them up at public expense, he was not adjusting a dial. He was proposing a new theory of the human.

This is why Wood calls the Revolution radical in a sense that goes far beyond muskets. The whole order dissolved, he stresses, without industrialization, without urbanization, without railroads, on the strength of an idea that people decided to believe.

One of its deepest reversals was the dignifying of work itself. Labor had been the mark of the dependent and the common. The Revolution began the long process of making it honorable — this is a tragedy in our day, but only because we have lost Jefferson’s distinction between work at the foundations of life that fosters competence and independence and, on the other side, wage-labor and bullshit jobs.

The real upheaval brought by the Revolution was that equality became thinkable at all. We have so completely inherited the result that we experience it as the natural state of things, which is the exact measure of how radical it was. Equality is not the human default — not in any civilization, and not even in any pre-civ small scale society where rank and order still exist on levels we can hardly imagine. The modern notion of equality is a recent, fragile, and hard-won achievement that was far more outrageous in its moment than the people living comfortably downstream of it will ever feel.

That’s why it’s absurd to me when people build their whole personalities out of 18th century anarchist literature, posing as “anti-authoritarians” against all hierarchies. We do not have a hierarchy problem anymore. We have the opposite problem. The bow has been bent so far the other way that everyone now assumes, as a kind of background condition, that we really are all equal in every sense that matters. It would be strange to write “all men are created equal” today, not because we reject it but because we treat it as too obvious to bother saying, which is its own kind of forgetting.

What has gone missing is the thing Jefferson never lost sight of, the qualitative difference between people. The difference between those who want to learn and grow and those who do not. Between those who can fend for themselves and those who cannot. Between those who actually care about freedom, in the demanding sense that requires you to become the kind of person who can use it, and those who would just rather be comfortable. Jefferson built his whole architecture on the assumption that these differences are real, and that a free society has to find the people in whom the higher capacities are alive and give them somewhere to go.

Instead, we tell people they’re equal and that all differences in outcome are inherently unjust because everyone is entitled to the same living standard, regardless of effort, talent, or virtue. We have built an architecture that pretends the differences are not there. All you need to get into college today is a pulse and the ability to take out enormous amounts of debt. No child left behind, everyone is destined for the same prestigious careers unless they are failed by the system or simply choose poverty — there is no respect for natural difference.

Nobody shows us any of this better than Jefferson, because Jefferson is the man of the bridge between the life of the mind and the work of the hands. That bridge is the thing I care about more than almost anything. It is the whole reason I farm and write and teach at the same time, and it is why I keep coming to Jefferson’s defense. I originally published my case in Timenergy, in the chapter I called “The American Dream Betrayed: Slavery for All.”12

Jefferson’s freedom was not the thin modern thing, the freedom to sell your hours to whoever will buy them. It was the older thing, leisure in the classical sense, the time and energy to develop one’s ownmost human capacities. By that measure he is progressive for our time, more progressive than the politicians who promise to give everybody something and never once think to free our time from its reduction to labor power. Lenin took for granted the division of labor between the proletariat and the professional revolutionaries. Bernie Sanders might have said he was against the oligarchy, but each of his “everything for free” solutions was a bailout for a failed and corrupt institution — and none of it had any hope of freeing up our timenergy.

My Jeffersonian apologetics do not wave the contradiction of his plantation away. I can hold the contradiction and still insist his vision was more progressive than anything any president or candidate for the presidency has put on the table this century. For any hope in a future that restores anything resembling balance between the urban and the rural, the life of the mind and the work of the hands, we will not be looking to politicians any time soon. For now, we turn to the ones who, with roots deep in the Jeffersonian vision, cultivate the ground for this kind of renewal.

III. The Renewal

The easy way to dismiss all of this is to call it regressive nostalgia. The yeoman republic lost to Hamilton two centuries ago, the reasoning goes, and wanting it back is a costume.

Hamilton’s response to Jefferson, in the Report on the Subject of Manufactures and the funding scheme, was that a serious modern nation needs commerce, credit, manufacturing, and a strong central state, and that Jefferson’s agrarianism was a beautiful nostalgia that would leave America weak, rural, and dependent on the very Europe Jefferson wanted to keep at arm’s length.13 On the economic merits, history mostly vindicated Hamilton. The country that emerged is obviously urban, industrial, and commercial. On the other side of World War II, it has been the leader, the world cop, and arguably an empire. If not for the Hamiltonian path, we would all be already speaking German, Chinese, or Arabic (or we’d all have been wiped off the map, for that matter).

So all credit to the theorist of credit himself, Hamilton won. But in the meantime, we have all also lost. Which is why more and more people have been moving from cities to rural areas in an attempt to reclaim a more perennial way of life based in closer relation to nature and the foundations of life. I just got back from the Modern Homesteading Conference in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where three thousand people were in attendance learning how to do things like process their own chickens, grow food and, if need be, live off-grid. Every person there was excited to meet Joel Salatin who walked through the fairgrounds like a prophet of the people, making casual conversation with attendees and chatting with vendors — he even stopped to take a picture with us while trying our salad turnips.

I think it is lost on a lot of people exactly how significant Salatin has become, so I’m going to pause to explain a bit more than would have been necessary to the homesteading audience. You see, in the world of regenerative agriculture and homesteading, Joel is basically the godfather. He’s like Slavoj Žižek but for raising healthy and happy chickens.

Joel Salatin farms the Shenandoah Valley and has spent forty years arguing that the way we eat is the way we are governed. What is happening right now he calls a “homestead tsunami,” i.e. families pouring out of the cities onto small acreages.

In 2020 a million backyard flocks of laying hens appeared in America. Seed companies sold out. Salatin started fielding phone calls from billionaires asking how to build what he drily calls an “agrarian bunker.” The Jeffersonian vision is not behind us. By his account it is arriving, and the first wave has already crested. Half of all American farm equity is about to change hands as the average farmer ages past sixty and there’s more interest in this way of life today than ever before in our lives.14

What makes Homestead Tsunami the same genre as Jefferson’s agrarian writing is that its focus is on the Why (for the How you’ll want to read his Polyface Micro). Homestead Tsunami is a vision document, an argument about what a human life is for. The argument is Jefferson’s, nearly line for line. Salatin borrows a distinction from Paul Harvey (of old radio fame), between the freedom to do what we want and the freedom to do what we ought. Salatin says the first one is a driverless car, free and useless. Real freedom is participation in the foundations of your own life, and the very thing that destroyed it was the kind of convenience that makes us impotent. In the name of convenience and liberation we enslaved ourselves to a host of dependencies.15 Set that beside Jefferson on the man whose dependence begets subservience, and beside the argument I made in Timenergy, that a society which insists everyone stay preoccupied with economic necessity is a society that reduces everyone to slavery. We’re all saying one thing: the free person is the one who does not depend, and dependence is the main output of the whole capital-technopolistic machine.

Salatin knows whose tradition he is standing in. He reaches back past himself to the Homestead Act, to Benjamin Franklin telling Europeans that America offered no great fortunes but a general happy mediocrity because most people there cultivated their own land, to John Taylor of Caroline, Jefferson’s own agrarian ally, whose 1813 sermon on a ruined soil Salatin calls the work of a soil saint that reads as prophecy.16 The line from Jefferson’s Monticello to Salatin’s Shenandoah is clear.

What Salatin adds is a translation of independence into terms a person who owns no plantation can use. You do not need six hundred acres. You need to know how to do things. The chapter that Homestead Tsunami builds toward is about skill as the one form of wealth no demagogue can confiscate, because nobody, as he puts it, has figured out how to stick a straw in your head and suck out your knowledge.17

Salatin’s son, Daniel, who I also had the honor of meeting and interviewing, built his own house at the age of twenty from trees they milled on the farm. Most guys that age will only have ever built a house in Minecraft. What Daniel has achieved, thanks to the sacrifices of his father and grandfather, is the yeoman’s independence rebuilt at homestead scale. This completes the reversal Wood pointed to, the one where work itself stops being the mark of the dependent and becomes something of dignity. On the homestead the work of the hands actually merits its honorable place of distinction.

There are limits to Salatin’s vision, though. Phenomenology gave us a term for this, i.e. bracketing. Heidegger’s way of saying it is that every revealing comes with its concealing. Which is to say, Salatin’s focus eclipses half of what Jefferson wanted — that’s no shortcoming on Salatin’s part, it just gives me something to contribute here.

Jefferson never separated the independent farm from the educated mind. The same farmer who grew his own bread was supposed to read the laws, study philosophy, be a man of science, sit in the ward assembly, and govern himself. Salatin gives you the hands completely and the mind almost not at all.

The closest Homestead Tsunami comes to the life of the mind is a borrowed scrap of aesthetic theory he stops to apologize for, “for those of you without the privilege of a liberal arts education.”

Notice what the apology concedes: that the liberal arts are a privilege some institution hands down or withholds. The thing is, though this has become the image, it was not the way things were prior to institutionalized capture and the medium revolutions of the last century. Most Americans used to be highly literate, and even more so before the twin compromises of television and the sharp rise in university attendance.

Most alternatives to post-literate normie life today, not least of which include the movements of homesteading and homeschooling, fail to correct for the problems of the screen or of the 20th Century’s division of labor between mind and hands.

This is where I always bring in two of Susan Wise Bauer’s works that I consider canon for my neo-Jeffersonian vision. Bauer’s program addresses what Salatin, at best, takes for granted or, at worst, neglects. For the children who stay, there is The Well-Trained Mind, a full classical curriculum run from the kitchen table, the old trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric — with no campus required.18

For the adult who left and came back, or who never left, or who went to college and got cheated out of an actual education, there is Bauer's The Well-Educated Mind, A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had. This work opens by treating self-education not as a fallback for the people the university passed over but as the older American norm. Bauer points to the nineteenth-century readers who taught themselves out of commonplace books and reading clubs once their schooling ran out, and to the etiquette writer Eliza Farrar's rule that “Self-education begins where school education ends.”19 Bauer draws direct inspiration from Jefferson’s instructions to the young Thomas Mann Randolph, when he argued that an education “is to be acquired from books, and if you pursue it by yourself, you can accommodate it to your other reading so as to fill up those chasms of time not otherwise appropriated."20

Both books are well aware of the fact that we lack the time and energy to do things the way they do them in schools when working or at home. Bauer’s thesis is that you can have the wealth of the liberal arts at a few hours a week, self-directed, at whatever age you happen to be. I think she’s more right than she even knows, given the advances in technologies that facilitate learning while doing basic chores around the domus.

Of course, this assumes you can find a way to free yourself from the incessant distractions of the smartphone and internet. Bauer is aware of this, but I think of a recent article by Keturah Hickman that argues the failure to counter the distraction economy can make homeschooling more dangerous than its alternatives.21

Polite Company

How Homeschooling Became More Dangerous Than Public Schools

When I was sixteen I tried to make a case to my mother for why I needed privacy…

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2 months ago · 491 likes · 179 comments · Keturah Hickman

Between The Well-Trained Mind and The Well-Educated Mind, Bauer covers the exact ground Salatin skips. The mind of the child and the mind of the adult can both be cultivated right now without waiting for a campus or tuition bill. What I’m calling Based Neo-Jeffersonianism argues that taking back our practical lives also means reclaiming the liberal arts from their capture by failing institutions.

Salatin tends to assume that an interest in the liberal arts is something that will stay in the hands only of those who attend college, and his homestead tends to assume that the children stay. Of course Salatin is quite open, in conversation and in the interview I had with him, that the kids might choose not to farm. Yet the default assumption is a vision without leaving, without university, and therefore without the need for return.

Wendell Berry, whom Salatin quotes twice without quite following, named this disease almost fifty years ago, in a book whose subtitle is the problem itself: culture and agriculture. The modern sickness, Berry says, is specialization, the split between thinking and doing, a calamitous scattering-out of the functions that used to live together in one person.22

Berry takes it straight to Jefferson’s own educational dream: the land-grant colleges were founded on Jefferson’s conviction that farming, education, and liberty were one thing, chartered in their own language to teach farmers “liberally and practically, as farmers,” and to send them home not only to farm but to lead their communities. They betrayed it, Berry argues, by splitting that single phrase in two, liberal or practical, and letting the practical drive out the liberal. The fault, he insists, is on neither side. “The wrong,” he writes, “is in their division.”23

Underneath the curriculum the university taught a deeper lesson, the one that hollowed out rural America. It taught that the way up leads away from home. We do not work where we live, Berry writes, and if we want to hold up our heads in front of our teachers and classmates, we must not live where we come from.24

W.E.B. DuBois talked about this in his story of John, who came back from school in the North to only find he had lost the ability to speak to or be trusted by his community.25 Notice that in the story of John, this member of what DuBois called “the talented tenth” was not himself working with his hands, but thought that he would be a thought-leader for those who do. The Jeffersonian vision was for the one who went to the university to come back and keep a hand in the processes, to stay involved in the foundations of life, to keep grounded in the life of practical living, not to live above it.

What Berry describes, the exit into the wider world that young people take as the only road up, is what I have been writing about under the heading “liberal rumspringa.” We are cut loose from roots, from home, from obligations and any kind of bonds other than the market, the resume, the CV and the institutional horizon it is curated to navigate.

The rite of return is the door the university slammed. Our adventures in the world are turned into a permanent state of nomadicity at the hands of capital and the bridge back to making any of it matter to where we came from is, for most, burned to the ground.

What neither Salatin nor Wise Bauer, much less Berry, ever considers is that working with earbuds opens up new horizons for a new bridge between the life of the mind and the work of the hands at the foundations of life. Theory Underground: Thoughts at Work is the attempt to open the life of the mind to people at work, so that the liberal and the practical stop being a choice one is forced to make and so that we can move beyond the idea that it’s necessary to move away and never return.

None of this replaces Salatin, it just finishes the sentence he leaves hanging. Berry already told us why it matters: a good farmer, he writes, is not a technician you can train in a season but a cultural product, made by generations, handed down in settled households and friendships and communities, where the past has prepared the present and the present safeguards the future.26 That is the bridge, both halves of it, the work of the hands and the life of the mind held in one life across more than one generation. Jefferson wanted it. Salatin is rebuilding the base for it. Berry drew the blueprint for the part Salatin left out in his focus on what was, arguably, the hardest part. Salatin had to prove that the practical side can be done: a small homestead can produce enough of a surplus to provide for itself and the community, even in a predatory economy that has been subsidizing the agro-giants who are destroying the planet while poisoning its inhabitants.

That bridge between the life of the mind and the work of the hands is being built. I grew up on a homestead that started with nothing but tents and a little travel trailer, with neither electricity nor a functioning well. My parents made a huge leap of faith to move to the United States, and an even greater leap to move from the urban to the rural setting. They’ve learned a lot in the last thirty years and now they’re paying it forward to me, my wife, my son, and to the members at TU who are in the Philosophy of Stewardship seminar.

But what I bring to the world of homesteading is the liberal arts that have been all but forgotten in this world, which is why I spent the better part of a year developing Canon: TCG, the liberal arts trading card game. I hope to radicalize the alternative education trajectory already inherent in the homesteading movement, by saying what passes as homeschool or after school today are still failing by Jeffersonian standards, not to mention, at the other end of the pole, even Franklin’s more practical standards. Literacy must be fought for more than ever in the era of coerced schooling and the most distracting medium of all time. Canon: TCG and the work of TU: Thoughts at Work is meant to cultivate soil for a working class intellectual renaissance.

All of this returns me to where I started, to the phone in my hand and the miner I will never meet. Berry’s deepest point is that the line between the exploiter and the nurturer does not run between two camps of people. It runs through each of us. We are all to some extent the products of an exploitive society, he writes, and it would be foolish to pretend we do not bear its stamp.27 That is the honest version of the Jefferson problem: not a hypocrite over there to be condemned, but a division to be worked on in my own heart, family, community, and larger structural world. The question is never whether your hands are clean. The question is which side of yourself you are feeding today.

IV. The Fourth Frontier

The life Jefferson pointed at, that Salatin is rebuilding and Berry drew whole, may not be available to everyone. I will grant the critic that. It is available to some, and it is better that some have it than that none do.

Not everyone wants it. Plenty would rather live entirely inside what Neil Postman called the technopoly, the stage at which the machine stops being one tool among others and becomes the whole environment, the air we breathe and the standard every other thing gets measured against.

Postman’s sharpest point about that condition is the quiet one. A technology on that scale does not argue with the old words — it redefines them while we are not looking, takes over “freedom” and “truth” and “wisdom” and, in his phrase, does not pause to tell us, and we do not pause to ask.28

The word it goes after first is freedom. Inside the technopoly, freedom comes to mean convenience, which is precisely the false freedom Salatin was pointing at, the driverless car that is free and useless. The labor of Jefferson and Salatin and Berry is to hold the older meaning while the newer one is swapped in under us. If the new meaning is the one you want, live there. We’re not coming to take it from you.

What I am asking for is room for the rest of us, room for the ones who want a foot on ground we actually stand on, and room for the people inside the technopoly who need somewhere to go and breathe, to get out from under the alienation for a while. There has to be a place for that kind of rest, retrospective distance, and renewal. I have written about what that looks like elsewhere in The Fourth Frontier.

That fourth place is not an amenity, and it settles a tension underlying all of this. I keep saying the free person is the one who does not depend, and against the machine that is true. However, as a picture of a human life it is false.

We are, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s phrase, dependent rational animals, and the dependence is not a defect we grow out of. It is most obvious at the two ends, in the small child and in the senior citizen, but between them, he writes, our lives are marked by longer or shorter stretches of injury, illness, and disablement, and we are carried through all of it by other people or, neglected, we fall, fail, and are forgotten.

Alongside the virtues philosophers have always praised, the independence virtues such as justice, courage, and self-control, MacIntyre sets a second set of virtues philosophers seem to have forgotten: the virtues of acknowledged dependence. These entail the capacity to receive care without shame, to admit a need, to give without keeping the ledger.29 Salatin says the same thing to the beginning homesteader in plainer words: the great mistake is the fantasy of self-reliance. What you actually want is mutual interdependence.30

The community that carries all of this is a particular kind of thing, and everything turns on it. It is not the state, which is too large and runs on the logic of the market. It is not the family, which is too small and lives or dies by the world around it. It is the thing in between, the local network of giving and receiving that both the state and the family quietly depend on and neither one can produce.31 This is what Jefferson was after with the ward, the little republic small enough for actual human action.

MacIntyre’s third term is also Berry’s settled community, the one that makes a good farmer over generations. Today, in the cyber era, I call for the fourth place: one that can bridge urban and rural, digital nomads grounded in a digital Jerusalem. The fourth place could be also, if you want the older name for it, the Benedictine answer, the one MacIntyre pointed to in the last line of After Virtue and Rod Dreher later made famous: when the wider order will not hold, you build the local forms of community in which the good life can still be lived.

The difference is that MacIntyre is not telling you to withdraw into a bunker and wait out the flood. He is telling you to build the thing itself. Even the old communist formula, from each according to ability, to each according to need, in MacIntyre’s hands describes not a government program but exactly this, the intergenerational household and the community of giving and receiving. Which is where I came into all of it in the first place, by way of Marx and Heidegger and the problem of what a human being is supposed to do with his time.

There is a grim joke buried in that Benedictine word, and Postman is the one who dug it out. The same order gave the modern world its clock. The monks built the first mechanical clocks to order their own days around God, to hold the seven daily hours of devotion with some regularity. Their device slipped through the monastery wall and became something none of them intended, a means not merely of keeping the hours but of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men. The mechanical clock, Lewis Mumford wrote, made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours, a standardized product. Without it, Postman concludes, capitalism would have been quite impossible.32

That’s how tech-focused critiques since Mumford and through Postman tell it, but, as I argued using Postone in Timenergy, that’s actually backwards:

Moishe Postone is amazing for making the above argument concerning the form of labor. He is also essential for thinking about abstract time in capitalist society. Marshall McLuhan and Lewis Mumford were media theorists and philosophers of technology who had their disagreements, but they both attributed the kind of time unique to modernity in the invention of a clock capable of counting fixed time, down to the second. Postone shows how it was not the clock that did this, but the needs of capital that made this kind of fixed clock time our default mode of time consciousness.33

The deeper point is that the clock did not even give us the sense of objective time it gets blamed for. That came from capital too, not from nature:

For if we look back, the notion of indifferent and objective time itself was only ever a thought experiment or methodological device used by mathematicians and philosophers. Not until industrialization did this notion get capitalized on and institutionalized throughout the world. If not for the devices of wage labor calculation and management, i.e. clocks and calendars, we would not have this supposedly natural intuition of objective, indifferent, and linear time.

Clocks and calendars with their accompanying bells and whistles sounding off in the barracks, the factory, the prisons, and the schools, are the mechanisms that subjectivize us into the version of a domesticated creature that can testify to, take for granted, and ritualistically live in accordance with a system that reduces timenergy to labor power.34

A tool invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God ended as the one most useful to men who wanted to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. The clock is where time first got turned into labor power, and prying time back out from under labor power is the whole problem I started from. The Benedictine monks handed down both inheritances, the community that can hold a life together and the machine that pulls it apart, and the technopoly used the latter to go to war with the former.

Earlier, I said that Hamilton already won: the commercial, industrial, centralized, machine-driven order took the country, what Postman called the “technopoly.” The fight most people think they are in, left against right or right against left, the humanist against the technocrat, or the religious vs. the secular, is not the fundamental fight going on. Postman’s way of putting it was that the real quarrel runs between technology and everybody else.

The machine does not even take a conspiracy to keep it running: the technopoly is a culture conspiring against itself, everyone enthusiastic, nobody counting the cost. The people who cannot take any of this seriously, who file homesteading under quaint and whimsical and reactionary, are Hamiltonians whether they know it or not, and most of them would be insulted to hear it, because they think of themselves as radicals, socialists, and Marxists even. Yet they are not attached to any living movement of working people, they only think in class terms belonging to a previous century that bracket from understanding their current position and the limitations of its horizon. Underneath what they like to rationalize by way of appeals to “politics” they are settled comfortably into, and doing the work of, the technopoly. They call it critique, but it is the Hamiltonian status quo that they dress up in ancient radical literature. I’m not railing against Hamilton though, he had his moment in the progressive century. The question is what this century is going to be about, and I’m calling it conservation and renewal.

The homesteading movement today and, to some extent, the great essence of MAHA, need not be the enemy of the machine, the urban, the technopoly. None of it will be “anti-capitalist.” The point is to foster the third term abandoned by a focus on family or state, MacIntyre’s community, capable of cultivating a real and robust dynamic relationship between the city and the country, between the homestead and the technopoly, between the liberal rumspringa and the rite of return. What I am calling for is to maintain both the exit into the world and the door that stays open for the ones who come back by choice rather than because they were never let out. Working out what that relationship is, in practice and not as a slogan, is the labor of both my theory and practice. It is an ongoing process, so stay tuned.

Writing it into reality

I promised at the start to come back to “hyperstition” as what Jefferson was doing. He wrote a country that did not exist and helped call it into being by writing it. Wood is the one who shows you it could have happened no other way, that the entire order of rank came apart without industrialization or urbanization or railroads, on the strength of an idea enough people decided to believe.

“All men are created equal” was false as a description of 1776 and became true, to the degree it has become true at all, because people acted as though it already was. That is, in its general internet usage, hyperstition: a fiction that makes itself real by being taken up and lived out. It is not lying and it is not wishful thinking. It is the only way anything new has ever been built, because the new thing has to be named and performed before it exists as a matter of propositional description of the state of affairs.

G.K. Chesterton put it more bluntly, because he saw that “belief” is too cold a word for what a founding actually takes. What calls a new thing into being is not calculation or certainty about propositions based in reasons or empirical reality. What makes the difference is loyalty. The only way to save a shabby, unloved place, and his example is the London district of Pimlico:

If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved…. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great…. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

For the anti-patriots I mentioned at the beginning, Chesterton’s message could not be more important: the best reformers do not love a place for reasons, but through a love that is unreasonable. The one who loves a place for reasons could stop loving the place if those reasons were to lose their basis.

Loyalty and unreasonable love for the particular is the disposition that a founding requires. You do not build the world you want by first proving it deserves to exist. Chesterton knew it, and my own life growing up from an impoverished plot in the middle of nowhere with nothing but our time and effort has proven it. You love it before it is anything, and then it becomes something. Chesterton writes that reform implies form, and the moment we have a fixed heart that has bound itself to something, it is then that we have a free hand.35

Two hundred and fifty years on, that is the part of Jefferson worth keeping. Not the marble. Not the contradiction we reach for to excuse ourselves. The act. The willingness to write the world you want before anyone will let you have it, and to mean it hard enough that other people start standing where you pointed. Salatin is standing there. Berry drew the map. MacIntyre reminded us we cannot stand there alone. The fourth frontier does not exist yet either. We are writing it.

Happy birthday.

Notes

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I. The Block

On November 1, 2025, the world’s largest direct publishing platform blocked this book. It was not rejected for revision, but blocked full stop. The fields froze. I could not edit the cover, the title, or the manuscript I had uploaded the day before. Underground Theory Volume 2 had cleared the same review without incident that week. This was the only manuscript Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing ever rejected from us across many titles, and the wording of the rejection, which one of the world’s most famous living philosophers later told me deserved to become “world historic,” was that the book “might result in a disappointing customer experience.” Two days later they escalated the language: where the first email said the book might cause a disappointing experience, the second said it had. Past tense, confirmed, about a book no customer had been permitted to read.

Then, a couple of days later, Amazon KDP suspended our entire account and locked us out of our backlist. Per their request, Ann emailed them affirming we had read the guidelines and would unpublish anything that violated them. They reinstated our account but this book, one you are literally or figuratively holding in your hands, remained blocked.

Once we were reinstated I sent the most polite email I have ever written, asking plainly which specific aspect of the content violated the guidelines so I could adjust. The reply, in full: “As per our policy, we reserve the right not to disclose any type of information we consider sensitive data.” A book banned for harm it had not caused, on grounds that could not be specified, by reviewers I could not reach.

I wrote back that this was like getting written up at work where no one will tell you what you did, so you have no way to be on your best behavior. Compliance had been made impossible anyway: the interface no longer let me unpublish the title, only “archive,” which unpublishes nothing. Remove a title I had no power to remove, to avoid further violations of rules no one would name. The replies came signed by Vamshi, then by Sofia, then by generic Content Review Team addresses. The names changed but the decision did not.

This is not how Amazon, or any business, is supposed to work. Amazon is supposed to want my money, and yours, so that it can get its cut. Kindle Direct Publishing is a volume business, a million books from a million people, most slop, some gold, all of them paying. Blocking one book is not a market decision. It is an editorial one. When the editorial decision arrives wearing a market mask, that’s when we need to pay attention. So the question others ask me when hearing about this: what was so dangerous about this book that the largest publisher in the world decided you should not read it? The short answer is that I do not know, because they will not say. The longer answer is the rest of this book.

II. What Amazon Blocked

My call for proposals to this volume was simple: the news was not Kirk’s death, it was the Left’s response to it, and that response marked a qualitative shift in what could be celebrated in public. The shift is the normalization of celebrating a political opponent’s assassination. Welcome to the new era. That was the idea of the call for proposals, which you can read in the following preface. What I have now is the book with twenty voices, several of whom disagree with me. We’re a diverse array of voices critiquing the political field itself, the left, and/or the right, in an attempt to better understand things. That is what Amazon blocked. What follows in this section is my speed-run of the different pieces you’ll be able to read here on your own. If you would prefer to have no spoilers, you can skip to the next section where I’ll go much more in depth into the Amazon block.

