How is the outrage going? The latest war, the latest ethnic atrocity, the latest betrayal by a politician that was supposed to be the great savior of the so-called dissident right. Is it all still getting you going? Are you still leaping out of bed at the crack of dawn, racing to your computer before your first coffee is even ready so you can devour the new and exciting provocations that your favorite online influencers are pushing? All to be forgotten as the same influencers scour the internet for what will get you jumping to their website the very next day.
Raise my hand as guilty as charged. On both counts. In my defense, my online influencing days are long gone, if they were ever there at all. I haven’t cared about hits on my website, or comments on the blog, or emails cluttering up my cyberspace for some time. It’s been harder to crack the passive version of online outrage, however; the endless consumption of outrage crack. But I’m starting to get there.
Recently Tucker Carlson did an interview with the CEO of Telegram, the first since his arrest when landing at Paris airport. In that arrest the police famously confiscated his phone. It turns out that he doesn’t have a SIM card. He keeps a phone to check that Telegram updates are working. But he doesn’t have a mobile phone.
Think about what that means. It goes together with anecdotes from people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who wouldn’t let their children use computers or mobile phones.
Someone recently said to me that they had switched off from most of the voices on the dissident right.
Personally, I stopped following a lot of the ‘Dissident Right’ accounts on X/Twitter I used to monitor daily, because I became increasingly tired hearing the same tedious talking points discussed at length without any real attempt to reach ordinary people or achieve any success in the real world, instead preferring to converse amongst themselves in a clique using pseudonyms.
I’ve noticed that ‘Dissident Right’ figures will smugly mock ‘Boomer conservatives’ for believing in the post-1945 liberal order, but maintain a support for ‘free speech’ and ‘freedom of religion’, ideas that are the apex of liberal thinking. The pagan LARPing annoys me too!
I recently recorded a podcast with The Great One where I spoke about the need to get off the internet. But it isn’t enough to just tell people to get off the internet. That’s like trying to tell a junkie to just stop shooting up on smack.
One of my long running tropes to make fun of is the young deluded brainwashed idiots running around convinced that they can change the world. But those on the dissident right are just as deluded in this sense, (although I would argue that the majority of the prominent voices are in it for whatever they are earning from it). We’re not going to cure modernism or secularism, and we are not going back to some sort of traditional world where everyone had a white picket fence on a country lane that led to a church where the priest was godly and the women wore long flowing dresses and, well, you get the idea.
We are especially not going back to that time because we’re spending all of our time and energy on the internet arguing about it. The powers at be are perfectly happy to allow us to argue back and forth in this way as it keeps us busy and stops us interfering with their plans. They do stuff while we verbally jerk off in cyberspace. I would say that they actively encourage us to remain in this online space by supplying or funding various voices on the dissident right.
Guys, the only thing that counts is doing. Let me quote this from Alan Schmidt:
Few people aspire to just nice white-picket fences and kids in a tame suburban domestic life. Not even women. Neither do they want simply a romantic partner to cohabitate with while largely living their own lives. They want to dream of what their partnership can do. They ponder the things they can accomplish working together. They want to have the adventure of a lifetime …
… Choice paralysis and safetyism is the scourge of modernity, putting everyone in self-created mental cages that obsess over analysis before living. It’s everywhere now, its suffocating blanket depriving everyone of that vigor so necessary for living beings. If you want couples to have children, encourage them to live with abandon.
Risk taking. We have been conditioned our entire lives to think that this is a fate worse than death. But they always lie to us, always. The nice safe life is nothing more than a spiritual and physical lobotomy. Yesterday I was speaking to a young couple that are about to buy into the Australian housing Ponzi scheme, a purchase of a small apartment costing them over $700K. They know it’s a Ponzi scheme, and they have a strong alternative option to move to Italy where their quality of life would improve immeasurably. But they won’t do it because the young man cannot for the life of him conceive of taking such a risk. It goes against a lifetime of brainwashing.
The solution to modernity is not seeking a mythical return to traditionalism. The solution to modernity is to take a step sideways and keep taking those steps. I know what I am talking about. My entire life has been a series of such steps. And yet, I too became ensnared by the internet demon.
Life is either an adventure or it is a drudge. But adventure does not mean being a pirate on the high seas. Adventure means carving out your own path, your own place in the world, and most importantly with God at your side. You can’t do it without God. He must be the focus of your life. With such a focus, your life will have actual meaning. The woman that you attract and choose to become your wife will then help carry you forward with that as your goal. And the children that you bring into the world will be your responsibility to teach and nurture towards the same goal.
Or you can go to nice restaurants and watch Netflix.
How do you do stuff? You go out and do stuff. You look around and see what opportunities are there for you. But you can only look if you can see. And you can’t see if you are glued to the internet. The screen is your substitute for doing. You can have one or the other.
One of my goals going forward is to ditch the mobile phone. I can’t do it yet but I will do it as soon as I can. Another goal will be to ditch email. My dream is a house with a landline phone that I let ring for long periods of time before I bother to wander over to discover who is bothering me.
I am offering you a solution to the modernist trap. It’s a simple solution, and the majority of good solutions are simple. Get off the internet. Start looking, start seeing, start breathing in the air, start searching, start recognising, start praying, and then start doing. And then keep going. And when you fall down, get back up. God loves a doer. This is not a Boomeresque peptalk to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Understand that if the very vast majority of people are not doing this then it is relatively easy to do this. There are still great opportunities in the world. I cannot tell you what they are, and nor would I want to. I have my own story to achieve, you achieve yours. As men we are defined by what we do and by what we have done. The internet is a do nothing zone.
Get off the internet. One day. Just one day. And then another. Thanks be to God.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.
