(or, How to Construct a True Political Uprising)
5965 words.
“There is not a man in France who is more of a civilian than I am.”
– NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
People tend to be locked into psychological framings largely influenced by their professional skillset. This is especially true for individuals formerly in the military, or those pulled from the world of computer science; both utilize distinct systems-thinking they filter much of the world through. Throughout every political sphere you will find individuals tilted towards these lived experiences, and it is common on the Right to find people who view everything through economic or theological lenses. In the pursuit of creating an intelligencia, those luminaries tilt towards the very academia many were exiled from.
This is not cause for division. If we identify such biases and the value they bring when juxtaposed against our own relevant biases, our capacity for collaboration increases. We do not need to correct the bias a programmer has towards his coldly rational outlook, and we do not need to correct the blue collar worker’s prejudice against intense theoretical debates in favor of lived experience. With this in mind, when I claim the normie is not real, I am speaking from a marketer’s perspective, one defined by sociological data, demographics, psychometrics, and long-term behavior patterns. When someone describes “the average person,” it’s important to immediately establish our terms or drill down into who they are referring to. If we don’t do this, we will assume the concealed prejudices of the speaker.
More often than not, when someone speaks of “the people” they are referring to their own class, or their own ethnicity, or their own relationship with society. As you might imagine, you would run into problems if you mentioned the Average American to a Black man and statistically referred to a White woman. The average man to you may be a patriot, and while this represents the baseline ideal for many, this may conflict with the data of who the average person actually is, and the bucket of patriots has certainly changed over time.
Having said all this, political radicals and ideological dissidents simply cannot break from its conception of “The People.” On one hand we understand it’s not as simple as that (even intra-ethnically, we constantly subdivide based on generation, geography, or gender) but on the other hand it’s all any group – from anarchists to fascists – wants to fight for.
So when we talk about The People, what do we actually mean, and what should we mean?
Who ARRRRRE These People?
In the Nationalist and Traditionalist areas of study, there is an understanding that for any sociopolitical organization to succeed there must be a horizontally-oriented folk, or a self-aware kinship that exists outside of the state apparatus. From this emerges the modern conceptualization of “The People,” and it is impossible to speak of this thing called The People outside of the shadow of the French Revolution and the relationship between the commoner and the various class strata of society. While throughout world history there was always an understanding of ethnic demarcations and unifying folk history, the concept of The People in relation to power and their ability to collectivize through this categorization has evolved from reactionary revolts to a self-aware entity.
Tracing this thread further back we see this conceptualization grow from a distinct Western individualism that blossomed in the wake of the Enlightenment and was filed down by degrees to the razor-thin blade of atomization and psychological critique. When we speak of The People in the current historical period, we typically mean those existing outside of central power or state-affiliated institutions, while others subconsciously refer to “the workers” and still others secretly mean “the disenfranchised.” The People in this sense are defined by their relationship to the organs of whatever the power structure may be; historically this would be the monarchy, in the present day this would simply be the state apparatus that assures us it is decentralized.
I choose to outline The People in a Jouvenelian view: the outer periphery of the power structure that constitutes a holistic social organization. Far from simply being a way to describe a complex sovereign nation, we see this very same social stratification and segmentation in tribes and villages. It describes the power relationships that, in the minds of both the rulers and the ruled, create the hierarchy of society with the main power at the center, the institutions of authority outside of that, and on the very edges are the citizens, the slaves, the people 1.
“This center in Jouvenel’s conception may be occupied by an institution, or, importantly, it may not be occupied by something corporeal. Regardless of whether this center is occupied, all human orders are invariably focused on this shared center of attention. […] The second category is comprised of subsidiary centers of power which exist outside this center. These subsidiary centers can be seen as delegates of this center, and act in its name and under its authority […] such entities as the nobility, families, corporations, trade unions, and any other institution within that order in conjunction of the central governing apparatus, or Power. […] The final category is the periphery, which is that part of an order which exists outside of the subsidiary centers of power. It is governed by them, and in being governed by them, finds its relationship to the center of society mediated by them.”
