I. The Friend Question and You

The Anglo v Slavic Models of Friendship i.e, the Buckos v the Droogs.

I have been meaning to write about the institution of friendship, the core concepts behind it and the differences between East and West when it comes to friendships for at least a year now. I set the stage pretty well with multiple posts on Notes explaining where I stand on the Friend Question.

Here are some:

And this:

There were others, but you get the gist of the idea that I’m sounding out here I’m sure.

And there was this one particular post from way back when where I basically pointed out that “Westerners” (by that I mean Anglos, and Anglo-dominated cultures) don’t have friends because of how messed up and repulsive they are, on the inside. That they have a yawning hole where their friendship-making center ought to be or something like that. Worse, I claimed that they don’t even understand the concept of friendship and misuse the term! However, I was using inexact terms at the time and my understanding of the problem has developed since then.

I now have concrete proofs for my theses on friendship.

First of all, I believe that I can trace the root concept underlying Slavic friendship, which I extol so heavily on this blog, to the ancient and almost mythical concept of the Druzhina. I briefly mentioned this concept a long time ago, but tabled it for later discussion.

Before we dive into history and specifics though, it is important to understand that male friendship is the building block of all higher social organization. Male to female relationships are important as well, but they’re more primordial and basic and of a lower order of complexity. Animals are able to replicate the basic male-female relationship. Only human societies (and not all of them) are able to create male friendships. Remove everything society has erected and men and women will still be attracted to one another on a neural, instinctive level. Me, I dislike everything about the whinier sex, but I can’t help but be attracted to them and, if I’m honest with myself, I enjoy their company once in a while because they laugh at my jokes and smell nice.

IMPORTANT: you can’t EVER be friends with a female because friendship is a male concept and refers to the ideal, (non-sexual) relationship that two men can have with one another. In contrast, men and women can only ever be related by blood or by the bedroom. Women assume that men who have a male friend are secretly having sex with them because that is the nature of their relationships with me, or, they are simply pretending to believe this to undermine male friendship by insinuating that it is gay (feminine) in nature.

But I’ll write about all of this another time as we continue the series.

Point being: how a people approach the issue of what we call “friendship” in general terms determines what kind of a culture you are going to end up creating. So yeah, it is very important to discuss and understand. In actual fact, the building block of society is not the individual, but the kind of relationship that two or more individuals have. In other words, it is not the stones but the mortar between them that determines the shape of the structure. A bunch of individuals living in relative geographic proximity to each other are like pieces of rock scattered in a field. A structure only emerges when you apply mortar between the pieces to start arranging them to lay the foundation for a wall. That’s the social science or technology in the metaphor. And without the mortar, the stones that you stacked fall apart as soon as any pressure is put to bear on the structure and scatter back into the field. Thus, the study of social organization cannot be a study of individuals, but rather an understanding of how individuals cooperate or enter conflict with one another. This is something that Libertarians don’t understand (or similarly simply pretend not to) and why their models end up coming out so absurd and unrealistic — because they are based on the individual (the stone) and not the relationship between individuals (the mortar).

Related to this: I intend to write a deep dive on Ayn Rand’s family background as an ethnic globalist revolutionary cell operating out of St. Petersburg, Russia. Stay tuned for that.

Ever since I announced my intention to write about friendship as a concept and to compare and contrast Western (Anglo) and non-Western (East German, Slavic, Turkic) I’ve started to encounter synchronistic proofs and explanations that have really fleshed out my theory. It is as if the cosmos itself wants me to write about the topic. As it turns out, someone has already done similar work on the topic and come to very interesting conclusions.

Enter Curt Doolittle of the Propretarian ideological school of economics. He has a very interesting theory about the core concepts behind male Anglo self-organization (friendship) and how they came to be. Actually, we agree on almost everything about Anglo culture/civilization — we simply assign different value judgements to it, as you will see later on. The only point on which we disagree is where Curt Doolittle tries to universalize his claims about Anglo male self-organization (friendship) and to erroneously misapply them to the Slavlands.

First, a short primer on his ideas is in order.

Curt Doolittle’s “Pirate Friendship Values” Theory For Anglo Civilization

From what I gather, Curt Doolittle runs something called the Natural Law Institute, which is primarily a conference for Libertarians and a YouTube channel for lectures that I have been listening to for the last month now. Let me just qualify the critique that I am about to launch into by pointing out that I found the ideas fascinating enough to designate them as my go-to playlist while cooking, doing my morning exercises and driving around. I found a lot of value in them, especially the parts where Doolittle and his fellows outline the concept of “feminine” and “masculine” strategies of waging warfare.

