On Prophets and Populists

The key idea today is really simple and I won’t insult your intelligence by trying to string it out across several hundred words to make myself seem smarter and waste your time. No, seriously, why do so many Substack writers still do this? I can understand being a bit wobbly as a writer in the beginning, but the process of getting your thoughts down on paper tends to get streamlined as you continue. It can only be a stylistic choice by these other authors at this point.

This ties into my point about populism quite neatly.

There’s nothing special to populism, really. Nothing to get super enthused or super enraged about. Populists are just a form of politician. The only difference is that, denied their natural base of support in the form of some kind of lobby or oligarch, populist-politicians are forced to appeal to the people as a way to compensate for their lack of traditional support.

In other words, populists can only get away with saying what the people are ready to hear. They don’t exist to propose any radical ideas. In fact, if they did, they would cease being populists because they wouldn’t find a ready and waiting base of popular support for their radical ideas.

Pushing and normalizing radical ideas is the role of the archetypical prophets. That’s what I do here on this blog. Although, I am not the prophet - I am just one of many, and the internet is full of many prophets jockeying for influence and trying to share what they believe to be the truth and trying to convince others of it as well. The only thing populist about this blog is the writing style - it is simple and to the point. But the articles are used to convey ideas, not to run an election campaign or cobble together a political platform that will appeal to most people and get them to pull a lever.

If I was interested in just being a populist, I’d shut up about alternative science, the Old Testament, Russia’s lack of success on the battlefield and just tell people what they wanted to hear. And it’s not that I have something against politicians lying to the peasants in principle. In fact, I think the two groups deserve one another - like the shepherd and the sheep. One group wants to fleece the other and the other wants to be fleeced, begs to be fleeced and kicks clods of dirt in the face of those who don’t want to stand in line to be fleeced alongside them.

Who am I, a humble blogger on Substack who dreams of one day making $1000 of monthly income from his writing, to stand in the way of this match made in heaven?

And in terms of politics, well, the system is rigged in more ways than just a stolen vote here and there. Does this mean that there is no hope for populist politics going forward?

Well, yes and no.

Most people, despite the propaganda and the coercive against them, still resist parts of or most of the elites’ agenda. This is enough for populism to be demonized by the elites and labeled a looming specter that is dangerous to Liberal Democracy. They are right to be afraid, of course. At its core, the Liberal Democratic project is elitist and the structures that it creates with which to govern over the peasants are designed with one objective in mind: to limit the power of the peasants.

Populism allows the peasants recourse by channeling their numbers and energy behind a popular candidate, who then has a chance to dismantle the Liberal Democracy that he was elected to be the head of. There are enough extremely powerful examples in history of this exact power process playing out, but the peasants are either unaware of them or have been conditioned to reject them on moral grounds. In general, everything to do with populism is considered evil in our current society because the curators of morality correctly calculated that it would be in their interests to make it so, and that the peasants would be dumb enough to shackle themselves to this new moral codex, even though it was a transparent ploy by their enemies to weaken them.

Now, all that being said, populists generally have a very dubious track record of getting things done though. This is because almost all of them come to realize that they can get away with talking the talk and forgo actually having to walk the walk.

Take Trump, for example.

The orange man did literally nothing for his supporters, but still by and large retained their support going into the 2020 elections. This is actually explained easily enough by the observation that, once again, the peasants are dumb and easily manipulated.

Remember: peasants only exist to be used, abused and exploited and this will never change. The only exception to this rule is if a ruler takes pity on them for being so weak, pitiful and retarded OR if a power balance exists within a given political system where a ruler has no base of support among the elites, and so has to lean on the people for support. The former is largely a fantasy and the latter has actually occurred several times in history. Just because it failed on this go around doesn’t mean it can’t work on the next.

But, again, prophets are a different animal all together. The one thing the Old Testament gets right is the reaction of the masses to the prophets of their time. Basically, if a populist simply leans into an existing sentiment and exploits it to his ends, a prophet tries to change an entire way of thinking. Prophets are never elected to office, but their ideas have a chance of eventually making it all the way to the top, diluted and twisted beyond all recognition of course.

