Dying civilizations operate from one principle alone: keep the pivot of power functional so that everyone stays together and the civilization does not follow inertia and simply disintegrate. This is both their diagnosis and therapy.
Civilizations start screwing up because they insist on togetherness. “We must include everyone, we are all one, we are all equal,” they chant, out of fear that they will lose members. They refuse to let people go who need to be elsewhere.
Economics might well be the master science of change. It involves tradeoffs and why people make decisions. It also reveals time like a grave rubbing. Some people think in short term and others in long term capacities.
Your short term thinkers do not want under any circumstances to lose people. To them, that looks like society coming apart. They will in fact bribe the stupidest, vilest, and least useful people to stay within a civilization simply to avoid the optics of having people leave.
They pay a high price for this, like people who insist on shopping at Whole Foods, but to them it is worth it for being able to keep the sensation of comfort, security, and unity because it makes them feel better right now, even if that feeling departs after only a few hours.
In economic terms, they have valued their feelings higher than how things are going to turn out in time. This is similar to opting to buy drugs today instead of saving for next year, or buying the cheap version of a product so you can have it right now instead of saving up for the real deal.
Long term thinkers look at adding value. To them, the only competition in life is a race to be the most stable, productive, creative, and balanced society out there. You add value by imposing order, removing risks like crime and disease, and building a civilization around sanity and goodness.
When the short-term thinkers take over, they immediately target this goal. They want to redefine “sanity” to include insanity and “good” to include bad, because that way everyone is equal, which makes these people feel good because they know they will not be ejected for the bad stuff they do.
At the root of collectivism thus we find individualism, and at the root of individualism we find a distrust of the long-term, which makes us see it as fatalism, a terminal spirit disease where one fears the world is bad and therefore compensates with good feelings in the short term.
It reminds me of many scenes from the 1990s. The world out there is scary, unpredictable, violent, chaotic, disorganized, criminal, and predatory, but in here we have a warm place, a group of friends, good music and wine, so for now we enjoy this warmth and ignore the world.
This is no different than what our parents did. They looked at the world, threw in the towel, and moved to the suburbs where they did their best to buy off all the problems that they saw. Maybe, just maybe, they thought, we could get through this without having to deal with it.
Younger people should get a pass. The social world creates a walled garden reality where people exist in a bubble of sensations, judgments, and feelings so that others can manipulate them. Young people grow up entirely in this control- and product-oriented reality and know nothing else.
The problem with short-term thinking is that it avoids the problems that will eventually come to pass. The crises of the WW1 era, themselves reflecting the horrors of the French Revolution era, were visted upon us in the 1990s, made most visible by corporatocracy, diversity, globalism, and media control.
Out of that time came the fulfillment of the heavy metal vision: music which made beauty out of darkness, escaping the blues-rock paradigm, and in turn showing us a window into continuity with our ancestral origins and the only possible future we have of escaping the terror of modernity.
Informed heavily by Tolkien and Lovecraft, these black metal bands advanced a simple idea: it was better to remove the bad and exhalt the good than it was to accept everyone, be pluralistic, love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, and otherwise be “civilized” in the way that leads to decay.
Society is still reeling from that revelation, both Nietzschean and pagan, which brought the heathen truth of nature into a human world that has replaced the natural with socializing, industry, egalitarian politics, and consumerism.
For Black Metal History month this February, join in appreciation of some of our classic articles on the topic, such as the FAQ, Dark Legions Archive, interviews, and of course, all of our black metal archives.
Metal riffs are the Sword of Actuation. Does Western civilization really have any hope of “escaping the terror of modernity” though? Does crawling out of the ashes really count?
PS I wish Terminal Spirit Disease wasn’t such a sad sack self pity fest
The way the will of the norms are, they require popular voices to consider new ideas. It would require a double face sword, a soul in two, who could set aside truth in order to thrive within that sphere and infiltrate it and even after, what then of politics? The game of the corrupt and pandering, I do not think it can be breached until a voice as dissident as Trump comes around again.
The more people orient toward realism instead of social approval (equality), the more of those dissident voices will come out. The best of the West have been hiding and dying childless for centuries.
