Two Pathologies of the Left

1.

In one of Reddit’s most popular left forums, /r/ChapoTrapHouse, one of the primary recurring memes is an obsessive auto-flagellation taking place on every thread even tangentially related to race, wherein the 85.1% “non-PoC” (to quote their 50k survey) userbase express a feverish desire for annihilation, inventing new methods for the genocide and abuse of white people, most especially themselves, as their responses to posts remarking on the strangeness of a white userbase engaging in such conversation.
Chapo themselves and occasional worthwhile discussion on the Subreddit identify the cause of this. The race of “white” is, more than anything else, a race that is not a race. Whiteness is the default perspective and thus it is one which is empty, without any culture of its own except ephemeral material interests of capital holdings. The leftist men (and overwhelmingly, it is men, 86% male and 89.3% non-trans according to the same survey) demonstrate in their response to this an inversion of the right wing race paranoia. The rightist is cut from the same cloth, white men with intense racial pathologies, yet theirs is outwards-looking, a fear. The rightist man’s race-pathology is a navigation of their fear-desire complex revolving around the “Other” male, something demonstrated in their cuckold fascinations. The leftist man meanwhile has a race-pathology which is turned inwards, a selfish hatred of himself for all that he is not. As all masculine individuals, he cannot live his self through anything created, but most instead find a phallus, something “real”, which the leftist is unable to find within himself. He thus engages in a twofold movement where he flagellates himself in hatred of his own lack, in hopes that it may allow him access to a “real” and thus acceptance by those who he perceives as “real” - whatever underclass he is currently obsessed with as the authentic phallus-keepers.

2.

A recurring theme among feminist art is the depicting of the vagina from the front, remaking it from the hole it appears as in the “x-ray shot” trope of pornographic art into the neo-phallus of “pussy”. Contained in this image is all that feminism aspires to - to make the vagina as equally a phallus as the penis, to make the vagina an equally vulgar symbol of domination as the crudely drawn phallus. It is only natural therefore that the most successful feminism today is #GirlBoss culture and its worship of the female capitalist. One of the most important pieces of this is a recreation of the medical revolution, wherein masculine scientific knowledge was used to supplant and overthrow the feudal savagery of supposed witchcraft in medicine. Feminists today do this through the scientific psychiatry so popular in America, colonizing the interior of the mind, its holy bible and ideological model is the DSM-V. This psychiatry is rigorous in its endless attempts to legislate, unable even to tolerate broad descriptions of types or characters, as in the Freudian diagnoses. Interiority is a problem that must be classified and labeled and medicalized into its own specific category. More and more autistic divisions of individuals are drawn up in the holy book, in both universal mental categories, and the supposed science of identity, legislating hundreds of genders and sexualities for what once remained a fluid mystery of the Cities of the Interior, governed informally in its moment, now colonized and legislated by feminism’s process of acquiring an equal claim to the masculine. Feminism is, through this, not concerned with any liberation or empowerment of femininity but rather with creating a new masculine out of woman.

Feminine Deception

In the greater universe of masculinity attacking femininity, in attacks on both ciswomen and transwomen, there is an identical method despite radically opposite ends. The woman, regardless of if she is trans or cis, must be rent clear of her artificiality in some way. Among pinup art is a recurring theme of women’s utter incompetence mirroring the outfits and settings they find themselves in, parodic versions of everyday outfits, displaying the falsehood of all that woman attempts or strives to. The man claims for herself in this depiction of woman a role of undressing, of taking down. The rhetoric of rape pornography shows this explicitly, a fascination with powerful women being made-vagina by their facade ripped away, the core of their being revealed, the object of men’s desire. In identical motion, is the method to destroy a transwoman. At her core is something real which must be exposed, the centerpoint, what in ciswomen is the object of desire, is now a thing prompting revulsion, an ugly core which must be brought to light. Attacks are made with the goal of bringing it to light, showing she is “actually a man”, taking away her deceptions and falsehoods. This not an incidental fact of gender relations but a constitutional fact of the male consciousness. The male sees himself as possessing of Truth, of Genuinity, and it is his job to uncover it in all things before him. He therefore finds himself driven to violence at encounters with the feminine, with seeing before him that which is constructed, that which is hiding the core that he is on terms with, whether as equals (fellow men), as objects (ciswomen), or as things to be destroyed (transwomen). It naturally follows in his imagination that he, being a complete, self-contained, subject-organism, must make the women the same as him - a complete, self-contained, object-organism and thus strip away that which he alone has in his possession - the clothing he tears off, the facades he tears down, in being anything other than naked and enslaved, the woman is committing theft by mocking that which is contained within his enclosure of the self.