– C.A BOND, NEMESIS
The People constitute the outermost concentric circle of society, below the institutions and elites. While societies and civilizations across history have different ways to populate this configuration – the institutional power could be a priest class, dynastic families, or cartel oligarchy depending on where in the world you are – this is merely to represent the relationship that this population has with each other part.
Across the ages we see this populist periphery wielded by power to accomplish various outcomes. We will see the middle strata – commonly understood by us to be academia, the managerial class, and the military – wield the commoners (plebians) as a weapon against the central power so as to take that power for themselves. At other times we see the central power – the central committee, the aristocracy, the emperor – wield this very same outermost periphery to keep the institutions in check. The military can turn the citizenry against the king to overthrow him, or the king can unite the its subjects against the police to stop a coup d’état. More familiarly, revolutions can be instigated to topple the President and the Police alike. We see this occur frequently in international geopolitics in the form of what are known Colour Revolutions, where spontaneous uprisings of the citizenry can often be paired with fifth generational warfare operations in the interest of destabilizing a zone of geopolitical interest.
Many have correctly identified that successful revolutions tend to be originated within the intelligencia or the military, as a breakaway splinter of the institutional power. Revolutions very rarely arise from the working classes, the plebs, or The People. The revolutionaries certainly appeal to The People, recruit The People, and crucially interface with The People through various means, but rarely do these phenomena blossom directly from the fringes of power. In many cases, we see this concept of The People as an ideal to strive towards; an identity-based mythology that animates the citizenry to action against the oppressor that stands in the way of their own actualization.
In each of these cases, there are only two components: the imprisoned, and their massive oppressors. The academics or military personnel do not position themselves as appendages to the central power they are ostensibly against, and they hope that the fuel they need for their fire do not recall any of the existing group animosities that are ever present in complex societies 2. Can an ambitious general make the workers forget their spiritual, cultural, and perhaps even ethnic boundaries which cause daily conflict? In a multicultural society, can you truly unite the myriad of conflicting ethnicities and sexual identities on the basis of class?
Throughout the 20th century, we have seen many examples of this – including nationalist and communist movements, with varying levels of success – and can now stand atop the monumentous mountain of corpses and assess which examples work better than others; is it the unity of ethnicity, nation, race, or class that truly stand the test of time? Perhaps it’s religion, or the dream of an internationalist technocrat Übermensch? When a revolutionary screams “we have the numbers,” what specifically are they counting?
Or as individuals do we all simply assume we are the majority?
“The mistake in not seeing in society more than one power, i.e. the governmental or public authority, has an astonishingly wide vogue. Whereas in fact the governmental is but one of the authorities present in society; there exists alongside it a whole host of others, which are at once its collaborators, in that they help it in securing social order, and its rivals, in that, like it, they claim men’s obedience and inveigle them into their service.”
– BERTRAND DE JOUVENEL, ON POWER
In our current era, there are many who reframe this relationship as Regular People vs. Elites. A survey of the popular discourse will see some version of this, even in the mainstream and certainly on the political outland. Many have adopted a descriptor essential to Marxist or Post-Left mechanics, signaling towards what’s known as a Superstructure, wherein even components of the dominant social apparatus that appear to be in conflict – think politicians vs. the church, or courts vs. academia – merely serve to strengthen the interconnected machine. In this model popularized by Louis Althusser, our lived social experience consists of just two parts: the base and superstructure, where the base holds all the real power and has merely been fooled into thinking it does not 3. The superstructure of a society includes its culture, institutions, political power structures, roles, rituals, and state. It implies that there is a baseline humanity connecting all peoples of the world that is obscured and oppressed by power itself.
