Hello children!

It is I, ST, your friendly neighborhood Troubadour. I hope everyone is excited because I have a new story for you all. You're gonna love this one it’s called “The song of Sir Theatrikos”:

There once was a knight called Theatrikos,

His blade it was rusty and filled with dross,

His shoes were so old that they grew moss,

He saw himself champion of the cross,

The reason for such ideas on his part?

Every fiend, villain, ghost, specter, hound, and wizard he came across,

would yield on his record a brand new loss,

But he wont a man whom that exhausts,

He thought to calvary it drew him closs,

You see children, Sir Theatrikos believed in a certain code of honor. He believed that a man had a choice between getting what he wants in life and living honorably, and so each defeat, in his eyes, was just a sign that he was still on the right path.

Others believed his behavior to be quite gross,

about his feelings of supriority, they spread out goss,

so that one noon when he had his doss,

He was strangled by others with a strand of floss.

The moral, my dear children, is of course

That you shouldn’t be a conservative in our postmodern world!

Ok, but why start this Substack out with such an elongated allegory? Two reasons. One: As a man with 4 younger siblings, being patronizing brings great joy to my hardened heart. Two: Any consideration of the topic at hand requires the internalized knowledge that for the last 100 years those “fighting against the decay of the west” have been largely the same kind of self-congratulating losers as my fictional Sir Theatrikos. The romance of the nightfall over the land-of-the-evening (otherwise known as the west) has grown depressingly deep determination within many of the western world. Pagan nonsense like “we are living through the Kali Yuga” abounds to give people a sense of noble defeatism that justifies all their endeavors turning to dust before their very eyes.

The Mushroom

On September 3 1928 (which for my American readers would be 6 days and 73 years BNE), Alexander Fleming discovered that the Penicillium Rubens mushroom was able to kill Bacteria. Although at first, this seemed like an intellectual curiosity more than anything else it would eventually spark one of the biggest revolutions in the history of medicine: antibiotics.

Antibiotics are a curious medicine. They exist to combat a living entity, infectious bacteria, which constantly changes and evolves. Every use of antibiotics to kill bacteria brings with it the risk that it spawns an evolved colony of more resistant bacteria, which requires a newly developed batch of antibiotics. As such antibiotics present war between man and wild, the artificial against the natural, the blade against the dross, and the shoe against the moss.

But hold on a second! Didn’t we pluck that mushroom from a forest somewhere? It’s part of nature, so why doesn’t it evolve to help us? Why do we have to painstakingly come up with antibiotics where bacteria can just hang around and do whatever they did before?

It seems that nature’s power of evolution only helps those endeavors that align themselves with the nature of its constituents.

At this point, it should be pointed out that I use the word “nature” in its proper meaning. Explanation here:

It is in the mushroom’s nature to defend itself against the Bacteria that might harm it and so it evolved to defend itself against them, it is not in its nature to protect us from what harms us, and therefore we cannot use its evolutionary property for ourselves. Unless medicine complements our human nature it will always be artificial, always be the sweat of our brow, always be an insurmountable struggle against nature itself.

Tlaxcala
The Aztec empire was grounded in a belief in finite energy. The energy of the Universe was finite and the gods needed access to it. The logical conclusion was terrible: Each day Aztec high priests needed to commit a human sacrifice to give their Gods the energy needed to continue the Universe. If the sun was to shine tomorrow, man would have to die today.

Modern society isn’t much different. Those who have no concept of divinity continuously and unceasingly invent new doomsday scenarios: peak oil, overpopulation, solar flares and about a hundred other scenarios dreamt up by disaster prophets that are working in the UN and Rockefeller think-tanks all amount to essentially the same belief as the Aztecs finite energy. They often even call for the same measures the Aztecs knew: Population control, awareness of “mother earth”, predictive models, and: Tlaxcala.

