I hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving, and that you avoided too many awkward conversations around the dinner table with relatives. I’m back to put out a theory that my friend and fellow podcaster Elliott and I have been working on. In yet another example of shameless self-promotion, this is part of a larger project that we’ve been working on for our show, so if any of this interests you, check out the series starting here.
We’ve been thinking a lot about what separates the ideological Left and Right, and aside from all of the complex cultural and regional aspects (for example, Blue State vs. Red State), the Left and Right have very different relationships to time as well. In short, we on the Right (or at the very least the non-Left) are in a time war with the Future. The Left, on the other hand, is in a time war with the past. If any of you have read any Nick Land , this might sound somewhat familiar. If not, no worries. We take Land’s ideas and make a Kierkegaardian leap of faith in a different direction. We fight the Future.
At first glance, this sounds crazy and/or like an opportunity to start doing chin-ups with Sarah Connor, but hear me out for a second, because I think it really does work. One of the main ways that we as humans perceive passing time is through entropy, or the state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty that takes place over time. Over time, there is a definite tendency for things which were once more ordered to become less ordered. You can see this in all sorts of things, and for our purposes here it’s best to look at entropy in systems. System breakdown can look like anything from produce decomposing over time, to ongoing societal collapse, to our own impending mortality. As the ancients would say, tempus fugit. We are all of us made up of various systems, and we make up the human systems that are greater than us. Because of this fatal tendency within ourselves, the human world around also inherits this flaw. Entropy it seems is a feature, not a bug. W.B. Yeats once said, “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”
At this point we are left with the question of how we react to this entropic problem. Do we give in to despair and enthusiastically look forward to the collapse of human life and meaning, even working to speed up the inevitable end? Or do we acknowledge that systems will break down, while at the same time working to preserve the true, the good, and the beautiful, as well as working within our means to build new things that preserve human life and flourishing? Remember, we’re in a time war here. You can’t not take a side.
The Left- “I hate you, and you can’t leave”
In this great time war, the Left are the ones who seek entropy, personified in the Elder Gods of H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos. It doesn’t matter if a system was beneficial or not. Systems require hierarchies, and all hierarchies are bad. The Left does their daily devotionals in order to summon the Elder Gods into our world. They crack open the dread Necronomicon and recite the final line in their dark litany, “I hate you, and you can’t leave.”
Let’s hope there’s not an actual Necronomicon out there, but regardless this last hypothetical line nicely sums up the ideology of the Left. Anyone who does not want what the Left has to offer, is automatically an object of hate and derision. If you wanna leave and let the lefties eat themselves in their hellholes, no dice. You HAVE to stay with them and they’re gonna make you a better person like them. 2+2 MUST equal 5. You must accept their hatred of what you stand for and you must help them work towards entropic breakdown.
In the time war, the Left looks towards the great, utopic future which will usher in an enlightened era of equality and tolerance. Doesn’t matter what the Current or the Future Thing is, it’s of the Future, and therefore it’s the best. You’re a backwards (that is, an anti-Future) person if you don’t want the Future. Shut your eyes and welcome the slimy tentacles of Cthulhu with welcome arms and learn to code, you cis male! Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see!
The Right- “Make History Great Again”
Ok, so we’ve established that the Left is obsessed with the Future at all costs. They worship Cthulhu and want a Future hellscape. But what about the Right? Where does the Right stand in the time war? No surprise, the Right fights the Future. The Current and Future Thing is most likely a psyop and not good for human flourishing. To react against those Future things is to be capable of pattern recognition, you know, that thing that has allowed humans to survive for thousands of years? So when the Left claims that the Right wants to “take America backwards,” what they really mean is, the Right wants to preserve those things from the Past that have allowed us to do so well. It’s not that the Right forgets the atrocities of the past (ahem, the Holomodor anyone?), rather it’s that the Right recognizes the absolute importance of history. History matters, and standing up for your history matters. The Left seeks to “deconstruct” and “queer” the Past, thereby making it the proverbial fake, ghey, and most definitely cringe. As Orwell so famously said, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
So what should we do? Work to reverse entropy.
Everything will eventually wind down, that’s true. But in what Tolkien called the shipwreck of life, I’d very much prefer to preserve what is good and is pro-human. After a lifetime of being a vaguely right-leaning but mostly centrist person, the insane acceleration of leftist policies over the past couple years has made me want to finally start reacting. To react is to say that you reject nihilism and the downward spiral, and to actually give a shit about things. As Johann Sebastian Bach famously said, ‘Alle Menschen müssen sterben.’-“All humans must die,” but that doesn’t mean we should welcome Cthulhu with open arms, and it definitely doesn’t mean we should start reading from the Necronomicon.
So concrerte steps? That gets hard, because we are all different and in different places in life. But some general principles apply. Reject nihilism. Give a shit about the things that are good and the people around you. Regardless of overt political affiliation, that is what being on the Right means, to preserve what is good and to fight against the entropic Future of the Left. You might not have considered yourself as being on the Right, but if you stand against entropy, you are.
To end with one more quote, Dylan Thomas wrote “Do not go quiet into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I think that’s a pretty good stance to take right there.