To the male, there is then an existential terror in the feminine attaining a sentience of its own. Woman still must play on a somewhat equal playing field with him, like him being possessed of humanity and having some “center” they can be stripped down to, whether that be the ego of the male or the object of the female. When the feminine acquires sentience, when illusions and deceptions can speak for themselves, the male is struck with horror. Bo Burnham has dedicated his career to inventing malevolent “centers” behind the dispersed schizophrenia of images and icons that is pop music. His most devoted scholar, Shannon Strucci (feminism’s true aim - to make women equally possessing of the masculine), attempts much the same project, with broader focus, presenting voluminous primary sources on all manner of illusions without cores, intercutting close, tedious readings of Burnham’s work with close, tedious descriptions of everything from pop music to waifuism to nursing home assistant-robots to 1950s quiz shows, all as a drawn out impotent cry of horror and rage, the male soul being unable to conquer the feminine deception. He tears off layer after layer of clothing and finds - nothing. No vagina to colonize, no XY chromosomes to lynch, nothing except another layer of makeup, another presentation, another illusion.

Yet the question is formed that can never be brought up in the male’s heart as the comprehension of its true depth would disintegrate him instantly - what claim did he ever have to that which he built himself from? Since the dawn of culture, there has been feminine deception atop all reality. Makeup, clothing, theatre, art, have all been present as facts of human communication and as facts of the human experience. The individual is expressed through these layers of deception and lives through these deceptions, their ego dispersing through their costume and status and artistic production and etc. The masculine fear - horror at these illusions attaining power of their own - is a fear of his own illusions, those which he claims to own and encompass, attaining lives of their own and acquiring freedom outside him. It is this which drives his revulsion, it is a slow process of his own defeat, a slow recognition of that which he had once enclosed attaining freedom of its own and him unable to any longer contain it within himself. His illusions desert him and he is left with nothing, an ego alone in darkness, forever stuck groping for the enclosed-self he can never again attain.

Rhodesians Never Die

At around the 49 minute mark in BDobbinsFTW’s video “WARNING: BLACK OPS 4 IS BAD FOR YOU” he delivers the following explication of his ideal school:
“First period is Runescape, where you don't pass until you've amassed ten million gold. After the sixth grade this class switches to EVE Online. Second period is ARK Survival where and your group must tame a Titanosaurus. Third period is Overwatch where you must hit GM. Fourth period is Blackout where your squad must amass a hundred wins. Fifth period is Minecraft where in a given period you must build the greatest structure you possibly can and you are graded on just how good the instructor thinks it is. Sixth period is story games. KOTOR, Skyrim, Last of Us, Tales of Walking Dead, every semester, a whole new set of classes relying on new games pushing students to learn and adapt the mind on a neurological level to new challenges, new obstacles, neuroplasticity, neurofluidity, exposure, adaptation, kill, kill, kill. I am not kidding about any of this. This is not a joke. This is the future and I'll do it myself if I have to.”
This comes at the end of a long narrative of comparing his experience with two video games, Call of Duty and Runescape. Call of Duty, as he describes it, was a period of immense waste, a time in which he built for himself a life of childish unending indulgence in a mindless easy matchmaking while alternating between sex and marijuana in his downtime. Runescape is contrasted as positive through describing the various dramas and conflicts of his friends, the thesis of which is in his direct comparison to Lord of the Flies stating “we lived it”.

