The Haunting

Guest Post by The Zman

A couple of years ago, John Derbyshire, in one of his podcasts, talked about the sexual aspect of what ails the West. He referenced this comment to Steve Sailer, in one of Sailer’s blog posts. No doubt others have noted that women in the West seem to be the driving force behind things like immigration. The angle is always that the women are ascendant, because the men have grown soft. As Derb talked about in that podcast, the girls are inviting in the swarthy foreigners, because they are dissatisfied with their men.

That is appealing to men, especially older men, as older men are always sure that the younger generation is soft. When I was a boy, my grandfather would say, “In my day it was iron men and wooden ships. Now, it is iron ships and wooden men.” I’m an old man, but not so old that my grandfather lived in the age of sail. It was just his way of saying that his generation was tough, while the younger generation was soft. The thing is though, this assumes that only men have changed, while women are just responding to this change.

Maybe a better way of thinking about the sexual aspect of our cultural crisis is that both men and women are haunted by different specters. For instance, our women are growing increasingly deranged, not because men are wimps, but because the traditional sex roles no longer exist. This leaves them as free radicals, with the wacky fads out of feminism and gender studies, orbiting them like unpaired electrons. Put a different way, women are like bees without a hive. Without the normal social stimulants, they become erratic.

Here’s a good example. This women is not satisfied being an angry lesbian. She has been a public nuisance for a long time, ranting and raving about homosexual causes. Self-identified lesbians are 1.3% of the population, according to the CDC. That’s a small club, but not select enough, so she is now claiming her son is transgender, which is not even a real thing. Like so many of our women, this woman is in a race to the most bizarre and deranged position imaginable. It’s the need for attention, applied to inappropriate things.

The male side of this coin features a nostalgia for a lost future. It is a form of romanticism, where men imagine a past that led to a different present. All of those decisions by prior generations, have led to a present where there is no point to being man, because there is no role for being a man. The only place where men are needed is the military, but even there, the multicultural nags are working to ruin things. It’s not a longing for the past, but a longing for a different past that resulted in a more fulfilling and meaningful present.

If you look at the various sub-groups within the Dissident Right, they are almost exclusively male. The alt-right certainly has a strong romantic streak. Their embrace of the fascist aesthetic was always based on an imaginary version of history. The PUA guys go the other way, embracing a cynical and callous view of women as nothing more than a game to be won. It is an absurd version of the alpha male. Even guys into alt-lite stuff like Patriot Prayer or the Proud Boys are trying to create a space for men to be men.

The result of all this is men and women are rocketing off in different directions, seeking something that fills the void left by traditional sex roles. The trouble is, the current culture views traditional sex roles as toxic. That not only directs the search for biological fulfillment toward the wrong answers, it makes the right answer the polar opposite of what is acceptable. The result of this is blue-haired feminists screaming into the teeth of reality and the cartoonish primal scream of the Bronze Age Mindset.

It’s why polling on so many issues divide sharply between males and females, married people and single people. That last part is probably the most important, as people living the traditional married life may as well be in a different country from the single. The former have a point, while the latter are searching for one. The former see politics and the state as a necessary burden, while the latter view it as the hunting ground for personal fulfillment. It’s why Antifa is run by girls and the alt-right is run by boys.

Of course, the specter driving all of this was created in the bygone era, the one where the West still had its traditional social arrangements. The increasing animosity toward baby boomers, by younger people, has a lot to do with the fact that the young blame their parents and grandparents for screwing up the system. This is certainly true in America, where the boomers inherited a world of order and then set about destroying it, replacing it with a world of disorder and irrationality, without ever explaining why they did it.

That really is the specter haunting all of us, regardless of our age and circumstances. It all seems so unnecessary and pointless. What was so monstrous in the 50’s and 60’s that it spawned a generation hell bent on self-abnegation? That’s the specter that haunts our age. It’s as if the point of the cultural revolution was to create a society of people infected with the existential attitude. The result of the revolt was a people gripped by a sense of disorientation, confusion and dread in the face of an absurd and meaningless world.

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