Tlaxcala was a city not far from the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Whereas the Aztecs conquered a myriad of cities as they expanded through the Mexican region they would never conquer Tlaxcala. As such the city became a thorn of hostility surrounded by the empire. Never strong enough to become a serious threat but also never defeated Tlaxcala became one of the primary targets of the Aztec's phony wars. Such wars were not fought to conquer but rather to keep the Aztec machine running, they provided the empire with a running supply of captives they could sacrifice and a steady amount of regular battles that trained up its soldiers into hardened veterans.

Thus the Aztecs mounted themselves on a perpetual motion machine of war that slowly grew their empire ever more powerful. The Aztecs used the very nature of their civilization (and that of Tlaxcala’s) to lock each other into an eternal battle that kept the empire on its toes and away from decay. Yet it was the same “controlled threat” of Tlaxcala that, with the arrival of the conquistadors, would spell doom to the Aztec empire.

War as medicine

Whereas the army of a political entity consists of people, the army of a body consists of its immune system. The immune system is an incredibly destructive force. So destructive in fact that, if it weren’t held in check by the body, it would kill the body. The only thing the immune system really needs to do to wipe out diseases in the body is to acquire a certain amount of knowledge about them. Once that knowledge has been attained the rest usually turns into a matter of time. Where the mushroom is an unnatural way to combat disease, the immune system is our own, natural, answer to whatever the rest of the wild tries to throw at us, it learns, it adapts, it overcomes (So it’s only a matter of time until it will be known best for displaying curious hydration preferences on the Discovery Channel).

So, if we can somehow boost the immune system, can we have a lasting effect against diseases?

Oh yes! Introducing: Vaccines.

Known from movies such as “Where did Polio go?”, “The last days of Chicken Pox” and “Goodbye Measles” people often think our friend is being typecast as an all smiles, all American superhero, but that is mostly because his more controversial billings as a villain in productions such as “Polio the last days: Monkey Madness” and “Turns out there was no chicken-pox but I got Guillain-Barre syndrome anyways” got much less press.

What Tlaxcala was for the Aztec empire, Vaccines are for the body, by helping the body fight a weakened version of a Virus they train it up to easily handle the real deal. The results speak for themselves, nowadays the only version of yellow fever people in the developed world have to worry about comes with a culture shock and a set of overly demanding in-laws.

But the other dynamism of Tlaxcala, as the incubator of great destruction, can also be found. Like in the previously mentioned, straight to DVD, prequel to the Polio eradication “Polio the last days: Monkey Madness” for example. Here we had a possible hint that disease contaminated vaccines could be conducive to the development of cancers in the recipients’ bodies: https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/polio-vaccine-and-simian-virus

Far from being an exact science, vaccines need to be screened and tested to make sure that they don’t hold unintended consequences.

Artificial life

The idea of artificial life is very old. Many say its first iteration was the Jewish mythos of the Golem. This grouping of people is marked by the wider signifier of: Morons! The fact of the matter is that the core symbology of artificial life is a constant of human history. Whether it’s the cackling of a hyena or the uncanny valley effect experienced when interacting with a robot with a humanoid, silicone, face, man automatically recoils from grotesque parodies of life and has held them always as the monsters that creep at night.

Artificial life is something deeply scary to us. It is the rejection of nature in its base form, artificial things don’t have a nature, they are dead, and if they perpetuate themselves they must do so by feeding upon the living.

Is everything artificial bad then? No. But artificial life is, because where life is there is an essence, and where there is an essence there is a nature, yet the artificial life lacks both and is, therefore, neither living nor animate: a puppet. Puppets too are not bad per se but it is when they cease to be held by strings that they become the stuff of nightmares.

Anti-Vaxx 2: Panic and the Boogaloo

When the, by now infamous, Covid-19 (henceforth only referred to as “the coof” because I am not a nerd) started spreading out from China into the west, those in alliance with the western power structure commonly referred to as “the cathedral” found themselves in a very new position. For the very first time in their lives, they parroted Anti-Vaxx rhetoric. Yet if you know that politics is basically just schoolyard drama on a civilizational scale, that shouldn’t be very surprising to you. If the nerd does a kickflip, kickflips are uncool, if the cool-kid likes comics, comics cease to be nerdy. When the “right guy” was back in the oval office, all this rhetoric was immediately abandoned and the pressure was now on to get the damn jab.