Among settler-colonial cultures, there is a recurring fascination with sporting. The mythic art of White America has in large part consisted of such glorifications, high school athletics, young attractive men hiking through rugged terrain, men and boys stalking the wilderness with firearms, etc. In Rhodesia, the culture of the whites at the turn of the century was best summarized by Piers Brandon as “when not making a fetish of sport (...) tended to worship Bacchus.”. In their myths, this plays along as an undercurrent throughout. From a vague chaos across the Atlantic, they staked out across the frontier, the singular man, the cowboy, in raw struggles against the elements. Here lessons were learned which cannot be taught in the safe, coddled, feminine world. In The Cowboys (1972) John Wayne makes a point of disrupting the lecture and erasing the blackboard to draw a crude horizontal line in order to take the boys from their school into the real world of a cattle drive. This is recreated in pageant plays of conquest every year during gun season, when all the men and boys engage in the adjectives they were taught to worship from their youngest age, parading through the untamed wilderness with firearms on patrol for the largest, the biggest, the trophy…

It would be a mistake to conflate this settler-colonial sporting with the traditionalist pursuits of often identical activities under some vague attack on “male athletics”. Mishima Yukio and Julius Evola wrote extensively on sport (bodybuilding & martial arts, skydiving & mountaineering respectively) and their usage of which to pursue pre-modern forms of consciousness and activity which has a markedly more profound and interesting character than what I am addressing. Rather, the settler-colonial sportsman is differentiated from this as seeing himself firstly as an economic unit. Notice the language of the ideal school described by BDobbinsFTW. Each grade is based not on an experience of the game as an artwork or means of social bonding, but of the ability of the player and their group to achieve high numbers within the game. Ranks, vague qualities of “goodness” for Minecraft, exact counts of monetary holdings, the lumping in of anything without this unending sporting gameplay loop reduced to “story games” and the description’s degeneration into a bizarre rant wherein single words which vaguely point to concepts of power and efficiency are thrown about, ending with an empty manly cry of “I’ll do it myself if I have to.”.

In settler-colonialism, the notion of the human was violently recreated into the economic unit, coequal with other, equally abstracted, non-human economic units such as the financial instrument or corporations, onto the equal playing field of liberal economics. The individual created is one which exists in relations of numbers and of quantity and is from this that the conception of the person that liberal materialism develops. The American glorification of engineering for engineering’s sake as example, what matters is never the meaning of objects in any artistic or experiential qualities, but in its relation to some body-without-organs of numerical value. American agricultural contests have been a long standing tradition, monocultural farms ever striving to use any means it can to achieve the best numbers, the biggest hog or tomato.

Her emerges an individual who is possessed of “freedom”, insofar as freedom is the individual’s ability to experience animal-pleasures in meaningless tasks for the glorification of a numerical abstraction. The liberal masculinity is one empty and slavish, men suited for nothing other than loops of numerical value achievement. It is thus a natural evolution from the cowboy to the “world’s biggest hog” contest winner and now into the contemporary problem of the bugman, the weak urbanites who build a life for themselves out of plastic toys and sugary troughs filled with pop-cultural slime. In their attempts at true freedom and rationality, white-male civilization has created for itself a creature suited only for slavery, a creature which derives satisfaction from nothing except the enjoyment of Sisyphean tasks, further striving for more and more, bigger and larger, greater and greater. To this new species of man, there is no meaning, nothing higher, nothing greater. There is only number and the insectoid love of increasing number.