Even a system seemingly ensconced in internal conflict secretly utilizes that war to perpetuate the system, since none of them truly want to see the system genuinely harmed or destroyed. It not only tolerates crises but requires them to maintain its relevance. For example, the best way to encourage support of the police is to encourage, or perhaps simply tolerate, a wave of violent protests. Those more on the fringes will point to false flag attacks, a historically proven but still hotly debated phenomenon where a catastrophe encourages citizens to forgo their rights and side with authoritarianism, especially if they previously opposed the authority.
Within the Leftist critique, the state of things is more about how nothing can be permitted to exist outside of the power-approved ideological framework, so unless your politics are advocating the dismantling of every single aspect of society, you are unbeknownst to you a puppet of the very system you are against.
All this is to summarize how the model of The People vs. The Power can exist in different variations and with vastly divergent goals, and must increase in complexity to explain the obvious contradictions that emerge under inquiry. While there is obvious truth to the claim that dissident movements that are permitted to exist do so with the approval of sitting power, it is too far of a reach for many to believe that this means the conflicts existing between internal power structures are not genuine.
“What seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological.’”
– LOUIS ALTHUSSER, ON IDEOLOGY
Some will detect echoes of this in the modern discourse regarding The Cathedral, which outlined the part of society that informs ideology and belief and doesn’t account for the complex illusory conflict that is necessary to explain the much more grandiose conspiracy of a superstructure. In the case of the Cathedral coined by Curtis Yarvin, there are significantly fewer institutions required for this Zord, and the purpose is only to, as Noam Chomsky would say, manufacture consent. In these dialogues, consent could be summarized as “not causing problems,” which is far easier than creating ideology in the affirmative. Less totalitarian in its scope, The Cathedral will employ similar mechanisms to maintain its power, although it is typically described of having no uniform ideology and exists merely as organs of power seeking to prolong their existence while centralizing its own authority. Whenever necessary, it will neutralize any group or phenomenon that threatens it, atheistically employing whatever the current ideology is to make it’s enemies into society’s enemies. With coherent approval as its ultimate goal, it will nonetheless settle for neutralized chaos; whatever allows it to operate with the fewest impediments. It is a profoundly cynical view of the interplay between religion or ideology, and those who occupy the positions of power.
“The cathedral is just a short way to say ‘journalism plus academia’—in other words, the intellectual institutions at the center of modern society, just as the Church was the intellectual institution at the center of medieval society. […] The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.”
– Curtis Yarvin, GRAY MIRROR
There is a lot of truth to this, and I do not want readers to dismiss the idea that any opposition that emerges within a powerful system does so while being permitted by that very same system. There is a very real phenomenon known as “controlled opposition,” where the illusion of revolution is presented to The People as a pressure release to keep them in line and exhaust them for an extended period of time. Anyone who has ever lifted a politician to a position of power on the platform of change and populist revolution only to have them step back from their promises knows what controlled opposition feels like, and it is a fantastic way to deflate the tension of an aggrieved populous. This is not to be confused with populist revolutions that are just poorly constructed and fail, which they often are.
The crux of all this is: if something claims to threaten the system and is permitted to exist, then the system has not identified it as a genuine threat.
It is important to note that it is possible for dissidents to emerge from the bottom rungs of society and campaign for change, especially if sufficient force is applied. I simply want to point out that these revolutions – including Fascist, Communist, and Capitalist movements throughout the 20th century – only seem to accomplish their goals with institutional backing at some level. In this sense, we tend to see populist revolutions within or alongside other institutional revolutions. For example, early on the rise of Hitler was approved by the Conservatives in the German government for their own ends, only for the revolution to pivot against them later on. This is a common occurrence, especially in Communist revolutions.
Were The People Ever Controlled?
Uprisings commonly claim they speak for the spirit of the masses, and it is integral to their effectiveness to say that “talk past the sale” and imply the goals are essentially won already, thereby achieving social proof of their mission. You are not fighting a giant, you already are a giant, and all you really need to do is awake for the system to collapse. It’s clear this abstracted crowd is something appealed to, but is does it ever really employ them? Are they given orders, are they integrated into the battlefields, are they asked to directly sacrifice?