This book starts with my wife. Ann takes the cherry-picked Kirk quotes that circulated after the assassination and puts them back into context, line by line: the “some gun deaths” remark on the Second Amendment, “I can’t stand the word empathy,” “I hope he’s qualified” about the Black pilot, the alleged slur that turns out to be Kirk naming Cenk Uygur. Five quotes restored, five distortions exposed. This is what scholars used to call “source criticism” and what journalists used to call “due diligence.” It’s what sadly nobody in the reaction cycle bothered with, because profiting off of reactions to truncated clips was the point. The infrastructure that once sat between a public figure’s words and the public’s reaction has eroded, and what replaced it is the decontextualized clip plus algorithmic amplification and the consequential tribal rage.

Several pieces are built on an actual encounter. Elton L.K., an openly Christian leftist, was on vacation when his Airbnb host said “what goes around comes around” about Kirk, and asks what the Left has not answered: if the Trump coalition’s working-class voters were driven only by economic grievance they would have flocked to Bernie, and they did not, because Trump and Kirk met a spiritual need the Left has nothing comparable to. Kier Adrian Gray, a former anarchist activist, gave her piece as a talk at McKerracher Family Farm during the Theory Underground retreat of 2025. Kier said that when she was younger, she would have celebrated Kirk’s death too. What she then goes on to share is about how she has grown since the days of her youthful activism. Angel, twenty-four, phone dead on a London bus, listened to three men do comedy about the killing two rows up and came back with the cleanest account of what the comment sections do: the post is the thought now, the thought generated for the post, people publishing their way into opinions they do not hold alone.

The theoretical spine of the book is the claim that the medium produces the form of the response, carried in half a dozen vocabularies that converge on one diagnosis. David Ruiz, working from a Theory Underground canonical thinker Neil Postman, argues the urgent fight is not for “free speech” but for context. He lands on C. Thi Nguyen’s “moral outrage porn” as the name for what the comment sections do: people sifting information not to inform themselves but for material to use in the next outrage post. Solosky’s four-page hammer puts Marcuse at the center, the 1964 insight that aggression is a form of social bonding, and shows that the Left Marcuse tried to lead has become the thing he warned against. Matthew Stanley decodes the cultural references on Tyler Robinson’s bullets, the Helldivers 2 button combinations and OwO furry signaling and RickRolling, to argue Robinson is not a Left or Right radical but a more disturbing emergent type, the internet-immersed reality-divorced shooter Katherine Dee calls a carrier of “slop violence.” Alex Sappington, in the volume’s most stylistically distinct piece, asks what kind of game public discourse is and what happens when it becomes normal for a player to get killed. Chad’s Other Roommate interrogates my radical responsibility framing at length, in a Marshall McLuhan and Nick Land register. He argues that my framing presupposes a shared world, and the Left that celebrates the killing and the rest of us horrified by it may no longer inhabit one. No.investigues writes from Mexico in a Baudrillardian register refusing the books’ own terms, prescribing restraint where I had prescribed commitment, the opposite of the Preface’s “not choosing is losing.”

A second cluster works the political register rather than the moral. Edward Remus reframes the assassination as the opening shot of a civil war within the Democratic Party rather than between the parties, a warning to the realignment camp of Fetterman and Newsom, and walks us through the Newsom-Kirk podcast where Newsom called the “Trump’s for you, she’s for they/them” ad “the Willie Horton ad of 2024.” Jasper Thomas indicts the rest of us, claiming that moral, epistemic, and tactical critique of the Left are not political critique, and none unlock the historical possibilities the Left exists to unlock. Tony Chamas, Tony of 1Dime and my co-author on the forthcoming Post Left? book, gives just a genealogical deep dive: the Left/Right binary from the National Assembly to now, the asymmetry by which “Leftist” survives as a moral identity whereas “Rightist” almost never does, and the harder claim that “Leftist” has become a brand for a precarious professional-managerial fraction whose politics rationalizes the decay it claims to resist.

A third cluster of pieces turns the gaze on symmetry and on what the Right has done with the moment. Sašo Dolinšek, from Tokyo, reads Erika Kirk’s televised forgiveness of her husband’s assassin as the model the Left needs and refuses. Erika Kirk said she forgave Charlie’s assassin live in front of the Trump administration and Trump rebuked her for it. The Anonymous Professor, anonymous because the views would cost the writer a job in academia, makes the symmetry claim directly: neither party ever cared about free speech, the Left’s institutional capture normalized cancellation and the Right’s recapture of state power has stripped the mask. That the piece had to be anonymous, in 2025, in a volume about a Left that no longer permits disagreement, is the evidence it offers. Michael Tracey carries the longest comparative record, the McCain funeral in 2018, the George Floyd protests in 2020, the Kirk memorial in Arizona in 2025. What he shows is that the Right’s response is its own George Floyd Moment, i.e. the state-backed extravaganza, the canonization of a martyr, the Speaker of the House and the Secretary of War proselytizing from the stage.

III. Disagreement Printed as Disagreement

The two contributors I have not mentioned are the two I disagree with in print, inside my own essays, by name. The standard practice for an anthology is to suppress the editor’s disagreements, frame the volume broadly enough to accommodate everyone, smooth the contradictions, and leave the reader believing the editor agrees with everyone he printed. That practice is dishonest and instrumentally rational at once, because the editor needs the famous name on the cover and the famous name needs the editor not to fight with him in the same book. Everyone wins except the reader, who loses the only thing that would have made the volume worth the time, which is access to the live argument inside it. Theory Underground does not run on the social capital that makes that bargain necessary, the tenure and grants and blurbs and reading-list inclusions that all track the record of who has not made enemies of whom, because we have none of it and have stopped pretending we want it. What we have instead is the freedom to print disagreement as disagreement.

Jacob Thomas takes a position on what he calls “trans children” that I do not share and that Theory Underground does not endorse, frames the gender culture war as finally a parental-rights question, and offers the book’s most provocative practical counsel: stop arguing with your lonely uncles and invite them to football. I like the idea of spending time with those with whom we disagree, but I do not think casting perfectly moral and totally justified concerns about the “trans child” messaging in terms of “lonely” or “paranoid” people does anything other than a disservice to the person making that move. I almost didn’t include his piece because, honestly, anyone who unironically uses the term “trans child” in 2026 is someone with whom I would rather not share anything, especially not space within a volume. With that said, I know Jacob in real life and appreciate the spirit of where he is coming from in this piece; furthermore, I feel the need to exercise my own Levinasian principles of dialogue with those with whom I disagree. You can read his piece and my own disagreement with him within this volume.

My other disagreement is with Slavoj Žižek. When he came on Theory Underground for an interview in late 2024 he asked us directly to disagree with him. Well, I haven’t done so publicly since then, but I’ve been wanting to. My first foray into public disagreement with my good friend Slavoj begins with when he took the Iryna Zarutska case that the Left had ignored and defended Kirk’s attention to it as morally serious. Where his piece falters is the Zarutska passage itself: right after the killer, unprovoked and in cold blood, stabbed Zarutska repeatedly in the neck with a knife on public transportation, we can hear on the recording the killer saying, “I got that white girl” three times. Žižek narrates the murder at length without mentioning those words. The issue with this omission is that it was also omitted by mainstream media, making it easy for liberals to think that the right was racializing a murder that the murderer himself had racialized. I asked Žižek if he knew about this and he said that he was aware and that it simply was not his focus. I think the omission shows who Žižek is writing for, i.e. the Guardian-reading NPR-listening progressive. Maybe that’s important, but it helps me get at the fact that we do not share the same big Other or superego within the era of duopoly extremism. I have owed Žižek a disagreement since 2024, so this is my first attempt to return the gift.

IV. Amazon’s Block

Five months in, with four denied appeals behind us, we are publishing through Lulu with BANNED BY AMAZON on the cover. After Sofia’s sensitive-data email the thread went quiet, I bumped it, I escalated, and the final reply came on February 24, 2026, four sentences from a new name, Dinesh, upholding the decision, linking two help pages, thanking us for our cooperation. We had been told the rules required compliance and the system had made compliance impossible. The thanks closed the loop. We went around them. For the record, the book you are reading is the exact version Amazon blocked, untouched, with three additions, Tony’s piece, the Nick Land interview transcript, and this introduction. Nothing else has been changed, softened, or removed, because Amazon would not say what to change and we refused to guess. We would rather have you guess for us.

I tried to get the press to cover this story, emailing every major news outlet as well as over fifty alternative media content creators. The most interested outlet was the Washington Post, which invited a 700-word op-ed, and then declined to run it. It’s worth noting the conflict of interest: The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, as is Amazon KDP. Make of it what you will.

Nick Land, a justifiably controversial yet nonetheless unavoidable and incisive voice in the world today, was flabbergasted when we shared with him the news of our Amazon ban. Land had filed Bezos under opportunistic capitalist and not under massive political censorship operation conducted in the drag of doing business. “Drag” is Land’s word for it. The losses Amazon now eats from the block, in reputation and in the revenue from this book and the others by us it could have sold, dwarf anything it would have lost by letting the book through, so the appeal to customer experience is capitalist drag, the decision dressed in profit language when the motive is not economic at all. When sympathetic readers shrug that it was probably just AI, the decision puts on AI drag, the appeal to a faceless system in which no human is responsible, what Land calls an inverted Turing test, not an AI persuading you it is human but something out of the cathedral persuading you it is an AI. What it really is, in his reading, is a religious offense. This book is too heretical, and not in any way Amazon will specify, because to specify the heresy would be to avow a doctrine the platform cannot afford to endorse. “We reserve the right not to disclose any type of information we consider sensitive data” is not a refusal to share trade secrets. It is a refusal to name the religion, which can keep operating only so long as it stays unspoken, because once articulated it could be argued with, refuted, and opposed. Land calls this a definitional “reign of terror,” where you are denied any account of what you are being persecuted for so that everyone watching internalizes a censor they cannot identify. The block is not a discrete event, but a transmitter.

A fellow traveler at a publishing conference was told by someone high up at KDP, openly, that anything related to Charlie Kirk after the assassination had been blocked platform-wide as internal policy. “There you have it,” the source said, as though that settled the matter. The Kennedy assassination is not blocked on Amazon. The MLK assassination is not blocked on Amazon. There is no neutral principle on which the universal blocking of Kirk material can stand. I forwarded the block to Žižek, whose entire reply was, “Thanks. Really, we see now what censorship is, right?” When I read this response to Land, he disagreed: “We do not see what censorship is, we are more confused after several hours than when we started!” The Cold War kind of censorship was simpler. This version wears the clothes of customer service, hides behind algorithmic or A.I. deniability, and refuses to say what it is censoring or why.

The diagnosis the book makes about the post-Kirk Left is the diagnosis the block makes about the book. The Left’s logic on Kirk was that he said things that hurt, so he should not have said them, so silencing him could be celebrated. Amazon’s logic on the volume is that it contains material that would have caused, or did cause, “customer dissatisfaction,” so silencing it was justified. The agent shifts from a decentralized mob to a centralized gatekeeper and the structure holds: preemptive elimination of the not-yet-spoken disagreement on the grounds that someone, somewhere, would have been hurt by hearing it. The official language is therapeutic, dissatisfaction rather than disagreement, and that is the giveaway, because disagreement is something you can argue with and dissatisfaction is something you can only avoid causing.

I do not love being an exhibit. I would rather have shipped the book on time and let it argue on the merits, in a year that has cost me enough already. During the time that I was wrestling with Amazon KDP my wife was pregnant, my dad fell off a ladder and broke his ribs and collapsed a lung, and consequently my mom and I have been working overtime on our regenerative family farm. Yet the block has also been a backhanded gift. It signal-boosted the whole affair. It got the attention of many people who would have otherwise never taken note. It made the audience larger than it would have been if Amazon had simply let the book through. That is the Streisand effect on a story that should never have been a story. The cover is permanent now: BANNED BY AMAZON. As long as the book is in print, on the shelves where Lulu’s distribution lands it, in every photo anyone posts. The op-ed that the Post killed had ended on a line about not judging a book by its cover. The book now wears the censorship on its cover, so both are true: do not judge the book by the cover, and also, notice the cover. The block was meant to make the book disappear. It made the block visible instead. That is the final answer to what Amazon was censoring. They were censoring this answer.

V. What This Volume Is For

Theory Underground exists to create the conditions for rigorous thinking about the problems we actually face, the work the old institutions have either lost the will or lost the freedom to do. It happens here now, in this volume, on the Substack, in the lectures, in the cohorts, and on the farm. If you want more of what the book is doing, subscribe at theoryunderground.com/subscribe. The Substack ran several of these pieces ahead of the print release because the block had slowed it and the conversation could not wait. Read the pieces together, in order, but pass them around individually too, to the people who need them. The book is a book and a toolkit.

The situation has only gotten worse since I wrote the Preface. Silence is not neutral, the platforms will fill it, and what they fill it with is built to maintain the chilling silence that hides under the cacophony of permitted slop and trained passivity. The choice is between speaking imperfectly and being filled in for. The contributors chose to speak. The forces that be would have kept our voices from ever reaching the public. Rather than allow the ban to force us to go quietly into the dark, we insist on making a scene. We will be heard.

Welcome to the new era.

D.J.M.
McKerracher Family Farm
Careywood, Idaho
April 2026

All of that is to say that I never setup a proper welcome email to the TU Substack. Because I’ve been publishing a lot for the last few months, we’ve seen a marked rise in subscriptions and interest. Hundreds of you read something like Castration Culture or Brain-Mogging Clavicular, to only then get the lamest email ever. Well, that was the default email because I never setup a real welcome mat to my work. So here it is.

I’ll probably delete this in a week or so because the main point is to make sure it gets to people who have signed up before the custom email was set. Once it has presumably reached you all I’ll be able to remove it from the ‘stack. Thanks for reading.

Hey, David here.

Welcome to the Underground.

TU: Thoughts at Work is part Substack, part publishing house, part independent adult oriented lifelong-learning school, part whatever the hell it needs to be to develop my concepts, my grasp of various thinkers, and to engage in the subjects that help me do these things.

My work is all about the future of education and the future of work. My daily theory and practice is about pioneering new modes of life that bridge the life of the mind with the work of the hands at the foundations of life. There’s nothing like it on the internet and I think it matters more than anything, so I hope you love it.

With that said, I should probably put a big disclaimer up front: If you’re into homesteading or homeschooling, you’re likely to be surprised by the style of my content. If you’re into critical theory, you’ll be even more surprised. My thinking is heterodoxically orthodox in ways that will make me seem reactionary to leftists and leftist to reactionaries, or both sides will just write me off as a middle of the road liberal. I think this is wrong. I’m betting that this is actually trailblazing beyond the captured deadlock that keeps my colleagues spinning in circles gooning to their enemies at the end of history.

A few things about my concepts: Timenergy, post-class fractured mass, vicious retrojection, socioanalysis and structural political phenomenology based in concepts like ressentiment, being-in-the-world, and the ordo amoris. My work theorizes what it means to be human, the Good Life, the structures at both institutional and personal levels that hinder it, the future of humankind, and much, much more. Some people follow it because it’s a great way into the world of theory, others because they’re interested in my experimental mode of life, and others still because there’s a kind of energy and freshness to everything I do that can’t be found anywhere else. Whatever it is that you like about it, let me know, because otherwise I’ll inevitably only hear from my haters (they love to let me know what they think!).

I’m a worker with earbuds and I tend to assume that most of my readers are as well, i.e. listening via robot-reader apps or to the read-aloud versions on Substack, YouTube, or Spotify. I’ve got a lot of busy professionals too, but we all stand to gain when the content is made for people working on the line, behind the wheel, on the commute, doing the dishes with one earbud in, the ones who want to get into big ideas about what it means to be human, how to live a good life, and how to change something. I’m betting most of you don’t need a seminar room or a graduate stipend to think at the highest level. You need timenergy (my concept for large and reliably repeatable pools of time-with-energy), quality lectures, and someone who refuses to dumb it down or do the thinking for you.

What you’ll read here is part theory, part memoir, and part manifesto all braided together. Philosophy is in my blood and I breathe ideas, whether when I was working at Amazon, for a decade before college in construction and food industries, or now, on the regenerative family farm-homestead building something I hope outlasts me while raising my son with my wife.

I’ve got three goals with this work:

1. to actually get to know you, because this is not for a generic audience — it is meant for a future audience and the few quality people who “get it” enough to help grow this garden for those who come after us.

2. to build something real outside the attention economy and the university both, where ideas can have staying power instead of churning into slop and, without getting captured by the incentive structures of activism, still have a real chance to change the world.

3. to think thoughts that are rendered impossible by contemporary institutional PMC horizons that otherwise constrain, castrate, and censor the possibility of genuine dialogue or the theorization of what’s going on.

As a free subscriber you’ll get new pieces all the time, but I do best when free from a schedule. Almost everything I write is free because the way I make my money is not by being a wordcel. Where my income comes from is not Substack. Substack subscriptions fund my coffee and that’s it. The people who make my lifestyle possible are the ones who subscribe at my personal website theoryunderground.com/subscribe

If you want to go deeper and support the work, the best way is to become a paid member there: BECOME A MEMBER.

One last thing.

I love getting to know the people who actually read this stuff. It would mean a lot if you’d take thirty seconds and hit reply with:

1. who you are and what you do all day

2. one idea, book, lecture, or song that’s been living in your head lately

3. whether you’re here to change your life, change the world, or both

Hit reply and say hi. I read every one.

I put everything I’ve got into this. I hope it’s worth your time.

David McKerracher [Pronounced Mick-Care-ack-er]

PS. When you reply, if you want, just say you’d like a copy of my second book, Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, foreword by Slavoj Žižek.

PPS. A few pieces to start with:

Three pieces that will encourage and inspire:

Castration Culture Work

IRL-theory-projects

It’s my first Father’s Day. I’ve been thinking about what fatherhood means for a long time. Now that I’m in it, I think it’s important to establish some of my operating assumptions and aspirations. This is not the whole story, it’s just where I’m at. It’s also my response to so many guys who think they “already did that.” In theoretical terms: fathers in fact are different from fathers in fidelity.

Fathers in fact treat fatherhood as a title that was won but cannot be lost. It’s a done deal, he already did that, even when his kids are still alive and continuously in need of his provision, protection, presence, attention, and example. These dads who act like they got the little badge and then check out from their kids lives are not that common, but I have met my fair share.

Such men come off as cool until you find out they’re dads, and then you’re like wait a second, where are they? What have you done with them? And they’re just full of excuses while living in a fantasy land of escapist hobbies.

I don’t write this to sit in judgement of them — we can leave that to everyone who matters, i.e. their children, the mother of their children, and of course, all decent people. The fact is, one can never know the whole story. That’s fine, this piece is not about the dads in fact only, it’s about fatherhood in its more noble register. What is it that makes the difference? The answer is fidelity. To really unpack that will require thinking with, against, and beyond Alain Badiou.

Natural facts vs. the events that structure being-in-the-world

What Husserl called “the natural attitude” describes the kind of mindset we enter when reducing the lifeworld to mere biological correlates.1

Fatherhood, and parenting more broadly, is just a story about genes using us to reproduce themselves.

The move I’m going to make here is to compare the natural fact of being a parent to the natural fact of falling for someone, and then show that what really matters is everything that happens after the fact.

Badiou’s theory is essential for this, but he will only get us halfway there. What he does for love is what we will extend to better understand fatherhood. The major source for everything that follows is a little book he wrote, one that I read with my wife something like seven years ago, when we had only been dating for a year: In Praise of Love. We read a few books about love but this one had a huge impact on us.

My claim is that the magical experience of falling in love is directly analogous to the magical experience of child birth. Even though that experience is obviously so much more intense for the mother, fathers frequently report that it’s totally surreal, that they breakdown in tears, that the whole thing is crazier than a psychedelic trip on mushrooms or acid, etc. These radical events get reduced to biology, to mere natural facts. Badiou helps us see how everything special about the human experience comes from binding ourselves to the magical event itself, not from leaving it in the past and flitting from adventure to new adventure.

Take it back to when people try to explain away love as just chemicals or neurons. They say falling in love is just oxytocin. The easiest comeback is that it’s not just oxytocin at all, it’s the something-special triggering the oxytocin. It’s not like you did a bunch of molly to force the feeling of love — no, oxytocin releasing naturally is one part (and no small part) in a whole ensemble of other factors that go into making the love event.

So what does it mean to say that “Love is an event in the world”?

Without having spent a decade reading Heidegger’s Being and Time, can you even know? I wish we had time to unpack how much Badiou is drawing from Heidegger here, but suffice it to say that “world” in this sense goes far beyond normal usages of the term. To give it a gloss: world here is not the planet or the stuff on it, but the structured field of meaning that lets any of it show up as mattering in the first place.

If the world is that field of meaning, an event is what breaks into it without being accountable to it. The event is something the standing order cannot register or explain on its own terms. It goes beyond sensational news events or headlines, in fact, any attempt to write about it is going to necessarily fall short. What makes it an event rather than a mere surprise is that the field has to reorganize around it. The world had no place for this, and now the world has to be remade to have one. Badiou talks about events in the realms of politics (the French Revolution), science (Galileo’s founding of physics), art (Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique), and love, for which he only thinks it through as far as the walls of his radical progressivism would allow.

As an event, love cuts across the division of subject and object, intervenes in the middle of your plans, and hijacks them. Badiou gives the encounter its weight by refusing to file it under the ordinary run of things. In his In Praise of Love, Badiou says that the encounter has “the quasi-metaphysical status of an event, namely of something that doesn’t enter into the immediate order of things.”2

What the event opens is not a feeling but a standpoint. The question love asks is a question about the world, asked from two rather than from one: “What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one?”3

Everything special about romance that follows is the work of staying faithful to that event once the chemistry that corresponded to it has settled down.

Fidelity is what makes you a subject

The event by itself is nothing. People have these encounters all the time and most of them go nowhere. What converts chance into something durable is the declaration, and what sustains the declaration is fidelity, which Badiou strips of its sentimental sense and redefines as daily labor. The declaration first: “The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright.”4

Fidelity is what comes after the declaration, the encounter held open and kept alive by work rather than by feeling: “the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure… that is what love is: a declaration of eternity to be fulfilled or unfurled as best it can be within time: eternity descending into time.”5

The Ethics raises the stakes. This is where he gets spicy: fidelity is not one good feature of a subject — it is what produces a subject in the first place.

Before the event there is just the human animal, the creature that perseveres in its own interests and calls that a life. Badiou’s word for what the event does to that animal is convoke: it calls the animal past mere survival into something it was not yet. The subject is not just the body that was always there. It is what gets made when the animal stays faithful to what broke into its world.

To put it in my own terms, fidelity to a truth event is what takes us from mere homo sapiens to the more elevated term human subject. The lovers do not stay two private people who happen to coordinate. They become a third thing that exceeds them: “The lovers enter into the composition of one loving subject, who exceeds them both; the militant and the artist likewise enter a subject that exceeds them.”6

The imperative that holds this subject together is one phrase, Keep going!

Strip out the binding work of fidelity and the subject is lost, leaving only an animal pulled around by its appetites. In that mode one collects little magical moments that flare up and fizzle out because nothing ever gets built on them.

What I’m going to do is take Badiou’s already provocative and problematic thesis and extend it. In the same way that you do not become a real person by simply being a member of a species, love followed by fidelity to its event ruptures us from ordinary life and asks to be made our basis through deliberate practice. For Badiou, this is true of all truth events — what he doesn’t think about very seriously is how that works when it comes to fatherhood.

Badiou: fidelity for the couple, but not for the child

Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world. “The birth of a child, if born from within love, is yet another example of this possibility.”7

Badiou theorizes fidelity for the couple, but he does not extend it to the child. He gives the child a real place, it’s just not raised to the dignity of its own event, but is something more akin to a garden the couple takes on together as a hobby.

A child is “yet another example,” an instance of love’s power rather than its purpose. In Badiou’s vocabulary the child is “a point of support,”8 an occasion that forces the couple to redeploy Two around it, not the thing the couple was for. Badiou rejects his friend Jérôme Bennaroch’s position, which claims that the Two must finally pass into the child as “the One”: “[for Bennaroch] love’s true goal remains the existence of the child as the expression of the One.”9

Badiou refuses it, and states the rule behind the refusal: “Don’t mistake the experience for the final aim.”10

He will not have “love’s splendid creation of the power of Two … duty bound to genuflect before the majesty of One.”11 It is easy to imagine fidelity to the event of love with a woman, because that is exactly what Badiou models, in detail and at length. What he does not do is think it through to natality.

Badiou is right about the One and wrong about the child

The refusal has to be conceded before it can be corrected, because Badiou is half right. If the child is the One that the Two exist to serve, then love has been folded back into the very fusion it was defined against, the One scene the whole book rules out. Bennaroch’s child, the child as telos and as the One, really would make the Two genuflect, and that really might betray the Two. So far Badiou is on strong footing.

What he misses is that the child is not a return to the One. The child is another event. It is a new alterity that was not in the world before, the self-othering synthesis of opposites that ruptures totality and stands there as a force in its own right. Levinas supplies what Badiou’s apparatus lacks, a way to think the child as other rather than as One. The child, for Levinas, is the figure of a future that is mine and not mine at once, the closest thing to me becoming the most radically other, and fecundity is his name for that relation to a future that is not my own. The face does not leave the one who meets it unchanged. It puts the father under obligation before he has agreed to anything: “in discourse I expose myself to the questioning of the other, and this urgency of response engenders me for responsibility.”12

The infant’s face, which comes through in the cries of helplessness more than anything, makes the demand in its sharpest form. Levinas says that “the face” (of human expression) says “thou shalt not kill”13 but in the child it goes a step further: it says “Thou shalt nurture me, or I will die!”

I’ve got a piece on the phenomenology of the baby crying, why people get so triggered by it and, more importantly, what this unique experience teaches us about how our species differs from all other mammalian creatures. The quick gloss is that we’re born prematurely and helpless. No primate is born so helpless, much less for so long. We are born with an incomplete first nature that requires serious cultivation through the construction and practice of second nature, i.e. culture. What makes us what we are is, in this sense, not just any of the usual accounts, i.e. opposable thumbs, rationality, pattern-seeking, fire, walking around upright, being made in the image of God, etc. What makes us human is, first and foremost, nurture.

If you don’t want to miss that piece, make sure to subscribe to this Substack. Or become a member of TU for real here: Subscribe now

Badiou’s refusal of transcendence

Badiou’s blind spot is principled. He refuses it on purpose, because he hears in any such claim the return of transcendence. You see, he has a radical atheist’s allergy to religion (yet fails to realize his fidelity to communism is itself religious, but the critique of his politics is for another piece). Badiou reads Levinas’ phenomenology as a theological takeover: his elevation of love is “the ultimate revenge of One over Two.”14

His slogan for the whole refusal is flat: “Love on bended knee is no love at all.”15

The Ethics runs the same reflex. Faced with Levinas’s “Altogether-Other,” Badiou tells us to send it back where it came from: “abandon the theme of radical Evil like that of the Altogether-Other, [which] belongs to religion.”16

Chesterton had already answered this kind of boast. For him the man who kneels is not diminished by it but enlarged, and the man who will not kneel is not freer but bound. Worship is a posture of the body before it is anything else, and the body that refuses it is the body in chains: “He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed … If man cannot pray he is gagged; if he cannot kneel he is in irons.”17

Invert Badiou with it: a love that will not bend the knee is not fidelity. This is the love of a man-child, the one who takes himself to be too great to kneel and mistakes his irons for freedom. The refusal does not keep a love pure. It keeps the man too small to hold a love worth the name, his partner small alongside him, and his child smallest of all. A father that will not change diapers, much less provide, protect, and presence, is a pathetic wretch. Even if that father cannot show up in these ways because he was taken captive by the enemy, the wound is still a wound.

Correcting Badiou requires no article of religious faith, just that we notice that the infant’s face is not God. You do not need the Almighty-Other to be commanded by a creature who cannot survive your forgetting. Badiou threw out the child’s claim because it arrived dressed in the language of the Almighty-Other. As a philosopher, he has a responsibility to distrust that kind of thing. Yet he was wrong to yeet the baby in that bathwater. The face of your own child is the most immanent fact in the house — encountering it is not something that happens once, but over time. This truth event transcends you the way another person transcends you, not the way a deity does.