They explain that European societies were very masculine-coded and that this is why they were so successful.

In contrast, certain groups of hostile people have been using feminine strategies of warfare i.e., subversion to bring down our masculine, European culture from within.

By codifying, categorizing and explaining these strategies, the NLI people have done us all a great service. From what I understand, the goal of the organization is to come up with a series of proposed reforms to our existing law codes that would effectively outlaw these hostile, foreign, feminine subversion strategies from being inflicted on the population. Also: some of their fellows like to use my stuff in his work, which is very flattering. I bring Curt up because he is the only one out there talking about these deeper ur-structures of social organization and how they shape modern civilization.

Furthermore, because of his spirited defense of Anglo civilization, I see I him as a kind of avatar of the spirit of the Anglo man. I’ve spoken to so many Anglos and Americans who essentially believe in the same things as Curt, only not as articulately. I believe that he’s channeling the ethnic oversoul of the Anglo people with his work. Seriously.

In other words, I couldn’t ask for a better foil to highlight my points about how different our two peoples are. Curt’s own triumphant exaltation of Anglo civilization and the social structures that it has formed over the centuries are identical to my critiques of them. Isn’t that amazing? Yes, well, at the end of the day, we simply apply a different value judgement to the same information and that is the only real difference between us.

Now, Curt’s core assumption is that all human activity is about acquiring and defending property — he’s a “Propertarian”, remember? And so all of the institutions and technologies that we build revolve around litigating who gets what and how much. In fact, our very language developed to figure out who owns what. Well, I’m not a linguist myself, but Curt brings up a lot of proofs for his theory in the field of linguistics. From there, ethics and morality also follows the same core motivating principle.

Seeing as I don’t concern myself with any of these concepts, I’m more than willing to grant Curt all of that.

I write about conspiracy theories and metaphysics/mysticism. Furthermore, to my mind, morality and ethics are hoaxes and law is just the codification of the victor’s terms of surrender. The only thing that I believe has any value is, coincidentally, what Curt believe to be the eternal enemy of Anglo civilization and social progress. Yes, Curt considers the British Empire to be the height of the Aryan-Aristotelian ideal of abolishing everything related to backwards superstition (mysticism) and anti-evolutionary/anti-adaptive traditions all around the world. Lastly, Doolittle uses Neo-Darwinian gene selection theory as the underlying scientific explanation for … well, everything, actually. Superior selection of genes because of geography and LLC formation is what created the super-race of Anglos, who would go on to first conquer the backwards world of superstitious primitives and then invent the modern world that we all love so much, with all of its technological wonders and social progress — to his mind, at least.

The face of progress!

But all of that is just details. Let’s just stay on the theme of friendship today.

Curt has a very simple explanation for how Anglo male self-organization was engineered. He refers to the governing ur-structure of Anglo society as the “democratic pirate gang/ proto-LLC”. Yes, Curt believes that Aryans are essentially pirates and that our civilization derived from the organizational principles of, well, organized piracy. As I mentioned above, he believes that the Anglos achieved the perfection of this pirate ideal with the creation of the British Empire. No, seriously, this is the core of his reasoning and the actual terms that he prefers to use, not mine. I’m not mocking him at all here.

Here is the logical progression of his theory..

From the ur-structure of the Aryan tribes we get:

Steppe-pirates ==> European subcontinent warbands ==> Anglo pirate bands ==> democratic forms of organization (pirate gangs of traders/raiders) ==> the formal codification of the first LLCs ==> modern corporations and finance ==> eventual Western technological and financial and cultural dominance of the world via imposition of Anglo democratic, capitalistic and rule of law norms.

A key point: pirates elected their captains and relied on contract law to ensure lawful distribution of booty. Thus, pirate gangs ==> democracy + rule of law = the core of Western (Anglo) civilization.

Amusingly, Slavlanders often pejoratively refer to the Anglos as “pirates”.

I know that my grandpa does for a fact. The phrase “good for nothing stinking pirate rats”, has come up at the dinner table more than once when discussing history or current events. Perhaps Curt, who spent some time living in Ukraine, picked up the idea there. I only hope that he understands that it is meant as a pejorative when we say it, not a compliment and we’d balk at the idea that anyone would willingly assign such a label to their own people and their own civilization.

… maybe he does and has simply decided to own the term if that’s the case. Like American blacks and the naughty negro word.

