Children who "know" propaganda when they see it

[dane]

I've seen something interesting both with myself and others, that some types sense the bullshit of narratives, explanations, etc. right away. I've always been like this and thought it was normal until I became a teenager and saw too many of my fellow peers follow obnoxious orders "because the teacher say so".

The most interesting example I can recall was when the group of my friends got divided. Think chud and tranny growing up as friends before splitting apart. And it all happened over Harry Potter. Me, some friends and my "crush" or whatever 12-year-olds call love found the good guys of this story to be so goofy, so lacking, so anti-everything-cool that we embraced the bad side, the purebloods, the ones with family history and honor. Had that skull & snake tattoo on my forearm, painted with some sharpies. Total school drama over such a simple story. The ones who were "good" are all know trannies, leftists or activists.

So the question is: do you have similar experiences with children/young teens "calling out" the fake and gay narratives and what do you think about it?

[Guest]

Example of low-agreeableness: case closed

[dane]

Example of low-agreeableness: case closed

most probably.

[JohnTrent]

The trouble with discussing these matters is that the main cause is never immediately discernible: is it something to do with a home environment, the exposure to certain historical imagery at a young age (like the Civil War / WW2), a strong and obstinate mind, or intuiting fundamental interests such as race survival? Or, is it simply a personality trait occurring from a vacuum, with everything else being the result? All can be listed out and some might view one in particular as the sole cause, but it is unknown to us at this point of time. It would be better to focus on two types of characters that can be noticed in the school setting: namely, the intelligent student and the pre-Warehouse student. Both tend to have some resistance against public school propaganda, for different reasons.
The Ray Peat article discussing intelligence is not seen in a positive light by some, due to its questionable views on IQ, but the parts about schooling come to mind. For the unorthodox intelligence, brought up in an affluent situation, the modern form of schooling is alien to them; they read and do as they like, a caprice of the childhood mind guiding them all the way into adulthood. The bookshelves and means of the parents are a stimulus of their child's whims, further strengthening the child's mind. Ivan Illich said that most education is brought about by external circumstances, the purpose of learning being exclusive to a truly personal experience. Where I'm going with this is that those who resist propaganda in the school setting do not rely on the school for learning. It is recognized that it is useless, and such a personality responds accordingly to the setting: annoyance, indifference, or in the case of the Brilliant Bipolar Mind, simply leaving the system. Those who do not recognize this are wedded to the school: it is the pro-social action to do, and why distrust it? Sidenote: one of the most effective advertisement strategies used to popularize the Vaxx was a pro-social one. What you see in the primary school is a more benign and more advanced version of that pro-social strategy.
A post I considered making in the Warehouse Thread is that public schooling can illuminate how certain personalities end up becoming Warehouse'd. The most prominent examples of this would be in more rural areas, where most students have a dim-to-distinct awareness that their role in life is to be in Warehouse environments, or some profession interchangeable with this spiritual dead-end. The result is that such students are hostile to teachers, frequently getting in trouble or attempting to humiliate the teachers by any means necessary. An important note is that this is done by White students, and does not have to be the cause of a growing dysgenic population (even if there is an observable dysgenic factor within some of these exhibited behaviors). They are aware that what comes after high school is a fate of useless servitude, and lash out like an encaged animal. For this reason, there is an expressed contempt for whatever is being taught, especially in the case of English and "Social Studies"/History classes. Opposite to this is a greater interest in physical activity and construction-type courses. You could say that the aggressive response to propaganda is because they have no use for these subject in their personal lives, but it is from this position that they are better able to notice the failings of it. Some might even talk positively about Hitler because it's irksome to the teachers, and use it as a way to cause further conflict in the class setting. All of this is a futile struggle, and they will buy into a soothing propaganda of another kind (think of normiecon talking points), but they nonetheless resist what they hear. Then the Warehouse comes to swallow them up, along with a constant grim rumination on debts & other such things.
The ultimate difference between the Warehouse resister and the intelligent resister is that the former is responding to a decayed environment, but the intelligent character might have always been geared to their conclusions no matter the setting. Because I am not Gen Alpha, I have no clue what things would be like today, but perhaps we will see more of an aggressive response from younger ones exposed to the most blatant propaganda, similar to the pre-Warehouse type.

[IE IN IE /A (S]

Where I'm going with this is that those who resist propaganda in the school setting do not rely on the school for learning. It is recognized that it is useless, and such a personality responds accordingly to the setting: annoyance, indifference, or in the case of the Brilliant Bipolar Mind, simply leaving the system. 