Lacan wrote about the mirror stage, when the child begins to see itself in the mirror and in reference to others, and thereby develop an individual sense of self. Well, fatherhood is similar but in reverse: a process of realizing oneself responsible to that little one and, through the child, to the mother.

The social form of the refusal: adults first

What Badiou holds as philosophy, that the real subject of love is the becoming of the couple, a whole culture holds as common sense: that the point of family life is the satisfaction of the adults. Katy Faust reverses the frame. The party whose rights are at stake is the child first and foremost, and the party obligated to sacrifice is the adult. This is the major theme of her book, Them Before Us: “adults must do the hard things so children don’t have to.”18

Children, on her account, have a natural right to be known and loved by their married biological mother and father. They are not, in Robert George’s phrase from the Foreword, “lifestyle accessories.”19 What a child needs, in Faust’s recurring metaphor, are three macronutrients: a mother’s love, a father’s love, and stability. What connects Badiou and Faust is the keyword: fidelity. On the conjugal view Faust works inside,20 the rules of marriage, permanence and exclusivity, are not arbitrary. They follow from what children need: the union that makes a child is built to keep that child’s two parents together and faithful to each other for life. Marital fidelity, on this account, is not a private virtue between spouses but something owed to the child.

Badiou’s love event keeps fidelity to itself. Faust bases it in fidelity to the child. The claim here is that the second completes the first rather than competing with it. Faust herself declines the philosophical version of fidelity. She says outright that her book is practical and not theoretical, and rests her case on social science and on the personal testimonies of orphans and children of surrogacy. Because she is no philosopher, Faust is unable to take her position to the next level. Because Badiou reduces the child to the false binary of either a side project or literally God, he never goes beyond the common sense ideology of individualistic liberalism (typical communist: rather than deconstructing the individual vs. collective binary, he simply bundles the former and calls it the latter). By thinking Badiou through Faust and Levinas, we are able to go one step further.

Fatherhood is performative follow-through, not a feeling you once had

For a father, the event that has to be kept faith with is concrete and humiliatingly ordinary. It is catching the baby, holding the baby, cutting the cord, playing catch, changing the diapers, losing the sleep. More importantly, it means showing up for the mother. “The most important thing a father can do for his child is love the child’s mother.”21 The point is that it’s a process: none of it ends. It is not an experience you had once and then graduated from. It is something to structure a life in fidelity to, so that the actions keep coming on the days when the feeling is not overwhelming, not oceanic, not even present at all. The virtuous man is not a man who once felt the right things at the right time. He is the product of a lifelong process of performativity in the good sense, i.e. actual follow-through on the experiences, the aspirations, and the ideals he claims to be in fidelity to. Fatherhood in this sense is not conferred by biology, the name on a birth certificate, or a job title.

Badiou theorizes the failure mode when talking about lovers and militants, we just extend it to fathers. Betrayal is the renunciation of a fidelity that has become difficult, the slide back into self-conservation, “to break a loving relationship because of the pull of an obscene desire, to betray a political sequence because of the repose promised by the service of goods.”22 Against it stands the only maxim the book offers: “Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.”23

I did not get natality-pilled until my late twenties, and then I spent the better part of a decade laying the ground for a family. In that decade I watched how many guys take fatherhood seriously only at the level of propositions, or at the level of experience, to only then fail to take it seriously at the level that actually matters: structuring one’s life on the basis of fidelity. As a male it is too easy to think the manhood pass comes with the biology or the job, or with whatever else lets you feel you already arrived.

The male failure mode: forgetting, and theory as escape

What the child’s arrival does to a man, before it is love made duty, is something Levinas called “shame.” Don’t think of this like embarrassment or guilt. Shame in the exact sense the young Levinas gave it in 1935 is the most exposing thing that can happen to a self that thought it was getting along fine on its own. What shame punctures, in that early essay, is self-sufficiency, and what it reveals is that there is no exit from yourself: “What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself.”24

Shame is not, for Levinas, a feeling that arrives and passes. It is structural. To be ashamed is already to be hunting for the exit, already to be an existence trying to excuse itself: “Nakedness is the need to excuse one’s existence. Shame is, in the last analysis, an existence that seeks excuses.”25

The shame of On Escape is shame before oneself, the self caught being itself. The face that commands, and the child whose face commands hardest, arrives later, in Totality and Infinity. Jacques Rolland reads the early need-to-escape forward into the later being-for-the-other, the subject expelled toward responsibility.26

Given that shame, a man has three moves:

1. Rationalization: he can defend it, justifying his “freedom.”

2. The Path of Escape: he can distract himself, living a dodgy lifestyle of evasion.

3. Own it: he can heed the call on his conscience and show up even when it’s not convenient.

In the first, he refuses the puncture and re-covers the self, as Levinas describes the self-satisfied bourgeois man who “would be ashamed to lack confidence in himself.”27 Such a man throws a white mantle of inner peace over everything that contradicts him. The catch is that shame already seeks its own excuse, so to defend is not to get out of shame but to make the excuse stick, to launder the disturbance back into a tranquil conscience.

The second option was to distract himself. Here I am borrowing Levinas’s word, escape, évasion, and shrinking it. His escape is the deep ontological thing, the need to get out of being as such. Mine is the household version, the thousand exits a man takes so he does not have to sit in the discovery: the online gambling, the porn, the painkillers or beer, the sports, or, more likely in our proverbial neck of the woods: theory itself. Nothing is more convenient, for a man who likes ideas, than to use ideas as the exit.

The third option, which is the only real option for fatherhood: he can own it. The seed is right there in 1935, in the line that points past escape: “Shame is founded upon the solidarity of our being, which obliges us to claim responsibility [only] for ourselves.”28

In On Escape that responsibility stops at oneself, and the essay never talks about owning-it as the way out. It’s a short early work that ends still looking for a door. The turn from responsibility for oneself to responsibility for the other is his mature ethics, the Totality and Infinity move. For the father it is the whole game. The face of the child is the Other you cannot excuse yourself out of, and owning the shame it provokes is not penance, it is the beginning of being a subject at all. The theory-minded male reaches for the first or second by reflex, which is why we need Levinas.

The cost of evasion is not private. On the first page of the preface to Totality and Infinity, Levinas says violence is less what you do to another’s body than what it does to a person’s own continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves.29 What he never really does is take it a step further into the generational ripple effect: broken fathers make broken sons, who make broken homes, who make the next round of broken fathers. The absentee, the addict, the checked-out husband, are versions of one structure, in which a man’s refusal to bear his own existence makes existence heavier for everyone who depends on him.

Individual blame, structural excuses, and agency

I have friends my age who had their children young, who had no real fathers in their own lives and no real sense of what fatherhood means, and who have, for all practical purposes, lived as absentee fathers. Four, five, six kids, neglected and cheated on as a way of life. I don’t say this to sit in judgment of them. There but for the grace of God go I. I do not write this from a position of superiority, but from the privileged vantage of a someone whose mistakes were numerous but different in kind. From this position, now in the fresh air of the evergreen pine forests of North Idaho, I am able to say these things, but that doesn’t mean they’re easier said than done.

Unplanned pregnancies, dysfunctional homes, poverty, selfish and manipulative partners, the structural stultification of timenergy, a culture that diminishes and scapegoats fathers, the radical isolation and lack of supports for new parents in the post-class fractured mass, all of it is real and every failed father bears witness to each of these facts about modern life. I also grew up under all of these same conditions. If I had a child in my early twenties, by accident and with some cheating ex, then it would not be so easy to do this theoretical work. The point is that even from my privileged vantage, I understand how easy it would be for me, an obsessive male who likes nothing better than to get deep into theory that has nothing to do with one’s actual existence.

To say that the father could, through fidelity to the love event and then to the child, become a subject, is also to say that he could become an actual agent in his own life.

Taking ownership and enhancing agency is the opposite of what most (especially leftist) theory is about. Žižek gets at this in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology with his analysis of the song “Gee, Officer Krupke” from West Side Story, where the youths are like “oh I had a terrible upbringing now I can’t control myself.”30 His point was that they know this recourse to structures is just an excuse and they flex that awareness by mocking it.

I want to go a step beyond Žižek here though by bringing in a posi hardcore band from Riverside, California, called No Bragging Rights. NBR has got a song on exactly this theme called Cycles, which has this refrain at the end:

“How could we know any different if this is all we’ve known? This cycle must end with me, How could we know any different if this is all we’ve known? This cycle must end”31

Yes, the deck is stacked against every father. The point is to stop making excuses, call the wound a wound, and to instead steel oneself for the battles before us. Reject the first two options of response to the obligation instigated by the face of the child and commit oneself to the third: own it.

So your dad wasn’t there and now you use that as an excuse to be absentee yourself? No way, break the cycle. As Mike Perez writes: “I am the product of a broken man, The embodiment of empty dreams… I am empty like your bottles, Am I just like my father?” But instead of stopping there, he refuses: “I refuse to be a monster. I know I have the same weakness inside of me.” Instead of wallowing in the wreckage, he insists on fighting to overcome: “I also have the strength to control my own destiny, This must end with me.”32

The point is never to blame the individual and at the same time to refuse the structuralist move of rationalizing behavior and removing agency by recourse to systems analysis. We can have our structural critique, but that becomes the pure cope of escapism without agency-maxxing.

Natality, the wound, and the ground of grace

An objection arrives here from the reader who will not have children, or cannot, or whose love-event is spiritual or metaphorical and was never going to issue in a literal child. There is an expanded idea of natality that answers it. Hannah Arendt coined natality as the human capacity for new beginning, the “miracle that saves the world,”33 and Jennifer Banks has lately drawn out a whole countertradition of birth as creativity and renewal, running it through Nietzsche, Arendt, and others, and addressed to everyone, regardless of whether or not you have kids.34

That expansion has a power to it as an abstraction, but it borrows all of its force from the primal grounds underneath it. The reality is that we were all born, and that we were all born of a man and a woman. How I go beyond Arendt and Banks: if that man did not love that woman, and that woman did not love that man, and the two were not committed to the project of love that resulted in you, then you live in a wound.

The shocktroops of capital’s culture of castration are lined up to tell you that the wound is not a wound, that the fact of who your parent is was an accident and that you can choose your family. There’s a grain of truth there getting inflated into a whole lot of cope. What they eclipse is that metaphorical natality means something because the literal one happened first, to you and to each of us, in a particular house, whether or not that turned out well or badly.

Unlike the rebel priest class, I am going to tell you the wound is a wound, and that it is also, in the broader sense, the ground of grace, of forgiveness, of radical renewal. Those are one opening, not two. You cannot be forgiven a debt you were told you never owed, and you cannot begin again from a place you were told you never fell from. You cannot break intergenerational trauma that you cannot own. You cannot pay it forward well if you do not inherit it with humility.

Unlike that baby in the I Think You Should Leave skit, I do believe people can change.35 You can break the intergenerational trauma by doing the things they did not do, building the life they did not build, showing up in the ways they did not show up, and staying in fidelity to the truth events that structure a world held in common. The natality-shaped wound is where you were made. It is not where you are required to stay.

The part that is for me

This is not written from the far side of having kept the fidelity. It is written because I know I will forget. Badiou says love is not a state you arrive at but a sequence you keep re-entering, a series of points at each of which “you must replay the ‘Two scene.’”36 The claim here is that the same holds for the third who arrives, and that fidelity to the child is the disclosure of the world through that event, replayed on an ordinary Tuesday and the ordinary Tuesday after it. Eternity descending into time looks, most days, like getting up.

There is nothing more male than forgetfulness when it is convenient, and nothing more convenient, for a male into theory, than theory itself. This is my reminder and my pledge to not let my theoretical work become escapist. The last temptation is to write the essay about fidelity to the child instead of practicing it. That is the temptation this essay is trying to stay ahead of. It is a reminder, and the person who most needs reminding is the one writing it.

Well, in the time that I’ve been writing this (two weeks) I have changed his diaper every morning and put him on the pot several times a day (we’re doing elimination communication) when a part of me would rather be doing other things; I take him out to do the farm chores with me in a carrier so his mother can sleep in, and I continue to show up and make her meals and clean, doing the work of a traditional village of women. That’s not a boast, it’s the bare minimum. It’s also a rare privilege afforded by a lifestyle made possible by the members at Theory Underground.37 The fact is, though, it shouldn’t be a privilege, it should be the default. A world that doesn’t allow this kind of showing up is the kind of world that needs to change.

Thank you for reading.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.

Badiou, Alain, with Nicolas Truong. In Praise of Love. Translated by Peter Bush. New York: New Press, 2012.

Banks, Jennifer. Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth. New York: W. W. Norton, 2023.

Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1925.

Faust, Katy, and Stacy Manning. Them Before Us: Why We Need a Global Children’s Rights Movement. Foreword by Robert P. George. New York: Post Hill Press, 2021.

Girgis, Sherif, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George. What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. New York: Encounter Books, 2012.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Levinas, Emmanuel. On Escape / De l’évasion. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

No Bragging Rights. “Cycles.” On Cycles. Good Fight Music, 2012.

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Directed by Sophie Fiennes. Featuring Slavoj Žižek. Zeitgeist Films, 2012.

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I call it a rumor because she apparently later denied that this was the case. Regardless, when Will’s daughter Willow had, prior to this incident, come out as polyamorous while on a talk show with her mother, Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow called monogamy “antiquated” without any pushback from Jada.1 Whatever we can say about Will Smith, one thing is certain: he is surrounded by women who do not have the highest estimation of lifelong committed monogamy. I don’t really care what they as individuals think, nor do I aim to change anyone who is poly’s mind. The issue is that such people are rarely just doing it. I’s not a “you do you” and “mind your own business” kind of thing because they’re on a mission to normalize it while attacking monogamy.

What this chapter’s installments will show is, in part, that polyamory is impossible — impossible to scale, across populations and generations, without leading to catastrophe (it fails what I call the “pro-civ test,” something developed at length in my forthcoming work). Along the way we will learn why monogamy, as it is practiced in the culture of the liberal rumspringa, is itself also not tenable.2 It’s not just a matter of survival, but of flourishing. The most important question we will ask: what kind of human subject does this kind of culture cultivate?

A Quick Definition

At this point I suspect most of my readers know what “polyamory” means, even though it’s a recently invented word. But for anyone lucky enough to have missed this in the last fifteen years: polyamory is a mashup of Greek and Latin words that translates to “many loves.” Monogamy generally means a committed relationship between two, whereas poly people “open it up” and “bring others in” for what they now call “consensual non-monogamy.” Generally, monogamy was seen as progress beyond the actual historical norm in the most patriarchal societies, i.e. polygamy.

When explaining all of this to someone the other day, she said, “So polyamory is like the libcucked version of polygamy?” By which she meant, playfully of course, that poly is an uber-progressive inversion of polygamy where the man, rather than possessing many wives, instead gets cucked by many girlfriends. Will Smith became the face of that kind of male, but he is far from being alone.

Poly, So Hot Right Now

Molly Roden Winter’s More: A Memoir of Open Marriage hit the New York Times bestseller list and drew coverage in the Times and New York magazine.3 Around that time Peacock aired a reality show about “throuples” (intimate unions of three) called From Couple to Throuple. A 2023 Pew study found that a slim majority of adults under thirty now say open marriages are acceptable. And of course there are other celebrities “coming out” as poly, such as the actor Nico Tortorella who has been poly for years.

Celebrities do all kinds of weird things though so they’re not necessarily canaries in the coal mine on this issue. The hardest fact to wave off is the legal one: in 2020 the city of Somerville, Massachusetts voted unanimously to remove the two-person limit from its definition of “domestic partnership,” becoming the first city in the country to recognize relationships of more than two people.

Cambridge, Arlington, Oakland, and Berkeley soon followed, working from a model ordinance drafted with a clinic at Harvard Law School.4 Five years on, Somerville had twenty-two multi-partner domestic partnerships registered and one of its two candidates for mayor was an openly polyamorous city councilor.5 This may be a subculture, but it has bestsellers, reality shows, and city ordinances behind it now.

Why It Matters

If you think this is not a very philosophical matter, that these are just horny college kids and weirdo celebs rationalizing their sex lives, then you wouldn’t be the first. However, I think that the rise of polyamory over the last fifteen years has a lot of causes and that it is more than a limit case or mere symptom of other issues.

Poly has an ideological rationale which, if you have enough of the secular progressive priors in place, will actually sound seductive and enlightened. The normal way people respond to polyamory is to say “I just couldn’t, I’m too jealous,” almost like it’s a personal failing. As though, if you were more overflowing with love and virtue, you would open it up. This is a terrible framing that sets people up for failure.

I’m not writing this as an outsider, but as someone who has always challenged every orthodoxy, who has been doing a ruthless critique of all common sense ideologies for over twenty years. I spent a good amount of time being anti-monogamy. Like most of the norms that I challenged though, from holidays to marriage, I have realized that it was I who was the idiot and the traditions were, in fact, good for reasons that go far beyond their normal justifications. So for over a decade now I’ve been theorizing exactly why polyamory fails, and what it teaches us about the deep wisdom of certain norms. For those who are new to this topic, I’m here to save you some time and supply you with better arguments for monogamy, and against both polyamory and polygamy.

To really get into this will take some time. I wrote this as a chapter of my book Castration Culture provocatively titled “Relationships Aren’t Colonized Enough, Actually.” This is part one, where I’m going to get the most theoretical. Over the course of this series I aim to show that polyamory is not just the wokest of the woke ways of performing how you’re so woke you don’t get jealous. Rather, poly is the fulfilment of Big Romance when it combines with certain ideas native to the rebel priest class who administers the liberal rumspringa in capital’s culture of castration — all terms developed in other parts of the Castration Culture series. You can read this as a stand alone piece or go read my posts The Natality Pill and Castration Culture pt. 1.

The Most Radical of the Radicals

There is an Instagram account called Decolonizing Love. It has a modest following and an immodest thesis: non-queer closed relationships are oppressive products of colonialism and its hierarchies. In a recent post, they claimed that “hierarchy” was “a linguistic ghost before the 16th century” and that “its explosion into the modern psyche was a deliberate act of intellectual alchemy, largely via Louis Dumont, that reframed raw domination as natural order.” The post concludes that, “What you defend as ‘common sense’ is colonial ideology wearing its latest mask.” They close by warning readers to “do the homework before you step into the ring.”

The Decolonizing Love account is run by a polyamorous couple in Toronto. Millie is a relationship anarchist and activist. Nick identifies as non-hierarchical polyamorous. They sell coaching sessions, run workshops, and promote a Relationship Agreement Generator through their website.

The Decolonizing Love project argues that hierarchical relationships are inherently unethical, that monogamy is a product of colonialism and patriarchy, and that jealousy is a conditioned response to be unpacked through therapeutic processing. So basically 99.9% of all relationships that have ever existed in any large-scale civilization throughout time were bad.

The thing about Millie and Nick is that they did not pop into existence from nowhere. They are the tip of a body of literature that has been growing since the sexual revolution, especially in purportedly radical or alternative spaces.

The Poly Canon

Behind Decolonizing Love sits a canon: The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy (1997), More Than Two by Franklin Veaux and Eve Rickert (2014), Polysecure by Jessica Fern (2020), Opening Up by Tristan Taormino (2008), Stepping Off the Relationship Escalator by Amy Gahran (2017), and Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá (2010).

These six books, plus a growing infrastructure of workbooks, journals, podcasts, coaching certifications, and Instagram and TikTok accounts, constitute the intellectual foundation of contemporary polyamory. They share a set of philosophical commitments that have never been seriously examined. This chapter examines them while demolishing some of their core premises.

The poly way is a new anti-civilizational orthodoxy that promises itself capable of replacing the structures that make love, family, and human flourishing possible. The simple progressive approach will call monogamy antiquated, whereas the most “radical” of the radical leftists will call it “colonial false consciousness.”

I will show that both are wrong, and that their proposed alternative lifestyle is structurally impossible to scale across the population and across generations. To do that requires some theoretical heavylifting, to which I will now turn.

I. The Virtuous Circle and Why It Breaks

The sociologist and clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle studied under Lacan in Paris before writing a series of bestsellers about technology and human connection. In Reclaiming Conversation (2015), Turkle identifies what she calls the virtuous circle: the healthy, reciprocally dependent interplay between solitude and solicitude. Solitude here means genuine being-with-oneself. Solicitude means genuine being-with-others.6

The circle works like this: being alone, undistracted, leads to imagination and reflection. That leads to creativity and empathy. That leads to a secure sense of self and confidence, not the fake confidence of pickup artists and LinkedIn gurus, but the real thing: you have found your talents, you have cultivated them, and you know you have something to offer the other. That secure sense of self leads to deep connection and a more fulfilling social life. That solicitude, the genuine being-with-others, then feeds back into solitude: it gives you something to reflect on, something to work with, raw material for the imagination. The two poles sustain each other. Neither works without the other.

If you don’t feel confident, you haven’t succeeded in solitude yet. If you don’t feel confident, you haven’t found your talents yet. And if you have found your talents but still don’t feel confident, you haven’t gotten the opportunity to truly cultivate them. That is a structural problem, not a personal one. As unpacked in chapter three of my first book, Waypoint, the structural stultification of timenergy results in the collapse of the virtuous circle.

When a society prioritizes production and development ahead of all else, the communally available large and reliably repeatable blocks of time-with-energy that are the default for people, which I have theorized as “timenergy,” gets reduced to “labor power.” Labor power is either a commodity competing in the “free market” or it is centrally managed by bureaucrats, but regardless of whether it is socialistic or capitalistic, the point is that modern people don’t really have timenergy because our whole lives are spent making ourselves as exchangeable as possible in the service of production.

What happens when the circle breaks? The two poles become refractory. Instead of pulling you in, they push you away. You can’t achieve genuine solitude because you’re always distracted, always on call, always reaching for a device that promises friction-free escape from the anxiety of being alone with yourself. And you can’t achieve genuine solicitude because you haven’t developed the secure sense of self that would let you show up fully for another person.

You end up lonely and distracted with yourself, and lonely and distracted with others. In between the refractory poles of the collapsed virtuous circle you spin in what I call the vicious cycle. It’s a phenomenon first seen by Kierkegaard, which got its formal and structural development by Heidegger. For the ease of teaching the vicious cycle, I like to name its three moments as the ABCs of falling: A for ambiguity (never getting to the bottom of anything), B for blah blah blah (idle chatter, the superficial exchange of whatever is trending), and C for non-committal curiosity (flitting from thing to thing, never committing). These three feed each other and result in most people settling for a presentist naive and hyper-distracted mode that Heidegger called “falling.” We don’t need his fundamental ontology to get into it though, the point is that when caught up in ambiguous and non-comitally curious idle chatter, you stay at the surface, leaving your talent to rot. The self achieves no heights or depth — the vertical itself becomes indistinguishable from oppression and one turns their one-dimensional plane of existence, forced by necessity, into a virtue.7

I wrote my second book, Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, largely at an Amazon warehouse during lunch breaks and bathroom breaks — after a lifetime of never having the timenergy to write a proper book, I chose to do it with my fragmented bursts of energy and time. What was it I was theorizing, though? In short: the concept of timenergy signifies something everybody already knows but nobody has a technical term for: large, reliably repeatable blocks of time-with-energy.8 Not time-without energy or energy-without-repeatable large blocks of time. What matters is the combination, time-with-energy regularized into repeatable blocks substantial enough to sustain the virtuous circle. [Without going into the ontological and ontic structures that underpin this, because we don’t have time, I hope the definition alone will suffice.] Modern job-centric societies are designed to make timenergy almost impossible. You might have time after work, but you’re drained. You might have energy on the weekend, but it’s consumed by recovery and errands. Timenergy is a necessary condition for the Good Life, but we don’t have any because of our work-centric society. That’s the thesis.³

What’s the problem with polyamory, and the deep wisdom of monogamy? Keeping the concepts of timenergy and the virtuous circle in mind, let’s turn back to the poly canon. Its founding axiom is that love is abundant. The Ethical Slut, the 1997 book that launched the movement, argues that we live in a “starvation economy” that conditions us to treat intimacy and love as scarce resources, producing jealousy, possessiveness, and fear. Reject the scarcity model, the authors promise, and love will flow like air.

Love may not be finite, but timenergy for achieving the virtuous circle is certainly scarce. The solitude and solicitude required for one single deep loving intimate relationship already tax the limits of a human life. You need solitude with your partner and solitude without your partner. You also need solicitude with your partner and solicitude without your partner. Right there are four distinct modes of being, each requiring substantial blocks of time-with-energy, and they compete with each other constantly.

Anyone who has ever tried to sustain a deep relationship while maintaining a friendship network, a creative practice, a spiritual life, and a sense of self knows that the balance is already precarious with one partner. Multiply the partners and the virtuous circle doesn’t just become harder. It becomes impossible. The refractory effect kicks in: both poles push you away.

What fills the gap is the ABC circuit of the vicious cycle: ambiguous processing that never resolves, blah blah blahing about feelings that never come close to genuine discourse, and non-committal curiosity about one’s own emotional states that flit from partner to partner, from NRE (new relationship energy) to NRE, never achieving the attunement that only comes from staying.

Max Scheler’s ordo amoris, his concept of the objective order of love, reveals the deeper error. The poly canon treats all love as quantitatively the same: more or less of a single substance to be distributed across more or fewer recipients. Scheler says the opposite: love is qualitatively ordered.

Different kinds of love exist for different kinds of relationship, each with its own proper form. Loving your spouse differently than you love a casual partner is not a hierarchy problem. It is the correct operation of the heart. The failure to rank, the failure to love things in their proper order, is what Scheler identifies as the fundamental moral disorder.9

In what follows I’ll take Scheler’s initial work a step further, to show the absolutely necessary hierarchy of attention goes all the way down to perception itself — the choice is never of whether to privilege one over another, but rather, who to prioritize. Not choosing is also choosing, it’s just not romantic.

Worse, poly does not scale across populations or over time in a way that stands a chance to be pro-civ. There’s a reason that poly people, when looking for precedent in previous societies, cannot find examples beyond monkeys or small groups of people incapable of reading or defending themselves. With timenergy and the virtuous circle now on the table, the reader will have enough to know why. But there’s a lot more to the argument, for which you’ll need to stay tuned.

This was part one of the chapter “Relationships Aren’t Colonized Enough, Actually.” So far I have only shown why the founding axiom of the poly canon, that “love is abundant,” breaks the moment you account for timenergy and the ordered structure of the heart. Next I will show that poly is not the cure for monogamy's failures but their completion. If you want to follow the argument to its own completion, make sure to subscribe.

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If you want to back the Castration Culture book directly, you can pledge on the website, which is coming soon.

Thanks for reading.

You can read part 2 here.

If you don’t already know about this volume or how it got blocked by Amazon, then you can check this out here: “Dissatisfying Customer Experience” as Amazon’s Definitional Reign of Terror | Conversation with Nick Land on the Amazon Block, and the Cathedral vs. Political Economy and the PMC — TRANSCRIPT

Tower of Babble

Now more than ever, after the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk, people have doubled down on the idea that we’re in the middle of a heated civil war over the freedom of speech. Yes, people are voicing more and more outrage over what they should and shouldn’t be allowed to say. Meanwhile, I’m growing more concerned that people may be fighting the wrong fight without realizing it. It seems to me like what people are really fighting for is the freedom to babble on incoherently. We watch all sorts of disconnected events happen throughout the day while never noticing that context has gone out the window. It’s obviously worse for those in the online world but even for the few Luddites who have managed to survive off of just TV, radio, and books, we’re living in a time of information glut. There’s no escape. It’s just a bunch of us reacting all day long and yelling about whatever pops into our worlds through screens of all shapes and sizes. There is absolutely no context to anything that we say or respond to. No one seems to notice or care either. A lot of people are spending their time not sharing ideas thoughtfully, but posting their tantrums to information presented in slot machine fashion instead. Are we contributing to a global conversation or are we all just stuck taking a never ending opinion poll? What is most important for me to know about next? [pull lever] How do you feel about this now? And how about this? How about now? And now?