Tittly-tottly top-o’-the morning to ya, mah fellow pirate mofuckas. Shiieeeeeeeeet. Where dat Spanish booty at? I’m finna to appropriate their wares ‘pon this fine morrow. *sucks jaundiced gums*

Actually, when Curt speaks, he sprinkles in a few terms here and there that I can’t help but notice and raise an eyebrow at like his use of the term “hetman” to describe an appointed local leader. Also, his references to Indo-European “land pirates” appears to be an attempt to describe the Cossacks, who would elect leaders through direct democracy (hetman is a Cossack term). Curt even describes the large wagons of the Indo-Europeans as a kind of proto, smaller wooden ship that sailed the grass sea of the steppe. More on that in a moment.

However, the similarities between us and Anglos end there, in my opinion.

The Cossacks, who are the direct descendants of these Aryan-Scythian “land pirates”, as Curt refers to them never formed LLCs like the Anglo sailers of the same time period did. Furthermore, they never developed a tradition of contract law and courts and a culture of litigation. Liberalism also never took root in these territories and peoples. Prior to the Cossacks, the Yamanaya or Aryan “land-raiders” never did any of this either. As proof of this, they left records of their culture in some places like modern-day India, and upon reading the Vedas one will find no mention of LLCs or anything even resembling the concept.

So, basically, Curt’s argument falls apart when he tries to draw this false equivalence.

In other words, he thinks that he is describing all of “Aryan-European” civilization, but he is actually just describing Anglo civilization and universalizing it and extending its roots back to the halcyon days of our near-mythical forefathers. I must draw a line in the sand on this and push back on Curt’s attempts to characterize us as “land pirates”. Because, actually, we are dealing with two fundamentally different organizational structures that are even antagonistic to each other.

If the basic male organizational structure of Anglo society is the pirate gang like Curt claims, and from which their entire culture springs, then the Slavic equivalent is the Druzhina. And the two could not be more different as concepts.

Also: I believe that it is from these two core structures that our two cultures’ approach to friendship is derived. A kind of trickle down effect over the centuries, if you will. Don’t ask me about the mechanism for how this was done, by the way because you’ll only get more “superstitious” theorizing from my end. Me, I don’t believe in neo-Darwinian gene-totalitarianism, which has led to a total dead-end in biology and racial science. At this point, I think it’s just a silly old Anglo superstition, frankly, similar to how the Circassians thought that they could prick their harem girls with needles smeared in smallpox infected blisters of diseased cows to inoculate the girls from smallpox. Darwin should have been retired ever since epigenetics was (re)discovered in the early 00s or as soon as the DNA helix was sequenced.

Another, better, and more talented Anglo scientist named Rupert Sheldrake would borrow from Russian scientists to explain this cultural tradition passing down over generations through the concept of ethno-specific morphic fields of inherited information and experience instead. In Russia, we could call this a form of neo-Lysenkoism, I suppose. But the “how” is just an interesting detail when you can simply observe for yourself the reality of the continued existence of the druzhba concept in the Slavlands to this day.

And here, perhaps, it makes sense to take a detour by referencing none other than the infamous philosopher Alexander Dugin himself to fill in some of the conceptual blank spots in the Doolittle model for explaining the difference in self-organization traditions among the European peoples.

Dugin’s Land Power v Sea Power Model

Fans of the blog know that Rurik is not a fan of Dugin for a number of reasons. Most of them are related to his neo-neo-neo-Platonism and the deal that he cut with the Kremlin to shill their agenda following the death of this daughter via car bomb.

But that doesn’t mean that I can’t engage with Dugin’s ideas fairly though.

His most famous thesis relates to the two archetypical different types of civilization. You’ve heard of this theory I’m sure. I am referring to his land powers vs sea powers model. Yes, Dugin believes that all of history is a clash between these two civilizations that take on various avatars throughout the centuries to continue the struggle. So Sparta v Athens, Rome v Carthage, Russosphere v Anglosphere. And in Dugin’s mind, the land power is the traditional one (good) and the sea power is the progressive one (bad).

This is in direct contrast to Doolittle’s model, of course. Curt sees similarity where Dugin sees difference. To Doolittle, the great bodies of water and the steppe are both seas (of a kind) that are navigated by nomadic ships (wagon-schooners) and dominated by pirates or raiders out to make a profit. Again: to his mind, this is the ideal organizational structure from which we got law, innovation, capitalism, property rights, democratic institutions and so on. And I wonder if Doolittle might have picked up this idea of wagons being used like sea ships by Aryan raiding bands across a vast grassy steppe simply from speaking to the locals in Kiev and hearing them talk about about the great Kiev-Russian hero-kings.

I ask because I was taught about Sviatoslav’s land navy as a kid and I know for a fact that no Anglo child was ever taught these stories.