I am not a flat-earther. 
When I was five my friend told me that the earth is a sphere. And I was like: “No that’s just a hill”. But he was VERY insistent. And I asked him how he knew this but he just went and got the governess. And she affirmed “Yes indeed the earth is a sphere”. And I asked them how but they couldn’t say. At the same time they remained VERY insistent. I did not even understand why this was something one would care about, much less how you would find out. So I mostly remained silent, essentially in taqiya, for the next two years, until I found some picture book on ancient Egypt which described the Eratosthenes method which somewhat reduced my angst on this issue.

Now "low agreeableness" doesn’t really work here. Before puberty I was very pro-social: literally friends with everybody, playing games and telling jokes. There was something about this situation which just felt weird and wrong. This statement seemed weirder than many fairytales and Bible stories which my father told me but was held with unrelenting seriousness and without any indication as to its visibility, without any indication even as to what it could possibly mean.

Considering what OP said: I don't want to give my HP exegesis. That Salazar Slytherin is supposed to be the bad guy for having had some objections to unrestrained muggle mass migration in HP2 and for making some military preparations, when the whole point in HP1 was how Wizards are persecuted and have to hide from them; WHAT?  

"But have you seen the movie 'The Ninth Gate' . . . and . . . and how it make you feel?"

[dane]

Where I'm going with this is that those who resist propaganda in the school setting do not rely on the school for learning. It is recognized that it is useless, and such a personality responds accordingly to the setting: annoyance, indifference, or in the case of the Brilliant Bipolar Mind, simply leaving the system. 

I am not a flat-earther. 
When I was five my friend told me that the earth is a sphere. And I was like: “No that’s just a hill”. But he was VERY insistent. And I asked him how he knew this but he just went and got the governess. And she affirmed “Yes indeed the earth is a sphere”. And I asked them how but they couldn’t say. At the same time they remained VERY insistent. I did not even understand why this was something one would care about, much less how you would find out. So I mostly remained silent, essentially in taqiya, for the next two years, until I found some picture book on ancient Egypt which described the Eratosthenes method which somewhat reduced my angst on this issue.

Now "low agreeableness" doesn’t really work here. Before puberty I was very pro-social: literally friends with everybody, playing games and telling jokes. There was something about this situation which just felt weird and wrong. This statement seemed weirder than many fairytales and Bible stories which my father told me but was held with unrelenting seriousness and without any indication as to its visibility, without any indication even as to what it could possibly mean.

Considering what OP said: I don't want to give my HP exegesis. That Salazar Slytherin is supposed to be the bad guy for having had some objections to unrestrained muggle mass migration in HP2 and for making some military preparations, when the whole point in HP1 was how Wizards are persecuted and have to hide from them; WHAT?  

"But have you seen the movie 'The Ninth Gate' . . . and . . . and how it make you feel?"

My concern is not of harry potter specifically, but rather the ability of children to see the bullshit and how they reply to it. One could say the same about star wars or other narratives like that.

I don't think it deep down is low agreebleness because that is just how you respond to the information, if you choose to confront the authority, accept it or silently refuse to believe.

I've speculated whether the tranny type describes in other thread is just a failed, surrendered version of the type who can see through the lies but decides to return to them anyway in an effort to be safe, normal and protected.

And oh well, we end up in pretty much the same thread as the ones discussing trannies, sensitive young men, BAM's lack of space paragraph, etc. Post if some of you have more insight, otherwise I will stop here.

[anthony]

When I was six years old I became very enamoured with Halo. I instinctively really liked The Empire in Star Wars.

As I said in the first person shooter thread people compress things down to a level which can fit in their own heads. I didn't get everything these things were. I didn't "know". But of all the things I could not get or fully appreciate I was still drawn to these ones. And I wasn't alone. My understanding may have been less compressed, but the lasting popularity of genuinely cool things has to say something. Most people don't have opinions on the Harry Potter houses either way, they're too busy playing video games about shooting peoples who are different. Reading Warhammer stuff. Manga. etc.

But as for OP's question, no, I don't think many people will call out much of anything wrong with the state of things. Even as they're drawn to the right answers. I guess this is where we enter the true propaganda zone. Perhaps best exemplified by that case I keep going back to; Japan lovers who hate America so much and love Japan so much that they learn Japanese and move to Japan... and then start crusading to turn Japan into America.

[Guest]

I would posit that lower openness is also useful for immunization against propaganda. It is a tragedy what the system does to most openminded people especially when it succeeds despite disagreeable/assertive character. Propaganda victims on the frontier of the openminded/assertive dimensions are high priority for deprogramming because they are most capable of choosing to do it themselves once their realizations go supercritical. We need to find a cure/prevention for fairy-tales-are-real-and-im-going-to-tell-people-in-the-dentist-office norwoodism.

