4589 Words.
Below is a speech I delivered at the first Company of Adventurers event held in Toronto. There is no audio or video to accompany this, however this has been revised to include many of the tangents that I wandered into. It was a phenomenal event and all in attendance were a credit to their impossible essence.
Good evening, my name is Dimes.
You will have to forgive the somewhat disjointed nature of this speech. I felt compelled to do some last minute rewrites as I looked around the room and saw several beautiful women present.
And I’ll just be honest with you, most of this was constructed on cock and balls references.
I have been asked to set the pace and the tone for this fine event. It’s a lot like a wolf pack. Conventional wisdom would dictate that the alpha wolf, as the pack leader, is front and center as the North Star. I learned, however, that the Alpha actually leads from the back, the women and children in the middle, the most young and ferocious in front of them, and at the very front are the old, busted, decrepit, washed wolves, there to set the pace.
So, I hope I can exude wisdom for you tonight.
Every speech prepared for tonight that was written before the victory of Donald Trump in America likely had to be amended, if not rewritten. I never had this problem because I did not write this ahead of time. All the Homework Guys have once again proven themselves lacking in the physiognomy of the soul.
What is to be said that has not already been said? Let’s just say this: Donald Trump’s election triggered a vibe shift, which makes these events more essential than before. It forces us to look inward, to our own political machinery. It forces us to look at Poilievre and weep furiously, it causes us to glance at the PPC, take three cocktails, then glance again.
Would you? Can I say something without everybody getting mad?
Most importantly it forces us to reassess our predictions, our political models, and what we plan to do with the opportunities presented to us.
And we do this here, in person, in groups. That’s far more essential than many believe.
This is what I find most exciting about our scene currently. After slamming our heads against the brick wall of collectivism vs. individualism for the greater part of our existence, we have switched the questions from “what should be done?” to “what comes next?” and finally to “what do we do now?”
The enemy of propaganda is not the collective moving as a single fist or the sovereign individual, but a small group that can reason through manipulation and create their own internal filters for information. It is here we see the formation of group identity and its dynamic feedback loop with the individual members.
One of the pillars of me being here tonight is to tell you how to do that. And you can start tonight. It is rooms like the one we are in now that will constitute the seeds of great trees whose branches may one day be adorned by the hanging corpses of our enemies.
That’s a strong start. That’s a wild thing to just say to a room full of guys about to be arrested. Hell, from where we are standing presently, I reckon it feels like we are winning, so why am I speaking like this?
The reason is that you’re not here to win. You’re here to decimate. Winning was never enough.
Most people gathered here feel compelled to engage with democratic institutions but do not otherwise believe in democracy.
It’s okay to say that here. I believe that very few people, across all ideological and spiritual sectors, believe in democracy. I could ask any five people here their assessment of democracy and I can guarantee “gay” would be two of the responses. And by democracy we don’t mean seeking consensus in a team, but rather the electoral system within an advanced civilization that expects leadership to be propelled from below and maintained by a competent matrix of informed individuals.
For democracy to function requires the Mass Man. The rational individual who can bind together with other individuals completely laterally, like a real time strategy game. The age of psychiatry in the 20th century was the death of the Mass Man, leading to its fracturing into runaway self-consciousness and the tribalism of fandom sectors.
This is where we are currently, and even hyper-informed genius psychos like us still fall victim to believing a mass reaction – or awakening – is right around the corner. Or we believe that the stage is set and we are missing only the key of sudden leadership.
You will hear people openly advocate for this even now, stating that the only way anything can get better is only after things get as bad as they possibly can. Any good news delivered any time before the last seven seconds of tortuous death must be treated as an attack in itself.
I mentioned the word “fandom.” What’s a fandom? You can probably intuit that it means a comic book reader or a Swiftie. There’s the undeniable aspect that it is a consumer. But in broader sociopolitical terms it’s something you can join, draw an identity from, adopt a behavior set through, and it really has very few barriers for entry. It is a shared affinity for a product above all else, and an ideology can absolutely be a product.
Are you a revolutionary or are you just a fan of one anime and one book?
Organizations of all stripes must always sort through genuine believers and adepts from sociopaths looking to join an army. The more radical they are, the more difficult it is.