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, who’s also the first I heard use the term “information glut,” has a chapter titled “Now… This” In it he discusses how TV news presents us with these self-contained stories, one after another, that have nothing to do with each other at all. The only thing joining them together is an anchorman saying, “now… this” This way of presenting information does more to disorient someone than it does to inform them. This is only made worse by the fact that there’s a commercial interruption every 8 minutes or so. One moment you’re hearing about a possible railroad strike, then an earthquake in Haiti, and then about a looming recession that will most likely be the worst in history; followed by commercials selling us spray-on deodorant, golf clubs, and life insurance. Postman wrote this in 1985 when TV news was just starting to hit its stride. Fast forward to today, thanks to our smartphones and social media, we are living in the “Now… This” world 24/7/365. A thumb swipe has replaced the anchorman’s “now this…” and the TVs are in our pockets. You almost literally have to go into a remote part of the wilderness to avoid this nonstop stream of “information.” However, even there, you may still get a signal.

In 1985, as disorienting as it may have been then, at least there were only a limited number of sources, relatively speaking, of course. You had television, 5 years into the 24 hour news cycle experiment, along with radio, magazines, and newspapers. A lot of physical media. Today our smartphones, which are themselves a piece of physical media, are more like portals. They allow us to enter into a cyber womb of our very own algorithmically powered thought bubbles and echo chambers. We’re already living in our very own virtual worlds where bots and worms of all sorts nibble away at our brain stems and regurgitate back to us not only all the things we love, but more often, for engagement purposes, all the things we love to hate. The more time we spend online, the more we seem to become uncomfortable and unable to handle the conflicting information presented to us by the real world. I should be allowed to live my life and listen to only what I want to listen to and nothing else. I should also be allowed to say anything I want to, whenever I want, to whoever I want. So I could see where the urge to fight for the freedom of speech comes from but what about taking the responsibility to know what we’re talking about? What about context? What about not being an asshole? We like to point the finger at everyone else about “alternative facts” but it seems like we’re all collecting random facts and ideas from an assortment of sources which only niche groups of people share. Whether they are true or not doesn’t seem to matter as much today as whether or not they provide us with the arsenal we use to bombard everyone and no one at the same time with.

This sounds a lot like what Neil Postman calls the great loop of impotence. He says, “Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.” The internet and social media have automated the jobs of pollsters and the news in this process. It has made the process transparent. People used to avoid pollsters but now people can’t seem to get enough of posting their unsolicited opinions/emotional outbursts online voluntarily.

This approach to “conversation” and “debate,” which drives people to gather this assortment of disconnected information, seems to make us susceptible to straw-man arguments, oversimplifications and other tribal tendencies. Sometimes it feels to me like 90% of all the content on the internet (besides porn obviously which probably makes up most of the internet) is either outrageous claims about how something random is racist and then other people being outraged by those people saying that something is racist. For example, “people didn’t support ______ because they’re racist.” This goes alongside content that says “can you believe people said that people didn’t support ______ because they’re racist?” We don’t seem to engage in any arguments here but instead resort to “gotcha” statements or pointing the finger at people we think are ridiculous (this might be an example of “owning the libs” style content of which Charlie Kirk was known for pioneering online. Rush Limbaugh passed him the torch. Stephen Colbert could be the left’s version). We scour the internet for these pieces of information that trigger us. Some people need trigger warnings while others soak in a bath of as many triggering pieces of content as they can get their hands on. C. Thi Nguyen refers to this content as moral outrage porn in a paper by the same name. He says that we’re in danger of becoming habituated to using information not to inform ourselves but simply to sift through it for material we can use in our moral outrage posts. We collect information not to educate ourselves in order to make important decisions but to use the bits collected as “I told you so’s” and weaponized scoffs used to attack strangers (and more and more, bots).

Freedom of speech is definitely important, but I also think that right now it isn’t as urgent as fighting for context. It’s not far-fetched to say that this chaotic, cacophonous media environment played a significant role in Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I would say that this environment contributed not only to why some appeared to dehumanize Charlie but also to why Charlie himself appeared to dehumanize others. Regardless of either side’s intentions, the truth gets lost. When we all succumb to these chopped up, incendiary versions of reality created to snatch away our attention by any means, we can’t be surprised when we can no longer understand each other. What’s the point of fighting for the freedom to talk past each other all the time? What is that going to help us accomplish? Wouldn’t those in power take advantage of this situation? Also, and maybe even more terrifying, doesn’t it seem like those in power are caught in the same trap? One of the advantages of the internet has been to topple the gatekeepers but one of its consequences has been the abandonment of the water cooler. It’s great to avoid those people who we hated to see or hear from but we’re also missing opportunities to find where we share similar struggles. We might be able to help each other in some way if we can figure out how to start communicating. This isn’t going to be easy and the George Carlin in me says it’s highly unlikely to happen but we should give it a shot anyways. At this point, fixing America is like trying to get a casino full of paranoid schizophrenics to sit down together and start a friendly game of Monopoly.

As much as I wanted to end this piece with that clever little line on Monopoly for schizophrenics, I’d rather have Neil Postman have the last word with one of my favorite quotes.

“Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about this event, for in America everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

Thanks for reading.

Author Bio:

*David Ruiz (B.A in Philosophy and Psychology) is an independent scholar and fellow traveler at Theory Underground and the Maurin Academy. He has a research project centered around the work of Neil Postman. He came to love philosophy after admiring the work of George Carlin, Bill Hicks and Doug Stanhope. He grew up playing Football, loves making music with samplers and synthesizers and doesn’t want you to know that he plays Magic the Gathering. He also has no idea why, and feels weird about the fact that, he wrote his own biography in the third person.

We chose this piece to share today because, for all the new subscribers to the Theory Underground Substack, many of you have yet to hear about the Amazon block from last year. What better way to hear about it than when we shared it with Land?

This volume was supposed to release a month after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, as a quick response, and, at the time, included 19 contributors, including a piece by Slavoj Žižek. But Amazon blocked it. What followed was a Kafka-esque appeal process that we definitely lost. Now it’s finally coming soon, thanks to Amazon KDP’s number one competitor, Lulu. Get ready! BLOCKED BY AMAZON is in the publishing pipeline’s review process, we’ve already sent it off to the printers, and it will become available on July 1st, 2026.

David McKerracher

So Nick, I wanted to switch from the whole topic... Maybe we could just take a minute here to share the news. This isn’t new news — you already heard the news — but it’s worth going over again. We published, or tried to publish, a book. How long ago? Like a week and a half ago at this point?

Ann McKerracher

Yeah, about a week and a half, two weeks ago.

David

Yeah. It’s called On the Left’s Response to Charlie Kirk. This book has, let’s see, a good handful of authors [nineteen]. They’re across the political spectrum. So it’s not just a post-left book, it’s not a right-wing book. It’s got quite a few people who are of various tendencies of the left, who are critical of the left, but it also has pieces just reflecting on the general culture of censorship. For instance, we have an anonymous professor in there talking about how both the left and the right at this point are suppressing free speech in academia. The instigating event we’re trying to use as a springboard into deeper conversations was the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and that book has been blocked by Amazon.

Some people go, “Oh, well, of course, who cares?” because they already know that Amazon’s woke or whatever, which is, by the way, not obvious to me. Just because they might be a little woke in the actual warehouses, that doesn’t mean you should assume the Direct Publishing service would be. I’m not even sure this is a woke thing. I don’t think it’s about the left position or right position on the culture war. I think it’s just a corporate thing. Ann, maybe you could lay out the chronological details a little bit more.

Ann

Yeah. The way the KDP publishing platform works: you submit your cover, you fill in all the details, you submit your manuscript, you set the prices. You click Publish, and then Amazon takes up to 72 hours to review it. In the past, with some of our Underground Theory anthologies, the book has been approved within 24 hours, and then it’s live. With this one, we got an email — instead of saying “Your book is approved and live,” saying “Your book has been blocked.” The only reasoning it gave was: “It may cause a dissatisfying customer experience.“ We were like, interesting…

Nick Land

“Dissatisfying customer experience.”

Ann

Yeah, that was it. On the actual KDP platform, the status of the book showed in big letters: BLOCKED. And we now can’t even access the back end. So all the information we put in — the description, everything — we’re basically locked out of that book information that we uploaded to the platform. Of course, we have the manuscript and everything saved elsewhere.

Two days later, they send a follow-up email reminding us that, after a thorough review of the content, your book has been blocked because it has caused a dissatisfying customer experience. So from “it may cause” to “it has caused.” And I’m like, what do you mean? The book isn’t available. No one’s read it.

Then another two or three days later we get one more email telling us our KDP account has been temporarily suspended, so now we can’t even access all of our other books. You try to log in and it says your account has been suspended because we have content that goes against the community guidelines and we have offensive content. To reinstate the account, you have to email us saying, “I have read the terms and conditions” — or “I have read the community guidelines and agree to unpublish anything that violates these rules.” I was like, okay, I’ll do this, because we need to be able to access our account, but also: Amazon, the book isn’t published. What are you doing?

I wasn’t sure if there’s just some automatic AI system going through these steps, flagging things. Or, like Dave was saying, maybe there’s a person approving these decisions. It was a weird thing. It wasn’t just like, “Oh, it’s blocked,” and then that was it. It kept disciplining us.

Nick

I had heard a version of it before in much less detail, so I’d been a little bit prepared, but I am absolutely flabbergasted on so many levels by this story. I really thought we were beyond this. This is like something from the very worst depths of the whole crazy mind-control culture that — I’m not going to try and say when it peaked, you know, 2017, 2018, something like that. But it’s just incredible. It’s so incredible I would have to suspect, and maybe this is just because I’m paranoid, that it’s a person, it’s a rogue person who is so pissed off about the current trends in the world that they are just lashing out in this insane, quasi-random fashion. I’ve got no basis for that other than my prejudices. It’s other madness. It’s other madness. And I so thought we were beyond this. I so thought we were beyond anything remotely like this, that I’m stunned. I’m stunned by it.

David

To that hypothesis — there’s a strong possibility that what I’m about to say does not in any way debunk it, and I’ll say why in a second. We have had at least three different names respond to our appeals. Two of the initial emails just said “Amazon Content Review Team.” But then on specific ones, there’s one name that is five syllables long and is definitely Indian in origin. I have no idea how to pronounce it. And then there’s another name that’s as normal to the American ear as Becky. So we really have a weird mixture of names signing off on these messages.

The reason that doesn’t debunk what you’re saying, though, is because, as I said with Ann, AI flags this, and then flagged content goes to review for a single person who’s sitting there eating potato chips and listening to music. They take a quick glance at it and they go, “Oh, I hate that,” and reject it out of hand. It could be that, instead of having to type out a rejection, AI does the rest of the work and then signs off with a randomly generated name. There’s no way to know — it could be a person, it could be AI, it could be a mixture. But if we were to be strictly literal, it sounds like there’s several people who keep looking at this and responding in agreement that this is bad and we violated something.

Nick

One of the reasons it’s so hard to begin to make sense of it is that there’s obviously much edgier stuff out there on Amazon than this volume. I had no sense at all, really, before hearing this story, that Amazon was at the cutting edge of this kind of censorious mind-control culture. I thought it was relatively loose, just based on the fact that I know what is trading through Amazon. I don’t want to name stuff because I don’t want to set off alarms and have people start hunting it down. But there are things I think would definitely have been in deep trouble in the depths of woke mind control that are now being shipped through Amazon completely easily. Which makes this case seem really, very, very hard to make sense of.

David

There’s not even any slurs or anything like that. And I know that you can publish slurs on Amazon KDP, so that’s interesting. They’re saying it violates their content guidelines, which, by the way, if you look at their guidelines, includes stuff like no hate speech — which obviously has been expanded to include so many things that nonetheless gets through. So if I say that this person calls that other person the F-word (I’m not going to use the word because I don’t want to get banned on YouTube, but), let’s say this person calls that other person the F-word, like, “Oh, that person is a real jerk, he called that person the F-word, what a jerk.” You can still get banned for that, as I just proved here on YouTube. It could technically violate stuff on KDP. But KDP does not block stuff like that. By most woke standards, that would be blocked, but KDP does not block that. So I had this assumption, like you, Nick, that Amazon was just like, “Yeah, publish what you want, guys.”

Nick

Part of the whole context of this, if we’re panning out a little bit. It’s not as though one whole set of responses to this story is, “Well, you’ve got to go somewhere else.” Obviously, just in terms of saying something to the world, there are lots of other places you can go that I think have an excellent standard now of free speech. Ignore the whole X thing because it doesn’t really do long content, but Substack seems to me extraordinarily open, liberal in the best sense. Medium too. But more narrowly publishing — Amazon’s monopoly is so crazy. There’s no way you can go and say, “Hey, Amazon’s a bunch of jokes, we’re going to take it to somewhere else that also has a thriving ebook publishing and marketing operation.” There isn’t this other.

David

No.

Nick

That just brings me back to the whole set of questions, like — isn’t that monopolistic power entirely dependent on maintaining extremely vigorous liberal standards? If people were going to take this story, and the reputation of Amazon was going to be based on this story, everyone is going to say, “You have to route around those assholes.” You’re just giving the North Koreans final say on what you can publish. It’s completely insane. Amazon has to see that.

I’ve no idea… Bezos, whatever you think of the guy, I’m not a particular fan, but I’m not a particular enemy either. I hadn’t got him on my list as someone who was engaged in this massive political censorship operation under the guise of doing business. I thought he was an opportunistic capitalist. And this is not opportunistic capitalist. This is something completely nuts.

David

On the level of mind control and this idea of, “Aren’t we beyond that 2017 through 2018 mind-control thing?” — I do want to get into this topic of what does this tell us about the Cathedral. But really quick, just for clarity on the situation. I’ve put a couple of videos out about this so far, but I haven’t read the email that I sent them.

When Ann sent them the agreement, just so we could get our account reinstated, we were basically saying, “Yes, we’ve read the community guidelines and we agree to not publish anything that violates them.” Once they sent us the email that reinstated us, I sent them this email:

“Dear so-and-so [the last person who had emailed, and Amazon Content Review Team], Thank you for reviewing my appeal and reinstating my KDP account. I appreciate the opportunity to continue publishing, and am committed to ensuring all my titles fully comply with your content guidelines and terms and conditions. To help me maintain good standing and avoid any future issues, could you please provide more details on the specific aspects of my content that were found to violate the guidelines? I reviewed the guidelines and believe my book aligns with them, but without knowing the exact concerns, it’s challenging to make informed adjustments. For reference, the title in question is On the Left’s Response to Charlie Kirk, which discusses political responses without promoting hate speech, illegal activities, or other prohibited elements. If this was a human review, I’d value any insights to better understand the process. Please let me know if there’s additional information I can provide. Thank you for your assistance. Best regards.”

That’s the most polite email I’ve ever sent anyone in my entire life. And this was their response: “Hello. As per our policy, we reserve the right not to disclose any type of information we consider sensitive data. We are unable to elaborate further on specific details regarding our terms and conditions beyond what is available in the following help pages. Regards.”

Nick

Just madness upon madness, to an extent that is completely unfathomable. What is going on there? Is it just that these people are lazy hacks, maybe outsourced lazy hacks, and this is their way of saying “I can’t be bothered to actually help you here”? Or is it something more sinister going on? It becomes close to a definitional reign of terror at the point where people are denied an explanation of what it is that they’ve been persecuted for. What is the purpose of that persecution? It just creates generalized terror. It’s like you’re supposed to be in a mindset where I don’t even know what I’m not allowed to say. A kind of paralyzing, preemptive anxiety that you might be somehow doing something wrong. It’s completely illegitimate, what is happening here at such a deep level. It’s really shocking.

David

So this would be the segue into the question about the Cathedral that I have for you and Ann. We were talking about this a little bit. I told her she doesn’t have to do any preparation for this, because she’s already thought a lot about the PMC, and the PMC is a good jumping-off point to then talk about the Cathedral. The Cathedral could be thought of as a certain theoretical way of going deeper into the conditions of what people are trying to get at when they say the professional managerial class. Would you agree with that?

Nick

I would directionally agree with that. My sense of the Cathedral is the fact it’s not being read deeply enough. I think it’s a really important, deep conceptual innovation that has happened. I’m attributing all of this to Moldbug. This is Moldbug’s Cathedral. It’s one of the actual concepts in his whole arc, and it’s a whole arc. There is serious intellectual greatness involved in that Unqualified Reservations arc to a degree I don’t even think Yarvin himself gets, in terms of what he’s done afterwards, in terms of how he seems to self-understand what he’s done. I don’t think he realizes how important what he’s done is.

So preparing for this, I completely unrealistically got an agenda here that would take us through the whole history of political economy until we get to the Cathedral, and then go through the history of modern Western religion until we get back to the Cathedral. This concept is the critical concept at the conflict of all the important traditions. The theological and the economic and the intellectual political-economic traditions of modernity come together in this notion. So that’s why I’m reluctant to just say, “We know cathedrals, we know what those assholes are, they’re the PMC.” That is kind of true, but the magnificence of the whole thing is really lost there, I think.

Ann

I’m pretty unfamiliar with your conception of the Cathedral as it relates to the PMC, so maybe you could just explain a little bit more for anyone who will be listening and, obviously for me, about that distinction, and what that means to you.

Nick

My comparative blindness on this is about the notion of the PMC, which, in a very impressionistic way, I see as also arising in a late stage of this long, deep tradition of political economy. What the PMC are is a group of people, and the Cathedral, maybe is a group of people. But I don’t know whether that is really the best way of conceiving it. We will do some cycling on this, because the whole thing is actually deep and intriguing.

Let me do an absolute race through political economy, which maybe serves a little bit for the PMC but is, I think, indispensable for the Cathedral. The first thing to say is: there used to be this thing, political economy. Political economy is a science, a discipline, an intellectual structure. Of course, for the people doing political economy, it’s also a thing — but that’s certainly not how it’s remembered. It’s remembered as being a particular intellectual edifice that crucially collapsed.

It’s an English-language phenomenon, and the French prototype for political economy is the Physiocrats. Political economy emerges by basically distancing itself from the Physiocrats, retrospectively, in ways that (Marx is very convenient) political economy says, “Oh, the Physiocrats are intellectual apologists for feudalism, because they’re basically saying that all wealth comes from agricultural production. The people who are feeding the nation are the foundation of the wealth of the nation, and everything on top of that — you can have artisans, you can have merchants, you can have higher-level trades and activities — but all those people have to be fed. So the people feeding the nation are supporting the whole of the economic activity of the nation.”

Political economy begins with a notion that is associated much more with what comes at the end of the traditional political economy, which is basically labor. The political economists do two things — maybe more, but two that are really indispensable for this conversation. They say that social coordination is decentralized, and the agent of social coordination is, as in Adam Smith’s sense, the invisible hand. And they say all value, the edifice of value, doesn’t rest upon production of food particularly — it rests on labor.

And then we get the culmination, or as the further right will say, the demolition. What Marx does is bring the notion of the labor theory of value — which is essential to the pre-Marxist, pre-leftist traditional political economy — to the point of crisis. He does it by this crucial move: distinguishing labor and labor power. He says: if you take the liberal, pre-leftist theory of political economy seriously, all value is produced by labor, and labor is wage labor, so people are paid for their labor, and therefore profit is impossible. Unless this notion of labor has to be systematically broken. If the value of anything is the amount of labor that’s been put into it, and laborers are paid for their labor, then the laborers get paid for everything they do, and all revenue from the market goes to labor. Where is capital in this at all? It doesn’t exist. It’s mathematically annihilated.

So Marx’s crucial move — which, wherever you are ideologically, I think has to be understood as being of vast importance — is to say: no, labor is being used in two very different senses. The consistent sense is that the value of anything is based on the amount of labor that has been put into it. And that also applies to the worker. The worker is paid according to the amount of labor that is put into reproducing labor. According to this Marxist-bourgeois-liberal economic calculus, you cannot fairly pay wages that are unable to reproduce labor. If you do that, you would just lead to human extinction. You have to pay, just like for anything else, the amount of labor that goes into reproducing labor power. People have to be born, they have to be fed as children, they have to be to some degree educated, all of this kind of thing. And they have to feed themselves, support a family, have a house — whatever conditions. All of these are costs for the reproduction of labor power, and that is what wages are directed to. They’re directed to treating labor as any other commodity, where you pay for what is required to reproduce it, based on the amount of labor that goes into reproducing labor power.

But that is totally different to just paying labor the amount of labor value it produces — the amount of labor it can do. The amount of labor a laborer can do is a very distinct quantity from the amount of labor that is required to reproduce that labor. And between those two different uses of the word labor — between labor and labor power — is what Marx calls surplus value, which he sees as the key to unlocking the entire dynamic of capitalism. Of course, all his work basically is about capitalism. He has a few tangential remarks about feudalism and a few tangential remarks about post-capitalism. But Marxism’s analysis of capitalism, this is the key and the core of all of it.

So this is his huge move. There’s two things I have to say immediately to justify why I’m talking about this at all. Sure, liberal capitalist economics then sidesteps Marx. They say, “Oh, the so-called liberal tradition of political economy was wrong, the labor theory of value is wrong, what Marx has done is proven — he has done a reductio ad absurdum of the labor theory of value, and we have to move somewhere else.” And then you go into different things. On a purely theoretical level, what you go into is Austrian economics. Austrian economics is capitalist economics, as opposed to Marxist communist economics. So that’s the first thing.

You’ve got the Marxist tradition, where political economy collapses. Why does political economy collapse? It collapses because Marx introduces the distinction between base and superstructure. His critique of political economy, as he defines his own work, is to say: “Look, what political economy is, isn’t actually a real science of economics, because I’ve shown how confused it is. By actually discovering surplus value, I demolished it. I’ve demolished it on its own grounds. I made an immanent critique of it. What I’ve discovered is that political economy was just bourgeois economics.”

What I mean by bourgeois economics is that it is a superstructure of a base that is economic and is based on class interest, and that class interest is based on the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class. The base/superstructure distinction is that everything that is not the economy — that’s to say, crucially, law, politics, and religion — is just stacked on top of the economy. It’s harmonic with the economy. So when we’re talking about a capitalist society rather than just a capitalist economy, we’re talking about a capitalist superstructure on a capitalist industrial base. That superstructure will just be harmonic with the capitalist class interest of the bourgeoisie at the economic level.

At this point political economy has been destroyed, because political economy was saying that politics and the economy are an integrated thing, and what Marx is saying is, no, no, no. You’ve got the economy, that’s the base, the fundamental thing, and everything else is superstructural, stacked harmonically upon the base. So you don’t need political economy at all. You just need proper economics, and then an ideological critique of the superstructure that follows upon that form.

Okay, I’m going to get out of this mode really quickly, because we’re almost there. We’re almost at the thing. Marx doesn’t say much about religion, but we have to at some point. He certainly understands that Reformation Christianity, Protestantism, and liberalism are the same historical event. They’re the same thing seen in different aspects. Because religion for him is just this stacked-up harmonic superstructure, he doesn’t talk about it a lot. He thinks, if you’re talking about capitalism, that’s the important thing. You can just assume it’s going to be capitalist religion, because religion is convenient to capitalism — just as it’s going to be politics convenient to capitalism, a legal system convenient to capitalism. All the superstructure does what capitalism, the bourgeoisie, wants it to do.

Just to pause for one second on the other side, Moldbug. We’ve seen that what happens is that Austrian economics peels off and insists on doing capitalist economics. Not on Marx’s terms — it has its own criticism of Marx, very interesting, we probably don’t want to get caught up in that. But just to say: it jettisons the labor theory of value. It sees where the labor theory of value goes, it doesn’t want to do that anymore. It’s got its own theory of value. As politics it becomes libertarianism.

Two things need to be said about this, even in maximum-speed mode. The first thing is: what’s really weird is that, on a Marxist viewpoint, libertarianism would actually be the superstructure of a capitalist society. It is capitalist economics. Obviously, if the superstructure is supposed to harmonically support the interests of the dominant class of the economic base, which is the bourgeoisie, then it should be the prevailing social economics. But instead, libertarianism has been totally marginalized, and Austrian economics has been almost totally marginalized. It just feeds in indirectly. It’s been completely crushed under the dominant tradition of non-Marxist economics in the West, which is Keynesianism.

Keynesianism, again, is something it’d be interesting to talk about. Keynesian liberalism, and neoliberalism later on built on a Keynesian foundation — all of that has nothing to do with Austrian economics, nothing to do with libertarianism. So why isn’t the capitalist superstructure actually capitalist in orientation? Why isn’t it the case that capitalist modes of thought are actually dominant in a supposedly capitalist society?

That’s the question. And what Moldbug does is, he says — he does something to Austrian economics very comparable, I think in magnitude and importance and intensity, to what Marx does to the tradition of political economy. He does it also by dividing a basic notion. He starts with the whole Austrian analysis of property, and he breaks it in two. He breaks it by saying: you have to realistically divide property into secondary property, which is actually the only thing that the libertarians and Austrians are talking about, and primary or sovereign property.

So primary or sovereign property is, for Moldbug, what surplus value is for Marx. It’s the discovery that breaks the whole consensus of the intellectual regime that he’s engaging with. To draw this to a preliminary conclusion: sovereign property is the Cathedral. That’s how you get to the Cathedral, through this whole route, this whole path.

You have this thing that you reach in the end, that is the explanation. It doesn’t work as a Marxist superstructure at all, because it’s completely dominant over the economy. It’s not a harmonic superstructure that just does what the capitalist class wants. We’ve seen that what the capitalist class would want the superstructure to do is not being done. The superstructure has gone in a completely different direction to what the bourgeoisie, based on their Marxian class interests, would want. It’s gone to another place, and the Cathedral is that other place.

The Cathedral, the transcendental property structure, is the structure that — secondary property is property understood as working within the rules of a particular game that is set by the laws and regulations and mores of our society. Primary property is what allows you to actually structure the game. It sets the rules of the game. It’s the level of legislation of the game. By legislation, I don’t mean that law is actually supreme in the Cathedral. It isn’t. Law is at an intermediate stage, but it’s certainly at a stage that is sovereign relative to the economic realm narrowly defined.

So that’s a big dump. I apologize for that. But it’s just to say: this is why a narrow sociological definition like “the Cathedral is just the PMC” is, I think, unsatisfactory. The Cathedral is this crucial notion. The Cathedral is sovereign property. It’s the highest level of social dominance. If you’re using categories that sound vaguely Marxist, as if they’re all just kind of swimming up out of the economy, then that’s not going to get it at all, because the flow of power is in completely the opposite direction. The economic class is just pursuing the rules of that society. The rules of that society are being set by the Cathedral. It’s not by playing the game really well that you get to dominate society and make the Cathedral what you want it to be. That’s an inversion. Moldbug is saying that the Cathedral is what decides the rules that society at the economic level is operating under. Okay, I really have shut up from here now.

At this point David’s microphone cut out and he was inaudible to the others through the end of Nick’s monologue and the exchange that follows. Ann and Nick continue while waiting for him to return.

Ann

That was great. I knew that Dave had a follow-up question, so I wonder if he’s having mic problems. I’ll turn it over to him. Where’d he go? Dave? Yeah, mic problem.

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Nick

Maybe we should talk about something while we’re waiting for Dave.

Ann

It’s his mic problem. He was the one who brought up the PMC and the Cathedral in the first place, as it relates to this Amazon issue. It kind of stemmed from that.