But none of that is new or interesting. So what gives?

Why right-wingers lose

When the pendulum swung back and the Cathedral forced the west to Vaccinate, right-wingers, once again taking up an alliance with those camps that are critical of governance and power, produced the same arguments their opponents had just weeks before: The Vaccine is untested, there could be unforeseen consequences, etc…

Now the job of every right-wing pundit, thinker, and commentator is to now say: “Well these are reasonable arguments, factually correct and true but…”

I shall do no such thing!

None of the arguments really stick.

If you think this is a matter of science or discussion you are deluding yourself.

If you think this is a matter of principle you are deluding yourself.

If you think this is a matter of sovereignty, or politics, or human rights, or decency, you are deluding yourself.

The reason you don’t want to get the Vaxx is that your gut feeling about it is bad and as such you are perfectly willing to believe whatever random article you find on Twitter/Telegram/4chan… that speaks badly about it.

This is why you lose.

So should you stop listening to your gut feeling about it?

No!

But you have to step back from all of that medical discussion/political commentary/principled philosophy/conspiracy/whatever BS and actually start to think about why your gut feels the way it does. Never, ever discard your feelings. Rationalizing them is just a hidden method of doing just that.

And mind you: If you do anything else, any other kind of commentary, any other kind of attack at the Vaxx, you will only end up strengthening the current dystopia. Because demanding better testing, or more transparency, or more discussion does not stop medical tyranny, it just asks it to perform better.

The pagan west

In my last (and very first) substack piece I already outlined how paganism entered the west through the back, so I won’t bother repeating it here. Instead, I want to draw attention to the world it created.

The world that followed WWII, the world where Olympia once again became an event of international prestige and where Christianity once again became the world’s most persecuted religion. It was this period that made charity equivalent to donation and trust transactional. It was this period that saw John Lennon and the Hippy movement forcefully brutalize the mystical body of love itself. It was this period that unleashed, in full force, the ideas of Theosophy and Steiner onto my home country of Germany, making so many of my fellow countrymen into those germans. It was this period that took the cadaver of the west, attached strings to a dead man, and continued to parade around the rotting corpse as a puppet of its misery. It is the very presence of this period that your body recoils against.

Everything about the post-war period was artificial. For example, entire theories of economics were written about why this brave new world was here, and here to stay. Not one thought to mention that since 1945, the US-Navy guarded and guaranteed the trade of every economically successful, and/or soon to be successful, country on earth, the first time something like this had ever happened in history.

Democracies sprung up left, right and center and any sociologist who wanted to make it big saw fit to stress how natural, and naturally superior, democracy was as a political system. Not one thought to mention the aggressiveness in United States foreign policy to hoist democracy upon nations, whether they wanted it or not.

Martin Luther King Jr stood up to the US Government and tore down the walls that divided black and white whilst chroniclers manically mapped his memoranda. Not one thought to mention that behind him stood the collective force of America’s Super-rich which had chosen him as the challenger to the naturally much more popular Malcolm X.

This period had forsaken the natural for the artificial. This period had forgotten love.

This may be hard to see at first, but only love makes sense of suffering and loss and sickness. And oh how this period feared and hated suffering, loss, and sickness.

AIDS

There is no better disease to understand disease than HIV/AIDS. At a time at which sexual immorality and sodomy ran rampant AIDS should’ve made clear what was written so long ago: The wages of Sin are death. It was after all a disease almost exclusively reserved to the unchaste. If you lived a virtuous life, abstinent from sodomy and content in marriage or celibacy, your chances of catching the disease were almost non-existent. Yet, modern man does not see the instruments of his suffering as anything but cruelty and so he cursed God and handed out condoms. That is what modern medicine is, beautifully analogized by penicillin it allows man to temporarily spite the nature of creation and his place in it, it makes him into his own God who needs not concern himself with mortal problems such as broken bones or viruses.