One of the most interesting aspects of guerilla resistance groups and freedom fighters across the globe is that they seek to exist amid The People, but The People are rarely demanded of anything other than enthusiastic passivity. The consent of the public is essential for the stability and existence of any state, but beyond compliance not much is requested of them.
As Mao Zedong famously said, “the revolutionary seeks to swim amongst the people like a fish through the ocean,” but this seems to be more of a military tactic rather than anything strategic. You can easily see the shift from engaging the public to using civilians as shields. The People are more likely to be used as ammunition than become heroic martyrs in the conflict.
“The defeat of the military enemy, the overthrow of the government, are secondary tasks, in the sense they come later. The primary effort of the guerilla is to militate the population, without whose consent no government can stand for a day. […] The destruction in 1949 of the Greek Communist guerilla forces of the Democratic Army is a prime example. Malaya is another. The Hukbalahap insurrection in the Philippines is, perhaps, a third. All three show what happens when guerillas are cut off, or deliberately cut themselves off (as the Greek Communists did,) from popular contact and support.”
– ROBERT TABER, WAR OF THE FLEA
This is not meant to disparage the tactics of amateur militaries or dissident movements, quite the opposite: it is to establish that all active political groups appear to treat the citizenry of a nation as assets. This is currently how your government sees you, and every citizen must ask themselves what sort of asset am they being viewed as, and how likely it is that this judgement can flip and turn them into a liability. Are you someone the government wants to hear from, or are you someone the government wants to be silent? Are the boons you receive for your health and wealth, or compliance measures? How important are you truly to the center of power?
As pointed out in the classic on guerilla warfare “War of the Flea,” a curious thing occurs when a revolutionary group is finally successful: citizens, peasants, workers, they all talk like they were in favor of it the entire time, even fervent supporters 4. While they may have been swayed by the Communist propaganda and were primed for the overthrow of the government, all that was really demanded of them was their emotional support.
“Fidel Castro’s Cuban Guerillas, fighting on an island with a population of close to seven million, never at any time exceeded more than fifteen hundred armed men. Yet when the decisive battle of Santa came in December of 1958, cutting the island in two, the whole city, except for an isolated military garrison, became involved in the conflict. And when Batista finally fled the country on the last day of the year, virtually he entire population of Cuba claimed participation in the victory. Far from being isolated and indifferent, all had been rebels, it seemed.”
– ROBERT TABER, WAR OF THE FLEA
Similarly, in the classic “Coup D’etat: A Practical Handbook” by Edward Luttwak, a step-by-step process is expertly laid out instructing how one might overthrow a government from the inside. History shows this is most commonly done through the military, along with that intermediary strata of power outlined in the previous section.
While populist revolutions and coup d’états are different creatures, they share significant overlap in how they engage the population and play a deadly game of chess in how to neutralize popular opposition 5. A primary difference is the situation of the dissident groups and how an internal coup is able to strike like lightning to surgically overwhelm key positions within mere hours, while a revolution will always be fighting brazenly from the outside in. Despite this, we find a similar treatment of the broader citizenry. You want them to approve your actions, you may even get them emotionally invested in an ill-defined utopian scaffolding that permits them to fill in the gaps with their personal fantasies, but what you want them to do more than anything is not cause problems. Being on board means being silent more than anything.
While covertly recruiting powerful individuals unfriendly to the current regime is difficult, the total amount of individuals you must persuade to join your side is relatively low. This is especially true in modern nations where the organizational structure of the military and its vast intelligence apparatus is incredibly complex, and more authority is delegated to the officer classes due to the specialization required. In machines of increasing complexity, you need to fracture but a few components to make the larger processes break down.
“In general, the more sophisticated the organization, the greater its efficiency – but also its vulnerability. […] For these forces (battalion-size force and division-side force,) losing the cooperation of 10 percent of their personnel would mean losing approximately 10 percent of their effectiveness; in the case of (brigade-size force,) however, the loss of perhaps 1 percent of its men could lead to a total loss of effectiveness for some particular tasks (such as intervening in the capital city.)”
