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From Culture War to Consciousness war

MadMaxStirner

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Introduction; From Culture War to Consciousness War:
“At no time in Western Civilization has man accepted so willingly contrivances calculated to weaken and destroy him.”
  • Anton LaVey, The Devil's Notebook

For as long as I can remember I have considered the issue of society and what to do about it. There is a society; it is “out there,” doing its things beyond my control, and I am reliant upon it even though it isn’t me and I hate everything about it (its norms, ideals and aesthetics). This is an unacceptable situation, and the more I considered it the more I realised that the thing to do is to destroy society, my great enemy.
However, this is far easier said than done: I can’t just decide society doesn’t exist and then forget about it; what I need is a plan and a concrete set of steps aimed at achieving this goal, and to this end, a few obvious options present themselves:
Firstly, I could go around town throwing rocks into windows, turning dumpsters and mailboxes upside down and throwing them across the street, attacking people, tearing signs out of the ground, popping tires and catching buildings on fire all while shouting insults and obscenities at everyone in my path. Although this is a reasonable and respectable approach, it probably wouldn’t cause any significant damage to society at large before the men in white coats come to take me away to the funny farm.
Secondly, I could become a drug dealer and sell heroin, cocaine and meth. This seems like a very reliable method of causing damage to society, and is virtually guaranteed to cause some amount of devastation for it. However, there are already thousands of such people doing this far better than I ever could, and going into competition with them is more likely to get me imprisoned or killed than anything else. This part of the war on society should be left to certain very highly trained professionals.
Thirdly, I could become a domestic terrorist and mail bombs to universities and airlines like the Unabomber used to do. This is a far superior approach to the first and second in every way and may even cause substantial damage to society in the meantime, but probably isn’t enough to bring society down completely, and is far more likely to land me in a Federal Supermax Facility or State Hospital instead. Clearly a more calibrated and effective approach is needed.
Fourthly, I could become one of those Postmodern Philosophers and/or Critical Theorists that I keep hearing so much about; then, like they did, I would infiltrate the university system and undermine the values of this society from within.
Obviously between getting a PHD, a job teaching at a university and tenure, this will take time and effort to do, but so far as I can tell this seems to be the approach with the most objectively verifiable capacity to spread chaos and destruction throughout this society I hate so much; and so I set about to create my own school of Postmodern Critical Theory, aimed specifically at undermining all artificial values and norms and producing the maximum amount of devastation for the social order we live in, then for all existing social orders.

But while I was fast at work doing just this, something began to change in the society around me, and this change became manifest as the culture war, the most significant event in which so far has been the election of Donald Trump.
You see, dear readers, when I had first heard of the Culture War between the Snowflakes and the Chudflakes, and about how it was supposedly only a matter of time before it broke out completely, climaxing in the complete and utter destruction of the existing social order and the rise of anarchy worldwide, I thought that this was a very positive development; Neo-Nazis, deranged Evangelicals, MAGA Chuds, 4chan trolls, Kekistanis, incels and repressed homosexuals would clash with Tankies, Feminazis, Intersectional Fanatics, Tumbluristas, Karens and LGBTQABCDEFXYZ+ activists as our Culture Warriors would proceed to break out into open riots in the streets, butchering each other in the most vicious ways imaginable until those streets flowed with the blood of the Culture Warriors whose bodies would cover the landscape. This was the utopian dream I was promised by the deranged culture warriors of the right and left, nd although I knew deep down that it was a mere adolescent fantasy, something about this rhetoric hit home for me and appealed to my admittedly adolescent sensibilities.
Alas, things didn't turn out as promised or as planned, but it wasn’t a complete loss, because at least the show was made a little bit more interesting, especially after the spectacular nature of our political system was taken advantage of by a mentally retarded are hilariously arrogant Reality TV show host who hijacked the entire Political Reality TV Show in order to sell his ridiculous brand image using absurdist marketing ploys.
Indeed, it was a strange rabbit hole that I was to be taken down, one which would cause me to rethink my plans to destroy society; perhaps the answer has been in the mail for a long time, and perhaps this answer is the Culture War. After all, it was the culture warriors who had trumped up and raved on about the supposed power of these “Postmodern Neomarxist” ideologies in the first place, and so my course was set. I decided that I would try to ride the wave of the Culture War, doomed to failure as it may be, all in a cynical attempt to sell this book to Doomers and Acid Heads, who will then, with any luck, push us closer to Society being destroyed, but at least inn the meantime give me something humoroius to do and hopefully put a little extra money in my pockets with which to buy more rum, cigarettes, high quality coffee, cannabis and LSD.