The key here is filters, that is how you define a group. It was through the work of Freud, Bernays, Bion, and a rogues gallery of radical scientists that our conceptualization of ourselves began a skyrocketing of mutations. Fandoms of identities proliferated, each of us began to stack group affiliations. Even in our sector we behave like consumers. Are you a Hoppean-National-Socialist? Are you a Goth-Hegelian? Are you a Groyper-Falangist? We are in search of tribes, wandering the barren wasteland by night tracking distant campfires.
A popular word is “retribalization,” that seems to describe what I’m talking about. I’ve spoken to influential people who speak on the general need for retribalization, or the inevitable trend of retribalization, but when we get granular nobody really has a schematic for how to make a tribe, or what function it should have aside from “being parallel to the mainstream.” It is assumed you can just find like-minded people and land to the equation, and then a new vitalistic nucleus can be formed.
I’ve known a few people who have taken on such projects, even going so far as to attain the land. I’ll spare you the anecdotes, but it typically ends in tears, and that’s the good ending. It’s because they’re too open to whomever, and it turns out that when you open the floodgates to anyone who agrees just with your ideas… how many of your internet friends do you trust to live with you?
Even calling it a “tribe” doesn’t help, it conjures images of paleolithic politics. It is very easy to lose yourself in a memeplex of fantasies and stories relating to Rome, it is almost impossible to generate one yourself. Starting with the knowledge that this thing you are doing will be suffering and strife all the way down, and nothing will be ideal.
It’s not a rebellion, it’s not an escape, it’s not even a solution to the problem of modernity. It is survival. It is the ONLY THING.
All that you need to concern yourselves about is “first principles.” Values are good, historical literacy is great, research into ideology helps, faith will see you through, but all you really need are first principles, and I wager that most people here know what those are. The simpler they are, the better. This is how you form your crew. This is how you build your tribe. This is your friend/enemy distinction. This is how you find the baseline of what you are willing to fight for. To suffer for.
Most people here will not have that thing. Is it Donald Trump? I bet it isn’t, not really. Is it Christianity? Maybe for some, but not as many as one would imagine. Euro-Canadians? That might mesh with your ideology or theory, but do you know what that means at a deep enough level to suffer on behalf of its realization?
I’m asking a lot of questions. What am I? A Questions Guy?
Let’s get granular. The book The Network State describes ways to build an online community with a very simple constitution, stripping everything away to a single commandment. This is how you build your group, expressed as something where if the other person disagrees with it, you know they are your enemy. For example, “Christianity = Good,” or “Technology = Bad.” He writes like a NRx startup-sperg, and while it sounds reductive, it is an effective filter.
Maybe it’s “White People Good” or “Confucius Good.” The point is, if we cannot shake hands on that, or you try to argue that it cannot be that simple, I will know that we cannot be allies. That’s how you form a group, but how do you make it thrive? I mentioned Bion before, referring to Wilfred Bion. He was a contemporary of Freud who posited that people cannot be understood solely as individuals, and the 1:1 psychiatric relationship only explored one aspect of their identity. The psychology of group dynamics was his focus.
The group becomes a distinct organism, but the individual never really loses themselves in it; this synthesis is essential. One could say the dialectical tension is what we are trying to capture. But you wouldn’t say that here. Look at you people.
He identified two sorts of groups: The Basic Assumption Group, and the Work Group. A Work Group could be defined as any group that comes together to accomplish a project, and how they negotiate group dynamics to rank each other and accomplish that. After they accomplish the task they need another one right away, they need a new mission. They cannot just hang around, because if they do then they become the second group. A Basic Assumption Group, on the other hand, was one where there was no task or goal, and these groups tend to form all the time when people are thrust into any social situation for an extended period of time.
Workplaces, schools, churches: men and women are subject to them. You fall into them whether you like it or not. These groups begin to mutate over time, they have leading personalities and pair-bonding and internal rules on behavior; they are where cults of personality emerge, it’s where complex systems of frivolous dogma proliferate, where the most emotionally extreme tend to become leaders. Any group based on an identity without a long-term plan will inevitably become this.