Now, because Dugin is a metaphysician, he is able to approach the issue from a deeper dimension while Doolittle focuses on the exoteric structure and is not able to do the same. Seen from the outside, the two groups do indeed look similar. Two groups of men on wooden schooners with curved blades, a penchant for heavy drinking, carousing and golden earings out to raid their enemies across vast distances. Yes, I would be lying if I said I didn’t see the similarity — at least on that exoteric level.

Ay-yo, where dat Turkish booty at? Imma finna to roll up on dat Sultan nibba wit mah crew no cap on skibidi. They done be messin wit our skreets boutta get blown da fuk out.

I brought up Dugin to highlight that I’m not the only one to see a clear distinction where Doolittle sees a similarity.

The key difference to understand is that all of this so-called progressing or rather just “change” to use a neutral term, that we’ve been doing over the centuries is euphemistically referred to by Doolittle as “evolution”. This implies progress and improvement based on some nebulous set of criteria that no one has ever made clear to me. Curt even cites vaccination rates and other modern technological marvels as benchmarks for his rosy evaluation, just as an example. But a more traditionally-minded writer such as myself (or Dugin) would refer to this same process as “degradation”. At the end of the day this all comes down to a value judgement. Progressives (Anglos) believe in progress and money and technology while traditionalists/perennialists/metaphysical pessimists (Slavs) do not.

Simple as, ‘innit?

And now let’s get to my main point, finally.

The Sacred Druzhina v the Buccaneer Gang

In Doolittle’s model, the pirates are brought together by a mutual desire to make money and are bound together by a set of laws that they enforce on themselves to make their venture profitable. This becomes the basis of the Anglo understanding of friendship in modern-day society. Basically, unknowingly, they take this piratical, mercantile, democratic structure and apply it to civilian life, just like we do with our Druzhina in the East.

Now, the root word here is druzh, which then becomes druzhya, which means “friends” in Anglo, but which is an incorrect translation of the Slavic, clearly. Because the Anglo understanding of “friend” is basically a fellow buccaneer” or a “bucko”, for short.

We should drop the use of “friend” going forward and instead use these ethically-loaded terms in place of it to denote when we are referring to Anglo friends (buckos) and Russian friends (droogs). Yes, the singular of Druzh is Drugh (droog) like in Kubrick’s movie/Burgess’ book.

So, if the basic Anglo model of organization is the pirate LLC that is based around securing profits and uses contract law to maintain discipline, then the Druzhina could not be more different.

Unlike the buckos, the droogs made their pacts for pointedly and demonstratively non-mercantile reasons. They’d probably cut your head off for insinuating that they were land pirates or that their friends were just people that they were contractually bound to upon penalty of dramatically reducing their credit scores. You even get this sort of thing in all the Golden and Silver Age Russian literature.

Pay attention to how Pierre Bezukhov and Andrei Bolkonsky interact. Pay attention to how Dolokhov behaves with his fellow soldiers. Take literally any Russian novel and a character with Curt’s views and prescribed behavior would be the caricature of a villain or an anti-hero like Ostap Bender. Nowhere will you see this type held up as a model of behavior, but rather portrayed as a buffoon, at best.

Furthermore, druzhba relationships were entered into voluntarily and were held up by the concept of oaths, not by the contract law that Curt astutely point out that his bands of Anglo buccaneers, in contrast, were organized around. And yes, oaths seem superficially similar to contracts in the same way that a droog looks superficially similar to a bucko. But here, unfortunately, we have no recourse but to reference “superstition” i.e., mysticism and the significant hold that it had on pre-Anglo man. An oath is first and foremost a metaphysical concept because it is made to a higher concept or entity, not to a lawyer or judge.. It has nothing to do with contract law or the “agree to all” button you press when your phone updates. Contract law is, if anything, a degradation of the concept — one that is suited for the lower-order sort of person and society of degraded merchant values.

There’s no avoiding it, but here we come to another value judgement, pure and simple.

Curt and his people believe that the switch from oath culture to contract-keeping was an evolution. In contrast, my people believe that it was a degradation of a once primordial, natural and spiritual concept. Anglos want to get everything down in writing and notarized in the presence of a lawyer. A Russian, to this day, would be insulted at the very insinuation and would instinctively differentiate between the concept of a friend/droog and a business partner. In contrast, to an Anglo, the concepts are the same, and even if you don’t formally sign a contract with them, they will still only ever talk to you about money and business anyway. They think we’re naive and sentimental and we in turn think that they’re crass and demented money-obsessed goons.

To be a droog is to essentially be treated like a family member. You don't sign contracts with family members in Slavic culture. You also don’t involve third parties like lawyers or judges or nobles in family affairs either. In contrast, Anglos kick their kids to the curb at 18 or then force them to pay rent on their own bedrooms. They openly laugh at their own countrymen who ended up homelesa begging in the street. Their callousness and cruelty to their own is always a sharp slap to the face for any immigrant from the European continent to the Anglosphere, let me tell you. We notice these things and whisper amongst ourselves about you, believe me.