Thusly our tragic tale brings us to the issue of America’s favourite reality TV show; Political Campaigns and the activistic nonsense which usually surrounds them.
Every two years or so they litter the streets and landscapes with their trash: these strange brightly coloured signs with meaningless phrases on them, designed to look important. Their purpose is to inform me of all the latest wonderful, exciting and new options for political representation; such heroic individuals as “Joe Shitweasel” or “Jack Scumfuck,” and together they constitute a sort of catalogue of bold new reformers, all-american heroes, saviours and “not your typical” politicians, out to fix up our “broken political system.” All of them have paid for very expensive campaigns devoted to convincing me that their competitors are somehow all bigger pieces of shit than they are, even though we all know they are cut from the same cloth. They call them “campaign ads,” but for my part, I say they’re garbage. In fact, I think that the city should round up all the campaign ads in town, count them, identify the candidates, then fine all of them for littering at $10,000 per piece of trash recovered, plus the cost of hiring someone to remove them all. After all, if I put together signs that said “George rocks and Ray sucks,” and threw them around town, someone would almost certainly fine me for littering, and I probably wouldn’t be able to get out of it by castigating “George rocks and Ray sucks” as some sort of “information of vital importance to the public,” even though, in my personal opinion, it is.
But the lunacy doesn’t stop there, because around the same time that they put up physical ads, they also start paying for “online campaign ads,” which are essentially online harassment schemes aimed at pressuring us into taking them seriously enough to give them money out of what scant little cash we have in our bank accounts and to take time out of our days off of work to go vote for them. These ads typically consist of a single meaningless phrase over a picture of the candidate in question along with a request for money, something like “the stakes have never been higher” or “I need your help.” Sometimes, if they’re feeling creative and adventurous, something similar to “a bold new day” or “progress” may be plastered atop the candidate's disgusting face. These ads are sometimes even reported on by the News media as if they were actual events, as if the candidates were conjuring supernatural powers of some kind by acting out these ridiculous spectacles and sometimes religious leaders are pulled out to rave about the supposed “spiritual importance” of this pathetic charade.

Over the course of the past 30-40 years or so, our society and culture have come to be centred around all sorts of political spectacles which have become the primary source of meaning in peoples lives to the point that the ethos of modern western politics has become quasi-religious: somewhere amongst all these worthless degenerate shitweasels and ingrate lowlife vermin is our champion, who is destined to save us from all our real world issues, and what ever would we do without whoever that is? We must be informed of this person and of all of their latest bold new measures to save the day or whatever. It is, in fact, their duty to inform us of their greatness, otherwise, whatever would we pathetic lemmings do with ourselves?

Excuse me, but since when am I supposed to care about Joe Shitweasel? I don’t care about Joe Shitweasel and I never will. In fact, if I were to check the news tomorrow morning and the lead story is “Joe Shitweasel was brutally and horrifically ripped to pieces by grizzly bears this morning,” it would make my day.
When I found out that Walorski died in a car crash, I only grieved the fact that it wasn’t all the politicians that had died, and, bereaved, I announced: “why couldn’t it have been all of them!?!” But once I had gotten over that tragedy I celebrated it as a holiday.
When I heard Maxine Waters tell a crowd of people to actively abuse members of the Trump administration if they so happened to run into one of them, I actually actively agreed with her, but with the addition that this should be how all politicians are treated regardless of party. Politicians should get worse service at restaurants, 3 times as much spit and twice as many pubic hairs in their food and beverages, they should have to be accosted in public, have garbage thrown at them and perhaps even occasionally be picked up and thrown into dumpsters on their way to the Capitol like in Old High School movies.

It may be very common and expected for people to complain about politicians, about how much they suck and ruin everything, but I have a particular hatred for them that goes well beyond this. I see no intelligible reason why these people or their mock movements should ever be taken seriously by anyone or given any degree of prestige, credibility or special treatment, let alone why they should be at the top of our social pyramids. As far as I am concerned, politicians aren’t even the same species as the rest of us: nothing but maroding lunatics, degenerate vermin beneath rats, cockroaches, termites and mosquitoes, a blight, a scourge and a pestilence upon the world, living examples of what not to be.
Of all the groups of people on this planet, one in particular stands beneath all of the others in honesty, integrity, discipline, intelligence, coherence, and every other positive human quality: that group is politicians. Since time immemorial, these disgusting filth have polluted our world, and it is well past time that something be done about it. What we need is a final solution to the politician problem.

However, in that most surreal year of 2015, something strange happened. A new politician emerged on the horizon, someone who was bound to upset the political climate such that it would never be the same again, and that psychotic champion of the people was Donald Trump. Most politicians these days advertise themselves as being “not-your-typical” politicians, but in the case of Trump, this was undoubtedly the case. To the Progressive Liberals and SJWs who watched Leftie Lamestream Media, he was the harbinger of doom, evil incarnate, the spawn of Satan himself who has come to destroy us all. To the MAGA Conservatives, he was the God Emperor Trump, saviour of America, champion of the chuds, the greatest hero ever to walk the face of the earth. The Lamestream Media, Right and Left Wing, became obsessed with him for some reason, and all of the establishment political hacks went ballistic for our amusement. With “show, don’t tell,” being his de facto motto, Trump had established his relevance beyond any dispute; he truly was “not your typical politician.”