But the group organizational pattern is inevitable. Individuals will be drawn into groups, they will be pulled into political events, and they may even look for comrades to give their life meaning. Without a heading… maybe some people here have experienced that yourselves, how many political groups have you been a part of that ended in maddening, complex sorrow?
We’re not looking for leaders, we’re not looking for an army, we’re not looking for a revolutionary product. We are looking for how to realize our first principles outside blind adherence to systems that have failed to assist us.
This is all a roundabout way to say that your individual vote doesn’t matter, your vote is a data point that communicates information to the sectors where real decisions are made. These sectors function as organisms that represent groups as distinct organisms.
This is why you need to squad up for a seat at that table.
You are dealing with people who want your dispossession and have no problem crafting an identity on your behalf, and then assaulting it from a political dimension you have no access to. This is a type of control that cannot be persuaded with a bullet, as it exists as the persuasion for bullets.
When Trump was shot during his first assassination attempt, it didn’t matter that he was a lifelong East Coast Democrat who had the majority of the Black and Hispanic vote. What mattered was he represented Straight White Men, and it was this construct that was repeatedly attacked. We might roll our eyes when women screech about stochastic terrorism, but stochastic terrorism is real; groups can collectively focus and summon a tulpa through technological means that can ultimately lead to visceral attacks upon you.
I am reminded of an article I recently covered on my paywall show Real Secret Coffee Hours. It was written by a hicklib, does anybody know what that is? It is what it sounds like: a liberal from a rural area that is attempting to ingratiate themselves into the urban progressive sphere. They claim that they are from the rural world, those are their people, and they hate those people. They are attempting to sacrifice their friends and family for entry into this strata of politics.
Now the article in question explained how when the author was a child, gun safety and education were paramount. He recounted stories of training with rifles with his friends and family, learning how to hunt and respect firearms. He then claimed that all mass shootings in America were on account of this group specifically. It was a wildly incoherent piece, but whether or not it describes reality is immaterial. What mattered was it was written by a journalist, for other journalists, with the express intent of robbing this specific group of their rights and there is no way the target can argue the logic of this strawman used for ritual purposes.
Your candidate won; the Straight White Man got the most points. But you are not here to win, you are here to decimate. Winning was never enough.
Trump is a signal in the same way populist movements are a symptom rather than a cause. It means we are moving the needle. But we never planned for success. If we are being honest with ourselves, I reckon most people assume we are destined to be oppressed to the fringe.
As our discourse is victorious, it will be adopted by our opponents, and we will be boxed out.
This is something you’ve likely seen as new figures begin adopting what were once our most radical points, and our rhetoric appears to be mainstreamed. The Dissident Right, the Alt Right, the Fringe Right, it’s all being looked upon with greedy eyes. The smart Leftists already started adopting our rhetoric a year ago, the Libs are already figuring out how to convince us they wanted remigration the whole time, and all our discourse is being segmented for consumption by our enemies.
As our discourse succeeds, we lose our earned influence, and then we must reckon with the complete absence of influence. Is this what winning feels like, to have mass deportations enthusiastically driven by a Punjabi technocrat?
If you’re not suspicious, you have not been paying attention.
The power of discourse is important, but of you’re here it’s because that rings hollow now. There is no mass redpilling, there is no great awakening, there’s no inflection point where the complex work miraculously completes itself. You are not powerless within the shadows of the systems you obsessively study. However, the total victory we dream of, sad as it is to say, will never be realized in our lifetimes.
You are cursed to awareness, if you are presently in this room. You will never enjoy the material benefits of victory. Your predestiny is to suffer onward.
So, let’s talk about you, and how you relate to this paradigm of which I speak. How do you relate to groups? I will hazard a guess and say: you don’t do it very well.
It is tempting to become reactionary and enter the fandom of ultraviolence, or wax poetically about all the genocide you would do if you merely had the chance. You’re Conan the Barbarian who has only seen half of the John Carter movie. This still lacks the truly masculine trait of the first mover. Reaction is surrendering the conversation; it is entering the gravity well of something or someone stronger. You want to destroy while nurturing the secret belief that creation will emerge miraculously afterward.
If we survey the great barbarian hordes throughout history we witness their constant magnetization towards the center of civilized power. They had no desire to simply exist on their own. So even when they won, they succumbed to civilizing forces and lost their vitality. The conquerors vanquished their foes and fell victim to bureaucracy.