MKULTRA type projects probably focus on extending traditional normie-focused spray-and-pray propaganda to less agreeable/conforming, more distrustful/empirical, most innocently cerebral victims.

[dane]

I would posit that lower openness is also useful for immunization against propaganda. It is a tragedy what the system does to most openminded people especially when it succeeds despite disagreeable/assertive character. Propaganda victims on the frontier of the openminded/assertive dimensions are high priority for deprogramming because they are most capable of choosing to do it themselves once their realizations go supercritical. We need to find a cure/prevention for fairy-tales-are-real-and-im-going-to-tell-people-in-the-dentist-office norwoodism.

MKULTRA type projects probably focus on extending traditional normie-focused spray-and-pray propaganda to less agreeable/conforming, more distrustful/empirical, most innocently cerebral victims.

But then again, if one isn't high in openness, how would you sense that something is off about the narrative?

[GraalChud]

I've seen something interesting both with myself and others, that some types sense the bullshit of narratives, explanations, etc. right away. I've always been like this and thought it was normal until I became a teenager and saw too many of my fellow peers follow obnoxious orders "because the teacher say so".

The most interesting example I can recall was when the group of my friends got divided. Think chud and tranny growing up as friends before splitting apart. And it all happened over Harry Potter. Me, some friends and my "crush" or whatever 12-year-olds call love found the good guys of this story to be so goofy, so lacking, so anti-everything-cool that we embraced the bad side, the purebloods, the ones with family history and honor. Had that skull & snake tattoo on my forearm, painted with some sharpies. Total school drama over such a simple story. The ones who were "good" are all know trannies, leftists or activists.

So the question is: do you have similar experiences with children/young teens "calling out" the fake and gay narratives and what do you think about it?

While I could just post an anecdote about how I, like many of you, was drawn to the "bad guys" in one franchise or another (for instance I was somewhat ambivalent about both the Empire and the Rebellion in Star Wars, but loved the pre-episode 1 Sith, such as Darth Bane) and knew others who did the same, I would rather draw attention to the "literally me/he`s just like me" meme that is popular with Zoomers and older Gen Alpha types and is a widespread cultural expression of the young men "seeing through the bullshit" phenomenon you`re talking about. 

The general format of this meme involves the creator stating that they identify with or like some villain or anti-hero from a given film or book - such as Tyler Durden, Griffith, Tony Soprano, Patrick Bateman, Rorschach, Bane, Thanos, or Travis Bickle - who is understood by normgroids to be bad/a parody of something "toxic." As expected, the libtard response to this is almost always something along the lines of "you`re not supposed to identify with them, they`re the bad guy" followed by a wall of text explaining why this is the case and how the creators of these characters intended to use them to satirize or critique something/someone they didn`t like. 

Though this meme is often coal and is used by people who have no business identifying with its subjects, it is very popular and was unquestionably born of that same "seeing through the bullshit" impulse found in disaffected young men, even if it was appropriated by normgroid adjacent edgelords and brown Andrew Tate fans. Oftentimes the rationale for identifying with or idolizing these characters is pretty keyed, with much of the justification for identifying with them being centered around posters sharing/believing they share these characters` "worst" traits/beliefs with them - misogynistic or implicitly racist beliefs; having a mind so rational/intelligent that you are willing to commit genocide in pursuit of something you believe to be an objective good; a proclivity towards violence; or a having a flexible moral code/eschewing a rigid moral code in favor of moral flexibility or total amorality.

Its popularity does seem to indicate that there are a large number of young men who either genuinely do "see through the bullshit", or at least believe themselves to.

[JohnTrent]

...

When it comes to the media that attracts the attention of a younger sort, I believe we return again to Bowden's Pulp Fascism and Steve Bannon's "Darkness is good" quote. I think of Bannon in particular since he had mentioned Star Wars immediately after. What makes a younger audience rapt with fascination is the presence of heroism and villainy, but the heroism and villainy able to be expressed — by public school curricula, by film industries, by the publication of one fantasy/sci-fi novel over another — is subject to change. The impulse and wish for the hero and villain is ever-present, but the rendering of it is decided writ large. The Empire in Star Wars, the Paul Verhoeven adaptation of Starship Troopers, and maybe even the human faction in James Cameron's Avatar are all distinct from the more natural predecessors of hero-worship, because in a regular time the roles would be reversed. The plot would be presented in a different candor, where the weaker heroes of the Jedi and the Na'vi are tied to superstition and savagery; maybe noble in intention, maybe not, but the Empire shall overcome them. Starship Troopers is closest to this, even in the Verhoeven adaptation. The adaptation of Starship Troopers avoids the "weaker hero" not only because of its "anti-fascist" intentions, but also because the difficulty of portraying the bugs as good is insurmountable. The Heinlein novel does not ever seek to explain the bugs beyond a noted communistic behavior, and the hivemind of the bugs is too separated from the human characters to generate any insight. It is rightfully foreign, since it is, after all, a combative alien race.