Many political analysts and theorists have speculated as to just how Trump was elected given such “unprecedented” levels of unpopularity, even within his own party. Of course, concise causes are always hard to pin down, even after extensive research, but it seems to me that the largest reason may lie in the remarkable similarity between these two narratives about him. Both CNN and MAGA Conservatives actually believe that Trump undermined America's institutions, disrupted our political process as it has developed until now in some significant way, and inspired a series of cultural and political changes that would have been thought impossible previously. Unfortunately, however, all of these beliefs are false: Trump did not undermine our institutions, disrupt our political process or destroy our culture. If he did, I would be his biggest fan, but alas, Nirvana is not of this world.
After years of extensive research, I have come to the conclusion that the deciding demographic in Trump's election was in fact the teenage edgelord vote; 18 or 19 year old edgelords who were flipping through TV channels one night only to stumble upon Don Lemon's now cancelled show on CNN prior to his psychotic breakdown. “Donald Trump is waging an all out war against the American government, doing everything he can to destroy America's institutions, annihilate our political process, wreak havoc on our culture and society, and bring about a reign of ruin upon all of our leaders,” states Lemon, grabbing their attention and stopping their fingers from changing the channel. He then adds: “If Trump is elected President of the United States, Satan will pop his head out of the ground, Godzilla will destroy Tokyo, aliens will blow up the White House, hell will invade earth like in Doom, Y2K will happen 17 years late, there will be riots and orgies in the streets and the entire social order will be destroyed, after which we will all wonder into the wilderness, entering a world anew in a scene reminiscent a mad max movie.”
After hearing this, our untold millions of 18 or 19 year old edgelords proceed to become avid Trump fans, donating money to him, buying his signs and merchandise, advertising for him to everyone they can, and, of course, using the topic of Trump to offend snowflake liberals for their own amusement; anything they could do to bring about this utopian future they were promised by Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Don Lemon and Bill O’Reilly.
This worked very well for Trump because young people are the one demographic that every brand of politician has had difficulty appealing to, each putting forward their own pathetic and dumbfounded attempts to do so and all of them failing miserably, except for 3; Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, with Trump being the only one to successfully be elected the President of the United States. Political analysts can ponder indefinitely about how “by any measure Hillary should have won, so why didn’t she?,” but the answer is extremely obvious; her best attempt to appeal to young people was to tell them to “Pokemon go to the polls.” When compared with Trump’s army of pepe memers, there should be no question as to why Trump won the youth vote, and thereby the American Presidency.
What the Trump campaign represented to these youngsters was a sort of Satanic Pentecost whereby he would pass the Unholy Spirit of the Antichrist onto his followers and thereby imbue their lives with a newfound significance and occult power.

The reasons that Trump supporters had for electing Donald Trump were actually best summed up by none other than the Progressive Activist Michael Moore, when he stated that “Trump's election is going to be the biggest 'fuck you' ever recorded in human history - and it will feel good,” all the while lightly dissuading his audience from voting for him, but to no avail; the American Public found that sentiment more appealing than any arguments offered against acting on it, a fact Moore loathes to this day.
And so, for 4 straight years afterwards we were treated to a parade of hilarious reactions to Trump’s election; every week CNN would come up with a brand new absurd thing Trump was supposedly going to do, along with a new and groundbreaking “leak,” “accusation” or “legal scandal” that was supposedly going to take down big bad evil Drumpf for good, and some “expert” or “authoritative official” would be brought on to certify that Trump was in fact done for, and the online left sneered in self-righteous haughtiness for brief periods before switching back to raving about how “the end is near” or something.
Thanks to this, for the years of 2017 and 2018, Trump's edgelord base lived in a pleroma of high quality entertainment and meaningful political engagement which didn’t call for much more than to sit back and enjoy the show, except for the few times when the victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome would be used to create even more entertainment by the creation of contrived troll circumstances, such as with the repeated theft of Shia Labeouf's flag (one of 4chan’s greatest achievements) or all those times they overloaded Tumblr’s servers.
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the YouTube recommendations, then up the Infowars Breaking News Reports or down the Weirdo Web Rabbit Hole to 4chan or Drudge Report. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a crazed forum on 4chan and scroll down, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high - water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

However, by the year of 2019, the troops were becoming restless. It had been 2 years since Trump's inauguration, but hell was yet to invade earth, our society, culture and government were all relatively intact, and everything actually seemed pretty normal. This was devastating to the edgelord armies who had gotten Trump elected, and who were by now slightly older and had begun going through their respective quarter life crises en masse. There was still a slight afterglow left over from Trump's election, maintained by CNN’s insistence that all hell had broken loose and that chaos was soon coming to a venue near you, but this vestige of momentum was about to be crushed into oblivion by the absolute shitshow that was to be 2020.
You see, dear readers, up until sometime in early 2020, the general view of the 4chan internet troll right was still somewhat optimistic: Trump may not have collapsed society and uprooted our institutions, but at least the likes of Don Lemon, Bill O’Reilly, Hillary Clinton, George Bush Sr, George Bush Jr and Mitt Romney believed that he had, and this was at least a start. However, what they did not anticipate and what nothing could have prepared them for, was the immeasurable destruction and unending devastation of the inconceivably horrific catastrophe known as the COVID Plandemic.

It was early in the year of 2020, the very twilight of the new decade: the 2020’s had begun, and the next presidential election was quickly approaching, being already less than a year away. The Culture Warriors rapidly organised to plan and stage the next move; on the one side were the internet trolls (mostly degenerate 4chan web-junkies), Neo-Nazis, repressed homosexuals, Evangelical lunatics and other assorted subspecies of “alt-right” degenerates while on the other side were the Intersectional Fanatics, Feminazis, SJW’s, Karens, Covidians and other assorted subspecies of “alt-left” degenerates. The war between the Snowflakes and the Chudflakes was about to escalate to a new level and the Doom Omens of this coming Ragnarok began presenting themselves more and more leading up to the 2020 election cycle and ultimately culminating in the “insurrection” of January 6 2021, after which both sides seem to have again reached a stalemate and retreated into their respective cultural foxholes to await the day of reckoning.