The early 2010’s despair culture, a sorrowful scream of a child that had been born into the arms of the western ghoul (although most of it was quickly eaten up and commercialized), hit the nail on the head when Icon for Hire included “Iodine” in their 2011 album Scripted.

The old Christian understanding of disease, disease as a fact of life that alerts us to our shortcomings, makes us ponder death, and ultimately redirects us to the redeemer that makes all of it worth it, had long been forgotten. But human nature has a telos and that telos is, and ever shall be, God. And where vaccines once started as a complement to human nature they are now abuse of his nature to enable man to avoid its Telos.

This position did not mean that we could not fight disease, but that fight was only an accident of humanity’s eternal struggle towards communion with God and in that way fully complemented our nature. Now that we have made an idol of our own ability to combat disease we have beheld a disease that we cannot cure, cannot detect, and cannot eradicate using vaccines. The correct reaction, as with all courses of divine punishment and even those that aren’t, is humility. To accept that disease is a fact of life and that we cannot overcome it, to humble ourselves before creation, and to prepare for a world where the virus is here to stay. To return to the old normal.

But the Cathedral is proud.

Very proud.

And the right-wing?

Why the right-wing (really) loses and what the conflict of postmodernity is about.

The Cathedral is as conservative as it gets. It is the inheritor of all of western history, all of it. It’s Christianity and its turn away from God. The heart of Saint Francis and the debased violence of the french revolutionaries. The cunning of Metternich and the mindless lust for power of Charles Gustav of Sweden.

The rightwing wants to conserve parts of this. It wants to keep the good and shed the bad, just as the Cathedral wants to periodically distance itself from various parts of its history and so rejects its own inheritance. It is often said that conservatives conserve progressivism, they do, but that is not the problem, the problem is that they do so unwillingly. That way they become the left wings Tlaxcala, a phony enemy to be constantly consumed in endless phony wars keeping the ghoul alive. Progressivism, properly understood, however, can be so much more, it can be the red strand that connects father to son and mother to daughter, the weave that honors the past by carrying it into the future. The fulfillment of the commandment to honor your parents. Because when the conquistadors came into Tlaxcala they carried around their necks a cross, a cross that made them not understand a world of finite energy for they knew of a world of infinite mercy. And it was this fundamental misunderstanding, this difference between the Gods of the Aztecs and the one true God of Christianity that, with nothing but a handful of men, toppled the empire of the plumed serpent.

To honor your parents means to love them fully and unconditionally, to take up their mantle in both its glory and its disgrace. You need not celebrate the disgrace but accept it, wear it and endure it. And this is not just something to be done as a civilization but for each of us. So often would we like to shed from us persons we once were and say “he is not me anymore”, but this is folly, instead we must say “he made me who I am today, whether that is good or bad I do not know” only that is how we can travel forward in time. Because we can only hold on to our love if we hold on to our suffering, and we can only hold on to our highest moments if we also keep our lowest. Because if we fully embrace the past we make our next step into the future.

The conflict of postmodernity is about one simple thing: Modernity failed. It already collapsed and we had some 80 years during which we were able to artificially prop it up. The Cathedral sits in an ivory tower, desperately trying to keep it from faltering and western civilization sits below desperately trying not to get hit by the first piles of rubble that are shaking loose. The only question that remains is: Do you love the west unconditionally? Are you willing to shoulder its good and its bad? Its Aquinas and its Foucault? Its symphonies and its miseries? Its martial crusaders and its pacifist monks? It’s blessed Charles and it’s Oliver Cromwell.

Do you love the west for what it is? Or for what you imagine it to be? Can you bring forth in yourself the love that brings the life the west needs? Or only the apathy that brings death? Do you truly care for things to be better? Or do you not?

And if you don’t.

Then what are you doing?

Congratulating yourself for your own demise?