Nick

That was the trigger for it, for sure. It’s an interestingly complicated case. Yarvin [Molbug] is much [suddenly Dave comes back through] there we go.

Ann

We can hear you.

Dave

All right, there we go. But what were you going to say about Yarvin?

Nick

I was just going to say his general mode is very historical. He tends to have a lot of historical detail. He’s a kind of historian at a high level when he’s in his most comfortable mode. So he would probably find this Amazon case very interesting, because it’s so concrete. There’s a mode that he would see as obsolete of discussing this, which is: Amazon is a massive capitalist enterprise, it has a lot of power because it’s very rich, and therefore it’s like an asshole. I’m sure you could be a bit more subtle about it, but that’s the basic system. But that obviously doesn’t get even remotely close to it. What is the agenda for what’s happening in this case? Because surely no one thinks the strategy here is about profit maximization. That would be the most basic one. How could this be about profit maximization?

Or, to take it up a level, to go meta and say, “Oh, this is somehow about entrenching the power of the bourgeoisie, the effective capitalist class is somehow consolidated through this act” — I don’t find that even remotely suggestively persuasive at all. So instead we’re saying, well, why is Amazon the conduit for a certain set of approved opinions and beliefs? And those approved opinions and beliefs — there will be people who say, “Oh,” still trying to be finally Marxist about it, “somehow these approved opinions and beliefs are serving some traditional Marxist notion of bourgeois class interest.” I find that entirely unpersuasive.

So you start going up this stack of what was supposedly the harmonic superstructure. At one level, you’ve got all of this clunky capitalist stuff to do with property. Liberal civilization has actually not done well at locking down property at all, and when it tries to philosophically, it’s very unpersuasive. The whole Lockean theory of property is probably where we would end up if we were going to be in the philosophical tradition, and it’s extremely unpersuasive, I would say. So you go with a bit more sophistication to law, and you say: look, what property is, is what you can do to legally protect your claims. You have property over something effectively if, when your property rights are violated, you can take it to court and win. So property becomes this legal infrastructure. Now we’re heading up into the superstructure.

But then people say, “Well, where does law come from?” Again, I’m very sympathetic to common-law traditions, which basically say it’s a spontaneous thing, maybe even a spontaneous ethnic thing. But law has historically overridden common law by statute law. Statute law is legislated in some kind of parliament or political assembly, and that assembly is dictated by political process. So you have, in theory at least, politics being supreme over law. If you win a political victory, you can rewrite laws, scrap laws, legislate. So the law is downstream of politics.

And then you’ve got — the world is moving in this direction — trying to be as disillusioned and realist about power politics as it can be. It’s like Mao’s famous dictum: power comes out of the barrel of a gun. End of the road, you have power if you can tell people to behave your way using the threat of violence. Politics at the end of the road is that. But then it’s like: why do the people with the guns do what you want? What actually coordinates the people with the guns to point them in a politically approved direction? I think it’s only then that we get to the top of this — lots of inverted commas — “superstructure” stack, that they have a religion that is pointing their guns in the right direction. In Mao’s case, eschatological Chinese communism. In the case of Western politics, there is a religion that is coordinating political power. And again, we’re back on a different path, back again with the Cathedral. The Cathedral is an unacknowledged state church. It’s a religious institution.

So with the Amazon thing, what is going on is religion. There is a religion that is passing down through these levels — religion down through politics, through law, into economic power. The only real level at which it becomes fully intelligible is that there was a religious event: that book, that product, was in some sense heretical. It was a religious offense, because it’s not an economic offense. This is why the thing that angered them, this ridiculous thing — “it might lead to some level of reader discomfort.” What that’s implying is, “as a business, we’ve come to the conclusion that you might lose us money by upsetting our customers.” It’s pretending to be doing economics, and it’s farcical, because of course it’s not economics. No one could believe that putting up that book on Kindle is going to have some economic cost to Amazon, and that as a neutral, completely profit-oriented business, it made the decision it did as a profit-maximizing thing. Maybe there’s someone out there who wants to defend that. To me it’s an absolutely insane, lunatic suggestion.

So what is going on? It’s not just that they’re obeying the law. Amazon isn’t under some legal obligation to squash that book, of course not. In fact, we’ve got X, we’ve got Substack, we’ve got relatively free media now, which shows that’s absolute bullshit as well. There’s clearly no legal compulsion for them to act like that. So we go up the next level. Is it politics? And as soon as we ask, well, if it’s politics — whose politics? What —

David

Right. It’s not recognizable as anyone’s politics, either.

Nick

Except the politics of a religious movement.

David

If it’s the politics of a religious movement, and we just don’t tend to see it as a religion or as a politics — is the thing underneath that what we’re trying to get at here? Here’s the thing. People have grown numb to it over the last ten years, and to a certain extent, especially radicals, they seem the most pacified when it comes to this stuff, because their assessment is the system is so far gone anyway, so of course this happens. But from our standpoint — you used the word flabbergasted, and I think we agree — because our particular way of thinking about the system is, yeah, of course it’s so far gone, and of course there are all kinds of ways that free speech is suppressed, but not this way.

For instance, YouTube. If a video gets taken down, people go, “Well, of course it did. They care about the profit motive, the bottom line, it’s about the corporate funders, the advertising revenue. They don’t want to lose advertising revenue, that’s why they do this.” And so people use this to downplay, dismiss, and live in this sort of numbness where they expect to never be able to say anything that goes off the plantation. But with this, there’s no advertiser revenue at stake. If advertiser revenue is presumed to be the religious motive when it comes to something like YouTube, then okay, we’re not dealing with that here. We’re dealing with something else. Then what is it? What is that religion? That’s part of what’s driving me crazy. What is this thing that we’re bumping up against? And why do some people act like they’re very confident, like they know what it is, when it’s not obvious at all what we’re bumping up against.

Nick

Yes. It should still have the power to surprise, this thing. It’s obviously difficult because of the fact that the notion of the Cathedral now is — where are we, 2025 — so it’s over fifteen years old. It’s quite a venerable notion. I don’t know when it really broke out, escaped containment as a concept, but it’s been around a while, and people feel very used to it. They think they know what it means, and somewhat lazily they tend to undervalue its importance. And with woke too — there’s this whole discourse at the moment, “woke is being put away, we’re post-woke, even the left is now post-woke, they realize it’s peaked, we’re on the other side of it.” So when you hit this thing that is only understandable in terms of the most fanatical level of woke activism imaginable, people are just stunned and confused about it. It shouldn’t be like that.

So yes, the more people hear about this episode, the more they will be mystified by it. I would have expected this much more from YouTube, which I trust much more than I had distrusted Amazon. And with YouTube, again, the same thing: this explanation that it’s about advertising revenue. That’s an attempt to make it all sound like we’re on this Marxist plane of economic interest, but that’s not explanatory. Why would the advertisers judge things the way they do? They’re not judging things on economic grounds. They’re judging things under this hierarchical schema that culminates in the church of woke. It’s the church of woke that is telling the advertisers what adverts are good and who they should advertise with. That’s setting the agenda. It’s not cynical economic self-interest at all. It’s the fact that the advertising industry has been captured and has been under religious direction. And again, it had seemed that they were beginning to recover or back away from it, which is a discussion we may have to have as well.

David

Where I was going to go with the PMC and Cathedral thing — I think it’s true that the professional managerial class, or PMC, the way that term gets used usually, is just for a type of person, or a person belonging to a certain group of people. At the level of the name, it just refers to a group, professionals and managers, usually considered the college-educated. I don’t like that, but I do think it’s a good jumping-off point. Because when people are realizing that there are certain crises in academia, in activism, in the attention economy, a lot of the signs of these crises come from the realization: oh, there are people who seem quite confident that they are capable of speaking on everyone else’s behalf, saying what’s in the best interest of everyone else, and they tend to have some kind of institutional authority, or at least they act as though they do. These are the gatekeepers of culture to some extent, of media, of law — the influencers, the professors, the activists.

So their taste, their sense for what’s normal, and the degree to which, when they talk about what’s normal, they’re not describing, they’re prescribing. They’re trying to force x, y, or z to be considered normal. They’re trying to say, this is normal, this is not normal. It’s prescriptive. They’re trying to be the person at the airport waving the sticks with the lights on them, the air traffic control people — they’re trying to do that for culture itself. Maybe they do it nicely, maybe they do it like bullies. There might be a culture divide over whether it should be done nicely or as bullies. But this is the thing people are trying to get at with the term PMC. I think it became popular between 2016 and 2020 because the height of this kind of mind control was becoming very visible in that period.

One of the things I’ve tried to do is take that and go deeper, looking into these three crises: the crisis of academia, the crisis of activism, the crisis of the attention economy. I call that the three A’s [A3], and the PMC is in all three domains, for obvious reasons. There’s one level where people can take it a bit deeper and say it’s not about the people themselves, it’s not about identity politics. It’s not to say if you’re college-educated your opinion is worthless. It’s just to say, generally, there is this divide between those with degrees and those without degrees, and those with degrees are trying to gatekeep discourse.

But the much deeper level is exactly what you’re getting to. I wonder if James Burnham, and on the left side, Barbara Ehrenreich — I wonder if they fit well into it or not. Ehrenreich is pretty descriptive in her seminal piece that she wrote with her husband, called “The Professional-Managerial Class,” where she’s just describing the fact that class development did not go the way Marx thought it would. There was a time when it was really easy to talk about how, out of all the different classes, there are two major classes growing fast, and it’s likely they’ll keep growing — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The other classes are withering away. These two are growing, but the proletarianization of political economy makes it likely that the proletariat will become this sort of universal class, and it also just so happens to be the one with hands on the levers of power, in the sense that if they lock arms and step back, the world comes to a halt.

So it’s not like when the New Left comes along — say the Weather Underground — and says, “Oh, it’s the Black population, or the Vietnamese, or the children, they’re the new revolutionary subject because they’re the most immiserated.” No. What was unique about the proletariat was not immiseration. It was specifically power. It was the fact that it was growing in power, and that it’s not just labor power in the sense of a commodity, it also had power. Because if they locked arms and stepped back, things would actually stop. It costs the bourgeoisie millions per minute when people at a factory stop working. So they actually had power. Whereas other immiserated minorities, if they step back, nobody cares. It doesn’t actually change anything. So there was something unique at that moment.

And then something between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 20th century changed, that made it so that was no longer plausible — unless you had on some pretty rigid, orthodox, dogmatic Marxist or political-economy lenses. If you’re looking and you’re not super committed to seeing the world through the lenses of the Adam Smith–Ricardo–Marx spectrum, then you realize, no, there’s something else going on here, because the proletariat is not growing in power. It’s actually being fractured and splintered and segregated and moved out in a distributed manner across the globe. It’s not being welded together in city centers the way Lenin describes in State and Revolution. It’s the opposite. For Lenin it was, “Oh look, the cities are welding together this new class.” And it’s like, are you actually looking around you when you say that, Lenin, or are you just looking at books? Are you saying it because you want it to be true? We know it’s because he was looking at books and wanted it to be true, because it obviously wasn’t the case in Russia, where there was no proletariat, or at least not to speak of.

But what Ehrenreich, and also Burnham in his own more neoconservative way, are going to say is that what we see is the rise of a mediating class, and it’s managerial in its mode — whether we’re talking about actual managers or not. It’s one that seizes the means of legal control. From Ehrenreich’s position, it’s one that just sells itself to capitalists. It says, “Hey, you guys need us actually, because without us you’re going to have these workers striking. With us, we can keep them from doing that.” Whereas from Burnham’s standpoint, which is much more black-pilled, he’s saying, no, there’s something fundamentally different going on, and it actually has the power. The bourgeoisie is not the group that has the power. It’s actually the people who are doing politics and law. So I think this goes really well with everything you’re saying. But I guess I’ll turn it into a question by saying: do you think the Cathedral was the one calling the shots also in the time that political economy was in vogue?

Nick

That’s a very difficult and complicated question that I think might involve, again, some of the notorious circling-back behavior. Let me engage with what you’ve been saying at an earlier stage of that. Because your narrative has consolidated my suspicion about what’s going on with this notion of PMC, which is the fact that it’s an attempt to upgrade a broadly Marxist analysis by saying that what we’re talking about is class interest, and we’ve just not understood class interest enough. There’s this other class, they have their interest, it’s not reducible to the interests of the classical Marxist classes. They’re not acting in the interest of either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, they have their own thing going on — but it’s still material class interest.

And we’ve seen that ultimately that is all within a tradition that has a notion of the superstructure that cannot be right or adequate. You have to basically just say, “No, we’re just going to move the superstructure around a little bit. The superstructure now, it’s these class interests it represents.” It’s still harmonic, it’s still based upon this kind of economic base. We’re just moving the furniture around in terms of what’s happening at the level of the economic base. I just don’t think that solves the problems that we’re here in this talk trying to talk about. Even just concretely, we can keep going back to this Amazon thing. What Amazon is doing does not make sense in terms of the class interests of the PMC any more than it makes sense in terms of the class interest of the bourgeoisie. What class interest is involved in shutting this thing down, in an act of what is actually a translated, modulated religious horror? That’s what’s actually happened.

I think you have to then go to this thing: modernity can be run entirely, and in parallel actually, as religious history. And as religious history it begins with the Reformation. The Reformation is also a media revolution. It’s also Gutenberg. There’s no modernity, there’s no capitalism without reformed religion. The two things are the same process. Then we get a sociological confirmation of that in Weber — and I would say also we should never forget Sombart, who is a kind of reorbiting of Weber, crucially. These things are, in a deep sense, right. People try to slide off it and say, “Oh, somehow we don’t believe in what Weber discovered anymore.” But Weber discovered something totally important, the spirit of capitalism. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a crucially important text, and Protestantism and capitalism are almost the same thing. They are aspects of the same thing.

So then we get up to our PMC. What are we saying about the PMC in terms of religious history? Because Moldbug, and there’s a lot to say about this, he’s participating in a discussion about religious history as much as anything. For Moldbug the Cathedral is a religious episode. It’s a church, and we get to the Cathedral through this evolution of Protestantism. So what we’re dealing with, in all the works of the Cathedral, is religious history. We’re dealing with: what has our religious tradition become, such that this is now heresy, this is now sanctity, we’re approving this, we’re disapproving that? This is the very highest level of sovereignty. There’s nothing above it. You’re not going to reduce it to class interest. You’re not going to reduce it to anything else. This level of religious history is — you’ve come to the end of the conveyor belt.

So whether you’re talking about Ehrenreich or Burnham or anyone, if they’re implying that you’re talking about class interest in some ultimately Marxist sense — that this is something decided at the level of the base that is then harmonically reflected in the superstructure — you have completely lost the plot. You’re completely failing to see that this is religious history. And right from the start, the religious conflict has been — if you can start it in the Anglo tradition, with the Tudors, with the establishment of the Church of England, with Bloody Mary versus Elizabeth — this is what it’s about. It’s about the religious authority that is going to be at the top of the stack, which is what the Cathedral then is. It’s our postmodern version of — no, it’s not a postmodern version of class politics. It’s that all class politics is downstream of this.

David

This is something I’ve also talked about. When we’re talking about the mode of activists, or of academics who are for suppressing ideas and for trying to gatekeep culture — well, the priest class has always done that. It’s just that we have a particular kind of priest class that, because it disavows its function and role as a priest class, does things that are sort of suicidal by more traditional instantiations, by the norms of one. For instance, if you think that social harmony is one of the goals of the priest class, or one of the responsibilities proper to or emanating from that occupation, then obviously the one we have today has lost the plot. It doesn’t care about social harmony. This has nothing to do with social harmony. It has nothing to do with trying to meet people where they’re at, or halfway, and then raise them to some higher level.

So I’ve talked about it as a problem of the rebel priest class. It’s where people who would have historically felt called to go be monks or nuns, or potentially actual priests, are instead striking off to be some kind of radical-individualist bohemian, in a dumbed-down Nietzschean vein or something.

Nick

Yeah, interesting. If you go back into this thing, the role of the religious zealot as quietist monk — you’re not seeing the revolution in. If you’re seeing that, well, that’s when the whole system works. When you’ve got pre-modern, traditional Catholicism — sorry, when you have the Roman Church prior to the Reformation — it can contain its bubbling confusion by the fact that it can sort of send people, direct people, implicitly, into quietism, into monasticism, into these modes where they take their religious zeal out of the space of social ferment.

But when you’re in the Reformation, from either side — as Moldbug says, this gets something too complicated to go into in detail, but it’s worth mentioning — he sees Protestantism as a zealous phenomenon as basically indistinguishable from forms of rebellion and revolution. The peasant rebellions immediately in Germany; obviously in the Civil War in Britain, the Puritan extreme of the Roundheads was into a form of basically violent revolutionary communism. And reciprocally with the Jesuits — they saw themselves as warriors. In the whole fight in England over the escape from Rome, or however more neutrally you want to put it, it was being fought with subterfuge and martyrdom on both sides. It’s a military thing. It’s war.

We’ve sort of forgotten that. Because of the later evolution we’ve forgotten that these religious questions are tied up with just extreme social tumult, and historically pursued zealously. To get back to your question about social harmony or social peace — I mean, none of these people during the Thirty Years’ War would have thought that social harmony was a value such that one should compromise religious integrity for it.

David

To think about this as a religion — trying to figure out how to even phrase the question is difficult, because I guess when you have a religion, typically there’s a pretty obvious sense for what is being valued, for what is actually sacred as opposed to what is profane. And typically they make it pretty easy for you to know if you’re blaspheming or practicing heresy.

And I’m out here saying to them, “I don’t want to be a heretic, I’m not trying to blaspheme. Tell me how to do what you want me to do, and I will do it.” And they’re like, “That would be compromising us. That would be sensitive data.” How can that be a religion? How can any religion function that way?

Nick

This is super interesting framing. It’s true. This is super interesting framing of it, because obviously the whole trend on the way up was exactly to do that. You get these ridiculous things — you get statements even in the Smithsonian and all of these public institutions, these woke versions of religious doctrine that are just like, “Whiteness is punctuality, whiteness is concerned with logic, discipline” — I don’t know whatever the particular thing is that they’ve discovered recently. It’s extremely literal, specific, and exactly as you’ve just said, they see the religious compulsion to produce clear declarations of faith. It’s just like the Thirty-Nine Articles, but for woke. “This is what we believe. If you don’t subscribe to these particular points of doctrine, you are in profound error, and you deserve to be treated harshly as a heretic.”

But as you say, that isn’t how Amazon has just behaved to you at all. Instead they’ve said this weird thing where you’ve somehow blasphemed unforgivably, but we can’t tell you how. That is extremely strange. I’m not going to ramble on this. I’ll just say one more thing quite quickly. Maybe this is a really interesting transitional symptom. Maybe the fact that the coercive apparatus of whatever witch-finding is being executed is at an intensity that’s almost unbelievable, and yet it’s not willing to publicly declare its principles, to actually make some doctrinal statement. This is a weird combination of a massive lack of confidence combined with this also uncompromised element. This is like a new phase of things that we haven’t really — that we’re just obviously seeing now with this. It almost makes you nostalgic for the point where they would nail their principles to the wall. It was easier to laugh at it, actually.

David

Could that be why it’s considered sensitive data? Because if they were to say it out loud, they know they would be subject to public ridicule. They’re that far off — that far removed from the consent of the governed, or the possibility of some general will?

Nick

This is so much the right question to ask. And it takes you to this confusing spot. Can it be that, that which has this extremely enviable total monopoly on a whole range of publishing and distribution activities, be so gone in religious zealotry that it will take this path, the path of holding on to the religious zealotry even as it recognizes that this is no longer publicly available? There’s a level of craziness here that just keeps getting deeper.

David

I appreciate the degree to which you’ve been flabbergasted here. It’s a breath of fresh air, being surrounded by theory people and radicals or post-radicals, post-militant types of people who are all so numb to it. Or maybe purporting themselves to be “realists” to such an extent that this is all just par for the course. I’m like, no, but I think that there’s something new and remarkable in this development.

So first of all, thank you. It feels nice to hear from anyone else, especially you, that yes, this is a thing. This is weird. And not just weird, but also fruitful for inquiry. This is worth thinking deeper about, worth taking your tools of theory and getting to work. Let’s think deeper about what this says about our moment. Because the volume itself was already doing that about the assassination. What is it that we can tell now about where we are in history? What kind of an era are we entering, given the fact that it was normal to hear people cheering on the assassination of a political rival — and one who is, by the way, the most mainstream and milquetoast when it comes to the Zoomer side of Republican politics. There’s no one more mainstream.

Nick

Talk about upsetting your customers.

Actually, I love that statement. That deserves to become world-historic. I need it repeated. The exact wording of that thing — the bit where they said it would upset our customers. What was the exact wording?

Ann

“Customer experience.”

Nick

“Dissatisfying customer experience.” Hold on. There’s something perfect about that. There’s something perfect. This is kind of post-Orwell perfection of just — it is defining where we are, apparently, in a way that none of us could have come up with. None of us could have come up with that phrase. It had to come from there. It had to be a discovery, because it’s so perfectly weird, it’s so sinister, it’s so obviously dishonest, it’s so drenched in history — and this exact moment of history — in a way that none of us could have guessed before it was uttered.

David

I have the exact wording here in front of me from the initial — this was an email from twelve days ago, on November 1. They said:

“Hello. Thank you for the submission of the following title: On the Left’s Response to Charlie Kirk: An Intellectual Reflection on the Cultural Significance of Kirk’s Assassination, by Slavoj Žižek, Ann McKerracher, Michael Tracy” — and then they go through the rest of the contributor list.

Just a quick pause: the fact that Žižek gifted us something that he had written about the case — it’s nice as a signal booster when you’re putting an anthology out, and he’s got a great piece in there. But in terms of world-historic value, this is — because it has Žižek, who’s one of the lead cultural critics we could say, and then Michael Tracy, who’s not exactly a mainstream journalist but is well-known. Because it has Michael Tracy and Žižek, this is not something where people can say, “Oh, it’s just a bunch of nobodies who threw together some slop.” Anybody who reads it will see there’s some real deep original stuff going on in there. But it’s also got a couple of very famous people.

Nick

The fact that they felt that they could just squash those names. I mean, it’s really extraordinary. It’s really extraordinary.

David

Okay, and then the rest of the quote goes: “Based on our review, we won’t be accepting your submission for publication, because the book might result in a disappointing customer experience. For additional information, you can refer to our terms and conditions here.”

Nick

“Disappointing.” So, yeah. I would hope the takeaway, there was a lot more we could have talked about, and a lot of it we’ve touched on briefly and been fast, but really, what’s going on in that expression “a disappointing customer experience” is the thing to revolve around thoughtfully. Because it’s the crucial thing that is pretending to be an economic statement. It’s pretending to express class interest. As if Amazon is saying — as an agency driven by bourgeois class interests, we have to reject this project, because it would compromise our fundamental drive towards profit maximization. And we all know — everyone knows, everyone who hears this knows — that that is utter bullshit. It’s completely unbelievable. There’s no way anyone who is not completely insane could take that at face value.

So on a pedestrian level, it’s obviously an insulting lie. But in being a lie, it points you towards: well, what is actually happening there? It’s clearly not a kind of economic decision. And it’s interesting that it has to position itself as an economic decision. It has to pretend — it’s in drag. It’s in paleo-Marxist drag, in a way that should be comical to everyone. I suspect it will become comical to everyone.

David

This is where — I don’t want to start something new, but I just have to. Going into this, one of the big things I had about the Cathedral was specifically the relationship between capital as AI, which is one of your most generative ideas — really one of your contributions to the whole conversation about artificial intelligence and capital. The idea is that capital has this intelligence, and the Cathedral goes against that intelligence. It tries to patch things up, slow things down, change the direction of the movement of capital.

What we have here is “Oh, well, it would be bad for capital” — that’s kind of the subtext of that email. “It’d be bad for the customer.” Isn’t it interesting, here, that when people aren’t bothered by this, they go, “Oh, it’s probably not even a person, it’s probably not even a rule, it’s probably just AI.” All of a sudden, AI is being used not just as a fetish, but also as a concern-terminating cliché. It’s almost like, “Well, there’s no one at the wheel. It’s just AI.” What does that mean for a world where it’s a Kafkaesque sprawling bureaucracy, but nobody could even get mad at any of the functionaries in it, because, well, AI is the thing that’s driving it now?

Nick

Yeah, that’s an extremely interesting comment, because, like you say, it’s basically assuming a capital-AI identity. So I say it’s in capitalist drag, it’s in AI drag. There’s total interchangeability. It’s pretending to be either capitalist axiomatics playing out mathematically, or it’s pretending to be an AI algorithm playing out mechanically.

I know I’m radicalizing from my earlier stage, but I’m going to say: of course, it’s neither of those. Of course it’s neither of those things — if they’re even separate. It’s not capital-equals-AI that’s writing that email. Or if it is, it’s because it’s enslaved to something completely different. It simply couldn’t be an algorithm that defective, and it couldn’t be a profit motive understood as that defective. Neither of those are possible. If it were either of those, why would it not just say what the rule is? The whole thing about an algorithm in its reductive sense is that it just cranks out stuff according to rules. It doesn’t say, “I can’t tell you what the rules are, you just have to accept that there are rules and you’ve broken them, but they’re a secret.” That’s something so pathological that AI hasn’t got there yet. AI hasn’t got to the point that it can be that psycho.

David

AI in drag.

Nick

Something is hoping you will think it’s now. It’s an amazing thing. It’s this inverted Turing test, isn’t it? It’s not an AI trying to get you to believe it’s human. It’s something coming out of the Cathedral, trying to persuade you that it’s an AI. It’s complete inversion.

David

Yeah, in the most surreal way possible. That was my concern last year for the intro to Nick Land class. At the end of it, that was what I raised. I was like: how will this not become the dominant ideology of people who don’t want to have to be responsible for the decisions that they’re making in public office? “Oh, well, it’s the intelligence of the system. It’s so far beyond us.” How will it not be the new “Oh, the market knows best,” which is sort of the neoliberal way? “Hey, we just can’t argue with that.” It’s like, “Well, AI is just so intelligent, we just have to go with it. It’s so complicated, guys.” But of course there’s people there. It’s people who are using this so that they don’t have to be pegged as somehow responsible or capable of doing anything otherwise.

Nick

It’s extremely paradoxical and peculiar, really. I’ve never resonated whether anyone who understands what’s happened to you guys with this is not mystified by it, if they’re willing to think about it. It takes us full circle back to the discussion right at the start. Of course you can just think, “Look, I can’t think about that, because it’s too gone, it’s too weird. If I really thought about it, it would just blow my picture of the world totally to pieces.” This story is like that. If you really think about what the hell is going on there, it’s just everything starts spreading, and the walls start melting, and it’s like, what the hell is happening? Not everyone’s going to be willing to go there, for sure. But I think a lot of people will. This is a data point. I think a really great data point.

David

I think that’s it. That’s the wrap, guys.

Nick

Awesome.

Ann

Thank you for joining us.

Nick

It was a pleasure.

Thanks for reading.

Stay tuned for BLOCKED BY AMAZON: On the Left’s response to Charlie Kirk, coming July 1st, 2026.

Eleven years ago I took on Being and Time. I’d already tried and failed a couple of years prior. This time, with the help of Dr. Stewart Gardner, I was able to get through it. Gardner had, as optional reading on the syllabus, some of Simon Critchley’s articles. I found these really helpful — even more so than I had found Hubert Dreyfus’ famous lectures on YouTube. Since that time I have published work on B&T, it was essential to my M.A. thesis and the development of timenergy theory, and I taught a whole course on it at TU.

Critchley also teaches across the continental canon and I especially like his work on Levinas. So you can imagine how honored and excited I am, then, to announce that he is joining us today at 10 AM Pacific. (Join Link on Membership Profile at the TU site)

Truly a once in a lifetime opportunity. See you there!?

