We bought a new Subaru Outback last year. Nice car … but. If I get too close to the white line on the shoulder, it ‘nudges’ me back toward the center. The headlights dim automatically, even if I don’t want them to. The engine cuts itself off at traffic lights. If I turn my head a bit too much to the right or left a voice tells me to watch the road and if I yawn it tells me to pay attention. After two hours it tells me to stop for a break.
It has GPS, but it’s crappy compared to Google. Heated steering wheel, seat heater and cooler, backup camera and forward looking camera, I could go on, but one should ‘get the picture.’ My issue is that I don’t want most of that stuff, but I have to pay for it anyway as it comes with the car. Aside from the obvious direction we’re being pushed, that being driverless cars that will ultimately be ‘controlled’ by the ‘authorities,’ all those bells and whistles need to be maintained at a cost, and one would have to spend an inordinate amount of time studying the owners manual in order to use many of the features the car offers that I don’t really care to have to begin with and don’t use. So I’m paying for and paying to maintain ‘features’ that go to waste.
So what’s my point? There’s a black pill here, but one that perhaps we should embrace. I’ll let the folks at Imperium Press explain. They do a pretty awesome job.
Human societies tend to produce more than they can maintain as they grow more complex. But the problem is that as complexity increases you get a) increased maintenance costs, and b) decreasing marginal returns. So eventually the costs of maintaining infrastructure outweigh the benefits, and the obvious solution is to let some of this infrastructure go to waste—and then go back to producing more shit. This solves the problem, at least for a while. This is a normal social cycle and not necessarily fatal, but what is fatal is when society meets its maintenance costs with non-renewable resources, whether this be slave labour from an empire too big to maintain, or half a billion years’ worth of sunlight in the form of finite tree juice. Even so, collapse rarely happens all at once. Decline is not usually catastrophic but a kind of ratcheting down effect. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was it dismantled in a day—Rome fell and then got back up and fell and got back up for centuries. Each collapse lowers maintenance costs by throwing out some amount of infrastructural capital, so maintenance costs are reduced. Collapse is not total, but nor is the problem really solved—the next crisis is inevitable. This is Greer’s “stairstep” model of collapse, which he calls “catabolic” after the mechanism whereby cells harvest energy by metabolizing large molecules into smaller ones.
We Europeans (and those of European descent) are what we are because our ancestral environment forced this long-term planning on us. We are what we are only because our ancestors never got black-pilled, got on with the job, and started planning for winter long before it was here.
We nationalists talk a big game about how the folk matters more than the individual. Right now, our folk are suffering runaway degeneration both moral and genotypic. The heroic view is the amor fati view, the view that not only does not fear but cherishes the purifying fire, if fire must come. You may not see the open horizon on the other side of it. Your family may not see it. But your folk will. After winter, spring.