– EDWARD LUTTWAK, COUP D’ETAT: A Practical Handbook
What we see during the planning stages of a coup d’état is not so much poetic appeals to the spirit of a nation or propaganda, but cold arithmetic on how much they can expect the population to cause problems. This is where the Schmittean Friend/Enemy distinction comes into play, because this is all about pure tactics with a strict timeline. The moment you decide to take action against an organization and plan it out realistically, you automatically create the Enemy Other. While there is disagreement with how this Friend/Enemy distinction can be elevated to higher politics, it is impossible to avoid when executing short-term political strategy.
“The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.”
– CARL SCHMITT
The day the capitol city is seized, the populous are likely aware that a tectonic shift is occurring; there are rumbles of discontent, perhaps even rumors of disarray in the central committees, and in the cafes and bars throughout the city it’s certainly being discussed. But this group will never make any relevant reaction, as they are the last to know.
What’s most telling is the game plan for the day of the coup, which in essence states that more than anything they just need people to do remain neutral. A perfect coup is when the important figures – officers, politicians, union leaders, populist leaders – just stand by, don’t make phone calls, uncharacteristically sleep in, and conjure plausible deniability. As the movement gains momentum, this neutrality will likely shift to affirm the revolutionaries, and more and more individuals (especially those with social ranking) will endeavor to assist what they believe to be the winning side. These are the cynical and the status-seeking, and there’s far more of them than you’d initially think.
“Why did the [Gaullist coup] fail? Perhaps the main reason was that the four generals had utterly neglected the ‘political’ forces and had allowed the immediate power of the armed forces to obscure the somewhat less immediate, but ultimately decisive role that they could play. […] More importantly, the trade-union organizations, the Communists (CGT,) the Christian Democrats (CFTC,) and the Force Ouvriere, all rallied around the government while most political parties did the same […] The effect of this refusal was decisive; the larger part of the ‘wait-and-see‘ element in the armed forces stopped waiting and declared its support for de Gaulle, and this was the end of the coup.”
– EDWARD LUTTWAK, COUP D’ÉTAT: A Practical Handbook
Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquest of Europe is popularly viewed as exporting the French Revolution by imperialistic means. While Napoleon in fact had many problems with the Jacobin party and disparaged what ultimately became of the Reign of Terror in the years after the revolution’s success, he nonetheless waged war across Europe while proudly trumpeting the rise of The People against the Ancien Régime. It was an exciting populism sweeping the continent, with Napoleon accusing nations such as Britain of failing to live up to their nationalist promise, and the power of The People were locked in the decrepit ribcages of various monarchies and necrotic structures. The march of the invading French army was on the side of the populous, effectively turning them against their own aristocracies and states.
Much like Hitler would later do, this was a war waged against the established conservatives, the reigning kingdoms, the centralized power structures from the old world that had no place in the new Europe. The liberators declared it was time to wipe the corrupted slate clean and not only empower the European, but create a New European. Under this new French imperium, they would allegedly issue no cultural oppression, and allow a multipolar existence, with France at the center. This would never come to full fruition, but there appeared to be no plans at the outset for outright ethnic cleansing or serfdom.
During this epoch something exciting was happening, and The People were asked to greet the invading armies as heroes.
Even as Napoleon marched against his greatest foes in Britain and Russia, he prophesied a world without imperial dominion, slavery, resource extraction, and cultural export 6. It would be an imperialism to end all imperialism. This gave rise to debates about what Napoleon’s true motivations were; was he a liberator of the oppressed, or an egomaniac exploiting them? The answer is most likely that he was both, and in each historical case it can be argued that each revolutionary truly believed in what they were doing. With this in mind, another common thread is that the promises made to this population are always very loose and open to individualistic fantasies, and the plans for how it will benefit these oppressed after the revolution’s success are usually ill-defined.
