William Blake, The Voice of the Ancient Bard, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy Z, object 54, composed 1789, published 1826, Library of Congress, Washington
Thinking about some sub ideas after the idiot Gamma / high status socialization topic. It’s hardly exhausted, but it’s important not to get stale. The Band is on temporary hiatus while the second chapter of the metaphysics book is worked out and written. Short, less challenging subs can fill the gap until things normalize. For Band readers, a small update can be found as a postscript to this post. For Substack, something more accessible, interactive… sociable seems right. Curating some Band culture posts for accessibility to new readers. Social topics with potential applicability - healthy youth socialization, importance of sports, Alpha friends, Gamma parenting, etc. Feel free to fire away with suggestions. I have no problem taking up a good idea - for the love of Harambe, look how much has come from the SSH. And that wasn’t even suggested to me personally.
Eadwine at his desk, around 1147, illumination on parchment, from the Eadwine Psalter, Trinity College, Cambridge
This sub takes up a something timely - preserving memory at a time of [perpetual year zero until systemic collapse]. And some small civic duty. It’s Gen X’s destiny to be shut out of cultural dominance by demographics. Like the Silents who were the older parents of our friends. But we occupy a unique place between epochal shifts. And have memories and insights on what was right and what went wrong in building the House of Lies narrative. Unlike the repulsive boomers, a lot of us honor our ancestors and want to help how we can. The way the internet can cross age strata is a gift. Knowing Gen Zs looking for something more ennobling than soy and Satan have found the Band is beyond rewarding. Same for Millennial parents seeking the same for their children. There’s a lot they kept from you guys. And a good chunk of it has value for navigating this cultural brownfield. Or rebuilding real communities. So applicable oral history of the before times that really weren’t that long ago.
The motivation is necessity. There is an obvious effort to purge or adulterate all kinds of information for any number of synergistic reasons. A perfect storm of ideological year zero atavism, nothing works anymore, business failures, growing idiocy, corrupted “AI”, etc. And behind it all, the general information collapse that comes at the twilight of any era. We grew up in a golden age of information storage and access, but that’s already over. Recognize a ghost run and plan accordingly. Readers know there’s no dooming here. I hate blackpillers with a heat close to Gammas. Preserving knowledge and memory is the solution. It just means … wait for it … taking responsibility for your destiny.
Younger readers are especially victimized. The House of Lies is potent because it’s centralized and atomized. People are isolated and manipulated. Intergenerational bonds are a wreck. Popular “alternatives” on the internet abound with grifters, cucks, or controlled opposition. One of the most interesting things about socializing online - writing or commenting - is the range of contacts. My readers are a very small group in internet world, but far larger than I could to reach in analog times. And since I don’t push an agenda or program, different interests can find useful things. Readers range from teenagers to seniors and come from all over the world. It’s magical, but a responsibility. To pick up the slack for our parents’ failure as best I can and buffer the looming shock transition to reality for anyone amenable to listening.
Nikolay Kasatkin, Orphaned, 1891, oil on canvas, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
Note that this Substack draws on personal observation and experience. Its range is limited by its author in ways the Band isn’t. Generational and other generalizations come with two limits.
They’re generalizations. NA[X]ALT. Distinguish by the fruits. If the generalization doesn’t apply to you, a sane person can assess without emotional reaction. If there’s an emotional reaction, it applies to you. A lot of my generation bought into House of Lies nonsense. They’re terrible. Calling them out is irrelevant to me.
They’re personally sourced. Other Xers will have different experiences. I couldn’t care less personally, but they’re welcome to share for the same oral history reasons. Emotionally-charged adherence to type is a boomer thing. If this is troubling, consider it a sign to reflect on your life choices in a quiet place.
Anonymous artist, Lecture Hall mural, Beatles Ashram, Rishikesh, India
Extra note for parents of UHIQ children. They are eerily aware of their contexts, read far beyond NPC expectations, connect dots and chain implications intuitively, and remember anything significant forever. Childhood betrayals are indelibly imprinted. [Raw emotional trauma of a child’s tantrum] + [child’s sense of fairness] + [mnemonic permanence] = long term impacts that are impossible to convey. Instinctive relationship bonds can be bent or broken years before adult solipsists realize they were on the table. O the plus side, memories of what life was like are really clear. And how they flow together into the long tapestry of life that followed. Observe, read, react, requires the persistence of working memory. The foundation of my whole Marco Arc collapse projection was being able to remember the things that make it up.
