What matters anymore?

We live in a post-political world. I realize that seems entirely contradictory to what we observe, but when politics became all, politics ceased to exist as a usable term. Usable terms by definition must be exclusionary in some way and politics fails that test. There is no longer anything politics does not encompass or touch, your paycheck, your church, your relationships, your workplace, your mental health and in the case of Joe Biden, your children. Politics has become all, and thus it has become nothing. In that hellish landscape, is there any reason to waste time and energy with anything that doesn’t keep you out of a boxcar in the next decade? Is anything outside our baser nature’s necessary, or are things like art, philosophy and religion just liabilities to our survival at this point?

Despite the fact that there are a great many who have the luxury of not having to worry what happens a decade past this current year, there exists the grand overarching question of ‘Why are we doing this, and why does it even matter?’ Not to be a sophist, but this is a fundamentally philosophical question. The answer is different for all of us, but there should be a common thread running through each answer. Unjustified suffering is insanity, and the mere continuation of genetic material via offspring is a poor explanation. Western civilization thrived in part because great men had grand visions and worked tirelessly to master a skill or subject. It was an outward looking, expansionistic worldview that sought knowledge as its own reward, and in that pursuit elevated even the common man to a place he had never been in the history of the world. It wasn’t all of them, but a large enough contingent to make the difference between mud huts and the Space Shuttle. The rebirth of civilization is the only worthy goal for us to collectively strive toward and endure whatever is required to achieve that goal.

Part and parcel of achieving that goal requires some decidedly unsexy disciplines. While everyone may feel better about themselves doing stationary mag dumps with split times and bizarrely named John Wick scenarios (bro I did a 2.3 on my Hungarian Bear Hostage Drill with my Zev on a cold bore!), your children’s children may be better served if you can also explain The Republic or City of God without using the paperweight formerly known as a Macbook Pro. The two are not mutually exclusive, but again if you cannot be a living memory and source of western civilization, what is the point of burning through a few more microns of your telomeres and some trips around the sun?

The right in America has always had an issue with presenting and being a vision for the future. This continues to be an issue to those who see the conflict brewing in our country. We failed to set conditions for victory in Vietnam and have failed ever since on a geopolitical scale, and that same problem is amplified in the political and culture war we are currently engaged in. The right has never set goals or conditions for victory, and it shows. Three percent of the population has incrementally changed the sexual norms of a nation, and done it by setting a goal to achieve and working in unison toward it. Philosophy, art, religion and the trappings of civilization matter because a crucial condition of victory for me is that civilization exists on this continent for my children. Your ability to shoot, move and communicate is for nothing if you do not have the requisite knowledge, education and discipline to transmit precisely what it is you are fighting for. You will have lived and died in vain, a locust who consumed and destroyed but was unable to rebuild anything in its place.

A large percentage of Gen Z has absolutely no frame of reference what living in a civilized country looks like. Most cannot remember 9/11 or that a world existed prior to smartphones and the internet, or the nuclear family. Few boomers and Gen X-ers have any idea how dire the situation is because people largely self-segregate, but we are less than a generation away from erasing huge swaths of our collective social memory. Sadly, is a great many people who purport to believe right-sided thinking do not practice what they preach. Erase Karl Marx from the history books and create a true tabula rasa beyond the wildest dreams of the Magical Parchment-worshippers, and his ideology would resurface in a generation. Philosophy matters because victory is not just the death of your enemies and the lamentation of their women, but the preservation and transmission of the core of our civilization. Survival is nothing if we are savages or our children grow up to be.

Philosophy, religion and the core principles of our existence matter now more than ever precisely because we are partisans. As circumstances largely beyond our control continue to burn the dross away from our lives, little things cease to matter. The character of the man next to you matters more than the caliber of his rifle. One will not matter in victory, the other will. The inability of 90%+ of the right I have met to articulate their views in a convincing way to the younger generation, and the lack of any desire to do so is disconcerting. The left has experienced success because of its outreach and tireless effort to convert people. Changing this requires leaving the echo chamber and dedicated study. It is difficult and often times you can’t quantify the results but is is absolutely necessary. Reality and most of my beliefs will not cease to exist, because they work better than the left’s. However if we sentence the next generation to rediscover civilization, we have lost. Gear and guns aren’t enough, they never were.