I want to reference a book called Changing Images of Man, which is a book referenced almost exclusively by leftist conspiracist types, the ones who attribute all world events to the OSS/CIA. The reasons for this varies, but the text is characterized as something related to social engineering, and apparently a kind of eugenicism (the eugenics claim is entirely wrong and the excerpt evidence is selectively chosen). Within the text is a type of liberal historicist study of how mankind is viewed: how man is characterized through stories and myths, and what differences can be found between different periods of Western culture. Joseph Campbell was of course a contributor to the book, and the conclusions about it are that a new unified view of mankind should correspond with post-1945 conditions. From a repeated cursory look at the text, there doesn't seem to be a long exegesis about the ills of hero-worship, but because there is such a universalist ethos within it, it can be naturally presumed that the text has some light opposition to a more fascistic image of Man. There is a brief remark about NS Germany having a unique myth of its own that guided its citizens, but the sentences are structured in a way to imply this is self-created and something unnatural in design. Concerns are brought out about how this could occur in the American context, with people behind the scenes "manipulating" the public into adopting the fascistic image of Man. The reason why I focus on this book is because it responds to a problem of mankind's image, which implicitly includes the roles of the heroic and the villainous. The problem in question is that "our image of ourself and our universe has become fragmented and we have lost the guiding 'sense of the whole' earlier civilizations seem to have had". This is one of its starting points and everything that follows can be traced back to this underlying fragmentation of spirit.

The book isn't very important for this post, more of a stepping stone to get to a larger point at hand, but it does illustrate how there is an admitted deficiency in the contemporary image of mankind. Campbell himself has influenced the industry standard of story creations, and has helped to solidify the Hero's Journey into the mass audience imagination, but this is no true corrective to the problem. It gathers itself around the notions of how a mythic image of mankind can be created, or how it was originally created in previous historical eras, but no solution is strong enough to combat the issue. This is because hero-worship is far more associated with domination and power far more than Enlightenment/Post-Enlightenment conceptions of the world. Regardless, the problem is noticeable enough among scriptwriters and industry forces to be amended with the temporary solution of the Hero's Journey — rather than portray the characters in a contest of strength and masculine might, it is more beneficial to portray the story as a means to the hero's self-realization and individuality.

The phenomenon you describe appears to be a stronger form of the villain-worship seen in Bowden's Pulp Fascism, where the amoral content of lowbrow culture allows for an admirable enemy to appear. In this more recent development, it is a gradual usurpation. The hero of our times cannot be found, and so one is obliged to support the supposed villain, because there is no balance anymore. The hero presented to us can no longer be believed, and what self-realization can appear is presented best through the villain's intents. Griffith is undefeated in his overpowering dream, and will institute a new order. Tyler Durden in Fight Club is bound up with the Narrator, and what opposition the audience has to his beliefs is external to the film/novel itself; it resembles fascism, so it must be bad because of this. Travis Bickle is supposed to be conflicted, but he is engaging with vengeance against the world around him, which is replete with corruption and venal habits. He is a member of this, yet seeks to cleanse it, at the risk of his own death. The "worst" qualities should be worshiped because the alternative is worshiping vacuity: the most bare presentation of good. If this has transferred over to Andrew Tate of all people, then we may see more of this in real life.

To me, in these circumstances, that of “Hero-worship” becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.
- Thomas Carlyle, On Heros, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic, Lecture VI.

[august]

I would posit that lower openness is also useful for immunization against propaganda. It is a tragedy what the system does to most openminded people especially when it succeeds despite disagreeable/assertive character. Propaganda victims on the frontier of the openminded/assertive dimensions are high priority for deprogramming because they are most capable of choosing to do it themselves once their realizations go supercritical. We need to find a cure/prevention for fairy-tales-are-real-and-im-going-to-tell-people-in-the-dentist-office norwoodism.

MKULTRA type projects probably focus on extending traditional normie-focused spray-and-pray propaganda to less agreeable/conforming, more distrustful/empirical, most innocently cerebral victims.

Patrick Casey had Steve Sailer on his stream not too long ago and he said something somewhat related to this that caught my attention. It was in response to the question of whether he believed Whites may be predisposed to gullibility, referencing migrants in Europe as a current example. I'm paraphrasing, but he brought up the big five personality traits and said his guess is that if you group the results by race you'd more than likely find that Europeans score highest on openness, which implies that they are less "clannish" than other races. The double-edged sword being that higher openness means that Whites have the gifts of ingenuity, creativeness, curiosity, but at the same time will more easily accept "diversity," which is really just propaganda itself in practice. This likely wasn't too big of an issue in the past since the majorities of individuals, the various masses, would more often be sedentary to their localities or general regions. Now, however, the heterogeneity of countries and cultures, and access to movement and information, is probably what allows the less open, more clannish groups that only care about their own interests ("...") to dominate the propaganda realm.