Claiming Gen X grew up bipolar is hardly a new insight. Being at home in the analog and digital worlds has always been one of our generational traits. But there’s another split identity that isn’t exactly the same. We were also split between the sunny post-war Progress! side of the House of Lies and full-blown Clown World. Growing up in the noontide of the ascendant boomer - another experience impossible to convey if you weren’t there. Let Gen X hate for those locusts be the measure of what it was like. It was already obvious that the aforementioned Macro Arc was headed one way. But muh affairs, and finding myself, and booze, and trips, and gambling, and…
It was a bizarre time in hindsight. Split between two diametrically opposite social impulses. But children normalize what they know - hence what should be an ability to navigate the divide. So two sides, both internalized.
Early metastasis clown world, boomer “morality”, and t.v. as [the way things are].
The background of orderly pragmatic high trust culture.
All the things that were “edgy” and “boundary-pushing” for the boomers were the stuff we grew up on. Night terrors from watching The Exorcist because it came on and everyone was busy playing rumoli in the other room. Partying like the rock stars we were taught to admire from early teens. Drugs and music were harder and more intense and media and the street way more violent. We were the first generation to grow up normalized to 1000s of onscreen atrocities. Sex was reduced to hedonism as well. Not bombarded with porn, thank the Lord, but the merit of the sexual revolution and feminism were articles of faith. Boomer parents a) didn’t care and weren’t around or b) wanted to be [the cool parents an arrested development case wishes it had] and encouraged hedonistic behavior. “Kids will be kids, and I’d rather they do it here than throwing up or screwing in the bushes somewhere”.
Eugène Delacroix, The Barque of Dante, 1822, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris
But we were more moral than the boomers. It helps we weren’t victims of whatever blood sacrifice that froze them in amber - at least the 2/3 of us they didn’t murder in the womb. We tried to form relationships without role models and find authenticity in venal materialism. Make some kind of sociability with friends in the place of absent family structure. Heading through middle age, we didn’t abort or divorce like them, and are a different species as parents. In general. Younger generations can appreciate how ugly, hollow, cringe, and manipulatively fake a lot of boomer culture is. Being raised on it meant we got jaded and saw through it early instead of being perpetually titillating. It pushed some of us into dark place. But the background was still there in a way it isn’t now. Prosperous comfort. Baseline moral assumptions. An economy of Busytown jobs doing describable things. Our grandparents picked up a lot of the parental slack. In the late 70’s, the post-War boom was only 30 years old. Gordon Gecko was our father but the Waltons were our grandparents. Summers could be the 50s. Or the 30s. Huck and Tom or the Great Brain could ring true. Even the older city kin were the War generation. Veterans everywhere. Bipolar.
If this is interesting, there are a lot of topics to look at.
Cari Humphry, Boys of the Summer, 2010, acrylic on canvas
Postscript. Metaphysics book update. Finally blocking out Chapter 2. I’m going to post it on the Band when it’s done. It will move from logic and observation as ways of knowing to defining “levels of reality”. This means working through things more methodically than the Band. And what’s become apparent is how is how poisoned the language has become in the “intellectual” side of the House of Lies. The discourse - whether “science” or “philosophy” all assumes the inverted, secular transcendent materialism that is self-evidently unfit for purpose. The counter being endless reams of ontologically pointless jargon and blather. Scale and size aren’t ontological distinctions. Neither is the necessity of instrumental mediation. And all the post-Heisenberg blather perception creating reality is just humanist inversion in another skinsuit. Making man the measure of reality through inverting creation in God’s image. The pretense that we are ontological arbiters is the same auto-idolatrous be your own god that started in the garden. An appropriate terminology will be derived inductively what what we can know and how we can know it.
Although Clown World is trying, professional sports (and perhaps more specifically youth sports) is just about the last meritocratic arena we have left to engage/enjoy. Worthy topic.
I feel you on the "poisoned language" angle that comes with Lies Intellgensia™. The jargon and blather are truly endless. But from one internet rando to another, regarding metaphysics...have you read Judge Thomas Toward's "Creative Process and the Individual?" Published 1910. Refreshingly lacks adherence to the "discourse" and shares your logical investigation into levels of reality. Maybe it's your cup of tea.
http://rossongs.net/CreativeProcessIndivTT.pdf