In the meantime, however, we were subjected to endless brigades of propaganda projects centred around this psychotic obsession known as “the COVID-19 plandemic.”
First, the Lamestream Media started obsessively running headlines about some insanely dangerous new disease called “COVID-19,” and about how we supposedly needed to shut down our entire economy and destroy everything that we can in the name of “muh COVID,” because it’s supposedly “the only way to avoid the wrath of the muh COVID.” Mindless degenerates such as Anthony Fauci were brought on air and touted as “experts,” and would then “inform” us of the supposed “need” to destroy the economy lest doomsday befall us.
Then, politicians like Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo were brought on to declare that Fauci’s insane proposals would be enforced by law. Outrage ensued as peoples livelihoods and sanity were threatened, but there was nothing to be done: Fauci and his ilk had all the power, and those whose lives they destroyed didn’t. All the while, our supposed champion of chaos, Donald Trump, was busy at work implementing all of Fauci’s braindead proposals as the Lamestream Media simultaneously accused him of “ignoring muh COVID.”
Finally, an entire army of Karens and Covidians were deployed to insert “muh COVID” gibberish into as many people's daily lives as possible and in as many ways as possible. Signs were put up ordering us to wear masks, public bathrooms were locked down, and the economy was legally mandated to dismantle itself. By the year of 2021, the unimaginable horror and reality-shattering devastation brought about by the likes of Anthony Fauci had become quasi-apocalyptic, such that Fauci had firmly established himself amongst the great lunatics of history such as Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Trump had lost all credibility as an agent of destruction and chaos, and no one except for the Qanon weirdos could take him seriously from then on. With their champion discredited and their lives ruined, the Edelord armies retreated into the ruins of what used to be referred to as their personal lives: demoralised and half-crazed, they absorbed themselves further and further into weirder and weirder online spaces.
Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all got what was coming to them. All those pathetically eager MAGA freaks who thought they could elect Anarchy and Chaos with a ballot or a few punches into a voting machine. But their failure is ours, too. What Trump took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the 4chan Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending that apocalypse at the end of time.

The deciding factor in Trump’s election was effectively removed from the political scene, leaving the Normies to elect a champion of their own, one Joe Biden, and from then on the web-freaks went into a sort of hibernation, waiting for their next big opportunity to wreak havoc upon this worthless society; a truly tragic fate.

In many ways Joe Biden’s 2020 Presidential Campaign was a sort of negative image of Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Campaign. Trump marketed himself as an agent of chaos, oppositionalism defined and a totally new political force destined to bring ruin and destruction to the contemporary political establishment. Biden, on the other hand, marketed himself as a return to normalcy, blathering on about “our Great American Tradition,” which had supposedly centred our lives until the election of Donald Trump, and which he was supposedly going to return us to. Biden was the boring candidate, the toilet paper candidate. No one really wanted Biden to win, in fact the single largest reason people had for voting for Biden was their belief that he could. The political dynamic in the West had been completely turned on itself: here we had a “liberal progressive” candidate marketing himself as a return to tradition and a “reactionary conservative” candidate marketing himself as an agent of change.

Joe Biden, like Barack Obama, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand - at least not out loud. But that was some other era, burned out and long gone from the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, 2025. A lot of things had changed in those years, and now I was in AcidVille working on an insane new book for some reason that I didn’t claim to understand.
Days turned to weeks, which turned to months then to years, and before I knew it it was already 2024: election year. Trump was, obviously and to the surprise of no one, running for president again, and he seemed by any standard to be outgunning Biden and his coalition of boredom in all of the ways that mattered. The day of reckoning we had all been promised had come at last, and the online subculture of trolls and MAGA Chuds came alive once more, awakening from their undead slumber for one last time to reelect their champion; the almighty drumpf, the chosen one, destined to realise all our unfulfilled dreams and empty promises. Ragnarok was finally here, or so we were led to think, and 4chan looked up, as their redemption drew near; together with their allies they secured the big bad orange man a second term, thinking that this time their dreams would come true and the chaotic doomsday they were all promised and had bet their sense of self on would arrive at last.
How this new found rebellion will turn out is something I can’t say for sure except that it seems to be finally running out of steam, despite or even on account of its apparent ressurgence, which the MAGE chudshad to expend the last of their political capital to afford. Once these four years are up Trump will be unable to run for office again as per the constitution andeven aside from that he will be morethan 80 years old by the time he leaves office. Perhaps in a dementia induced psychosis he may try to stay in office longer, but even if he could mount enough staunch loyalists to ttempt such a thing it would only implode Americas political institutions and finally annihilate the bold faced lie of “American Democracy,” something our elites have invested far too much in to let go down the toilet for so little. Either way the result is bound to be th utter humiliation of the MAGA movement unless they can conjure up some new ideological spin for the whle thing, reinterpret their teen angst and sublate this whole circus into a long standing political staple, after which it would become a tradition of its own, like Marxism was for the left, and, like Marxism, it would become gradually dilluted until it defined itself exclusivdely by its own impotence, and this seems to already be happening right now as I write.