I haven't personally looked into it deeply although it seems interesting and sounds plausible enough, but I know that a lot of HBD has to be taken with a grain of salt because it treads a very fine line.

[Zed]

1. People naturally align with the interests of their milieu. If they are disconnected or detached from it, they will gravitate towards oppositional/critical viewpoints.

2. That is basic - but it is useless to utilize the concept of 'propaganda' - itself is a kind of dated cultural bugbear, designed to delegitimize oppositional viewpoints.

Ultimately, one has to step back and recognize most people do not engage with the conceptual world in the autistic/disconnected mode - the mode which seeks to scrutinize and test models, hypotheses and theories. For most, the fields of gravity are determined by the nature of what is regarded as 'good' by their cohort. 'Propaganda' is simply a method of establishing the goods and oughts of a given cohort, and this is the universal task within any norm construction process. As such, complete natural immunity to this belongs to either the psychopath or the true tist.

But what of those who are neither psychopathic or autistic? Those who are just mostly normal - yet find themselves quietly revolting to the Zeitgeist?


 Now, one can reframe the question in terms of the efficacy of the memes themselves, and the answer seems pretty straightforward: Does the 'propaganda'  grants you status, or does it lower it? More personally, how much must one efface themselves to become 'good'?

Imagine an alternative universe: What if - rather than mainstreaming the concepts of 'white privilege' during the Treyvon Martin early-BLM era - the libs instead pushed the meme that overcoming racism was a heroic duty. That the white man who fought for equality was the greatest of men, the most benevolent. That his willingness to accept sacrifices in the name of making a better world for everyone was a proof his inherent nobility... and that to do otherwise was to mark oneself as fundamentally low class. Would young white men have recoiled from this to the degree that they recoiled from what actually happened? Or would they see such a frame favorability, as offering a chance to gain status, and long to be regarded in heroic terms?

Of course, that didn't happen - and the the memes specifically attacked and targeted white men. For those who valued being good most, the sacrifice was easy to make. But for those who valued their status, their own pride shielded them from the worst acts of self-depreciation, and deepened their own sense of disconnection/detachment... if good required them to be less then, then their pride would compel them to reject that good entirely.

[dane]

1. People naturally align with the interests of their milieu. If they are disconnected or detached from it, they will gravitate towards oppositional/critical viewpoints.

2. That is basic - but it is useless to utilize the concept of 'propaganda' - itself is a kind of dated cultural bugbear, designed to delegitimize oppositional viewpoints.

Ultimately, one has to step back and recognize most people do not engage with the conceptual world in the autistic/disconnected mode - the mode which seeks to scrutinize and test models, hypotheses and theories. For most, the fields of gravity are determined by the nature of what is regarded as 'good' by their cohort. 'Propaganda' is simply a method of establishing the goods and oughts of a given cohort, and this is the universal task within any norm construction process. As such, complete natural immunity to this belongs to either the psychopath or the true tist.

But what of those who are neither psychopathic or autistic? Those who are just mostly normal - yet find themselves quietly revolting to the Zeitgeist?


 Now, one can reframe the question in terms of the efficacy of the memes themselves, and the answer seems pretty straightforward: Does the 'propaganda'  grants you status, or does it lower it? More personally, how much must one efface themselves to become 'good'?

Imagine an alternative universe: What if - rather than mainstreaming the concepts of 'white privilege' during the Treyvon Martin early-BLM era - the libs instead pushed the meme that overcoming racism was a heroic duty. That the white man who fought for equality was the greatest of men, the most benevolent. That his willingness to accept sacrifices in the name of making a better world for everyone was a proof his inherent nobility... and that to do otherwise was to mark oneself as fundamentally low class. Would young white men have recoiled from this to the degree that they recoiled from what actually happened? Or would they see such a frame favorability, as offering a chance to gain status, and long to be regarded in heroic terms?

Of course, that didn't happen - and the the memes specifically attacked and targeted white men. For those who valued being good most, the sacrifice was easy to make. But for those who valued their status, their own pride shielded them from the worst acts of self-depreciation, and deepened their own sense of disconnection/detachment... if good required them to be less then, then their pride would compel them to reject that good entirely.