Much confusion could be avoided if we understood the difference between these two roles. Prophets get mad at populists and populists return the favor. But, ideally, the two groups would recognize that they exist in a kind of symbiotic relationship. Prophets have to work on the masses to prime them for the populist to come along eventually and have his message heard and accepted. When that message finally makes its way to the populist’s podium it will be lukewarm and watered down, of course, but that is to be expected. All that matters is that populists and prophets work together as a team in a game of tug-of-war. The prophet heaves on the rope and the populist leans back and claims the gains. Then the prophet heaves again, and again, and again.

It’s a simple idea. But you’d be surprised how many people don’t get it. The conservatives in particular.

iamyesyouareno @iamyesyouareno

Tucker Carlson about White people standing up for White people in America. Very disappointing.

They love to attack the prophets who stand in the vanguard, working hard to push the Overton window rightward. And they do it in defense of current-day populism:

LtCol West Bestern 🛡️ @western_bester

Tucker Carlson has done more to wake up normies than anyone else in America. A bunch of compromised race grifters are being coordinated to "purity spiral" against him by their handlers in the Biden admin and other "centers" because of how effective Tucker actually is.

The working scheme I outlined cannot get any simpler, but the Right simply doesn’t want to understand or use it. The Left, on the other hand, lets its prophets work freely and simply shrugs when asked to explain or justify their relationship to them. This is because they know that today’s radicals pave the wave for tomorrow’s populists.

And that is why they win and the right doesn’t.

There is also power to prophecy. The peasants respond to meta-narratives that have been sown among them ahead of time. Think of the Bene Gisserit from Dune seeding the galaxy with their superstitions so that one day they could exploit the people’s credulity to establish a totalitarian witch theocracy. Or think about just any real religious group, secret society, ideological movement and so on that seeds prophecies about the day of the worker’s uprising, the coming of the anointed one, the day of the rope, the president that was promised, and so on.

Most of our media actually only exists to seed our minds with meta-narratives that are then used to exploit us in the future.

So, we are told a story about the brave Dumbledore’s Army Alliance standing up to the Fascist Pure-Blood Axis as children. Then, we are told that so-and-so is like the freedom fighter of the story and so-and-so is the Nazi.

Almost all popular Western media does this - they always portray their foes in fictional form so that the Teletubby peasants can then be tricked into the next hoax on the grounds of, “OMG it’s just like [enter pre-seeded meta-narative psyop here]”.

Just as an aside, ordinary Russians largely accept the parameters of the ideological battle between the Human Rights Freedom Democracy of the West vs the Authoritarian Nationalist Traditionalist Evil Empire Russia. That is, the Liberals in the Slavlands and in the West unironically accept this framing whereas Russian patriots ironically accept it and play along as the evil empire. You see this reflected in player choices for which faction to play as in various video games.

Like, take the Star Wars Battlefront series.

Russians prefer to play as the Empire because Lucas modeled the Empire on Nazi Germany and Russia and so there’s a kind of “hey, that’s us! We’re on TV!” thing going on. Despite being “evil”, Russian players still overwhelmingly choose the bad guys because self-identity is still more important to them than morality, which is a very encouraging sign indeed. Since pretty much all Western media depicts Russians as the bad guys, most Russians have done the alpha move and just leaned into the arch-villain role with a sense of good humor about the whole thing.

And why shouldn’t they choose the “dark side” so long as they can be themselves?

Look, let me just make this point again: universal morality has always been a tool and a weapon used against the peasants by the various theocrat conspiracies that have occurred throughout world history. From Moses to Marx, Plato to Schwab, the perennial theocratic occupation state of international priests has periodically risen up to repress the peasants through the use of either mystical, theological, ideological or moral terror tactics.

But most people are either unaware of what is going on, or aware, but remain trapped in a conceptual prison that does not allow them to mount an effective resistance to the enemy.

Case-in-point: the Russian government prefers to whine that actually they are the real Liberals and the West are the fake ones! And in a way, they are telling the truth, kind of. Post-USSR Russia was indeed built on an older version of Liberalism that never got a post-Occupy Wall St. patch/update with the SJW expansion pack. If Russia’s ruling class had its way, they’d like to keep things the way that they were in the 90s or 00s. But the West has moved on from those days and the Rebel Alliance is woke now, you see?

So stop whining and become the “Evil” Empire you were always meant to be!

**

Believe me, we will revisit these ideas again when the election cycle kicks off soon and the clown show begins again in earnest. It’s a good template to use going forward.