In all of this maddness, however, the enigma of culture war presented itself to me more and more as one of central importance: what kind of society creates a need for such fantastic yet banal pseudo-conflicts and how can such a chaotic and nonsensical thing as the culture war be a manifestation of political necessity? It doesn’t seem to add up, yet this is the situation we find ourselves in; one wherein all of our cultural and political institutions seem to have bet their future existences of their own negation.
This was not an original observation made by yours truly; in fact this phenomenon has been a staple of postmodern critiques of western society from the beggining and the only difference here is that these phenomenon are no longer subtle tendencies observed only by pedantic nobody philosophers operating out of the 1960’s era university system who described and articulated them in the form of heavily nuanced social theories, and have instead become so obvious and thouroughly saturated in our daily lives that almost everyone in our society today has at least some basic understanding of them, although they use much more direct language to describe these tendencies than those wannabe poets would’ve.
Anyone who even halfheartedly pays attention to politics has noticed the thouroughly engrained cynicism of contemporary political narratives and the dissapearance of real political projects which are at all taken seriously by anyone except for idealistic teenagers who still think that they “know everything” and are destined to “change the world” (a common delusion in our culture). Political Theory has ceased to exist as an actual serious subject matter and has become infantilized as our political life at this point in history is so banal and superficial that it is hard for us to even imagine an era when political ideologies were taken seriously or seen as anything more than advertising slogans to be employed by politicians in building their own personal brands.
This phenomenon is the reason why the late great philosopher Rick Roderick predicted in 1993 that: “it may become interesting if a candidate runs for an office and actually believes one thing [that they say]; why, that’d be an incredible New Politics. You know [how] everybody in America wants a New Politics? Well go out and find somebody that believes one damn thing in running for something: you’ll have a New Politics.”
Then, 22 years later, finally and at long last, we actually found such a person in Donald Trump, and, just as he predicted, a New Politics had begun to develop around him for the past 10 years, but although it was interesting, I don’t think it was quite as revolutionary as Roderick had hoped it would be 32 years ago, in fact it has been very dissapointing.
The Postmodern Critique of these phenomenon consists in this hypothesis that the Modern Age has already come to an end because our society has low-key given up on all of the ideals and projects that it has oriented itself around since the Age of Enlightenment. In the 19th and early 20th Centuries “progress” was not a shallow political buzz word used by politicians masquerading as leftists like it is today but an actual anchoring ideal which oriented western culture and even took the place of Christian Metaphysics for a time before it became more and more diluted and cheapened in our popular vocabulary. Even far right political lunatics and outright fascists such as Hitler and the Nazis would rave about it and had staked their entire political projecton this fanciful delusion that the world naturally and ineveiteably progressed towards ultimate greatness and supreme meaning. Today this weird enlightenment style millenarianism has almost completely dissapeared such that no one who hasn’t studied history can even wrap their head around how different this mode of thinking is.
However, observing this phenomenon is not the same as explaining it and still leaves us confronted with a mystery of sorts. Why is it that our society at this point in history has found itself in need of perpetual pseudo-conflicts masquerading as apocalyptic and world-shattering transformations but which are in fact banal trivialities that no serious person should spend even a moment considering and which it must conjure from every obscure corner of human life and drum up into oblivion until everyone gets bored with them and moves on to go obsess over some other equally stupid, banal and trivial pseudo-conflicts?
Postmodern Theory doesn’t deal in explainations and is content to simply observe that this phase has ended and at most to note that it has run its course and simply couldnt persist any longer because of its own flaws. Postmodern Theory is more focused on observing and categorizing the consequences of this development, however, it does seem to make sense that if our culture has exhausted all of its old and new narratives so that all of the concepts we use to undersstand the world have lost all coherence, one consequence of this might be an attempt to grasp at straws by exaggerating every insignificant event and fad imagineable by them and conjuring up endless pseudo-conflicts so as to give a new sense of significance to ones life. Some may even feign a return to traditional religion and morality but not because the intellectual and cultural strength of these traditions had been rejuvinated; instead it is only because of the political significance of traditional religion to these petty ideological pseudo-skirmishes. For example, Andrew Tate has never read the Qur’an, doesn’t actually believe in a single tenent of Islam and his lifestyle is as completely antithetical to the ideals espoused in the Muslim faith as is humanly possible, yet he claims to be a “Muslim” not because he actually “has faith in Allah” or anything like that but simply to be edgy and further distance himself from those nasty secular “leftist” intersectional feminist types.

The result of this is that there is a spectre haunting the Western World - the spectre of the Culture War. All the powers of old culture have entered into a holy alliance to summon this spectre: the Intersectional Feminists, Karens, anti-SJW freaks, Conservative Moralists, depraved political activists and deluded trans-humanist futurists.
Ever since roughly the mid 2010’s, this non-event has threatened to exert itself on our common reality at every point. It has no substance, yet has the power to warp our whole social reality. As a result, an entire industry has grown up around political and cultural conflict in a way never seen before: the profiteers of this conflict are known as “Culture Warriors,” and they have been working tirelessly for the past decade or so to maintain their illusions of self significance by facilitating and perpetuating this farcical non-conflict.
How have they done this? The vast majority of people have no use for hyper-political or hyper-ideological gibberish outside of their function as entertainment and as justifications for mock events such as political debates or elections so that the only people who would actually be invested and have a stake in the Culture War are, on the one hand, that handful of rich fucks who already have immense sums of money with which to blow on cultural engineering (people such as George Soros, Bill Gates, the Koch brothers or Elon Musk), and, on the other hand, those who (like Jordan Peterson) have found a way to monetize the SJWs and Wokeist Ideology. Everyone else could care less about the Culture War except on a handful of unique occasions in which it seems to spill over into Lamestream Consciousness. This being the case, how does such a pseudo-conflict as the so-called “Culture War” manage to perpetuate itself?