I suppose then it might be, in the case of young people/children who are not psychos or spergs, the values already tought to them by their parents. The meme about all normies being racist if the narrative was reversed seems true, and the case of christian normie zoomers here in Denmark are insanely disgusted by and rejecting the yearly celebration of self-chosen castration in the month of june.

[Guest]

@Zed brings up a lot of good points. When I think propaganda, I use it to invoke this entire sort of norm-generating sphere. Propaganda is slow work, not fast.

Of all big 5 traits, openness seems like the one most worthy of further decomposition. (followed by agreeableness, neuroticism and conscientiousness) Homosexuals have high openness and high agreeableness, including lesbians no matter how much they posture as masculine. This seems indicative of a more deep openness that makes the self ephemeral. If I am openminded for assessing multiple conflicting ideas, they are open-souled for simulating multiple personalities (BPD).

[Elfenlied]

I've seen something interesting both with myself and others, that some types sense the bullshit of narratives, explanations, etc. right away. I've always been like this and thought it was normal until I became a teenager and saw too many of my fellow peers follow obnoxious orders "because the teacher say so".

The most interesting example I can recall was when the group of my friends got divided. Think chud and tranny growing up as friends before splitting apart. And it all happened over Harry Potter. Me, some friends and my "crush" or whatever 12-year-olds call love found the good guys of this story to be so goofy, so lacking, so anti-everything-cool that we embraced the bad side, the purebloods, the ones with family history and honor. Had that skull & snake tattoo on my forearm, painted with some sharpies. Total school drama over such a simple story. The ones who were "good" are all know trannies, leftists or activists.

So the question is: do you have similar experiences with children/young teens "calling out" the fake and gay narratives and what do you think about it?

Part of it is as you say purely based around coolness. The Empire in Star Wars, Nazis in nu-Wolfenstein, etc, etc, villains in modern western media just happen to far cooler and more interesting than their heroic counterparts, who are just "plucky democratic resistance" recycled a thousand times over. On some instinctual level, the villainous groups as they are portrayed are simply cooler to many young white men. Perhaps my first redpill was being young and watching Star Wars episode 3 and being infatuated with Anakin's character in the movie, or always thinking the "faceless gas mask guys" in media are the coolest. As has been referenced in this thread, there's plenty of Bowden material that gets at why exactly modern heroes are so boring. I don't think it would be reaching to say that purely an identification with "villains" in media when young leads to an identification with "villains" in history when older. Most villains in modern media are to a large degree white-coded, which reinforces this for young white men.

Aside from that, pure contrarianism, "edginess", and low-agreeability all play a role.

[Elfenlied]

I want to expand a little further since this thread has reminded me, perhaps it’s a topic for another thread and I don’t want to derail this one, but I’ve been observing recently the rapid growth of the “stoic” archetype as the peak on male heroism. This is of course an age-old recurring trope but it has recently become a cultural mainstay in light of its popularization with manga among zoomers. What brought this to my attention was this recent “I have no enemies” meme:

https://youtu.be/-Djq3QihTyA 

https://youtu.be/Jk5vqznK-uQ

If you read the comments, it’s a general attitude towards a masculinity and a healthy disposition towards a world which young men have increasingly come to view as cruel towards them. That or chinaman philosophy. Internet stoicism is a deeply related current which has been around for some time, posed as a healthy, “based” PUA-adjacent masculine approach to life. Embrace that suffering will happen but do nothing against it or correct it. The apex of masculine heroism is to simply withdraw and “find peace” like Guts, or Musashi, or Thorfinn. Be a wholesome solitary warrior who forgives and does good but is not someone to hecking mess around with.

Where I think this is interesting is how it comes together with the the discussion of heroism in this thread. Characters like Guts or Musashi are “cool”, but they are also a kind of cool which is perfectly acceptable to our gynocratic society. I had the thought the other day that I feel as though a character similar to Guts post-Lost Children arc could be written by a woman, but a character like Griffith could only ever be written by a man. Griffith despite his androgynous appearance oddly feels like a more masculine character than Guts at many points in the story. He is ambitious, masterful, bellicose, and above all seeks to reshape the world in his vision. He could maybe be called Nietzschean in a way. Guts on the other hand feels like after a certain point in the story he could be a character in a female fantasy romance novel. “Strong aloof guy who hates everyone but secretly has a soft spot for that one girl”. I like Berserk, and Guts, and I don’t wish to denigrate his character, but I have always felt a sympathy to Griffith over him for those reasons. Griffith feels like a man who refuses to accept the world and transcends lower existence, while Guts simply accepts it and struggles on while abandoning his ambitions.

