You don’t realize it today, for the societies we’ve built for ourselves are quite comfortable in comparison to nature, but we’re all engaged in the true struggle: the fight for survival. Many might claim this fight for survival doesn’t exist anymore. Mankind has “won.” We’ve moved beyond it. As Fukuyama said, we are at the “end of history.” But I counter with my best Jonathan Bowden voice, “history never ends.” The fight for survival involves us all and you ignore it at your own peril.
Excellent piece. The conquest of space is absolutely essential, not for economic benefit alone, but as a spiritual duty. Only on the sharp-edged periphery between savage wilderness and civilized comfort can man become what he truly is. There is no wilderness more savage than space, no civilization more comfortable than the one we've built; the contrast between the two will breed gods and monsters.
I believe it's precisely for this reason that space colonization has been slow-walked by the managerial state. The occupational class fears what might come of it.
As you say it will not be states that accomplish this great work. It will be private groups, men of vision and means - Musk is the prototype but there will be more following him. The New World also was conquered mainly by ambitious men acting on their own initiative, in the nominal name of their kings but largely with their own funding and for their own reasons.
The focus on race just isn't compatible with Americanism. Of course in group preference is a thing, but you can forge in group preferences. I don't think the assumption that there is an innate sense that people of the same race are kin.
Agreed that we need new challenges to overcome and new frontiers to explore in order to fully realize and express our own humanity. With America as she is, there's no way to make it an ethno-state without some serious bloodshed and becoming untethered from the values that have defined America at her best. Jay Rollins at Wonderland Rules substack has talked about a civic nationalism, which I believe is the best way forward. The obsession with race as a metric for defining citizens' participation in society was a mistake when the Jim Crow segregationists did it; it's a mistake now that the wokester morons are doing it with their DEI bullshit; and it would be a mistake to push for white people to counter wokeist weakness with a white nationalist movement. Racial identity politics, whether done by whites or by blacks, will result in a Pyhrric victory and turn the nation into Lebanon or the Balkans. We're all in this boat together.
Maybe, since we're already an empire (globohomo), we need a Caesar to at least make it an empire based on values of strength and civic virtue, as opposed to being defined by consumerist gluttony and racial grievance hysteria. But if the would-be Caesar makes it about race, it's a wrap. We'll be warring against each other like the Sunni vs Shia fighting in post-invasion Iraq, and it'll take years or decades before we attain the cultural stability to undertake any real exploration of space or any other frontier.
The Fight for Survival
Excellent piece. The conquest of space is absolutely essential, not for economic benefit alone, but as a spiritual duty. Only on the sharp-edged periphery between savage wilderness and civilized comfort can man become what he truly is. There is no wilderness more savage than space, no civilization more comfortable than the one we've built; the contrast between the two will breed gods and monsters.
I believe it's precisely for this reason that space colonization has been slow-walked by the managerial state. The occupational class fears what might come of it.
As you say it will not be states that accomplish this great work. It will be private groups, men of vision and means - Musk is the prototype but there will be more following him. The New World also was conquered mainly by ambitious men acting on their own initiative, in the nominal name of their kings but largely with their own funding and for their own reasons.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/just-look-up
The focus on race just isn't compatible with Americanism. Of course in group preference is a thing, but you can forge in group preferences. I don't think the assumption that there is an innate sense that people of the same race are kin.
Agreed that we need new challenges to overcome and new frontiers to explore in order to fully realize and express our own humanity. With America as she is, there's no way to make it an ethno-state without some serious bloodshed and becoming untethered from the values that have defined America at her best. Jay Rollins at Wonderland Rules substack has talked about a civic nationalism, which I believe is the best way forward. The obsession with race as a metric for defining citizens' participation in society was a mistake when the Jim Crow segregationists did it; it's a mistake now that the wokester morons are doing it with their DEI bullshit; and it would be a mistake to push for white people to counter wokeist weakness with a white nationalist movement. Racial identity politics, whether done by whites or by blacks, will result in a Pyhrric victory and turn the nation into Lebanon or the Balkans. We're all in this boat together.
Maybe, since we're already an empire (globohomo), we need a Caesar to at least make it an empire based on values of strength and civic virtue, as opposed to being defined by consumerist gluttony and racial grievance hysteria. But if the would-be Caesar makes it about race, it's a wrap. We'll be warring against each other like the Sunni vs Shia fighting in post-invasion Iraq, and it'll take years or decades before we attain the cultural stability to undertake any real exploration of space or any other frontier.
you cant say greeks "lived in a condition of barbarism" my friend. do you know what the word means?