If you’re unable to join on time, no worries! The lecture will be available as a part of my Intro the Theory course which features other amazing guest lecturers. And in the meantime, you can check out this conversation with Simon here:

TMI if you want to keep reading:

A quick bio

Simon Critchley (b. 1960) is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He came up through the British continental scene, with a PhD from Essex on the ethics of deconstruction in Levinas and Derrida and an earlier MA at Nice on Heidegger and Carnap. His work runs across continental philosophy, ethics, political theory, and the relationship between philosophy and literature, with Levinas a recurring center of gravity. He has written more than twenty books, on everything from Greek tragedy and suicide to David Bowie, football, Shakespeare, and how philosophers die, and for years he co-edited The Stone, the New York Times philosophy column that put serious thinking in front of a general readership.

His new book, Heidegger Thinking: ‘Being and Time’ Explained, is a long-form walk through of every concept in Being and Time, written to be understandable and usable for intelligent, curious laypeople, and timed for the 2027 centenary of the book’s publication. I’m really looking forward to this one.

What Simon has never done is anything like what he’s doing today, i.e. give a guest lecture for a post left working class theory hub based on a regenerative farm in North Idaho of all places.

His public writing, a sampler

The Stone and other pieces at the New York Times:

What Is a Philosopher? (May 16, 2010). On the philosopher as a provocateur who questions societal norms and truths. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/what-is-a-philosopher

Why I Love Mormonism (September 16, 2012). Critchley on Mormon theology as a unique and often overlooked religious challenge in contemporary discussions. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/why-i-love-mormonism

Abandon (Nearly) All Hope (April 19, 2014). A critique of excessive hope in politics and life, arguing for a more grounded reckoning with disappointment. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/abandon-nearly-all-hope

There Is No Theory of Everything (September 12, 2015). A critique of the pursuit of unified theories in science and philosophy, in favor of the value of particulars over abstractions. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/there-is-no-theory-of-everything

To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die (April 11, 2020). How facing death philosophically can lead to liberation and survival amid crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/opinion/covid-philosophy-anxiety-death.html

What Would David Bowie Do? (January 9, 2021). On the fifth anniversary of Bowie’s death, how his music reflects dystopian realities and offers paths to transcendence. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/opinion/what-would-david-bowie-do.html

Shakespeare Foreshadowed Our Current Malaise (June 23, 2022). Connecting themes in Hamlet to modern existential concerns about reality and perception. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/special-series/hamlet-reality-philosophy.html

Life Doesn’t Need a Narrative Arc (June 12, 2023). On the self as fragmented rather than a coherent story, challenging the idea of life as a structured tale. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/special-series/life-doesnt-need-a-narrative-arc.html

The Guardian, “Being and Time” series (2009), an eight-part walkthrough of Heidegger that pairs well with our own Heidegger track:

Part 1: Why Heidegger matters (June 8, 2009). Introducing Heidegger as a pivotal figure despite his Nazi affiliations, and why grappling with Being and Time matters. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/05/heidegger-philosophy

Part 2: On ‘mineness’ (June 15, 2009). Human existence as defined by personal engagement with the question of being. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/15/heidegger-being-time-philosophy

Part 3: Being-in-the-world (June 22, 2009). How Heidegger inverts Descartes by positing that we are inherently embedded in the world rather than separate from it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/22/heidegger-religion-philosophy

Part 4: Thrown into this world (June 29, 2009). Thrownness, where we find ourselves already situated in a world, and the questions of freedom that follow. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/29/religion-philosophy

Part 5: Anxiety (July 6, 2009). Anxiety as the mood that detaches us from everyday life and opens free self-reflection. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/06/heidegger-philosophy-being

Part 6: Death (July 13, 2009). Being-towards-death as a liberating confrontation with finitude that shapes authentic existence. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/13/heidegger-being-time

Part 7: Conscience (July 20, 2009). Conscience as a silent call that pulls us from inauthentic social immersion back to authentic selfhood. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/20/heidegger-being-time-critchley

Part 8: Temporality (July 27, 2009). Time as unified by future, past, and present, rooted in human finitude. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/27/heidegger-being-time-philosophy

Thanks for reading!

Chapo Trap House, the biggest leftist podcast from the Bernie years, repurposed the word “chud” to function as a slur for right-wingers. Prior to that it just meant something like “gross, ugly subhuman,” a generic online insult drawn from the 1984 horror film C.H.U.D. that floated around 4chan-adjacent spaces with no particular political valence.1 What I find so interesting about this move is that it tells the story of the symbolic capitalist Left ascendent PMC in miniature better than almost any other single case study.

The word “chud” stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller. Bernie Sanders would have never adopted such a term to refer to working class guys who happen to have some right-wing opinions. Bernie was, for all his faults, best for his desire to work across the left and right cultural fault-line in America. “We are the 99%” as a slogan gets at the fact that everyone besides the oligarchs in America are in the same boat.

Not only did Chapo become the most wealthy and famous podcast during that period, they catalyzed a whole era of “chud dunking” that sharpened the self-assured and righteous, not to mention bullying, mode of left PMC activism — most obvious with Hasan Piker, Vaush, or their liberal counterpart Destiny.

“Chud” became the default go-to slur for anyone who disagreed on anything considered progressive in the moment. What this did was undermine Bernie’s “Our Revolution.” Between the years 2016 and 2020, Bernie lost key swing states as the media class representatives in independent media put pressure on both him and the rest of us to capitulate to increasingly niche and divisive culturally progressive issues.

The most interesting, telling, and ironic thing about the adoption of the word “chud” to function as the slur of choice by Chapo and their media satellites was the fact that the 1980s horror movie it originated from already tells the story that they were repeating.

C.H.U.D. from Horror Movie to Reality

The film is set in New York City in the 1980s. Homeless people living in the sewer system have been mutating into violent flesh-eating creatures, and the mutation isn’t supernatural. A corrupt government agency has been illegally dumping radioactive toxic waste into the sewers, and the most vulnerable and invisible population in the city absorbed the contamination.

The twist comes halfway through the film: C.H.U.D. has a second acronym reveal. It also stands for “Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal,” the name of the secret government program responsible for the dumping. The same acronym names both the monsters and the program that made them monsters. The cover-up is built into the language. The film’s villains are not the underground dwellers. The film’s villains are the corrupt officials between state and capital who created the contamination and then tried, rather than admit the cause, to instead exterminate the mutated population

Now look at Chapo. They take that word and aim it at working-class people whose political formation has been shaped by deindustrialization, the opioid crisis, the collapse of unions, the hollowing out of public education, and decades of institutional neglect, and the reduction of every household and community to an empty shell, where everyone’s timenergy is reduced to labor power and nothing remains but exhausted, anxious, semi-illiterate roommates and strangers down the street.

The slur lands on the population most damaged by the policies that the credentialed class has either implemented or failed to fight. This is why I wanted to write about it: What Chapo did is exactly the move the film’s villains perform, i.e. name the victims after the program that produced them, and treat the naming as though it were the solution rather than a repetition of the crime.

The class that has presided over the destruction of the working class for forty years now has a slur for the people the destruction produced, and the slur is the same word the destroying agency used in the movie to refer to its own victims. I don’t think any of them have seen the movie — so how poetic is this? I just can’t stop thinking about the irony of it all.

They Know Not What They Do

I don’t think Chapo did any of this on purpose. The thing about habitus is that it’s the hand-me-down way-of-seeing inculcated and performed by people thrown into history and class relations about which, in order to continue reproducing, they need know nothing.

I think the Chapo Trap House boys are just the dumb radicalized progressive progeny of Democrats who, for the previous two decades, had actively been alienating its former working class base by calling names and scapegoating those who disagree rather than trying to do anything constructive.

This isn’t a new pattern. Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal traces how the Democratic Party, over the last forty years, traded its working-class base for a credentialed professional one, which is the same class Chapo’s hosts come from and represent.2

Frank’s central point is that the abandonment was voluntary. The Democrats did not lose the working class, they actively pushed it away by treating economic populism as embarrassing, union politics as outdated, and the actual focus on material concerns of the people they used to organize as parochial backwardness.

Once you stop representing a class, you start needing to explain to your remaining constituents why you stopped, and the explanation becomes a story about the moral and intellectual deficiencies of those you left behind.

“They’re so ignorant, they’re so racist” go hand in hand with the idea that the only reason there is injustice in the world is because some people would have risen from poverty if only they had the access to better education — the implication being that ignorant people who remain ignorant after receiving said education deserve their poverty. Frank shows how this move to basing concerns about poverty in concerns for education instead was one of the big neoliberal moves conducted by the Clinton presidency. “Chud” is just the punchline at the end of that story.

Chapo Got Rich and Famous Hijacking Bernie’s Our Revolution and Hyperstitioned Chud the Builder in the Process.

During our training to be canvassers for Bernie’s Our Revolution, we were shown training videos. It was made painstakingly clear we were never to argue with people or call names. The whole point was, if you stand with the 99%, you simply focus on the positive policies that would work for everyone, maybe relate that to your own story and why you take it seriously, but never shut down or ridicule those who disagree with you.

What we saw between 2016 and 2020 was a complete betrayal of those supposedly representing Our Revolution, of us who were actually knocking on doors and making phone calls. The influencer class, who were cashing in on our need to hear some people yap about politics, were doing the opposite of what we were supposed to be doing.

What this actually resulted in is Chud the Builder. I blame Chapo for his existence. They created a slur for right-wingers and then the chud-dunking complex that grew up around them used it to mock and ridicule anyone who disagreed with any of the divisive, niche, and highly questionable new progressive issues that were being advanced. This hyperstitioned a symbolic position that someone was going to inevitably step into, claim, and perform.

“Hyperstition” is a term coined by Nick Land and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick in the 1990s.3 It names a fiction that, by being circulated and treated as real, brings itself into existence. It is the inverse of superstition. Superstition is a belief about causal correlation that is wrong but persists. Hyperstition is a fiction whose circulation becomes its causation. You write the script first. Then the actor steps forward to fill the role. Then the role rewrites the past so it looks like the actor was always going to fill it.

You can see the loop closing in real time. Kids on the internet start wearing the slur as a badge of pride after being bullied for having some opinion deemed taboo by the American Left influencer class. A Warhammer 40K Facebook fan group that wants to keep its grimdark game grim, and dark, as opposed to woke, embraces the slur and calls itself “Chud Hammer.”

Right-wingers across podcasting and streaming start adopting the term ironically, as a self-deprecating in-group signal, the way a lot of stigmatized groups have reclaimed slurs aimed at them. The irony slowly stops being ironic. The identity becomes the thing. Eventually somebody steps fully into the costume.

“Chud the Builder” streamed himself for two years harassing black people in public and yelling slurs at them, displayed his gun, hinted that one of these confrontations would end in a shooting, and then on May 13, 2026, in Clarksville, Tennessee, he actually shot a black disabled veteran on a courthouse plaza.

The Theory Looping Effect

This brings us to the theory looping effect that I introduced in my 62 Million Men piece, i.e. the operation by which a class with the authority to declare what is real circulates a vision of the world, and the world starts conforming to the vision. Pierre Bourdieu called the first half of this the “theory effect”: once a vision is held by the kind of class that can make it stick, the vision starts producing the world it claimed to describe.4

Ian Hacking, working from a different tradition, called the second half “the looping effect of human kinds”: once a category is in circulation, the people inside it know they are inside it, and they start changing in response, so the category has to be revised, because the people inside it are no longer what it said they were.5

Run those two together and you have what I have been calling the “theory looping effect”: the operation by which a class produces the very people its categories named, and then the people the categories produced confirm, by their performance, that the categories were accurate all along.6

Chud the builder is a vile figure, and he is personally responsible for his own behavior. However, the point is that the shoes he stepped into were hyperstitioned by the theory effect on the part of the up-and-coming Left symbolic capitalist class. This is the flipside of what happened with the stereotype of the gangsta rapper: the progressive PMC cheers from its privileged distance as the underclass person, who has no real opportunities on his symbolic horizon, takes on and “owns” the slur (the N-word in this case). The stereotype becomes performed, and the progressive PMC celebrates how “empowering” this is as “a form of resistance,” while it really makes everything worse for black youth who start to identify with it as a real position to perform. The difference with “chud” is that the people who take it on and perform it confirm their fantasy of the figure that gets scapegoated by the progressive PMC — this is why it’s the other side of the coin, so to speak.

As Megyn Kelly said when the Hodgetwins, twin black conservative podcasters, showed her clips of Chud the Builder running around harassing black people with the N-word for the first time: “That is a leftist's view of a conservative. That's what leftists and progressives think it's like to go to a conservative dinner party”7

That’s exactly right. Chud the Builder was not conjured up from the right so much as from the American Left’s stereotype, which Dalton Eatherly then took on as an identity and performed.

It’s Not About “Holding Them Accountable” or Whatever

At the end of the day, what symbolic capitalists do with their words matters a lot more than what working class guys are doing with their words. The people who have radical responsibility are the ones who have the intellectual pedigree, privileged class standing, and desire to represent a movement for large-scale structural change that would supposedly benefit everyone.

I’m not saying I want Chapo to “change course” or be “held accountable.” I consider socialite podcasters and the movements they hijack irredeemably lost. Churn feeders feed the churn, what more can we expect.

The point is to understand what’s going on, not because I have any interest in changing these guys who led the way in hijacking Bernie’s movement, but because if there could ever be a movement that really does cut across the cultural left and right and, at the same time, serve the overwhelming majority, the point is that it won’t come from these types who just accelerate and intensify the loop.

Vicious Retrojection

The cybernetic self-fulfilling prophecy feedback loop (CSFP) hyperstitions a theory effect loop, which closes when it gets performed by real bodies that end up hurting themselves and others.

That cybernetic self-fulfilling prophecy loop (CSFP) is what I have been describing under the working name “theory looping effect,” but the more precise name for this mechanism, and the one SAARUTU is developing this summer, is a term that comes out of my seminar: “vicious retrojection.”

We are the kinds of beings who are, as Heidegger says, always already out ahead of ourselves. At the same time, how we navigate the horizon of possibilities before us is on the basis of how we understand ourselves, which is first and foremost always overlaid by ideological interpretations that we wear like hand-me-down clothes. This projection is therefore always also retroactive. Vicious retrojection springboards off this into work developed by several other theory traditions, from cybernetics to performativity.

Every retrojective loop has a forward arm and a backward arm. The forward arm is existential-structural projection, the throwing-ahead of a vision and its installation. The backward arm is the retroactive-quilting (retroversion8), the closing move where the loop manufactures the past it needs in the actual performance of embodied subjects, which it then cites as confirmation of that past.

What makes the retrojective loop vicious, rather than merely cybernetic, is when the duopoly-extremist churn produces symbolic positions that are likely to swallow up and pull along dispositions that will, in adopting the stereotype framed by the slur, result in hurting oneself and others. That’s vicious, and the internet does it as much with incels, school shooters, and trans people as it does with gangsta rappers and chuds.

You and I are, both, always-already caught up in these retrojective loops. How we perceive reality is framed in advance by interpretive frameworks that colonize our horizon of possibilities; the positions in the fractal-field of the post-class fractured mass (PCFM)9 that are opened up or foreclosed, that we may or may not feel the ability to perform, are weaponized forms of ideology playing itself out beyond the operative metaphor-frames of the symbolic — the stakes of this kind of meme warfare are literal and embodied.

If that sounds interesting to you, if you’d like to dig in deeper, then you’ll be interested in this whole line of research that is developing between cybernetics, performativity, socioanalysis, critical media theory, and existential-structural-phenomenology. This is just a taste of what’s to come.

Subscribe now

This theoretical goldmine draws off of thinkers spanning all these fields (I’ll share a list of names in the footnotes below).10

The Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground (SAARUTU) continues the development of this research in its Summer ‘26 Cohort. Applications just became available and close June 10th. Apply to join here.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Theory Underground members get access to a guest lecture this Friday by Simon Critchley. And this Saturday begins ’s course on the History and Theory of the Deep State. There’s never been a better time to become a member at Theory Underground. You can do so here.

NOTES:

SAARUTU: Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground

SAARUTU has done empirical de-search in 46 cities across the U.S., Europe, and parts of South America and Southeast Asia. It is a hyperstitional and performative work of profilicity that bases itself in philosophical anthropology, critical media theory, and socioanalysis. Learn more about the latter below, after I give you a quick speed run of some of the research threads you could contribute to and learn about in the coming months as a part of this next cohort.

The cohort will be doing deep dives into:

1. Critical Media Theory (Marx, McLuhan, Heidegger, Bourdieu, Postman, Baudrillard, Ellul, Stiegler, et al)

2. Being and Time vs. Philosophical Anthropology (Heidegger vs. Scheler, Binswanger, Gehlen, Plessner)

3. Psychoanalysis vs. Socioanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Bourdieu, Lasch, Goffman, et al.)

4. Das Kapital deep dive (Marx, Heinrich, Mosley, Postone, Karatani, Luxemburg, Hilferding, Grossman, Lenin, Lukács, Rubin, Rosdolsky, Baran and Sweezy, Mandel, Uno, Althusser and Balibar, Backhaus, Arthur, Harvey)

5. Continuation of Philosophy of Stewardship in particular: Natality, Motherhood, and the Family (Arendt, Hrdy, Komisar, Ou, Haseltine, Faust, Bowlby)

6. Levinas and Berry on the Ethics of the Face (Levinas and Berry, with Husserl and Heidegger as the phenomenological background)

7. The Anti-Institutional Canon on Schooling (Illich, Gatto, Postman, MacIntyre, Berry)

8. Variations on Natural Law (Aristotle, Hegel, Burke, Strauss, Manent, MacIntyre)

9. Philosophy of Stewardship, more generally (Xenophon, Berry, Salatin, Fukuoka, Lasch and Harrington)

10. Myth, Secularization, and Modernity (Blumenberg vs. Jung, Evola, Guénon, Eliade, Löwith, Schmitt, Voegelin)

11. Hyperstition, Performativity, and Profilicity (Land, the CCRU, Negarestani, Fisher, Austin, Searle, Derrida, Butler, Lindbeck, Moeller, D’Ambrosio, Luhmann, Goffman)

What IS Socioanalysis?

Socioanalysis is the method that pivots from the subject's stream of consciousness on the couch to the objective structures that manage the relations of production atop the mode of production. Bourdieu names the term himself in the opening lecture of his 1982 Collège de France course, proposing that sociology adopt "those manners of thinking that are usually reserved for the highest objects of thought, those of metaphysics," and confront the social world with questions along the lines of "What does it mean for an institution to exist? What is it that is instituted, and who is it that institutes the instituted?"2

The object is the institutional unconscious, theorized through habitus ("systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures"3) and field (the "rules of the game" governing a social space, in which "the social exists both in things and in bodies"4). The master concept of the framework is symbolic capital, which Bourdieu defines as "a transformed and thereby disguised form of physical 'economic' capital" that "produces its proper effect inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as it conceals the fact that it originates in 'material' forms of capital,"5 which lets socioanalysis read the cultural-and-credentialed alibi system of the class living above necessary labor as disguised economic extraction. The mechanism that holds these arrangements in place is symbolic violence, which "operates with the complicity of its victim" and is granted "simply through misunderstanding, under the impression of not knowing who is doing what to us": "violence unrecognised is symbolic violence, it is the very definition of symbolic violence."6

Its deepest register is the imposition of categories of perception that the dominated turn on themselves, so that they "see themselves as the dominant see them or see themselves through the spectacles the dominant use to look at them."7 Socioanalysis is not neutral description but a weapon in the classification struggles through which dominant visions of the world get installed as the world itself ("a vision of the social world, when it is consensual, is the social world, it creates the social world"8), and Bourdieu insists that "classification is both weapon and target for social individuals in general; there is no social classification which is not both."9

Insofar as it gets picked up at all in modern academia, it is used as identity politics (in 2020 they talked about “white habitus” lol). I’ll sum up why I think it matters: socioanalysis is about self-defense. It is the tool by which you stop being a mouth puppet for a field, mistaking the field’s ideas for your own. The thoughts that feel most natively yours, the tastes that feel most personally yours, the aspirations that feel most authentically yours, are dispositions a field installed in you while you were busy trying to fit in or, increasingly likely, trying to cope with the fact that you did not fit in. Socioanalysis is what you do to recognize the field for what it is, to recognize the habitus it built in you or others for what it is, and to take possession of yourself back from it. It’s the first step for living the examined life in the post class fractured mass.

And it is self-defense from the class that classifies us. The classifications by which the dominant class makes its world go are weapons aimed at us. Socioanalysis is how we read those weapons, take them apart, and refuse to keep handing the classifiers the categories by which they sort us. It is the tool by which a group becomes audible to itself and learns to read the field that has been doing things to it without its consent. Once read, the field can be entered differently, navigated differently, left, or changed.

This is not consolation philosophy. It is a weapon and a key.

One especially cool thing about socioanalysis is that it’s upstream from what Americans learn as “sociology,” an approach that integrates “conflict theory,” “symbolic interactionism,” and “functionalism” without forcing you to choose one of these schools over or against the others.

As I said, TU is the only place on the internet where you can learn socioanalysis. At the peak of French theory, Bourdieu gave all the lectures we need to reconstruct its basic toolkit into a working discipline. Members get access to my introductory lectures that make it accessible, as well as a lot of my introductory writings that have yet to be published.

By keeping socioanalysis grounded in a post-Marxian reading of Das Kapital and a post-Heideggerian reading of Being and Time, and bringing it into conversation with Lacan, Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, et al., we’re able to do something truly amazing.

In this video where I was making the next SAARUTU cohort announcement, I talked about how I just spent the last week having a series of impromptu meetings with three different figures who I’ll leave anonymous for now. They were involved in the writing of the “Skole Kings” piece in Underground Theory Volume II. We’re collaborating on an insanely cool series of briefs and a master reference document for a comparative study of hyperstition vs. performativity theory. This is one branch of SAARUTU that I’ve been pretty private about and that only a few tier 2 and 3 members at TU have been involved in discussions for, until now. I’ll be sharing some of that work soon.

How to join:

Step one · become a member at Theory Underground
Step two · apply to the cohort (DEADLINE June 10th)
Runs · June 15th through July 31st
Plus · acceptance includes 1. an opportunity of a lifetime to be involved in the most cutting edge research on the internet, and 2. an invitation to the gathering at the farm at the end of August.

Thanks for reading!

Notes:

A few weeks ago I hit the same wall in a conversation on a drive. Different person, different topic, same reflex. Once again, the word “conspiracy” was being employed as a thought and discussion terminating cliche. I thought it strange because I’ve done a lot to filter from my life those kinds of intellectuals who are so paranoid about what other people will think.

Paranoid About Appearing Paranoid

It’s the same sort of friction every time. It’s rarely because I bring up a conspiracy theory. Instead, the interlocutor brings it into the conversation as a punching bag, to make an example of those belonging to the out-group, the kind of scapegoat that is supposed to set them up as the sober analyst.

I get the reflex. I’ve done it too. In fact, I found myself doing it a few posts ago — I said, “Conspiracy theorists always take this too far.”1 This is obviously totalizing and reductive in that way that loose everyday colloquial speech tends to be.

The friction, though, emerges when I sympathize with regular working people who are skeptical of official accounts, or when I stick up for someone who is into a conspiracy theory because the speaker is lumping him or her up with the most Looney Tune types of QAnon characters we could possibly stereotype. So I try to stick up for the person or group who distrusts official narratives, and then the colleague just start to shut down. They think they’re above being paranoid, but the problem is, they are themselves paranoid about appearing paranoid.

The problem with this term “paranoid” is that it frames things in terms of psychology. I don’t think this is something we can really understand though without socioanalysis. This means, drawing on the tools developed by Pierre Bourdieu, we look at the norms and rules of the institutionalized social fields that the actors are navigating.2

In socioanalytic terms, the friction I’ve been running into is their field-horizon specific habitus, which goes beyond basic disposition to acquired habits of perception and interpretation.3

The two examples I used above, of the podcast co-host and the interlocutor on a long car ride, seem similar but are different in important ways. In both cases the speaker is recoiling at anything that smells of the “conspiracy” label. In the first case, however, we were talking about having a conversation in public. In the car ride example, the interlocutor was not obviously worried about what an audience would think. In standard theory jargon we would say this was because of her big Other — she takes its rules to heart and has learned to think within its parameters.

But the “big Other” framing commits the same error made by the word “paranoid.” They both psychologize something that is better explained by socioanalysis. If we strip “big Other” of its clinical context assumptions and instead think of the person under analysis as a social actor who by necessity develops a habitus over the course of a life spent navigating fields, then we can say she was wedded to a certain institutional horizon. You don’t have to be conscious of your horizon’s possibilities and constraints in order to navigate a given field — in fact, and this is where Bourdieu is really good, the less you intellectualize it and go with your gut sense for the field, the better off you’ll be, assuming that it’s a field to which your disposition is especially amicable and for which your illusio has taken hold.4

In both cases, what they had adapted to and were now reproducing had a lot less to do with an audience than it did their field. Their habitus conformed to the taste of the NPR-listening liberal administrator, sensitivity reader, or hiring committee at whatever institution has captured their horizon.

What the label does

What my podcast colleague said was that the Epstein blackmail network idea is “just” a conspiracy theory. This performs a lumping move. He took the questions I had raised about intelligence networks, political legitimacy, and who actually holds power, and then lumped them in with the most cartoonish version of paranoid speculation he could imagine. He did not say, the specific claim that intelligence services were aware of Epstein’s operation and used it for leverage is implausible because of X, Y, or Z reasons. He said, “conspiracy theory,” and treated the label as its own refutation.

The lumping move is what makes the label efficient. It becomes thought and conversation terminating because it requires no engagement. It requires only that you invoke the category, and that the category carry with it, as an included feature, a population of maximally embarrassing exemplars: QAnon, that chemtrails guy, the man at the bar with the tin hat.

Once the label is applied, your interlocutor has drawn a line of sorts and it suddenly feels important to make sure you are on the right side of it with them. The social cost of remaining in the gray area between “sides” is supposed to suddenly feel immediate and high. For people wedded to certain institutional horizons, this is exactly how it feels.

The person who was willing to consider whether the Epstein network had intelligence connections must now denounce the idea, drop it, or hold the line and accept the social cost of associating himself with the stigma that has been placed on the scapegoated figure of the conspiracy theorist.

The label is aimed at the middle, not the edge. The lost-touch-with-reality figures are not the real targets. They are the props. The actual target is the PMC-adjacent speaker who might otherwise take the working class seriously. The label exists to keep that speaker inside the performance of sophistication by making the cost of stepping outside it prohibitive.

When my colleague said the episode would “confuse the working class,” he revealed the structure in one sentence. The working class is not confused. A lot of regular working class people were, have been, and still are talking about Epstein. Regular people have views about the case, have always had views, and do not need the protection of a podcast host. The fear of confusion was not fear for them. It was fear for himself. He was worried about what the episode would do to his brand, i.e. his standing in the field.

The thing is, and maybe I should have led with this: to treat regular class distrust as the product of brainwashing, internet grifters, or of bad information, is to do the work of the feds for free.

Doing the work of the feds for them

The aversion to anything that smells of conspiracy is not recent, and it wasn’t cooked up on NPR or even in universities. It has a history.

It starts with Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which appeared in Harper’s in November 1964.5 Hofstadter did not invent the phrase conspiracy theory, but he did something more useful for the postwar knowledge class: he treated popular distrust as a psychological type. Once distrust could be diagnosed as a style, a mood, or a pathology, the question of whether the distrust was warranted no longer needed to be answered.