“While the conflict gave birth to neither liberalism nor nationalism as political forces, it did accelerate their development, as witness the constitutions of a recognizably modern nature that had been promulgated in Spain, Sicily, and Sweden, and the nationalist movements that emerged in Germany, Italy, Serbia, Greece, and Poland […] the much retouched figure of Napoleon Bonaparte served as a constant beacon for all those who dreamed of glory, were excluded by the Restoration system, or were genuinely fired by the ideology of liberation. With progressive political movements further persuaded that the people only to take to the barricades to defeat the case of reaction, 1815 appears very much to be the dawn of an age of turmoil.”
– CHARLES ESDAILE, NAPOLEON’S WARS: An International History
Aside from uniting The People of Europe against the Ancien Régime – the devil they knew – it’s unclear what would have happened had Napoleon conquered Russia and his utopian designs came to full fruition. While his dreams drifted towards a holistic multipolar organization of the continent, it’s unclear if this invigorated proletariat would indeed birth a New Europe and exist peacefully side by side. It’s also unclear if France would not ultimately exert more power to keep dissidents in line, or extract resources and taxes disproportionately, or eventually attempt to import their cultural values to who they deemed unfit. Much like we see in modern nation building, the West tends to smuggle in a lot of values cloaked in “liberty.” Did the uprisings in Haiti usher in a new era, possessed by the spirit of the French Revolution? I suppose that’s a cruel rhetorical question.
When you attempt to lead a revolution to unite The People across a wide spectrum of geography, culture, and history, you are presented with the following incongruity: you don’t really have one people, you don’t really have unity, or you don’t really have a revolution.
An Era of Fluid Complexity Vectors
We have surveyed the landscape of how The People relate to existing power structures, revolutions that seek to disrupt them, and the propaganda that neutralizes or inflames at arranged flashpoints. This is not to say that the only thing that matters is power relationships, or like many in the Neo-Reactionary (NRx) sphere claim, that ideology is only the thin veneer placed over behemoths of private materialist interest.
While there is a strong geopolitical case of the neorealist bent to be made that as ideologies centralize power and reach a certain level of international relevance, they will make decisions to ensure their survival that may run counter to their stated ideology. We saw this with the Soviet Union, we see this with Saudi Arabia, we even see this with the United States; great powers that can manipulate the balance of power and will occasionally betray their values to maintain their status. Consider any time America has crushed freedom in the name of freedom or attacked its own citizens in the name of liberty. This is not, however, saying that ideology is not relevant, doesn’t inspire change, or stand as a necessary ontological compass that animates groups to action.
The truth is that a nation (or grouping of similar complexity) can survive with an idealistic foundation that is betrayed in isolated cases as a response to changing circumstances but cannot survive with a foundation that is permanent treachery and fluid principles. The truth is everyone who believes in peace must be willing to annihilate those who threaten peace. This does not invalidate the quest for peace.
It is this necessary ideological grounding that we will underscore now to chart a path forward. This is because while the relationship between The People and the ecosystem of interlocking power structures and phenomena that constitute a society remains the same, The People themselves have changed. The education level/indoctrination, the heightened individualism, the exponential layering of identities, the access to mind-bending technology, bioengineering through diet and environmental exposure to chemicals; our The People are far removed from the peasantry and worker unions of the past. This is why Leftists struggle to organize using the same toolkits as the past: the masses will not accept collectivization along reductive class lines, and we are witnessing the same thing happen along racial and ethnic lines where once they were a given.
It’s for this obvious but rarely acknowledged reason we can’t have The People ever again: we are too self-aware, too informed, too meta, and frankly too critical. It’s not that The People are powerless, it’s that The People are hyper aware of what defines their status and have willingly segregated themselves. Unity as we know it seems impossible, and we are forced to plan accordingly.