It is seen as feminine to not project power and influence at all times, bending the world to your will. But empathy is required for persuasion, imagining what someone else’s motivations and experiences might be is essential to hammer a group of men into a node of action.
Marshall McLuhan was correct when he explained how the electronic revolution, rather than triggering atomized alienation as we are exploded outward into infinite cyberspace, actually collapsed society inward and retribalized the Western mind along extensions of senses into a strange interconnected existence. The digital world has smashed us together into an unprecedented paradigm of total awareness, and when you combine that with the hypernormalization of psychoanalysis, we are always attempting to intrude into the lived experiences of friends, family, even our enemies.
This what I mean when I say you are cursed to awareness. I don’t think there’s any true way to rebel against this, we can’t truly live outside of this context. We can chart a multigenerational struggle beyond it, but we can never believe that we can simply step outside of it.
Being cursed to awareness has been granted a title: the Sensitive Young Man. Have you heard of that before? Does that describe you? Like “The Longhouse” it has a myriad of definitions depending the ideological priors of whom you ask.
A distinctly Western entity, the Sensitive Young Man is ambitious but not necessarily a leader; he is at war with society but not necessarily a revolutionary. The sensitive young man finds refuge in expanding labyrinths of theory drilling into the world and finds a pleasant home in the widening cracks between reality where endless ideologies lurk.
Every data point becomes a cathedral of intersecting rabbit holes, every idea is overthought, and every opinion commoditized as a mass market ready consumer packaged good.
He can believe this because in all likelihood he has never existed in a dynamic group that required absolute trust and placed a high value on information.
Now does THAT sound like you?
The Sensitive Young Man’s enemy reveals itself not as the matriarchy of civilization but the commoditized revolt itself. These are the canyons inside which he will be mummified in search of the secret of hidden vitality. Society requires ambitious men defined by ahistorical circumstances, with sufficient time horizons both forward and backward, to occupy the zone of proximal sovereignty by any means, lest they become bewitched by dysgenic agents.
Now more than ever we recognize that the goal is not to scramble to the status of a spiritual leader – or a God King – but to find your crew.
How do you build this crew? This would probably never occur to the sensitive young man, but it’s basically starting a gang. Or as famed Romanian Fascist leader Corneliu Codreanu described them, nests. It’s a type of organization seen since time immemorial, it’s how military units are structured, it’s how successful startups are structured.
Codreanu is a very illuminating example because, in his most famous work “For My Legionaries,” he has a line I will paraphrase as “political organizations are to control men, what we are trying to do is make men.” While finding your tribe online is a good first step, you really need to be in the same geographic area. You need to work together, you need to play together, you need to build trust and camaraderie.
A friend of mine who works in venture capital says that when he invests in a startup, it’s less of the idea and more of the team. A solid team can withstand all the chaos that will befall them on the path to greatness, but the greatest app idea ever made will crash and burn if it’s a bunch of mercenaries over Zoom calls. You and five friends who irregularly go rucking up a hill and help fix a car is more effective than a room full of PhDs. If you disagree, go join Mensa and change the world.
Orientating oneself in modernity requires calculations unimaginable to previous generations. Respect for tradition is essential, awareness of your lineage is essential, historical orientation is essential.
But if you think your ancestors are looking upon you and smiling, imagine your Boomer grandparents looking upon what you’re up to. I bet they’re confused as hell, and unhelpful at best. Imagine their faces written in the clouds like Mufasa asking you how to change the email subject line, forever.
They can’t help you. They should have no influence. You’re taking ownership of their bloodline. You stand alone. And it will happen to you too, it’ll be your face in the clouds one day, not knowing what’s going on, asking dumb questions like your wife watching Tenet.
Your job is to find a tolerable balance between values and effectiveness, fiction and truth, and erratic paths to reach that distant time horizon, alone. You are going to have to get used to appearing schizophrenic to your ancestors.
You are here to become tradition by transcending the dead.
We are drawn into these ideological Houses of Leaves not because they present immediate solutions, but because we sense a vibe somewhere deep within them, something we can still use to chart a course where all our traditions and institutions have proven ill equipped to lead us.