Three years after Hofstadter's essay the CIA weaponized it. On April 1, 1967, the Agency sent a dispatch titled "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report" to Chiefs of certain Stations and Bases. It first reached the public in 1976, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the New York Times, and was fully declassified by the late 1990s. It is filed in the JFK Records Collection and carries the FOIA designation by which it is now known, “1035-960.” You can take a look at it here. More recently, and the reason I even know about it, DeHaven-Smith reprinted it as an appendix to Conspiracy Theory in America.6

The operative sentence from Section 1 reads:

The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.

Let’s pay close attention to the grammar. The Agency does not propose to counter the claims, but rather the claimants. The target is the population of speakers, not the content of any specific argument.

The dispatch then supplies a list of specific rhetorical moves that we can still see our PMC-adjacent friends making on a regular basis:

1. Critics are wedded to conclusions formed before the evidence.

2. Critics are politically or financially motivated.

3. A large conspiracy could not be kept secret, so any such hypothesis is absurd on its face.

4. Critics are discredited from being taken seriously via some psychological explanation, i.e. seduced by intellectual pride, they fell in love with their theories, they’re paranoid, or they’ve utterly lost touch with reality (schizophrenia, etc.).

5. The people who produced the official account are too eminent to collude, so their standing settles the matter. (In 1967 this meant the rank of the Warren commissioners. Today it means the credentials, the institutional affiliation, the blue checkmark, the byline.)

All five moves are obviously alive and well. Any reader who has spent ten minutes on Bluesky or in a faculty lounge recognizes them. They have been repeated so many times they feel like ordinary critical thinking, like the sound of a reasonable person thinking clearly. Yet they were designed by the CIA to get credentialed intermediaries to carry a mainstream narrative.

The Agency understood what it was doing. It instructs recipients to engage friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors, employ existing propaganda assets in the media, and furnish sympathetic writers with background materials so articles and book reviews carry the desired frame.

The technique has since passed into the common discursive inheritance of the Anglophone knowledge class. Most of the people who use it have no idea where they got it.

Even without the history lesson we can just look at how the term functions

The sociologists Ginna Husting and Martin Orr analyzed the actual use of the “conspiracy theorist” label across a range of popular and academic texts in the 2007 issue of Symbolic Interaction. They titled the paper “Dangerous Machinery.”7 Their finding: the label does three things at once.

1. It serves as a routinized strategy of exclusion.

2. It reframes questions about power and corruption as questions about the mental condition of the person raising them.

3. It attacks the personhood and competence of the questioner.

The label short-circuits the examination of evidence by moving the conversation to the level of diagnosis.

That is what my podcast colleague was doing. That is what my conversation partner on the drive was doing. They were operating a piece of transpersonal machinery manufactured in 1967, refined over sixty years, to which they were so thoroughly habituated that the operation had become invisible as anything other than a simple matter of taste or standards. They think they are just being reasonable.

Alternatively, one could take the questions seriously. DeHaven-Smith offered an alternative analytic frame: State Crimes Against Democracy, or SCADs.8 SCAD names concerted actions or inactions by government insiders that manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty. The advantage of this framing is comparative study. Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Plame outing, the Iraq WMD fabrication, the 2000 election, the surveillance programs disclosed by Snowden, the suppression of the lab-leak hypothesis, the authentication-by-letter of the Biden laptop as Russian disinformation.

Treated in isolation, each SCAD is a one-off that can be waved away. Treated comparatively, patterns emerge, and clusters might be found with targets, timings, beneficiaries, and methods. What “SCAD” provides is an actual research object for social science and real journalism. This is what intellectual seriousness about the possibility of high crime in office looks like. To call it conspiracism is lazy, stupid, and self-serving in the class sense.

My reservation concerning this alternative term “SCAD” is that it reinforces the frame that presupposes that we are, in the U.S., “a democracy.” Read the footnote I’m attaching here if you want my condensed problematization of this assumption, as well as my proposed alternative framing.9 Or just make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a follow up piece when I elaborate on this more in depth.

Subscribe now

Unlumping three meanings of “conspiracy theory”

“Conspiracy theory” means three distinct different things. The pejorative use covers over the one doing serious work.

Until 1975, the existence of MKULTRA was a conspiracy theory until the Church Committee published the documents that proved it was real.10 COINTELPRO, the FBI's war on civil rights and antiwar figures, was a conspiracy theory until it was also proven.11 The CIA moving cocaine in the 1980s was considered a conspiracy theory until Gary Webb.12 NSA warrantless mass surveillance was a conspiracy theory until Snowden released the files.13 The Biden laptop was a conspiracy theory until after the election.14

How about the lab-leak hypothesis? It was banned off all social media in 2020-2021, respectable community would call you racist or a QAnoner if you thought it suspicious that there was an actual coronavirus lab in Wuhan doing gain-of-function research into the very kind of virus they were claiming had originated from that region but through someone eating a bat.15 Then, at some point, it became ok to talk about the lab-leak hypothesis.16 I’ll never forget how absurd it was seeing them bring Jon Stewart onto Colbert to talk about this, after they had just gaslit us about it for two years.

Conspiracy theory in the above sense is a hypothesis-about-coordination, an actual opportunity for ordinary social science or journalism to do its work. This is not the same thing as conspiracism as a worldview or mode. The progressive PMC tendency for the last decade has been to assume the latter while jettisoning the former.

The other meaning that is also lost when they default assume the term can only mean “ignorant” or “schizo” would be the republican virtue of dissent from official narratives. The refusal to take a credentialed account at face value and insistence on checking is a civic virtue in a supposed democratic republic. The refusal to defer is not a pathology, and the attempt to pathologize it, by the progressive PMC, is only revealing of its uniquely idiotic and self-defeating response to popular unrest in a post trust era.

So whenever you see someone making this move, of employing the term “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy theorist” in its pejorative form, refuse the stigma and insist that the speaker unpack what they mean. If what they mean is a totalizing cognitive style that reads every event as coordinated, every coincidence as meaningful, every institutional failure as intentional, then insist that they stipulate accordingly, because otherwise the assumption should be that they are assigning negative connotations to putting forward testable claims that identifiable actors did identifiable things together, with identifiable motives, means, and consequences.

They probably need a reminder that the whole idea of a free society presupposes that power is treated with suspicion and that the people retain the right to their own judgment about what their government is doing.

Be like, Oh, you’re using that term. In what sense are you using it?

1. Testable hypotheses

2. A psychological type, i.e. schizo-paranoia

3. Republican virtue

The weaponized label does its work by smuggling the first and third categories under the second. It takes ordinary social-scientific hypotheses and treats them as symptoms of the totalizing worldview. It takes ordinary republican dissent and pathologizes it as the product of bad information and grifters on the internet.

The totalizing machinery works because the operators no longer have to think about which category they are addressing. They invoke the catch-all label, and the target audience, trained for sixty years to recognize it as a diagnostic signal, updates accordingly.

The corrective is not the rehabilitation of every claim that has ever been called a conspiracy theory. It is the separation of the categories. Tell me which one you are talking about.

Symbolic Violence

The conspiracy theorist label operates as symbolic violence in Bourdieu's sense. It is accepted as legitimate by the dominated themselves, because they share the categories of perception that make its application feel like rigor rather than sanction. What enforces the label is the threat to one's standing in the field, the symbolic capital that the credentialed speaker has accumulated and stands to lose.17

The sanction is social, not legal. The cost of being grouped with the QAnon figure is enough to produce silence in credentialed speakers. The field does not have to expel them, because it only has to raise the cost of dissent above the cost of compliance, and the symbolic capitalist handles the rest.

In Foucault’s terms, the label is disciplinary machinery policing the boundary of the sayable. The credentialed speaker internalizes the policing function and conducts it in their own speech, pre-censoring the horizon of what they will take seriously. There are two modes this can take. The milder one is the professor or pundit who will say things in private they will not say in public. They know what they think and they manage the gap between thought and speech as a cost-benefit calculation. The label disciplines them but does not own them.

The deeper mode is worse. Here the filter has been absorbed at the level of habitus, of perception itself. There is no esoteric position kept in reserve. There is no private version of the take that would come out if the cost dropped. The categories the field uses to decide what counts as serious have been absorbed so completely that the PMC-brained speaker is no longer interpreting through them, they are perceiving through them. The 1967 dispatch’s five moves are not arguments this person considers and then deploys, they are the literal shape that reality takes on.

This is how we become useful idiots who take our marching orders from the CIA without knowing it. No lying is necessary if you no longer have a view distinct from your PMC field’s horizon. This is your water. You cannot see it because it is what you see with. I tend to say, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But that only goes so far and stops hard on a specific class line.

My sympathies only run one direction.

I hold two commitments together. The working class is deserving of radical grace, whereas the intellectual class (PMC) has radical responsibility. Radical grace means meeting them where they are at, extending patience for the shape of their suspicions, and refusing to pathologize the fact that they have noticed something is wrong.

Radical responsibility means that if you went to college and hold an actual title of distinction that marks you as an intellectual representative of sorts, or if you are a radical who wants serious change for everyone, then the burden of getting it right falls harder on you — and doubly so if you are both an intellectual and a radical.

Substackers, YouTubers, essayists, and podcasters are either inside the discourse class or adjacent to it. Rebel priest, symbolic capitalist, discursive Taylorista: the names matter less than the structural position we’re getting at. It’s a position within a field that has a reproductive and rationalizing role in the relations of production.

Taking radical responsibility for that position means working reflexively. Not in the performative “as a person with X or Y kind of privilege” but rather in a sense grounded in socioanalysis. Stop acting like your opinions are simply your own and not shaped by your field or its horizon of possibilities, as though, for instance, the way you set yourself up in relation to others via this term “conspiracy theorist” has nothing to do with the symbolic capital at stake in a field you are in, or the field you wish to enter (university, mainstream publishing, legacy media, etc.).

Taking radical responsibility for one’s place in the relations of production means, for the intellectual or radical, to stop scapegoating people who distrust power. Even if someone is not thinking very critically and is employing a map that cannot be challenged or falsified, it means exercising radical grace for them while holding one’s class to higher standards.

Thanks for reading.

Anyway, I was also glad for the chance to meet both Nick Land and Bret Weinstein. Land, because he's already a friend of sorts, and Weinstein, because it was he who first helped me see how far gone the campus left had become, back when he was being hounded for saying perfectly ordinary liberal things, which got him death threats and called a fascist for the trouble.

I was walking back from one of the giant hoop houses they had turned into a kind of conference center, tables set up for the different speakers and vendors, which also happened to be where I had my drone batteries on the charger. While we walked, Nick Land was showing me memes on his phone.1

The only slightly awkward part of hanging with Nick IRL was the fact that he was compulsively glued to X, holding the screen up to me every couple minutes like, “look at this one.” It was only a little weird because I was trying to act professional — I had gotten my family there on a discount in exchange for shooting drone footage of the weekend for the organizers.

Halfway between buildings and mid meme share from Nick was when Thomas Massie flagged me down. I said what, more or less, because it surprised me that he had noticed me at all. This was before his keynote, so he was not yet swarmed, nobody was rushing him. He said, “Are you David McKerracher?” I had to take a second to collect myself, because I could not imagine what would have put me on his radar. Then he said it. “You are the author of Timenergy. Dave, I love your book.”

After I’d gathered myself I said, “Thomas Massie, I love your work too. You were the one who forced everyone back to Washington to reckon with the actual consequences of a nationwide lockdown.” Nick Land nodded his head emphatically while I opened my copy of the Brownstone Institute’s new book and asked him to sign the page where it quoted the event.2 He signed the margin of the page while I went on, “Which means you were not only the one man who refused to give in to the COVID hysteria. You stayed keen on the precedent it set for basic civil liberties long after that stopped being convenient.”

Thomas Massie said, “Yeah, that was sort of The One Big Thing I did for a lot of people.”

I said, “That is right. But for me, the other thing, and this is huge, are your automated chicken tractors. I grew up moving those things by hand and always thought roomba style tech could make them move on their own — and you’re the one who made it happen!”

That is where I got cut off. Joel Salatin had angled over to pull Thomas away, because there was stuff going on in the event center and Joel was probably thought I was accosting Massie when it was the other way around.

Thomas put an arm around Joel, slapped him on the back, and said, “Do you know Dave McKerracher?”

Joel said, “Yeah, we met at lunch yesterday.” It was true, I had seen Joel walking around looking for a place to sit so I jumped up and gave him my spot — this made it so he could sit beside Ann and across from my mom. This was amazing because my mom has been a huge fan and student of his for thirty years.

Joel kind of sized me up, or rather, down (he’s much taller than I am) and I just smiled dumbly.

Then Thomas said, “Yeah, but have you read Dave’s book?”

Joel, an obviously much more well-known author, thirty-plus books and counting, raised his eyebrows slightly and said, politely, “Oh, you wrote a book?”

Thomas said, “Yeah, it is a really good book. I do not typically go for academic theory. I do not care much for the humanities or the social sciences. I am more of an engineering guy myself. But his Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy, really does it for me. He nails the issue.”3 Once again, Nick was nodding emphatically. At the very moment that I was reeling from the fact that freaking Thomas Massie was telling Joel Salatin, of all people, about my book, I was wondering if Joel even knew who Nick was. I hoped that wouldn’t make him write me off as a crazy NRx guy (anonynous anime avatar accelerationist). Thomas went on, “Timenergy pretty much sums up what is wrong with the whole political and economic system, and at the end it gets into why typical small-scale solutions like homeschooling alone is not enough. It takes the problem all the way down.”

Joel said, “Timenergy, huh.”

They were both looking at me now, so I said, “Yeah, timenergy. It is a technical concept that developed out of my studies of continental philosophy, basically what I get from running critique of political economy through my own existential phenomenology. Its definition is basically ‘large, repeatable, reliable blocks of time-with-energy,’ which in our society mostly goes to working for other people, after which we are too overworked and underpaid to do anything fulfilling with our families. It holds in both socialist and capitalist economies. After the managerial revolution, whether the economy is state controlled or supposedly laissez-faire and free market, in either case people get reduced to members of a population, seen only as professionals or as base laborers.4 What gets lost is pretty much the kind of life you are living out here.”

Joel said something like, “Well, I’m just an old geezer so that was a lot, but it sounds like you are saying, with big words, that we should work for ourselves.”

“Yeah, I said,” kind of feeling stupid. “That is pretty good.”

Thankfully Thomas jumped back in to save me. “It is not just that, Joel. Here is the thing. Dave’s theory challenges all of us. He is saying chicken tractors, automated or otherwise, are not going to save us. Homeschooling, left or right, is not going to save us. Government policy, for or against laissez-faire capitalism, is not going to save us. What we actually need — how did you put it, Dave? — large and reliable blocks of time with energy? — put toward, and this is the part, not just working for ourselves — did you not say it is really about being able to discover our talents and cultivate them under tutelage, Dave? It is, what, sort of in a sense about the liberal arts too.”

Joel half rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, well, the liberal arts…”

I told him, “You were an English major, and are a genuinely good writer and speaker, and those are liberal arts. The farming you do, in this management-intensive way, is itself a liberal art. You do it because you care about it as a thing in itself, for its own sake, because it is inherently meaningful work. It is good for you, good for your family, good for the soil, good for your community, good for the world. That is what makes it a liberal art. Socrates, in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, held that farming is the most important thing there is, second only to training for war.5 The reason Socrates gave is that there is no point defending a country in war if you cannot produce a good way of life inside it, and the people who produce that good way of life are the ones who farm. Farming keeps the body healthy while keeping you in tune with what you, Joel, call ‘the foundations of life.’”

Joel said, “I’ve never heard this argument get made, actually. Go on!”

Feeling encouraged, I said, “I count the sciences, biology and physics, right alongside the social sciences and the humanities, history and philosophy, all of it, as essential, as part of the arch itself, so that when you bring them together while you are out farming and listening to audiobooks, you are a farmer in the older sense, and that is why I think canon literacy matters so much for the people doing homeschooling and homesteading.”

At that point a woman with a clipboard came hurrying over to us, waving Joel and Thomas to her. As she called to them, Thomas told her to hold on a second and then turned to Nick Land and said, “Hey guy, can you get a quick picture of me with David McKerracher?” Nick looked up from his phone and muttered something like “Oh yes, why of course, yes, absolutely.” We smiled and Nick took the picture while Joel tapped his feet and the lady with the clipboard rocked back and forth. Then they left us there on the grasss.

Nick Land looked up from his phone and said, “This is a really great picture of you two.” , who I forgot to mention had been there the whole time, said, “I can’t believe that. Thomas Massie read your book. That’s so cool.”

I still do not know how Thomas Massie knew about my book. Nothing he said told me whether he had listened to it on Audible or had it handed to him by someone. I have no idea who would have recommended it. As far as I am aware he has never publicly called it out or endorsed it. All the same, it made for a good segue all the same. I did not get his personal email or phone number in that moment, so I haven’t been able to follow up, but Joel, later that day at lunch again, asked me to send him a copy of my book, and he gave me his own personal email too, which is something pretty cool — especially since he’s coming to my neck of the woods in June this year for the Modern Homesteading Conference in Coeur d’Alene.6

I wanted to tell you all of this because “the bridge between the life of the mind and the work of the hands at the foundations of life,” a phrase that has become a slogan of mine, only really makes sense if you understand a little of where Joel is coming from with his vision for regenerative agriculture, and a little of the broader vision for lifelong learning and home education that Susan Wise Bauer lays out in The Well-Trained Mind and The Well-Educated Mind.7 Joel and Bauer are each a piece of a missing puzzle that the other is missing, and with through is where this bridge is being put into practice on, what I call, The Fourth Frontier.8

It is also relevant this week, because Thomas Massie is back in the news, and I think he is an American hero. I do not agree with him on everything. We agree on what matters. Money should not be poured into wasteful programs. Policy that sets a bad precedent for the economy should not be rammed through without serious deliberation. The elites tangled up in scandal and sex crimes should not get to operate under the cover of darkness and redaction, and the Epstein files, even if we never get to the bottom of them, need to be taken seriously. The mere fact that AIPAC thought it was worth spending over fifteen million dollars to primary him out of his seat, to make some guy nobody has heard of into a congressman, is enough on its own. Even if you know nothing else about him. Even if you disagree with every libertarian point he holds.

So, critical support and a shout out to Thomas Massie!

Thomas, thanks for reading my book. Shout out as well to Polyface Farm for hosting, and to the , whose five-years-after-COVID conference this actually was, and where Ann and I also got to meet Bret Weinstein.

Thanks for reading,

Notes

This is a letter to the progressive who is still trying to be good by 2016 standards. It is not addressed to the activist who lived through the last decade without learning anything. That activist is in his or her mid-thirties now and has had the whole decade to take note and grow. If ten years were not enough then one more essay will not do it, so I am not writing to them.

I am writing to you, the one who never ran a meeting, who does not actually follow any of this except secondhand, who picked up a handful of the new words and the new rules along the way because you are decent and simply doing what decent people are supposed to. Journalists and influencers not captured by the duopoly would have handed you the losses along with the wins. Instead, your echo chamber hands you confirmation bias. You were left without the L, and you did not even know there was an L to be left without. The issue is that a person who is “of the Left” but who cannot own the L of the last decade is not only going to be politically ineffective, but is likely someone who cannot relate to other people outside of the confines of that little blue bubble.

Here’s the thing: It’s 2026, and you’re still acting like “trans rights” are a simple matter of people using the bathroom they feel comfortable in. It’s 2026, and you still say “white women” in a voice that implies bad or out of fashion. It’s 2026, and you still believe a person worried about immigration is one slogan away from a swastika. It’s 2026, and you still think Andrew Tate is a more serious problem than the activists who hijacked every movement you ever cared about and handed the right a decade of easy wins. It’s 2026, and you have not taken radical responsibility for any of it, because as far as you were ever allowed to know, there is nothing to take responsibility for.

I am not telling you this from the outside. I founded the Boise chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America in 2018 before any of its current leadership got involved. I lived through it getting hijacked by wokeism on one side and by Stalinists on the other.

I was there.

I don’t say any of this as an outsider. The thing about the vague and undefined “post left” drift I get lumped into is that the only unifying principle is that it’s not made up of right-wingers but of people who were there, who participated to some degree, and then, to various degrees, made their way for the exit.

I do not stand above any of this and have the scars to prove it. I was knocking on doors for Bernie, talking to ordinary people on the one side, while finding myself surrounded by the kinds of people who think you matter less if you are white, not queer, or not trans. I did not just bend over backwards trying to capitulate to such people, I threw my figurative back out catering to their concerns. In the process, I did not just start leading with my pronouns in meetings, I even adopted “they/them” and, at the peak of the wokeness in 2018, would on occasion wear a dress. [My wife Ann added, when reading this aloud for the podcast version: “We were being good little progressives” when we fell in love, but “we grew out of all that and have learned to see the error of our ways.”]

People like to imagine the trans-trending of those years was done for clout, for a little hit of virtue. Maybe with some people that’s true, but it was mostly simpler and grimmer than that. If you were born with a male body and you wanted to be listened to in those spaces, any masculine affect at all worked against you, so you adjusted by either shutting up, leaving, or conforming your style of presentation. Being “genderqueer” and “nonbinary” wasn’t a big leap for me because I don’t accept a lot of the baggage people put onto gender anyway.

The thing is, the people who won’t take you seriously if you happen to have the wrong identity, affect, or presentation are simply not the kind of people open to any serious organizing or new concepts. They fold every new thing into the categories they already had and carry on with their anti-right fusionism, the one principle they never thought to question, the principle that keeps them permanently crosswise with the overwhelming majority of a country. I’m not saying the overwhelming majority is right-wing, but it is certainly not interested in being told that its every ordinary opinion is a moral emergency in need of correction.

When I left activism midway through 2020, I did so knowing that a lot would need to change before any serious progress would ever become possible again. I wanted to research the reasons why every social movement seemed captured before it even began. I decided to not pursue a PhD because no program exists to ask the kinds of questions I was asking. There is no Post Left Theory School. There is no program for leftists who are interested in owning the L (the loss) and turning the tools of critical theory back onto itself. When I started Theory Underground, there was nobody doing this work — and there was no sign of any leftists doing serious work to take account for the decade of insanity we were living through.

Radical Responsibility

I’ve found a couple of notable exceptions. Tony Chamas [] is one of the rare breed who is taking seriously the reckoning incumbent on anyone “of the Left” who wants to do so responsibly. Anyone who has been tuned in to the emerging theoretical strain of post-Left/Post-Duopoly theory over the last few years knows that the conversations I’ve been having with Tony are the cutting edge of this movement — we have a book in the works that develops this tendency.1

Well, last week, Tony put me onto another person who has taken “doing the work” to a whole new level: , at the American Dreaming Substack. Paul has spent the better part of the last year assembling what he calls the Memory Hole, a dated and cited archive of the decade, built before the people who lived it can finish scrubbing it from the record.2 He is, by his own account, a man of the Left, and he is doing the rarest thing a man of the Left has done in years: he is taking the loss. He is owning it.

Paul refuses to pretend the last decade did not happen. That is the whole of what I ask of anyone who considers themselves of the Left. The obvious response is, Why this falls heaviest on progressives or leftists? The answer is “radical responsibility.” That kind of responsibility is unique to radicals, to anyone who wants to change society for everyone, especially those who consider themselves on the smart, kind, and right side of history. Any movement that wants to speak for the many against the money takes on a debt the size of its own advertising. The louder you insist you know better and that you speak for everyone, the more you owe when it comes out that you were running something insane. What Paul has made it easy to do is simply point to the archive.

What got memory-holed

Here is a little of the L you were left without. While you were being good, a book that asked God for help hating white people sold its way onto the bestseller lists and became a go-to for Democratic wine moms in suburban America.3 A Manhattan principal explained to parents who wanted honors math that test scores are simply systemic racism wearing a number.4 A prosecutor’s office sent a male serial killer of women into a women’s prison and waved off the danger by noting that there are probably not too many chainsaws in there anyway.5 A Supreme Court nominee declined to define the word woman on the ground that she is not a biologist. A utility worker named Emmanuel Cafferty lost his livelihood because somebody photographed the shape his hand was making out a truck window.6 You heard about none of it, because the only people telling you were on the wrong team, and you had been trained to know that anything from the wrong team was probably a lie.

It’s 2026, and you still haven’t gotten the memo — none of these events were rare or isolated, each one is one among many.

The issue is that what counted as “progress” for the last decade was the most backwards shit we’ve seen in our lifetime. The universities you picture as the citadels of tolerance spent those years rebuilding the color line and calling it justice. By the end of the decade a survey of more than a hundred and seventy schools across all fifty states found nearly half holding segregated student orientations, more than forty percent offering segregated housing, and seventy-two percent staging segregated graduation ceremonies — all in the name of “anti-racism.” At Yale the English department announced that studying white authors actively harms students. A lecturer at UCLA was suspended for the offense of refusing to grade his Black students more leniently than the rest, on the principle, which used to be the liberal principle, that you do not insult a person by lowering the bar for him.7 None of this was done by the right, and none of it was done in secret. It was announced, in press releases, by deans who were certain they were marching with Martin Luther King Jr.

It did not stop at the universities. It went all the way down to the eight-year-olds. In a private elementary school charging upward of fifty thousand dollars a year, small children were taught from a picture book in which a devilish figure slides a contract across the table offering a boy a thing called “whiteness,” with its perks of stolen land and stolen riches; the same book was assigned or promoted at more than thirty elementary schools across a dozen states. In Portland, third graders were taught that our society is inherently racist, and that of course you are racist.8 The part to sit with is not the lesson but the sincerity under it. The people who built it were not cynics. They believed, with their whole hearts, that they were doing the children a kindness.

You want to know what those meetings were actually like, the ones I sat in, the ones I ended up putting on a dress for? In 2019, the national convention of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization that is supposed to carry the banner of the American worker, ground to a halt because a delegate rose on “a point of personal privilege” to ask the room to please stop whispering, on account of his sensory overload.9 Before the chair could move on, a second delegate rushed a microphone to object that the first one had said the word “guys.” They “applauded” one another by eerily twisting their raised hands in the air, because apparently actual clapping was too much — as some of the activists would remind people, “Please, no clapping!”10 I sat in rooms just like that one. The workers such rooms claimed to fight for were nowhere to be found, because no worker who has to be somewhere in the morning gives three days of his life to watch grown adults scold one another for using the word “guys.”

Downplaying, dismissing, and disavowing won’t work

If you are tempted, the way the activist is always tempted, to tell me this was a few kids who would grow out of it, then look hard at what the kids grew into. In March of 2026, seven years on, the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP), a real party that has governed real provinces, ran its leadership convention on a system of color-coded equity cards handed out at registration, each card letting its holder cut to the front of the speaking line by category. This just happened a month or so ago: two women jammed up at the microphones, the first invoking her gender-equity card, the second answering that the cards have no value outside that room. The nonbinary chair halted the proceedings to correct a delegate who had thanked her as madame, and the room applauded the correction.11 They did not grow out of it. They wrote it into a constitution while becoming the laughing-stock of those corners of the internet who care to pay attention to what “leftists” are up to these days. This “progressive” proceduralism has made certain people extremely neurotic and OCD about every little difference at the level of identity, and absolutely incapable of working with people who are actually different. It never delivers a thing to anyone. It has always been a way of feeling righteous on the losing side of history.