There was a thread on old Amarna getting at similar topics re: masculinity and heroism in media, but I don’t see any other threads at the moment. Stoic characters like Guts display that your nature is violence and ambition, but that rebelling against that nature to become a withdrawn stoic is virtuous rather than imposing yourself upon the world. I see this as a general trend in politics as well, young men’s discontent towards the world being sublimated in homesteading or a sole focus on self-improvement. The seeking of individual rather than political solutions.

As a bonus, here’s a Twitter post from a (presumably) tranimal that blew up.

https://twitter.com/sewagecrow/status/16...86624?s=46 

“Human” here is a man who has rendered himself harmless and ejected his anger, instincts, and discontent in favor of wholesome chungusness. I think this is very common and influential precisely because it presents a vision of a “healthy”, “cool”, masculinity and heroism but does not also threaten libtarded or gynocratic norms.

[Guest]

https://twitter.com/sewagecrow/status/16...86624?s=46

“Human” here is a man who has rendered himself harmless and ejected his anger, instincts, and discontent in favor of wholesome chungusness. I think this is very common and influential precisely because it presents a vision of a “healthy”, “cool”, masculinity and heroism but does not also threaten libtarded or gynocratic norms.

I like that trope the coaler references but mostly because it allows one to follow the derivation of human instincts towards things step by step. When well done it is like a masterclass in natural law- albeit typically fuzzy in one or two areas where by all rights the character should be a baseline psychopath instead of a baseline human. It only gets really coaly when they deny parts of natural law as le heckin irrational, typically vengeance or moralizing violence.

[anthony]

I want to expand a little further since this thread has reminded me, perhaps it’s a topic for another thread and I don’t want to derail this one, but I’ve been observing recently the rapid growth of the “stoic” archetype as the peak on male heroism. This is of course an age-old recurring trope but it has recently become a cultural mainstay in light of its popularization with manga among zoomers. What brought this to my attention was this recent “I have no enemies” meme:

https://youtu.be/-Djq3QihTyA 

https://youtu.be/Jk5vqznK-uQ

If you read the comments, it’s a general attitude towards a masculinity and a healthy disposition towards a world which young men have increasingly come to view as cruel towards them. That or chinaman philosophy. Internet stoicism is a deeply related current which has been around for some time, posed as a healthy, “based” PUA-adjacent masculine approach to life. Embrace that suffering will happen but do nothing against it or correct it. The apex of masculine heroism is to simply withdraw and “find peace” like Guts, or Musashi, or Thorfinn. Be a wholesome solitary warrior who forgives and does good but is not someone to hecking mess around with.

Vinland Saga is interesting. It gives us a few different trajectories of manhood, and while we could say the main one is kind of lame or corrupted, the fact the others are also present and presented in more or less pure and honest forms is a testament to the creator's integrity, regardless of what he ultimately believes.

Askeladd is sad and troubled, but lives his whole life with purpose and drive even as he accumulates regrets. He doesn't let them get to him. He wants to make a particular mark upon the world and does. We could interpret his life as a kind of tragedy, that his energies and talents were focused into such a cruel and narrow mode of existence, but within that he was alive, and was connected to and living for something greater. Only so much of a man's humanity can flower in a life devoted to violence, but something Vinland Saga does not deny is that there is something there even in the basest of them. They're alive, vigorous, impressive, and often happy. Often also suffering, terrified, could meet an awful end. It's a very dramatic existence. They never got to develop deep relations with land and generational community of the kind we see in the farming arc, many of these men don't have families as far as we know. They don't get to experience the life of the mind or meaningfully contemplate anything beyond their immediate circumstances like the English monk. But they also do not have the lives of warriors. Nobody is better. Life seems to split itself into streams and channels which all afford different opportunities, have different limits, and shape men in different ways.

Thorfinn's father is presented as a kind of ideal. But it's undeniable that the traits which ultimately make him admired and respected are those he cultivated as a warrior. A way of life he didn't just leave, but actively betrayed. And as we see in the next generation of farmer's sons produced by the Icelandic society he chose to join, the alternative path he chose robs men of certain strengths. The Icelanders are very civil and decent people, but they cannot awe and impress. And they also cannot defend themselves.

There is perhaps a balance that can be achieved between all of the different paths before humanity, one which builds full and satisfying lives without creating weakness or intolerable compromise. I don't think Vinland Saga claims to have answers, but it does seem to say we need to look honestly at the world and each other to get closer. I didn't read all of it, but I never got the impression it was being dishonest about the nature of humanity.

And main thing I wanted to talk about with Vinland Saga, I really liked its characterisation of Canute.



I think he's the character who has the most interesting time with these questions Vinland Saga is about. He's a product of a new and delicate subculture adopted within a completely opposing overculture of sanguinary adventure and violence. He's a hothouse flower cultivated in the middle of a jungle. But this does not make him weak or worthless. The fine degree to which his nature and character have been allowed to develop give him an outsider's perspective on his own world (but of course it's not really his anymore). He is able to think differently to his subjects.

