Great Earnestness
Many different factions try to solve the problem of modern corruption in the west by presenting a new slate of values for us to focus on and direct ourselves. They are attempting to reignite the energy and attitude that gave traditional Europe the political, cultural, and spiritual power it once had. Some say it’s a matter of returning to Christianity. Some try to mobilize around a simple concept of “white well-being”- if whites simply look out for other whites, then we can take over and change the world. Others go a level deeper and suggest that we need myths and media that inspire white people in a positive and moralizing way and have religions that are self-consciously pro white/Aryan. There is a very deep and obvious problem with this way of thinking.
Any attempt at self-consciously prescribing values is doomed to be inauthentic because it always lacks a legitimate, satisfying, rational end goal. Europeans in the past didn’t create values to serve a utilitarian end. White people living for the sake of preserving white people is meaningless, uninspiring, and irrational. No traditional Europeans thought this way. European man in nature experiences life authentically. From there his genius, art, and power emerges. He exists within the story of history- a world of exploding competing egoisms, passions, and power struggles. His creative imposition on the world is an expression of his egoistic glory- his will to power and will to define values.
Out of this emerges nobility, culture, civilization, everything we value about the old European world in the first place. All the things that justify life itself. What is the point of any human life on earth if it’s not for a higher type of man to experience the highest passions and most noble refinement of taste? They are the Shakespearean actors who indulge in the draft of life and authentically play their roles to the fullest- not servants of some kind of utilitarian goal of upholding moral society or moralizing white people to serve some kind of pragmatic political end. They are ends in themselves and justify life itself.
A value system of “white well-being for the sake of white well-being” or “ideal community for the sake of ideal community” or “global power for the sake of global power” is nihilistic, irrational, and in bad taste. They destroy the thing they seek to protect and replace it with a fearful, shallow, reactive herd. And even worse- it’s boring.
Another ideal now leads us on, a wonderful, seductive ideal, full of danger, the pursuit of which we should be loath to urge upon any one, because we are not so ready to acknowledge any one’s right to it: the ideal of a spirit who plays ingenuously (that is to say, involuntarily, and as the outcome of superabundant energy and power) with everything that, hitherto, has been called holy, good, inviolable, and divine… the ideal of a humanly superhuman well-being and goodwill, which often enough will seem inhuman—as when, for instance, it stands beside all past earnestness on earth, and all past solemnities in hearing, speech, tone, look, morality, and duty, as their most lifelike and unconscious parody—but with which, nevertheless, great earnestness perhaps alone begins, the first note of interrogation is affixed, the fate of the soul changes, the hour hand moves, and tragedy begins.- The Gay Science
True creativity, genius, and energy comes from Great Earnestness. The earnest European man- his craving for forbidden knowledge, his competitive lust for strength and power, his exploding passions and deepest love- doesn’t require any ideal or obligation or reaction to political danger. Biology has endowed him with the egoism necessary to earnestly pursue all these things when moral conditioning doesn’t hold him back.
When dealing with life’s most difficult questions, human beings require authentic answers. You lose credibility with people, especially white people, when you limit their horizon to trivial and meaningless ends. They want their spiritual and artistic life to reflect something true about the human experience and their deepest instincts. There’s a remarkable lack of science or academic research into the evolutionary origins of religion and art in their purist forms. But one can obviously say that this mysterious world doesn’t evolve from modern utilitarian political concerns.
The very things we love about ourselves, the very things we fight for, the things that justify life itself, the things that give our culture and civilization credibility and energy, are things that emerge from our authentic Great Earnestness- from the mystery world of biology and ego.
Christianity is powerful because Christians believe in their one true god in earnest, but science is able to overcome it because it’s also an earnest and honest attempt at discovering the truth. The greatest artist creates from the heart- they don’t conform their creativity to an ideal. A genuine desire to learn, grow, obtain power, go to war, fight an enemy, is strongest when it’s driven by competition and passion, not obligation and the Moloch of abstraction.
When we are most earnest and allow the spirt of gravity to depart, we have the clarity and energy to be creative, to peruse the most tedious intellectual task, to mobilize the masses into great projects, and ultimately to justify life itself. Dismissing all of this potential and power and filtering everything through a reactive, utilitarian lens is both non pragmatic and inherently contradictory. Many will worry so much about preserving life that they forget how to live and justify it.