But it is just another value judgement at the end of the day, admittedly.

As for the causative factor, well, if we were to take Curt’s genetic reductionist view on the matter, well, then perhaps because we Slavs practiced cousin marriage to the 3rd degree up until very recently, we feel a greater connection to our fellow countrymen than Anglos do. That’s also probably why we’re so much better looking and much more open-minded, honest and intelligent, with better teeth in our skulls to boot as well. Just saying. There’s a golden median to be had here and the Anglos are objectively the ugliest members of the extended European family. Literally everyone except the Anglos agree on this by the way.

But I’ve digressed into gossip.

My point is that whenever an Anglo or Anglo-influenced person talks about friendship, he really means that he wants to start an LLC with a fellow buccaneer (you) that will be bound by some form of contract and all of the formal, litigious accessories that this implies. A friend is a bucko is just a business partner. That’s it — that’s the extent that the Anglo mind can reach in regards to the concept of friendship. All they want to do with you is to talk about money, essentially. In other words, all of their relationships are mercantile, legalistic, and opportunistic.

Sure, we primitives of the Slavlands often do our friends dirty as well, sadly … but we at least acknowledge that we’ve fallen from the ideal, which is this kind of selfless, money-less, and spiritual connection to another person exemplified by the Druzhina. To us, the druzhba is literally sacred. In the absence of any actual religious sentiment in society during the Soviet years up through to now, we had the ideal of sacred friendship to carry us through. We taught it to our infants in place of Jesus Christ. My father taught me about druzhba at a young age and many other young men got the same lectures and stories that I did. All Slavs that I’ve personally known and had dealings with have believed in this model of friendship, even if they’ve fallen far short of the ideal or chosen not to enter into the druzhba “contract” with me. It is not something easily or lightly entered into. Because a druzhba comes with obligations and commitments and a kind of emotional bond between the concerned parties. Whe we say “friend” we mean something entirely different to how the term is used in the West.

But the Anglo mind cannot even conceive of the very idea — that is the key difference to understand!

Even worse, Anglos think that the concept of druzhina/druzhba is primitive and superstitious! Yes, their state of spiritual degradation is actually held up as an example of how “evolved” they are via the rest of us. It’s sad, actually, to hear them admit or brag even about how depraved and money-grubbing they are without any shame. Like a child too young to understand when it is misbehaving or something like that.

*shudder*

And yes, the main criteria for entering into a druzhba is basically akin to a sixth sense tingling in the back of the spine feeling. You have to feel some sort of a deeper connection to the other man that can only be approximated with artistic language or other forms of expression. It cannot be litigated or approximated with contracts. To make matters worse, women, who cannot understand the concept simply equate it with sexual feeling via projection. Modern Anglo men, being naturally soulless and therefore feminine (mater = mother = materialism), also believe that deep male friendship is nothing more than butt sex. It is the best that they can do because of how limited their minds are. At the end of the day, what we are talking about occurs on the SOVL (soul) level. And you either feel it and then believe it or you don’t.

I’m really really really sorry for you if you are unable to feel on the level of SOVL. You have my condolences and my pity, truly. I wouldn’t trade all of the empires and riches of the world for it.

But, apparently, you guys did.

Just another value judgement at the end of the day, perhaps.

Thus, in a broader analysis, Doolittle is unable to see past his own Angloness on the whole male self-organization topic and misapplies it to cultures that have a totally different concept of the institution of friendship. But I didn’t mean to single him out on this. There are actually many Anglo or American or Jewish writers and thinkers who come to similar conclusions/mistakes like Curt does. And it is worth discussing all of their delusions regarding male self-organization (friendship) in this series. We need to cover Jack Donovan’s “Way of the Gang” model and Bronze Age Pervert’s “neo-Mannerbund” in the next installment. Why is this important, you ask? Because they’re all deluded and wrong and nothing good will come out of their proposals.

Most importantly, it won’t solve the problem of friendlessness in the West.

For that you need to bring in outside help.

On a more mundane level, I want to help men have friends again and I believe that by doing so, we will be able to restore people’s souls to some degree. If we can explain and understand the concept of friendship, we might be able to bring it back from extinction in the West. Or at least to re-establish the connection to something higher that has been lost. Maybe when lost it can’t be retrieved though, I don’t know one way or another.

For all my pessimism though, I choose to be optimistic about this one topic.

Stay tuned for Part II.