As the spectral Culture War has intensified and threatened to develop into a spectral Civil War, more and more things have become political and ideological and the development of narratives and counternarratives has become more and more important to more and more people as the occasions in which the Culture War has spilled over into Lamestream Culture have become both more frequent and more intense. Because of this, every developed country in the world has had their public consciousness become infected, in one way or another, by an unhealthy obsession with this grandiose pseudo-conflict which we call the “Culture War,” which is in reality a farce maintained by the contrivances and narratives that are cooked up by a relatively small handful of ideologically-driven lunatics and political opportunists.
This spectacle has been perpetuated by a stream of media events, big and small, both grassroots and top-down, but no series of past events can maintain it continuously: The Culture Warriors cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of meme making, and thereby the relations of meme-making, and with them the whole relations of internet troll subculture.
Media rage-baiting, centred around the pursuit of profit and attention and amplified by the rise of the internet, may explain a certain portion of this phenomenon, but in the last analysis we must understand it as a manifestation of already latent contradictions in our society. That’s why, in order to trace back the origins of the current Culture War, I have done extensive research into history, sociology, psychology and political philosophy in order to provide the best critique of the Culture War available so that you people can survive the coming pseudo-apocalypse that everyone keeps talking about.
As far as I can tell, the current Culture War developed out of the previous culture war (about 1979-2013) and seems to have developed in a series of stages:

The First Stage, which lasted from about 2004-2012, was centred around New Atheism and fueled by their capacity to spark the outrage of evangelocons everywhere. Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennet went on world tours aimed at spreading their edginess to the world, and an entire online infrastructure was constructed for the purpose of producing media for this growing subculture of edgy teenagers.
Unfortunately for them, however, this entire enterprise seems to have been single handedly held together by Christopher Hitchens, so that when he died in 2012, the New Atheist Movement, at least as far as its then current form was concerned, effectively died with him, causing the various profiteers of the movement to schism. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennet have continued producing content for us since, but they too started looking for new content to produce now that New Atheism on its own wasn’t working.
In a desperate attempt to cling to relevance, many of these profiteers resorted to ideological fervour, incorporating Intersectional Feminist talking points into their content in an attempt to attract a wider base. This was the strategy of Rebecca Watson and Steve Shives, who by the end of it all had been turned into little more than living memes to be used as internet hottopics for the entertainment of the viewers of far more successful channels.
Needless to say, this plan backfired so spectacularly that not only did they not attain a wider audience and instead garner the hatred of most everyone who knew of them, their efforts actually wound up igniting a hate-fueled reaction against them which actually did wind up appealing to the broader public. Soon enough, an entire industry had been set up around so-called “Anti-SJW Content,” which for a while seemed to somewhat successfully fill the Christopher Hitchens shaped hole in the hearts of edgy teenaged atheists the world over.
This project came to define the next stage of the Culture War.

The Second Stage began immediately after and as a direct result of this schism within the New Atheist Movement, all centred around this controversy over Atheism Plus and how shitty it was. It was during this time that YouTubers such as the Amazing Atheist and Sargon of Akkad began producing “Anti-SJW” content for their audiences, a change which was at first very welcome but which has since grown stale and repetitive.
This stage came to an end when the grifters came to exploit that market by saturating it with sub-par content, shortly after which New Atheism had been thoroughly reduced to a laughing stock, with its most serious project being to make fun of “SJWs” and “Atheism Plus” in a vain attempt to make themselves seem smarter than they actually are by routinely contrasting themselves with the most insane leftist ideologues, and thereby cover up the now obvious intellectual degeneration of the movement.

The Third Stage began when Trump declared that he was running for President in 2015. Immediately after this happened, the Mainstream News outlets began to take it up as an event, which they tried to perpetuate by exaggerating every nonissue that sprung up around him. On “left wing” “news” outlets, ‘OK’ hand gestures and Tostadas became the new political hot topics (at least for the day) while on “right wing” “news” outlets Trump came to take on an all-important (almost messianic and larger than life) persona, which has since come to function as the primary unifying factor within the contemporary Right Wing. Through this “bipartisan” effort, a positive feedback loop was eventually established, whereby Trump would make “outrageous” comments designed to be entertaining to those who would’ve already been prone to vote for him and infuriating to those who would’ve already been prone to be opposed to him, and in this way acquire billions of dollars in free advertising for his campaign from the media rage-baiting industrial complex by exploiting the growing American Political divide: this was when the current Culture War began to intensify and take on a form resembling something like its current one. The Trump Campaign represents the single largest spill-over of Culture War Politics into Lamestream Society, and ever since its success everyone else who has become invested in it has been desperately grasping at the last semblances of the credibility they enjoyed during that time frame, wether their tall tales were millenarian or apocalyptic.

