Messianic Onlineism and the Spirit of '16
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Note: This was originally published at The Asylum.
</picture>You hear leftoids talk about the spirit of ‘68. What is the spirit of ‘68? Most of us weren’t there, but it was a moment in time when it must have felt to all parties right, left, and center as if a burgeoning left-revolutionary consciousness was unfolding, filling the world with possibility. It was this perhaps intangible energy which was thought to unite labor movements, women’s liberation, black nationalism, civic rights, homosexuals, and pedophiles. I’m not saying that to be provocative. In ‘77, a depravity of French intellectuals (this is the technical term for a group of French intellectuals, like a school of fish, or a parliament of owls) all signed a petition to remove the age of consent in France. This is a very old and crucial leftist revolutionary idea, that the nuclear family is the source of all social oppression, that children should be raised by the state, and that the sexual use of children should be democratized and open to everyone. You can find these ideas wherever leftists are preeminent, because the ultimate motivating animus of leftism is “fuck you, dad.” Even most center-left activists, if they have any awareness of history, or their imagined place in it, still view the revolutionary events of the 60s and 70s with a kind of holy reverence. They still idolize the spirit of ‘68. Those were the days, yeah? There was solidarity, there was music and dancing, and most importantly, there was open, violent revolt in the street.
Our ruling class believes the rhetoric of equality, emancipation, and so on, with no reservations; they see no contradiction between their wealth and power on the one hand, and the spirit of ‘68 on the other. These people, having grown up lionizing and idolizing left-revolutionary thought, now find themselves holding the reins of power, and they are doing the best they can to administer the state according to those values, although they are only human. That means they are motivated by “low” animal drives such as greed and lust. There is often a petty profit motive or a sexual motive behind all the dastardly acts of corruption which our ruling elite perpetrate. But these petty actions—using regulation to choke out US industries and line their own pockets with investments in foreign competitors, stockpiling teenage girls to use as sex slaves on fuck island—these are not the ideals which guide our ruling elite; these are only the perks of the job. Everyone, no matter how rich or powerful, still sees themselves as the good guy. They conceptualize their lives in terms of moral narratives, and they understand their own life as some kind of struggle towards The Good. We can accuse them of hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is a universal human attribute. The problem with our leftist ruling class is not that they fail to live up to their own ideals, the problem is that their ideals themselves are reprehensible, and the worst thing any leftist can possibly do is live up to her ideals. The problem is that they’re willing to sacrifice good things like wealth and sex for the sake of the most evil and stupid moral values in the world: equality and emancipation.
Why did the spirit of ‘68 take over? Violence and laws can be used intimidate people, but they produce reluctant believers; they don’t win hearts and minds. The sad, simple, human answer is that emancipation feels good. The spirit of ‘68, as the Zoomers say, is a vibe. Good feelings only. No bad feelings. No reckonings or grim realizations, no surfacing difficult truths, ever. Left-revolutionary edgelords could produce coherent philosophy 100 years ago, but now that leftism has filed off all of its edges, they have nowhere left to lord. The spirit of ‘68 is now best encapsulated, not by the French revolution slogan liberty, equality, fraternity, but by its contemporary, ever-expanding manifestation: diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (and justice lol). Belonging is a recent addition but it was inevitable, just as adding a triangle of African skin colors to the pride flag was inevitable. The moment something like this is proposed, it would be a bad vibe to lay down a boundary. Boundaries precipitate bad feelings.
I’ve written elsewhere about the metaphysics of emancipation, but most people, even most leftists, do not think in such explicit metaphysical terms. On the contrary: they desire “emancipation” because telling someone “no” or hearing the word “no” makes them feel bad. To call this “emotional reasoning” is to give it entirely too much credit. No reasoning occurs, only attraction and repulsion on the basis of feelings. We may find it satisfying to believe there are intelligent, deliberate agents operating behind the scenes, planning the demise of the West, but in truth, no such agents exist. The world is run by normies, and the above is how normies think. There are some malicious sociopaths sprinkled throughout the normie ruling class, but they are not necessary for the system to be terrible. Add them or remove them; their presence adds no predictive power to the theory. They are a rounding error.
Good vibes only: any conversation, any line of thinking that causes public discomfort is automatically branded as immoral, as callous, as cruel. The spirit of ‘68 says: all your problems in life are caused by the people who tell you no. They are caused by boundaries, therefore the solution is to dissolve all boundaries. Hence diversity, equity, and inclusion, and belonging. And from the outside, we know that these slogans refer to a racial philosophy which is implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—anti-white, but to its adherents, to its true believers, it really is a bid to make race meaningless. If race is meaningless,
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