It’s 2026, and you still call this the side of progress. You are still treating as your betters the people who decided that masculinity as such was toxic, the whole of it, and ran that as a headline without flinching. They “normalized” a culture in which a senior editor at a major outlet listed among her resolutions for the year to band together and “kill all men.” This is the culture that had people hounding a movie star into apologizing and promising to climb into the back seat and shut his mouth for having said, out loud, that there is a difference between rape and a pat on the rear.12 The same people who got seventy-eight percent of Democrats to demand the police be defunded right up until the crime made them quietly demand it back. The same people who, when Charlie Kirk was shot dead in front of a crowd, either celebrated it or performed the little dance of caveats, “Well, he was polarizing,” “Well, he said some things.”13 The same people who decided the way to help women was to stop being able to say the word, swapping it out for “menstruators” and “bleeders,” while a forty-year-old male powerlifter rewrote the women’s records and the serious press explained that he had no advantage and that noticing one was a violence you commit with your mouth.14

Maybe this won’t convince That Friend of yours whose personality is the outcome of checking every single progressive purity check box. But if you have any intellectual or moral integrity, you will not forget that for most of the decade the way they moved frightened parents was the most gaslighty and manipulative sentence ever, delivered by a clinician or a television segment or a well-meaning aunt online: “Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter?” The sentence did its work because no parent alive can hear it and keep thinking straight, which is exactly why it was reached for. A therapist in 2017 put it to the parents of a boy as, “Do you want a happy little girl or a dead little boy?” One mother, quoted in a study, called the threat of suicide huge leverage. The figures that floated alongside the sentence ran to forty-one, fifty, eighty-two percent of trans kids having considered suicide. Here is the part to sit with: the best long-term studies we actually have, a Dutch cohort of more than eight thousand people running back to 1972 and a Danish cohort running back to 1980, put the real rate at fifty-nine hundredths of one percent and thirty-one hundredths of one percent. You were told eight in ten. The truth was nearer to one in three hundred. The sentence used to rush families past every doubt they had was built on a number off by more than two orders of magnitude, and when an American study at last confirmed that the blockers did nothing for these children’s mental health, the researchers sat on it for years because they were frightened of how it would be used.15 How’s that for the party of science, truth, and progress? For the side of, “Trust the experts!”

Let’s close out on this political cartoon I saw progressives and leftists sharing around their socials recently. It shows a dad and his son in the year 2300 looking at a museum exhibit of the last decade. It’s called “The Dumb Years” and it shows two cavemen in red hats burning books that say “Facts” and “Science.”

It’s the year 2026 and progressives share this unironically, as though the book burners were not also on the left. Did they really not notice when it became a left-wing fashion to film yourself burning Harry Potter? Or when the most prominent lawyer at the ACLU called for a book about adolescent girls being harmed to be pulled outright? How about the editors who reached back to rewrite dead authors: Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and Ian Fleming — scrubbing the words the goal-post-movers had recently deemed unsafe. None of these were done at the behest of Trump.16 It was not MAGA who was so afraid of books that they pinned trigger warnings to The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn and the Bible. Those were Democrats and their radicalized children. After it got so ridiculous that they became the laughing stock, Brandeis University, in an attempt at damage control, added the phrase “trigger warning” itself to a list of words too dangerous to speak.17

The cult was never just on the other side. The cult was the one that ran the struggle sessions, that charged its members five thousand dollars a head to sit at dinner and be lectured for their inborn sin of “white privilege.” Sure, MAGA has its cringe moments, but it’s a lot easier to point the finger at the Other and away from one’s own side when your media bubble is not showing you the lefties who knelt in the street to beg forgiveness and shined the shoes of strangers to prove their repentance.18 How much easier to focus on the speck in your neighbor’s eye and ignore the log in your own when you have been insulated by a media class that is willfully memory-holing the last decade. The same media class that handed out a diagram, in offices and schools, of a pyramid of white supremacy with mass murder at the top and, holding up the whole structure at the base, the sin of remaining apolitical.19

The war on facts was on both sides, but which side is more responsible? I’m saying it’s the one that claims its credentials from university degrees and continuing the march for civil liberties. That was the side that announced that biological sex is a myth.20 That’s the side that said asking a child to show his work in a math class is a relic of whiteness.21 If you were in such spaces, then you were swimming in waters where it was normal to believe that police were killing more than a thousand unarmed Black men a year when the true count was approximately thirteen.22 That’s the same media class that, just this year, only a month ago, circulated the outrageous lie that 62 million men were attending a rape academy that taught husbands how to drug and livestream taking advantage of their wives.23

The side of truth, love, and progress became the side of fear and reaction incapable of admitting how far it had overstepped. Now the fear of minorities was theirs, as Asian teenagers were made to score two hundred and fifty points higher than everyone else just to get the same letter from Harvard.24 That was the side that bought into the hysteria of the “Ok” hand symbol, buying into the lie that it meant “White power.” A lie made up by edgelord trolls on the internet, the same ones who allegedly made the new ugly trans flag just to troll the left — and it worked again.25 Over and over again they take their marching orders from the alt right meme-sphere and then they, with the college credentials and mainstream institutional power, give the silent majority good reasons to distrust anything left of center. As for the poster of Trump as “America’s Hitler,” in that cartoon: the decade’s actual language of extermination, a category of person described in a flagship journal as a parasitic condition with no cure, a civil-rights vice president saying of her opponents let them die, a feted speaker fantasizing aloud about emptying a revolver into the head of anyone of the wrong color who got in her way, was not coming from the men in the red hats.26 The cartoon is not a window onto the past, it is a mirror of our still-current moment, and the people who keep sharing it have never once caught their own reflection in its glass.

I am not telling you this to make you vote for anyone, and I am specifically not telling you to go and join the right. I am telling you because the decade you slept through did a thing that no election will undo. It set up a long century of conservative ascendancy. I do not mean the Trumpian kind of conservativism (a contradiction in terms), I mean the slow and durable kind. I’m talking about the people, more of them every year, who have quietly worked out that not all change is progress, that progress for its own sake is a categorical error, that there may be something worth conserving after all, and that they would frankly rather pass an evening with an open-minded person of the right than a closed-minded person of the left. The left can still win a race here and there, can still elect a charismatic figure now and again, and it will not matter much, because every such win now arrives already loaded with the memory of the decade, and serves mostly to activate and polarize and supercharge a reaction that an honest person, at this point, has to admit is earned.

None of this asks you to change your vote, your friends, or your sense of yourself as a good person. It asks one thing. It asks you to take the L. To say, out loud, that the decade was not a fever dream cooked up by Fox News and The Daily Wire, was not merely corporate capture, was not a handful of overzealous kids, but a real and historic episode of mass insanity that unfolded in plain sight, and that you, gently, with the very best of intentions, helped wave through.

You were left without the L for a long time, and that part was not your fault, because the people who were meant to hand you the record handed you a scapegoating cartoon instead. The record is in front of you now. The only question still open is the one your own side cannot answer, whether you are the kind of person who can take the loss, or the kind who has to keep insisting, against the evidence and against the children, that it was a win. It wasn’t, and everyone outside your little media bubble knows it. The overwhelming majority of Americans don’t vote. The silent majority is unaligned with anyone’s movement. Its trust has been lost by everyone who claims to speak on its behalf. The time to “do the work” is now, and the archives are available. Learning to own the L is learning how to grow.

American Dreaming — Memory-Holing “Wokeness”

American Dreaming

Memory-Holing "Wokeness"

This is the first essay of a multi-part series. Additional installments will be linked at the bottom as they are published. All of the currently published articles can also be seen here as well…

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a year ago · 143 likes · 18 comments · Jamie Paul

This is the first essay of a multi-part series. Additional installments are linked at the bottom as they are published. Jamie Paul.

To close out on a corny dad joke, and I’m sorry, I have to, because I am a new father: the Left without the L is “eft.” Read that aloud and it says the Left without the L is effed, and we all know that means it’s fucked.

9

A point of personal privilege is a clause in Robert’s Rules that lets a delegate interrupt the proceedings on his own behalf, repurposed here so that anyone claiming a marginalized identity could stop the room and speak from it; its companion, the “progressive stack,” sorted the speaking line by who held the most oppression, which meant people advertising chronic invisible illnesses to move up, and the occasional standoff over whether trans outranked Black when both were waiting at the mic. If that sounds like something federal agents would foster the conditions for just to mess up proceedings, you wouldn’t be the first to suggest it. However, I think Tony Chamas has a better explanation in his Genealogy of Wokeism series.

1Dime Review

The Genealogy of Wokeism

Can We Finally Define What “Wokeism” Is…

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4 months ago · 104 likes · 22 comments · Tony Chamas (Tony of 1Dime)

25

This phenomenon is a known fact. The "OK" hand hoax is well documented. In February 2017 an anonymous 4chan user launched "Operation O-KKK," urging others to flood social media with the claim that the OK sign was a secret "white power" symbol (the fingers supposedly tracing a W and a P), explicitly in order to bait liberals and the media into condemning a common gesture; the Anti-Defamation League records that the OK hoax "was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols," in each of which "the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist." "Okay Hand Gesture," Anti-Defamation League, Hate Symbols Database, accessed May 22, 2026, Link: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-hand-gesture.

The trans-flag claim is a different matter, which is why I said “allegedly.” My “source” is an anonymous 4chan post asserting that the 4chan board /pol/ designed the brown-and-black chevron version of the pride flag in a live thread, partly so that four of them tiled together would form a swastika. I know two different people who claim to have been there back then, one of whom is a leftist content creator at the CCCRU in Toronto. I cannot verify it and I am not going to pretend I can. The reason it is worth including anyway , and the reason a story this thin is still believable, is that the left earned that credulity: a movement with a documented history of taking whatever the alt-right cooks up on a meme board and solemnly adopting it has made exactly this kind of prank not only plausible but predictable.

Anonymous, post no. 471841316, /pol/, 4chan, June 21, 2024, screenshot:

Also, if “intent doesn’t matter,” which is an axiom of 2016-2026 wokeism, then this is functionally true, even if it’s not, because it still does, in fact, form a swastika.

The problem

What the piece cannot do is ask whether the twelve alternatives are the correct list to be using in the first place. Every cousin Aftab names is an internal condition of the individual. Schizoid personality, schizotypal, obsessive-compulsive personality, social phobia, borderline, social communication disorder, trauma-related disorder, social awkwardness, etc. He is presenting twelve ways to understand the person in front of him. These are twelve ways the dysfunction could be located inside the skull of the patient.

The issue is that by the time you are choosing between twelve diagnostic categories, you have already conceded that the answer is diagnostic. What if what we need to be looking for is not a syndrome, disorder, or condition? What if we go astray by waiting for a better edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) to give it a billing code. What if what we need to see is instead the structure the patient was formed inside?

The proto-version of this move is in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009). He called it the privatization of stress: what is in fact a collective political problem gets routed through individual therapy and individual medication, where therapy and medication do what they do, which is locate the issue in the person and work on the person. The issue is that the issue is not in the person. Fisher’s frame was applied psychoanalysis—the move Žižek and the Ljubljana school have been making for decades, where concepts forged on the side of a couch in a clinic get extended outward to ideology, politics, and culture.

Fisher could see that something was being privatized, but he could not see the field doing the privatizing. He had no theory of the field of the clinic in relation to the field of education, the field of insurance, the field of pharmaceuticals, the field of the platform economy that delivers the diagnostic memes—and therefore he couldn’t theorize what I’ll present at the end of this piece as the field of de-formation unique to the post-class fractured mass (PCFM). Fisher could see the symptom, but he could not see the field producing the symptom. Socioanalysis is the resource he did not have.2

Self-descriptive symptoms, read through socioanalysis

Aftab opens with eight patient self-descriptions of different symptoms:

• Eye contact makes me very uncomfortable.

• I suck at small talk.

• I have rigid routines.

• I hyper-focus on my hobbies.

• I am always fidgeting.

• Social interaction exhausts me.

• I am really bad at making friends.

• I don’t fit in; people find me weird.

The first candidate for these phenomena is likely an anxiety disorder. The trained clinician runs the differential and lands on something internal. But what happens when we run a different differential?

When we run the socioanalytic perspective, we ask what fields formed this person? As in, what social spaces with their own implicit and explicit rules for gaining or losing recognition structured what was given as normal? In socioanalytic terms, we cannot ask about the field without asking about the habitus produced within the individual, i.e. what set of durable dispositions, including ways of perceiving and feeling and acting, were acquired by operating inside a given field over time. What did the field encourage or discourage, what was rewarded versus pathologized, and were the incentive structures sending fixed or mixed messaging? Were the inherent dispositions and latent capacities of the individual capable of adapting to that context, and more importantly, how did this individual relate to, and get constituted in relation to, his or her peers in that given context? Genetic predispositions belong in this category: even where they play a role, they remain a substrate the field activates, shapes, or deforms. This is why no blood, spit, or MRI test can yet diagnose autism, even though everyone seems to agree genes play a big part. Finally, we must ask what illusio holds the subject in his or her current position, i.e. what dual libidinal investment for or against the game?3 Instead of asking what is wrong with one’s patients, ask what kind of world they were thrown into and how they formed in relation to others within the social field.

Aftab has a caveat at the end of his piece where he shows an awareness that there’s an outside to the DSM:

“Developmental context, response to relationships, and subjective experiences are all very important in looking beyond the surface presentation to understanding the meaning and functions of behaviors.”4

The problem is that this caveat is tacked on at the end, after a long post of different descriptions of different “types” of “disorders,” a frame that de-worlds the subject and then tries to tack the world back on at the end.

Ultimately, if you’re dealing with a patient who is suffering from a set of symptoms that make it difficult to operate in the world, and there are pills or practices you can equip them with that will help them, then the DSM might play an important role; but the DSM has become the new folk astrology. My friends and family who are always diagnosing their friends and family are not psychiatrists, they’re living in our society and reading the kinds of articles, memes, and reels that get passed around in the churn today. What I want to highlight is what gets lost by this kind of approach.

If the patient is a twenty-four-year-old male whose parents both worked full-time jobs they hated, who was dropped off at daycare at eight weeks, warehoused in age-segregated classrooms from five to eighteen, handed screen-crack at six, given unrestricted internet access at ten, absorbed pornography at roughly twelve, never in his life spent sustained time in an intergenerational context, never apprenticed to a master of anything, was never given a task that demanded sustained bodily engagement with a real adult or actually produced meaningful results, has never been formed by a tradition, has never belonged to a congregation, has never had a neighborhood, and has never experienced the rhythm of a day structured by anything other than the school bell or the attention economy — is it really helpful, in the long-term, to just look at the diagnostic manual that puts a label on their behavioral pattern?

Ask what eye contact would mean for that person. Eye contact is an act that presupposes you have been formed as a person who can encounter another person. It presupposes you have been looked at, held, attended to, corrected, dignified, and let be. It presupposes a history of mutual recognition. Strip the history and the act collapses into a sheer demand the person cannot meet. The inability to perform eye contact is not a symptom of autism or schizoid personality or social anxiety. It is the absence of the formation that would have made eye contact a regular human act instead of an ordeal.

Run the same read on the rest of the list. Rigid routines in the absence of intergenerational rhythm. Hyperfocus on hobbies in the absence of vocational apprenticeship. Fidgeting as the body’s refusal to be still in a context where it was never given anything meaningful to do with itself. Social exhaustion as the honest response of a nervous system that was never trained to metabolize social contact. Bad at making friends in a cohort where no one was given the conditions under which friendship actually forms. What Aftab showed us were not twelve internal pathologies sharing a surface presentation. They were descriptions of a single underlying condition: the condition of being formed by nothing in particular.

What thirteen years in the building does

John Taylor Gatto spent three decades teaching in the New York City public school system, got named Teacher of the Year for the state, and then wrote a series of books arguing that the system he worked inside was actively producing most of the things it claimed to be treating. Weapons of Mass Instruction is the distilled form of the argument.5 Compulsory schooling was engineered, not allowed to happen. Its architects were explicit. The goal was a docile industrial workforce. The methods were age-segregation, bell-structured time, disconnection from community, the abolition of autonomous work, the ritual humiliation of boredom, and the replacement of formation by credentialing. The system worked for a while in the sense that it produced what it was asked to produce.

The system no longer has even that telos. The industrial workforce it was built to supply has been offshored, automated, or degraded into gig labor. What remains is the schooling apparatus itself, running on inertia, increasingly functioning as permanent daycare for a society whose adults cannot afford to raise their own children.

Read through Bourdieu, Gatto is describing the field that produces the habitus Aftab’s patients arrive in his clinic with. Thirteen years in the building is not incidental to the symptomatology. It is the formation. The rigid routines, the hyperfocus, the fidgeting, the social exhaustion, the failure to form friendships: these are what you get when you take a human child and put them in that building for thirteen years.

The parents of these patients were themselves schooled in the same system. They then entered an economy that offers most workers neither time nor energy in the sense the timenergy concept specifies. Timenergy is not the same as leisure. It is the substantive condition of possibility for the kinds of activities that form a human being into a capable adult. The reliable, repeatable, energy-infused block of time in which someone can actually make things, teach things, attend to a child, build a garden, hold a conversation that matters, or show up to church.6

Here is where Bourdieu and timenergy meet. Symbolic capital constitutes fields that act as though they are not economic. The academic field, the artistic field, the professional managerial field, all simulate scholē, the Greek word for the leisured contemplative time that is the original root of “school” and the foundational presupposition of theoretical life. The simulation runs on a presumed distance from the necessary labor at the foundations of life. The PMC fields perform as though that distance is real and self-sustaining. It is not. It is borrowed, increasingly on bad terms, increasingly off the backs of the unformed children.

Timenergy reduced to labor power is what produces the rest. The house without a home. The family of roommates instead of an intergenerational dependency web. The child who, outside of school, had nothing but social media and pornography for company. The field of the post-class fractured mass (PCFM) is what every person ends up inside when the simulated scholē of the PMC fields has eaten the timenergy that would have made real formation possible at the foundations of life.

Parents with no timenergy cannot form their children, regardless of how much they love them. They can supervise, feed, drive to activities, and absorb the ambient anxiety of modern American parenting. They cannot form. Formation requires presence, attention, boredom, shared work, intergenerational time, and the slow accumulation of ways of being that can only be transmitted through sustained contact. Formation is what gets skipped when both parents work forty or fifty hours, commute, and come home exhausted to screens. The patient who arrives at Aftab’s clinic two decades later is the result.

Castration culture and the eyes

Take one of Aftab’s eight lines by itself. “Eye contact makes me very uncomfortable.” Run the differential on this one through a pair of archetypes that stand in for thousands of other deformation styles.

Consider a young man who first encountered pornography at age ten. By twelve he had a daily habit. By fourteen he had moved through the normal content into whatever algorithmic escalation the platforms serve to retain attention. By sixteen he had spent more hours alone with pornography than he had spent in conversation with his father. By eighteen he had never kissed a girl in real life but had been trained by thousands of hours of explicit content into a scripted, reactive, shame-coded sexuality that he cannot undo. He now presents in your clinic at twenty-four and reports that eye contact makes him very uncomfortable.

Which cousin does this belong to? The first twelve cousins cannot see this young man. They have no room for him. His difficulty with eye contact is not schizoid, not schizotypal, not obsessive-compulsive, not social phobia, not autism. His difficulty with eye contact is that, instead of developing meaningful human relationships and skills that helped him attain a real sense of self-worth and maturity during puberty, he instead gained a porn addiction. Now, instead of a well-adjusted self meeting another, his habitus of de-formation runs on a circuit of shame, defensive pride, and its underlying resentment—the whole cycle saturates his being before, during, and after every encounter with any other. Neurology and the DSM can only see where he stands after that de-formation took place, not the actual genesis through broken down fields in the context of deteriorating institutions and parents who have no timenergy.

Now consider the counterpart. A girl handed Instagram before puberty. By eleven she has been traumatized by exposure to hardcore pornography she did not seek out, along with the fact that all the boys hazing her in middle school are consuming it daily. She knows, before she is ready to know, what the sexual imagination of every boy around her is being shaped by when it turns toward her. While she absorbs that, she is also putting in her own thousand hours orienting herself in reference to hyperreal simulacra of other women on Instagram. Filtered, contoured, cosmetically enhanced, algorithmically selected for engagement. She builds a self under constant comparison to images that do not correspond to any real woman, including the women whose faces and bodies were harvested to build the images. By fourteen she is trying to become one of these simulacra. By twenty-four she is in Aftab’s clinic, and eye contact makes her very uncomfortable.

How much easier will it be for her to make eye contact than for the young man? Not at all. Beneath her conscious ability to assess what’s going on is the fact that her habitus relates to every other face as an audit. Every gaze has been internalized as a comparison she was trained to lose. She cannot look at another woman without ranking, cannot be looked at without feeling measured, cannot meet the eyes of a man without the full weight of the pornographic formation of his generation pressing in on the encounter. The shame has a different somatic texture than his, but it is no less powerful—her unconscious is a product of de-formation fields, neglect, and of being preyed upon by a society that sees her as nothing more than a consumable product to be ranked.

My two chosen figures are archetypical metonyms.7 They are the legible cases, chosen because the deformation-line from input to presentation is short enough to trace in a paragraph. The PCFM teenage subject can be deformed in a thousand other shapes. The boy whose father was working two jobs and whose mother was medicated into compliance. The girl raised by a stepfather she could never quite relax around. The kid passed through four schools before age ten. The one whose first sustained intimate experience was with a chatbot. The one whose friend group migrated from the neighborhood to the Discord server and never came back. The one whose older brother was radicalized in the manosphere and brought it home. The one whose older sister was pulled into the trans identity pipeline and pulled her along. On and on. Every one of these produces a distinct developmental signature, and every one of them presents to Aftab as something close to one of the twelve cousins without being any of them.

This is the underside of what Castration Culture is tracking. The symptomatology the DSM codes as one thing or another is often the somatic and relational signature of fake sex, introduced into children before their capacity for real sex had any chance to develop, in any one of a thousand variants. The clinical frame will never include this variable, because the clinical frame was built in a period that could not yet see pornographic formation as a mass intervention on a generation’s sexual architecture.

The Field of the PCFM

Aftab gave us twelve cousins inside the DSM frame. Cousins, by definition, cannot share a parent. They can share a grandparent, though. If the twelve cousins look alike, it’s because they trace back to the same grandparent, not because they came from the same parent. So do the genealogy. Find the parents of these cousins. The parents are the specific deformation lineages: pornographic formation, school as warehouse, atomized parenting, screen-mediated puberty, and the timenergy-poor household. Each is a sibling of the others. What makes them siblings is that they all came from the same grandparent.

The grandparent is a field, in the technical sense Pierre Bourdieu gave that word: a structured social space with its own rules, internal positions, and logic, which forms the people who live inside it whether or not they consent to the formation. The grandparent to our generation’s symptoms is the fractal-field of the post-class fractured mass (PCFM) that replaced the older interlocking institutional apparatus through which modern societies used to hand children off from infancy-to-adulthood and produce, at the end of the process, a specific kind of “well-adjusted” person. Babies still go in one end of that institutional pipeline, to never see figurative daylight until their eventual end in a senior care facility—the difference now is that the kind of “successful” formation that could be achieved in the 20th century has become increasingly rare.

The fractal-field of the post-class fractured mass is one of de-formation at the intersection of all the other fields colliding and breaking down after fifty plus years of capital hollowing out the institutions, by what tends to get called “neoliberalism,” a specific mitigating response to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF).8 By “institutions” we are referring to the disciplinary and educational apparatuses (which Althusser called “repressive state” or “ideological state” apparatuses), i.e. the prison, the mental hospital, the borders, the halls of government, the media, the compulsory schooling K-12 system.9

In the 20th century, all of these institutions became seemingly too big to fail and successfully displaced older and more localized institutions like the parish, the trade, the neighborhood, the extended family networks of embedded intergenerational dependence, the union of workers and their independent associations, the agrarian commons, and the school back when schools tried to make citizens rather than warehouse workers and the PMC (professional managerial class).

Consider how, in 1928, Edward Bernays described the average man’s civic involvement: “John Jones, besides being a Rotarian, is member of a church, of a fraternal order, of a political party, of a charitable organization, of a professional association, of a local chamber of commerce, of a league for or against prohibition or of a society for or against lowering the tariff, and of a golf club….”10 After the mid-20th century, John Jones got replaced with the guy Chomsky called “Joe Six-pack.”

“There are other media too whose basic social role is quite different. It’s diversion. There’s the real mass media, the kinds that are aimed at the guys who… Joe Six-pack. That kind. The purpose of those media is just to dull people’s brains.”11

This is the man who, outside of work, has only engagement with his television screen, investment in a football team, who is involved with politics the way he is with wrestling. Neil Postman saw this and wrote the book Amusing Ourselves To Death about it.12

None of the old forms disappeared cleanly, for every Joe Six-pack there’s another person who tries to get involved with community through Meetup.com. Simulations of each of the old civic involvements have been commodified and sold back to us in a way that, rather than serving our needs, instead scratch at the itching wounds that keep us addicted to the lack. All of these fields keep operating in fragmented forms, still producing some of their prior effects on some of the people some of the time. Increasing numbers of people are falling through its cracks.

What collapsed in the last fifty-or-so years is the capacity of the institutional fields to do the formation work that they did for the parents of our grandparents—they no longer function as a single interlocking apparatus. We are the third generation of the breakdown of the institutional matrix, living in the ruins of something that was able to maintain itself as a seeming organic whole for the generations of Talcott Parsons and Pierre Bourdieu (1950s — 1960s). It’s a world most of our parents still believe exists.

The post-class fractured mass is what fills the space where that apparatus used to be. Inside it you do not develop the kind of person an intact field would have produced. You develop the somatic and relational signatures of formation that did not happen, registered later in your nervous system, your social capacity, your sexual architecture, all the way down to your inability to look someone in the eye. The patient arriving at the clinic with self-diagnosed autism is more often than not giving accurate testimony about that field, in the only vocabulary the culture has given them to speak. The DSM is forced to read their symptoms as disorders, because the DSM has no category for the absence of formation and its consequent de-formation. The disorders are the only vocabulary the manual has, and it’s a frame that puts the focus onto the individual rather than the social fields and their formation work.

If Aftab’s patient actually gets the diagnosis notarized, they might just feel “seen” for the first time, but the fact is, they still haven’t experienced any form of mutual recognition. That would require something that would have had to happen organically in more primordial human involvements. My short example: Joel Salatin, the most famous popularizer of regenerative agriculture in the U.S., says that genuine confidence comes from the accomplishment of meaningful tasks.

“This is not a psychology book, but my experience drives me to make an observation: we learn our self-worth through doing. We don’t feel valuable because a focus group or self-help group made us feel valuable. Who we are is a direct result of what we do…. When children can’t, won’t, or don’t have project and ownership responsibilities, they see themselves as worthless. Feeling needed and contributing to the good of family and society is the foundation for developing self-worth…. Here is my completely unscientific anecdotal old geezer observational hypothesis: accomplishment drives worthiness.”13

I would add that meaningful tasks are done under the tutelage of someone worthy of respect who has time to get to know you, in the context of the kind of work that serves the foundations of life — that’s meaningful competence that transfers into confidence. That child grows up knowing how to look a person in the eyes, without the help of pills, CBT, two decades of psychoanalysis, or positive affirmations from someone paid to say them.

Bourdieu developed the toolkit for socioanalysis forty years ago, but he has been buried due to how inconvenient his approach is for today’s crumbling institutional order. A part of my project is to use it for the self-defense purposes he envisioned, while still taking it beyond where he left off. I’m writing a book about it, but for the time being will just say that “socioanalysis” is mysteriously absent from the theory scene. I think that’s a situation that needs to be remedied. Bourdieu is the first step for re-grounding Baudrillard’s reading of simulation in the field of cultural production rather than in a free-floating semiotics, and it sets me up to go beyond them both by theorizing the primordial grounds that their theories bracketed. That is for the book. For now, the move is this: next time some new constellation of suffering surfaces and the diagnostic class starts looking for its thirteenth cousin, do the genealogy instead. Find the parents of the cousins. Find the grandparent of the parents. The grandparent is always a field, and the field is the thing that has to change.

Thanks for reading.

To read some of my other socioanalytic work, check out Socioanalyzing Analytic Philosophy.

Also, if you’re interested in getting involved with the behind-the-scenes discussions, lectures, and my ongoing research seminar at Theory Underground, you can become a member here. Do so in the next week and you’ll be able to join ’s guest lecture course on the history and theory of the Deep State.14

Notes