The Fourth Stage began with the election of Donald Trump and ended with the beginning of the COVID Plandemic. It was characterised by a perpetual attempt on the part of media outlets, culture warriors, politicians and activists to keep their pseudo-conflict going and their veneer of self importance afloat by making Trump out to be some incredibly powerful being of ultimate significance in some way, either by presenting him as evil incarnate, the spawn of Satan himself sent to destroy us all, the literal Antichrist, the harbinger of Doom, bringer of Destruction, Death- destroyer of worlds, the Unholy one, he-who-shall-not-be-named, etc., or as the God-Emperor Trump, Prophet of God, the Bringer of Peace and Holiness, our Lord and Savior, the Messiah, hallowed be his name and peace be upon him, Amen, etc., and all the while, this entire conflict served the very same purpose of maintaining this entire faux-event: the media promoted Trump, Trump promoted the media, and advertising competed with Trump.

The Fifth Stage began with the COVID Plandemic and ended with the election of Joe Biden, and featured a splitting up of the Republicans and a faux comeback by the Democrats, who had significantly toned down their hyper-moralistic woke rhetoric by then. During this time, Trump's base both shrank and became more paranoid and devout, culminating in the storming of the capitol building on January 6 2021.
This stage was defined by an increasingly apparent weirdness on both sides of the political spectrum, during which the political situation had become something of a reflection of Joe Biden's campaign in much the same way the Trump Campaign had defined the Culture War up until that point; whereas Donald Trump’s campaign strategy consisted of living as a 4chan meme, advertising himself as a sort of patriotic anarchist and promising to undermine the establishment and upset the people his supporters don’t like, Joe Biden’s campaign marketed itself to the normies as a supposed “return to normalcy” and contrasted itself with the Trump Presidency by castigating it as a breech in some vaguely defined “long standing American tradition.”
While Trump focused on policies but only as a playground for his absurdist political doctrine, Biden almost completely abandoned policies and instead centred his campaign around contrasting himself with his opponent to an extent never done before; conversely, most of Biden's own voters did not like him or want him to win, and when asked the primary reason for their support, most answered by stating their belief that he could win the election. Put simply, Biden is a candidate with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, and this is in itself his distinguishing characteristic and his sales point: he was supposedly Mr. Remarkably Normal who wouldreturn us all to a state of remarkable normalcy.
Because of these developments, the political dynamic in the United States had been completely flipped on its head; here we had a “Traditionalist Conservative” advertising himself as the ultimate agent of change and manifestation of chaos, and a “Progressive Liberal” advertising himself as a return to normalcy and tradition.
It was also during this stage, albeit near the very end, that Trump's edgelord armies decided to take matters into their own hands and seize the Capitol on January 6 2021. Being almost the whole way through Trump’s first term, and with him soon to be replaced, it had been made very obvious by that point that the simple fact that Donald Trump was President of the United States was not enough to bring about the apocalypse, and if the apocalypse wasn’t going to happen by itself or as a result of Trump's election, then they would have to make it happen, and the way they decided to do this was to storm the capitol, smash glass, put their feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk and piss on their expensive and overpriced chairs. The Lamestream Media seethed and frothed at the mouth as the edgelords claimed the oh-so-sacred United States Capitol for themselves and shouted to the tune of millions of sobbing “leftists;” “long live the Insurrection!”
It was indeed a beautiful moment for humanity, but alas, it was also, from the beginning, doomed to failure and to be of no consequence; a victory not long for this world: one of the greatest tragedies in human history.

The Sixth Stage began with the election of Joe Biden and ended with the end of the COVID Plandemic early in 2023, and this stage was to a large degree defined by a persistent attempt on the part of politicians, media outlets and culture warriors to perpetuate Culture War issues and tensions, all to maintain a veneer of personal significance on their own part. The media then began spicing up their reporting by sprinkling reports on the supposed “horrors of January 6th” into their reporting on “muh COVID lauah.”
During this stage, much more elaborate and sophisticated attempts to control media narratives were enacted under the guise of controlling “misinformation” [claims the government claims to be false] and “malinformation” [claims the government admits are correct but would rather you not spread information about]. These attempts have come from both the right and the left, but have more often come from the left, as the Right has increasingly come to be consumed by the most insane paranoid conspiracies to the extent that it had almost incapacitated itself.

The Seventh Stage began when the COVID Plandemic ended in 2023 and ended with the end of the 2024 primary election season early in 2024.
This stage was defined by a growing realisation on the part of the general public, lamestream media and the US political establishment that neither Trump nor Biden are viable candidates, and that none of the candidates that had presented themselves so far were either. The defining feature of this stage was economic, cultural and political stagnation and disorientation as we waited for the chips to fall and the direction to be set.
As the primary season came to an end early in 2024, a general sense of gloom and doom began to develop amongst the online culture warriors as the grim reality began to set in that it was to be one of these lowlife fuckwits that would occupy the office of President of the United States and determine the political trajectory of our country from then on.
The next era in Western Politics was to be a nauseating fever dream.