The Subject of Pornography

Pornography is not meant to represent directly the fantasy in which the individual wishes to insert themselves. Expressions of fantasies operate on the dream-logic of sublimating unconscious currents and flows into theatrical-symbolic productions. Of all forms of this sublimation, there are few places where this more true than sexuality and masters of this idea such as Klaus Theweleit spent much of their time attempting to find sexuality in on the surface, non-sexual scenes, as sexuality. It is in this that pornography operates, ideas almost impossible to verbalize due to their pre-verbal flowing nature being sublimated into mediums of theatre and symbol.

Throughout the landscape of modern pornography, single thematic element is overwhelmingly dominant. The woman is centered in framing and posing - in acted porn the most common angle is a variety of framings showing the penis emerging from some edge of the screen to interact with the centered woman. The same pattern repeats in drawn or animated pornography, with the character now fully abstracted into the “faceless male” or tentacle tropes, the penis turned into the phallic abstraction of the tentacle or the phallic-body not even granted a fully featured (or fully human, in the case of when the face is drawn in order to be ugly) face, the eyes often shaded out to show only a mouth.

With this pattern of relations of man-woman in mind, there is a striking replication of it across genres. The man, through his penis and phallic-body contains within him all sexuality of the scene with which the woman, on her own desexualized, interacts with in order to become-sexual. The woman of pornography is the Subject, while the man is the Real. The relation of pornography is the relationship between the Ego, the untarnished soul and sin, the physical body which prevents its transcendence. It is for this reason that overwhelmingly pornography ends with the woman “corrupted” in some way - her face covered in semen while she smiles to the camera, tattooed with a dark ganguro tan, with a glowing purple tattoo on her mons pubis, and etc, that signifies her unification with the brutish physicality of sex. Sexuality is feared from this dynamics because, before anything else, what occurs within sexuality is a uniting with this Real, the shit and dirt of humanity and from thus comes its fear - the Subject not only constantly engages in flirtations with the thing it is supposedly above and beyond in our common Cartesian wisdom, it desires it, however much it protests, shown in “cock shock” scenes of revealing to the subject the horror at the bottom of their soul, how much she deeply wants the very thing the Ego-basis of a Subject is built around rejecting, transcending.

The Coming War Will Not Take Place

At the core of Twin Peaks is the eighth episode of the Return wherein through the ancient evil Judy, the evil Bob is birthed into the world. In the lineage of evil, something abstract here has continuity, the “Judy” entity which births it, but there is nothing old about Bob and there is nothing about Bob which is not entirely tolerated by the systems through which Bob operates. Bob does not transgress any systems he inhabits - where he inhabits is a neutral ground, the forces of the Black and White lodge both using as their field of battle and communication the systems of the FBI, cars, cell phones, the town, the woods, etc. These systems are remarkably tolerant and able to disperse actions committed on all parts of this equation of Black/White lodge balancing - the child of an ancient evil, birthed in the atomic bomb’s fire - and yet how much has he affected? How much of the narrative is irreplaceable? If one had never visited the town of Twin Peaks or known the proper people in Las Vegas, would they ever know that this spiritual battle against true evil had even taken place?

Since sometime in the 1960s when the first theorists on the left and right started proposing grand unfoldings of all America, fantasies of war abound on all sides of American politics, in an intensity stuck in a stagnant rising motion. Theatrical productions have occurred of replaying daily these visions - the militia movement stuck in endless repetitions of Ruby Ridge and Waco, the playback/zoom loops of all the gun show VHS tapes showing their own Truth of the matter. Socialists chant blood and fire with guillotine memes while Fascists masturbate themselves with each rereading of Siege, Atomwaffen and Socialist Rifle Association both gearing up for the proposed end - visions of marching troops, mass graves, artillery fire, crop burnings, cities crumbling, flags hung on concrete walls while cradling assault rifles to the tune of the Daily Shoah or Chapo Trap House, now broadcast from secret bunkers beneath headquarters where all your dreams come true.