At first this difference appears to only manifest as weakness and a general unsuitedness for facing the world. But it's more complex than that. First we see the strengths of civility, he's beautiful, of course. And he's also got a strong aptitude for fine crafts, skilled tasks, manipulation and artifice. We see him cooking. He both appreciates food and can do impressive things with it. He can grasp fine complexities which are lost on those around him.

But beyond that his nature is fine, but not brittle. He is very averse to violence, but in a far more noble fashion than is common in our own time. Canute was raised a Christian in a fashion which taught him he was meant he was to face the world with a unique moral strength. He is upset and appalled by violence and humanity's capacity for cruelty, but he does not run. He doesn't shut his eyes to it. He believes that he has a duty not only to see the world for what it is, but also confront it.

His initial responses are perhaps somewhat neurotically Christian in a sense we might recognise in Christians of our own time. He executes the impressive, if not miraculous feat of calming a man driven berserk with bloodlust by calmly embracing him. But his experiences do not drive him to a total faith or devotion to pacifism. Instead they morally harden him.



Canute is in possession of the most advanced consciousness of all the characters in the story, aside from maybe the purer Christian monk character, who fully embraces the limits, implications, and consequences of his strict values. Canute is capable of seeing himself, everyone else, and their entire society and way of life from a superior perspective. This being the case, he is capable of deliberately thinking out the nature of the different streams of life taken by his people. He is not personally carried by any particular one. The integrity and openness inculcated by his Christian upbringing paired with his experiences of the world have rendered him an outsider.

He can see socialisation and culture as forces acting upon men, and potentially as tools to be deliberately harnessed towards particular ends. I said above that Thorfinn's father crossed streams. He arguably ended up in a happy middle by chance. But he arguably failed his son and his people by failing to work out a sustainable and desirable balance between the characteristics of different lives. He thought to use his strength to compensate for the shortcomings of his chosen second life, and failed. He was wrong.

What Thorfinn's father haphazardly arranged for himself as ran from frustrations and pursued desires Canute decides to pursue directly and deliberately. With a clear and principled vision. He has become a true man of civilisation. His aim is to cultivate humanity beyond the boundaries of any unconscious way of life. The warriors, the farmers, and the holy men are all borderline static figures in the story alongside Canute. They might feel regrets or pain, sometimes wish they were one or the other, but nothing is meaningfully going to change. Thorfinn's father and the Vinland dream are ultimately retreats from human nature. Their results if they worked as planned would likely be deeply disappointing. And more importantly. They simply don't. The historic Thorfinn did try to settle Vinland and failed. Thorfinn's father dies at the beginning of the story and fails to pass on a coherent and workable set of values which will seed a new culture.

But Canute can. Canute is the ideal civilised man. He's an idealist hardened by brave confrontations with human nature. Like Thorfinn's father he appreciates the opportunities peace affords humanity. If anything far more so as a prince who probably had the most sophisticated upbringing of anybody within their entire broader culture. He understands what peace can secure for humanity. But he also understands that aspiration is expensive (Thorfinn's father was a frontier man living on subsistence) and that force doesn't vanish from the world just because you want it to.

The farming arc ends with some warriors becoming farmers. This is not a transformation into higher men. It is an uncomfortable exchange of one limited existence for another. You can beat your sword into a ploughshare if you want, but does that make human existence better, or just different? Canute is quite arguably no longer a Christian after his hardening, or we could say he becomes a far more advanced one. A Christian of a Europe otherwise centuries ahead of his peers. He does not beat swords into ploughshares. He instead uplifts warriors from thoughtless, indefinite, pre-historic cycles of animalistic (in the sense of simplicity and organic repetition, not evil or stupidity) violence and directs them towards specialised and particular goals which will allow their society to become more complex, specialised, and hopefully more human. One could say that he aspires to end the organic streams of human existence, and even end the entire old and traditional cultures of his people by finally initiating them into history and rendering them all self conscious.

This is what it really means to transcend barbarity. You can try to put yourself back in the box, but that doesn't work. You won't be happy and the world will still come for you. In our own time this means that the answer to the decline of civility and even the impending dark age of civilisation is not to become an animal or run and hide, but fight for civility. We are all conscious men now. We cannot go back, and I won't debase myself by embracing low and inhuman standards the finer parts of humanity worked so hard to put behind us. In my own way I consider myself a Christian, or at least I believe in human moral destiny. And for better or worse that means that I do have enemies.

[Johnny Meachair]

One of my most cherished memories is when all the boys in my AP English class, during a screening of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, stood up and applauded the gassing of the title character