The Eighth Stage began when every candidate other than Joe Biden and Donald Trump were systematically eliminated as candidates, leaving us to cope with the unavoidable horror of yet another election season consisting in a bogus choice between these two worthless, mindless, demented and depraved degenerate lowlives.
When people were selected and asked to sum up their respective campaigns in one word, and the results compiled, the one word the public came to associate with Trump was “Revenge,” whereas the one word the public came to associate with Biden was “Nothing,” meaning that Trump vs Biden = Revenge vs Nothing. This election which would not take place seemed to be our society's collective manifestation of the Freudian Death Drive in two variants; the Internalised Death Drive (Biden/Nothing) and the Externalized Death Drive (Trump/Revenge).
This stage ended when Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 election, effectively conceding to Trump before the election had even taken place because no one in their right mind thought that Kamala Harris had even a snowballs chance of winning against Trump: if Biden’s campaign represented “Nothing,” then Kamalas campaign represented “less-than-Nothing.” This was really the point when Trump won his reelection campaign, so that afterwards the election itself was a mere formality whereby it would be made official, and the culture was left to grapple with the existential consequences of a new Trump era.

The Ninth stage began with Trumps victory over Biden and Harris, which as I pointed out earlier was really when Biden dropped out and not on election day, and will end when Trump either leaves office or destroys American Constitutional Government by trying to stay in the presidency indefinately, whether successful or not. Either way I don’t see any way that there could possibly be any more than one more stage in the culture war after this one: all of the chips have already been set on the table and all the cards already plaid so that all that is left for us now is a slow decay into the future. The question then as now is “now what?”
There is no way to know how this fake culture war will end, but I can tell you how the next and final stage will begin. The Tenth Stage will begin sometime late in 2028 or early in 2029 when Donald Trump will either; give up the presidency to whoever his successor will be, at which point our formerly 18 or 19 year old edgelords will be in their early 30’s and will then spend the rest of their lives trying to recapture the edginess of their youth like the washed up braindead drug addled hippies of old, or, try to stay in power despite the consequences, despite the destruction of American Constitutional Government and despite the fact that he will be completely demented and infirm by that point, a move which would definately extend the conflict further but which would also amount to an admission of defeat, failure and impotence on the part of the MAGA right, who would then lose all ideological coherence and devolve into total dissaray.

From the beginning, we knew that this Culture War would never happen. After the hot culture war (The Counterculture), after the cold culture war (the Satanic Panic), here comes the dead culture war- the unfrozen cold Culture War - which leaves us to grapple with the corpse of culture war and the necessity of dealing with this decomposing corpse which nobody on the internet has managed to revive. The Intersectional Feminists, Alt-Right and Alt-Left are fighting over the corpse of Culture War.
The Culture War has entered into a definitive crisis. It is too late for the (hot) Civil War: this has already taken place, distilled down the years into the Satanic Panic. There will be no other. It might have been supposed that the defection of the MAGA-ists would have opened up new spaces of freedom for Culture War by unlocking deterrence. Nothing of the sort.

Since it never began, this Culture War is therefore interminable. By dint of dreaming of pure Culture War, of an orbital Culture War purged of all local and political peripeteias, we have fallen into soft Culture War, into the virtual impossibility of Culture War which translates into the paltry fantasia where adversaries compete in de-escalation, as though the eruption of the event of Culture War had become obscene and insupportable, no longer sustainable, like every real event moreover. Everything is therefore transposed into the virtual, and we are confronted with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony ultimately much more dangerous than real apocalypse.

Culture War has not escaped this virtualization which is like a surgical operation, the aim of which is to present a face-lifted Culture War, the cosmetically treated spectre of its death, and its even more deceptive televisual subterfuge. Even 4chan has lost the privilege of use-value, the privilege of real Cultural Conflict.

People living in the PostModern Age have many questions, such as: how did I get this disease? What are my treatment options? What will this mean for my loved ones? How did we wind up in this situation? What are the factors that led to and/or perpetuate the current “Culture War?” What will happen when those engaged in it are forced to return to the real world and live with the grim realities of the collapsing Neoliberal world economy and the morbid socio-psychological symptoms associated with Late Capitalism? Is there still any way to avoid hyper-reality and the spectacle and escape into the unmediated reality of directly experienced events?
To do this would require us to recognize the entire Culture War, together with all of the adjacent pseudo-conflicts with which the bulk of people have been attempting to make sense of their lives (everything from the “Cis-White-Hetero-Normative-Capitalist-Patriarchy” to “White Genocide,” “the War of Christmas,” and “Christian Oppression) as themselves just another manifestation of the fundamental instability of Western Civilization at this point in history. Any form of engagement with the world that achieves this level of self-awareness would amount to the Culture War escalating into a Consciousness War, something the NPC-Normie Masses will always be incapable of engaging with.
If there were such a thing as a “solution” to this debacle, it would have to consist in taking this up as a project; in transcending the Culture War and thereby engaging with the Consciousness War which is the real substance of this fake Culture War.
What we need is a new way of organising our lives, a new way to interpret the world, to make sense of our lives and to engage with the world and our lives, a new approach to economic production and social and political organisation: but I can’t give you anything like that, so instead I wrote this completely insane and unhinged manifesto aimed specifically at upsetting every one of your precious sensibilities. Its my way of saying “fuck you people.” And with any luck this project of mine will finally collapse this society that I hate so much.
 

Al Jilwah: Chapter IV

"It is my desire that all my followers unite in a bond of unity, lest those who are without prevail against them." - Shaitan

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