This is the social atomization that the entire spectrum of political groups complains about, and there is no reason to think this will not maximize over the successive decades as both technology and concepts of control become more democratized while trust in all forms of authority plummets. In an all-too-common scene, any leader who arises to propose a solution to problems is handwaved away as a subversive leader of an opposing revolution. The forces required to unite The People for any length of time have become so crooked as to be unrecognizable.
And that’s all before we get into the slowly unfurling catastrophe that calls itself a modern multicultural society. For the sake of this piece I am assuming weren’t living in a polyglot boarding house for salespeople who want to be rockstars and rockstars who want to be presidents. Until the terminus of this evergreen LARPicle, let’s assume for a minute we aren’t living inside a homosexual schizophrenic’s joke book, and things make a little bit of sense.
Or don’t, because the same rules will apply, you’ll just be keenly aware that when you’re reading this, you’re automatically assuming certain groups are not included, I’ll leave it up to your divine prejudices who falls in those groups.
Now, we revisit the phrase “there is no normie.” While this is practically true, the broadest unifying spirit of the audience you are striving to serve seems to be necessary to manifest your ideology into the real world. There is no conceivable system that exists populated solely by vanguardists, dissidents, or revolutionaries. The destiny of the revolutionary is to dissolve into smoke, if indeed it is what it purports to be and not a cynical power grab.
As a dissident, revolutionary, or vanguardist, the oft ignored purpose is to imagine a world without you in it that is better off for you having burned bright. Do you know who you are fighting for? And are you capable of imagining a world without revolutionary violence?
Or do you have dissidence itself as the very foundation of your existence?
Build the NeoStrata
There is no normie that exists as a different species (as they are oft described,) and appealing to The People is only a short term powerplay strategy; in reality there are a myriad of intersections of identity, trauma, and self-awareness that define this mass at the periphery of society, even before your account for the maximization of this in modern society and in a multicultural society.
If you consider how to reach out to your selected audience, you need to approach them with very specific messaging, goals, rhetoric, and understanding of how they define themselves. This is not because in truth we are all atomized individuals, but rather in the 21st century we demand a new type of unity. We implicitly understand that The People was a frame with which to fill in our own fantasies and a way for those promising utopia to rescind the promise after our usefulness is exhausted.
We are also so irrevocably savaged by technology and novel ideologies we are prohibited from behaving like worker ants in an intellegencia’s concerto. As a revolutionary-minded individual, your job is not to convince The People to act as one giant fist wielded against the state, but rather to infiltrate it like a virus and to withstand compounding collapses. To prepare for a rapidly oncoming future where crossing the threshold into power will be like entering the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. One must be grounded in the real and not be enticed by the imagination of power, which itself is an IQ shredder swung over a roiling population to keep them under control .
As a vanguardist you need to begin with a practical skillset, whether it be woodworking or training dogs. This will allow you to anchor your upward trajectory and create an intellectual base of operations from which you can branch out. This will be the divine prejudice which ensures you will not float off into an intellectual netherrealm where academic discussions of vague power politics underscored with pop-esotericism.
What you need to do is select a social stratum to set up camp in and you need to figure out how to make that strong enough to exist outside of an increasingly conflicted managerial state. Do not waste your time trying to craft a new intellgencia within the periphery.
In reality you need to empower smaller groups to exist as cells, and you must employ new ways to empower the myndwarred individual since there is no taste for mass movements anymore. There is only one wrong answer, which is 20th century populist unity.
We have to ask, do we need insane belligerents in this period we inhabit?
- 1.Bond C. Nemesis. N/A; 2019.
- 2.de Jouvenel B. On Power. Liberty Fund, Inc.; 1993.
- 3.Althuser L. On Ideology . Verso; 2020.
- 4.Taber R. War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare. Potomac Books; 2002. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/potomac-books/9781574885552/
- 5.Luttwak E. Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook. Harvard University Press; 2016. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737266
- 6.Esdaile C. Napoleon’s Wars: An International History. Penguin Books; 2009.