Tolkien wrote some themes like this into the Silmarillion. The Noldor, corrupted by the Silmarils(wealth, hubris) fall into infighting over the years, they split into groups, they hide away in vast fortresses while the forces of Melkor gather and proliferate steadily in their once claimed lands. Eventually these fortresses, no matter strong, fall one by one and none from the others come to aid them, until Melkor eventually runs the world unchallenged and commits atrocities for his own hubris, but he never gains what he seeks, nor do the Noldor. This occurs until the Valar(nature) come and reset the world.
When humans get too cerebral, they distance from nature and consequently become overly concerned with the tokens of the good life and not the good life itself.
I too watched La Dolce Vita lately.
I didn’t. There was/is a candy store around here with that name however.
Its also an italo disco title.
I think we are deciding now to escape. There is always hope. Doing right involves ceasing to do what is wrong, focusing on reality, and choosing the best options therein. With that, the cycle of nature starts to rise again.
Agreed on Terminal Spirit Disease. The band shot its wad right before it became popular, and they produced content to fill demand, but it was churn from then on, despite there being some good stuff on the second and third albums.
Do you know if Alf Svensson and the rest of the band wrote each half of With Fear separately?
This seems to be the lore, and I see the band refrains from discussing it, so I imagine it’s complex, but the lore endures because the album feels like different people going in different directions wrote each part and then stuck them together with duct tape and lube.
This article below is absolutely essential for historic information on the sub-genre:
https://www.deathmetal.org/article/black-metal-history/
And this article really nails where to start in terms of listening:
https://www.deathmetal.org/article/how-to-get-into-black-metal/
I’ve reached the point where I have forgotten most of what I have written. Thank you for preserving these in our shared memory here.
Not surprising given the amount of writing you do. There’s a ton of gold in the archive.
Should mention this one too actually which really delves into the drama of it all:
https://www.deathmetal.org/article/history-of-the-band-mayhem/
I listened to some Master’s Hammer today.
Is Guiness the best macro brewery?
What’s your opinion of Guiness draught stout? What about the non alchoholic variant?
I’m not Brett, but Guinness is crap. If you want a good British beer, go with Samuel Smith (the porter, oatmeal stout, and imperial stout are all outstanding; avoid the chocolate stout) or Fullers (ESB is a classic for a reason, and the London Porter is also very good).
I second the Sam Smith’s recommendation. If you are in Texas, Lone Pint makes a few good brews. The best beers are usually regional and not very popular because they are not sodas with alcohol like Buttwiper.
I’ve never tried Lone Pint; I’ll have to give that a shot some time. The clear winner of Texas breweries IME is Lakewood; their Temptress is quite nice. Real Ale is also solid. Go out of your way to avoid Legal Draft or Rahrs, both of those are complete crap.
Never had Lakewood. Seems to be some normal beers and some savvy marketing:
https://lakewoodbrewing.com/our-beer/
I do not feel as strongly about it as some do here. Guinness is better than many options on the shelf. It’s funny how we have a beer aisle with a hundred different beers, and maybe four brands strike me as drinkable. I tend to drink non-alcoholic beers when I am the designated driver, especially since about half of the bars in the country will discount them heavily if you mention why you are drinking them, and they are all pretty good but I would not buy them in a grocery store.
Is Rotting Christ black metal? It’s good metal for sure, but is it really black metal?
“Thy Mighty Contract” definitely is. After that, who cares?
In terms of atmosphere? They always were, despite the mixed grindcore, death metal, and heavy metal of the first album and demos.
In my view, the real actors there were Varathron, and they produced a great demo, EP, and two albums, if memory serves.
With Rotting Christ, we are essentially talking about the first couple albums, if memory serves. The second one embraces full on black metal, where the first is a lot like the first Darkthrone, a mid-paced take on death metal with lots of eclectic influences but primitive technique, and the type of atmosphere that black metal sought.
“…social order replaced hierarchy…”
How does that one go again?
Let’s see, everyone decides if something is popular or not instead of having the far above average intelligence people do it, so your music becomes Kanye and your art is Banksy and all movies must have one black, one gay, one troon, one woman, and one weak white guy with a Jewish first name and an Italian last name.
Socializing replaces social hierarchy.
The only good black metal records from last year were Warloghe (mostly written across the past two decades), Helwetti (mostly recorded two decades ago), and Sulpur (actually written and recorded years ago).
You forgot Tasman Saucco and Korordets
I don’t think anyone did.