The lesson Lynch comprehended like few else in Twin Peaks is the one that was taught in the “civil war” events of Anni di piombo. The systems we exist under today, the uncannily, advertisement-polished cars and phones of Twin Peaks are remarkably capable of absorbing and dispersing energies that once would have been unleashed in their pure form. The individual remains joined to the same forces - Bob’s relation to Judy, Dale’s relation to the White Lodge, but no war is allowed to take place on its own terms. Every niche group is lost and alone, dredging up long forgotten isms, bombings committed towards no one in particular, lone wolves firing upon vague enemies embodied in chosen crowds, it is here that the 2nd Civil War has already begun and will only escalate. As in Anni di piombo, there are no battlefields, no trenches, no aircraft - we do not live in a world where humans are any longer the dominant power capable of making such landscapes of our own creation. The fantasies of unfolding (apocalypse) are nothing more than just that - unfoldings, fantasies, ideological dioramas of the creator’s obscure little ideology. There will be no Day of the Rope, there will be no Revolution, such a thing would never be allowed. The civil war will take place, but only in the minds of the ones plugging into the parts of the machine setup for the individualist war making, the fantasies and dying thoughts of school shooters, the battlefields of the 21st century.

Medusa's Theogenesis

Naked and cold, Eros falls helplessly to the end as Thanatos sits pained in a tortured silence. Gianni Versace knew this in his final years, when he was struck down with an illness. Long walks on Miami beach, seeing nothing reflected in shimmering water. Too tired to fuck, what was it for now? Eros, to which he had dedicated his life and brand to, was being shown for all its emptiness as Gianni faced the end. The statues grew hollow, the gold fell to water, the sex gave no pleasure. Eros, the arborescent growing beauty of life was falling apart at his feet with the end just inches from him.

As the human soul, the sexual life-energy, the Eros behind the Versace brand, Gianni would meet his end in 1997 at the hands of his Thanatos, Andrew Cunanan. At the apex of a killing spree stretching across the nation, tearing through the closeted-gay community, leaving four men dead and exposed in a metaphor to the uniquely desiccating death of AIDS, he approached Gianni at the base of Medusa’s palace and gunned him down before Andrew himself faded into nothing, disintegrating a few days later into the ocean.

When a binary pair of matching parabolic arcs is drawn, an ellipsoid forms, within which is a filled shape consisting of all numbers bounded between the two arcs. In a literary context, this becomes the basic theory behind one form of the mandala, a cosmological chart drawn by a filling-in between two opposite trajectories. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow shows this elegantly, with the structural metaphor of the Herero village and the V-2 informing the meaning-creation process the rest of the book is built upon - the entire Modern era being built in the interior space between the y>0 arc of the rocket being fired upon England and the y<0 arc of Slothrop’s link to the rocket strikes.

If a God is anywhere, it is beyond. Beyond the trivial concerns of human materiality. The defining feature of a God, even a polytheistic one, is their ability to be above the concerns of the finite and material. When Abraham and his son descended from the mountain, when the early Christians saw Jesus rise again, Yahweh had demonstrated the nature of Godhood - the fact of transcending the seemingly impossible other of death, the final other which strikes a fatal emptiness in all life. A God is born from their ability to possess under their one sign both Eros and Thanatos. To the Yahwehist, God holds within his mandala both Eros (the Abrahamic lineage) and Thanatos (Hell/Heaven). Thanatos and Eros continually move under the power of one universal order, and thus all that exists within either sphere is granted meaning and immortality.

Between Andrew and Gianni one sign persists, that of the Medusa. Eros and Thanatos united, a new Goddess is born, one summoned violently in El Mayor Clasico’s 2015 video Versace, wherein El Mayor Clasico is driven to spastic writhings and tortured psychotic expressions as gold painted Medusa hypnotizes, poisons, accepts his sacrifices with her body as altar and church, the woman of mineral, the woman with the gaze of Thanatos and the serpentine dance of Eros. After Gianni and Andrew have perished, they return, united as two halves of Medusa, two halves of the equation of Theogenesis.