You’re going to have to make decisions that would appear to betray your stated values but serve your first principles. This is a game very few can play. This is not a fandom you can join, these basic assumption groups promise dogma and utopia; this is a road you walk alone until such a time as you can form a group of other inwardly-focused savages.
Masculinity is not achieved by the highly theoretical projection of the commoditized ideal upon the self, neither is it fantasies about joining a rampaging horde. It does not need to be commoditized as a pop-philosophy, it does not even need to be discussed. It is achieved by the individual strength of hostile will realized in the group dynamic, at varying times the warrior tribe and the self-sufficient family unit.
Guided by goals reaching up from the intersection of imagined past and future and scaffolded with blood memory, it seeks to map itself onto the real world rather than inhabiting the seductive memeplexes of radical theory.
The task can only fall to us. There is nobody else on Earth who can do this except for us, right here.
And I mean that in the sense of sheer survival. I’m going to tell you something you already know: a lot of these dreams of legacy and glory will initiate with us; they are not passed down or inherited. If you want to have a big family, odds are you’re the first one in several generations who have pursued this.
For those who concern themselves with the discourse over birthrates, the news has been dire: even outside of the West, births have plummeted, including throughout Asia, South America, and the Middle East.
Furthermore, the insistence that mass migration be constantly increased to rescue the population growth fails to address the reality that even migrants have fewer kids after one generation.
It seems apparent that no race nor religion can truly stand in opposition to Western Liberalism once encountered. “Look at the Muslims in Europe” some say, having 7 kids with all their income based on welfare. These strategies are only embraced by the terminally online.
Make no mistake, demographics are destiny, and replacement repopulation is the primary symptom indicating civilizational crisis. But the solutions are not as simple as accelerationist emulation of Eastern behaviors. Europeans, especially Anglos, have strong opinions on who should not have children, especially their neighbors. Eugenics flows throughout our social systems.
We are probably the only group that can think carefully about which qualities deserve to be maximized in society, or at least the processes which could be employed to reward these emergent decisions.
When I have spoken in the past to Muslims on the topic of mass migration into Europe, they speak of themselves as a virus. They speak of themselves as a tide of devouring rats. This is completely alien to the Western mind, and emulation will just lead us down a road of treachery. We do not want to multiply like rats or consume like a virus.
The only folk who can proceed through the fire of Liberalism and arrive at the other side are those who have stoked the flames; those who encounter it elsewhere appear utterly bewitched by its guarantees of consumerism, feminism, psychiatry, and welfare.
To put it more narrowly: you need a work-group populated by people who truly believe reproduction has a spiritual or ontological essentiality to their identity, not just an unintended consequence of seeking pleasure.
This is one immediate filter which may very well correlate with leadership qualities, intelligence, and other desirable characteristics of self-sustainability.
This is what we are truly discussing: we have abandoned the project of awakening the masses, we are looking very thoughtfully at how to create an entirely new people. This sometimes takes the guise of “parallel societies” or “retribalization,” but it all basically describes the same thing.
But it can’t live in our minds as a miracle that will descend from on high once a critical mass of suffering and dispossession is reached. What we’re describing is how Rome was founded, or how ancient Britain began. A founding stock of conquerors carrying the memory of their great civilization and planting it in new soil. In the case of Britain, it was Troy, and they cleared the lands of giants to do it.
That is the difference between a tribe and a fandom, and why many such groups regardless of their size of their population or war chest ultimately dissolve. Or why a cult of personality grows as cancer. Or why a brotherhood mutates into organized crime.
Do not believe that the mass democratic upset that just occurred means that you have won, you have merely opened the floor up for real work.
Those who chart this course will do so on their own will and determination, they are the ones who will direct the future on their own terms to see us through this civilizational collapse.
You are not doing this with the specters of your ancestors smiling upon you, you are not doing this for material reward. You are planting trees you will never enjoy the shade of, there is no status in this mission, and you have learned that there is no automatic camaraderie to be found with the ease of joining a fandom.
You are not here to win, you are here to decimate. Winning was never enough. Now your real work begins. Not OUR work. Your work. And you know what to do.
Thank you, and godspeed.