Progress & Decay
Natural history teaches us that stasis is an illusion. We witness the passing of time at a microscopic level, so short are our lives at a cosmic scale. Everything that seems to us firmly rooted in place; the trees and rocks, the ground, the continents, our planet and even our sun are in constant motion and flux.
Darwinism is the story of life’s unending struggle to overcome the adversity inherent in an ever-changing universe. We may deplore the immense suffering innate to natural selection, but without it none of the great and beautiful life-forms on this planet, ourselves included, could exist. Suffering, and the drive to avoid it, are necessary and ultimately desirable parts of the universe. The temptation to condemn nature as cruel and capricious is misguided. If we cherish the fruits we must honour the tree, and kindness and compassion are among those fruits.
All life is in a constant race against inevitable decay. Each organism is cyclical. It must reproduce, or at least assure that enough genetically kindred organisms pass on shared genes, and begin a new cycle before its own demise. When life keeps ahead of decay, there is progress. A herd expands in number; a forest stretches in size; grass overruns mud; a young wolf leaves to start his own pack; Seventeenth Century Englishmen establish a fresh start in the new world. When the struggle proves too harsh, decay triumphs. Life must be won.
The contemporary political use of the idea of progress is not only divorced from natural progress, but antithetical to it. Political progress, as the term is now used, is the celebration of homosexuality as a superior lifestyle to heterosexuality, hatred towards one’s in-group, the worship of the primitive and broken, the rejection of reproduction and the family, extreme egalitarianism, gender ideology and the suppression of scientific knowledge inconvenient to these agendas. What is politically progressive is naturally retrogressive. Political progress lifts us not to greater heights but takes us downwards back towards the primordial muck. The assault on the family discourages reproduction among that portion of the population with the foresight and intelligence to avoid unwanted children. The irresponsible and stupid are left to breed unchecked. The hatred of the ingroup and the worship of the inferior and broken synergise into an assault on everything superior and naturally agreeable. The ugly are favoured over the beautiful, the sick over the healthy. Every failing of the depraved is blamed on their betters. Since egalitarianism mandates, evidence be damned, that everyone is equal, depravity, cruelty and idiocy are never counted against those that possess them, but blamed upon those that don’t. They must be the oppressors that cause such traits in the oppressed. The only time that it is allowed that one’s flaws might count against him is if he comes from an oppressor category; if he is a white male.
Without reference to natural progress, political progress is at best meaningless. More often it is misleading. It suggests that everything described above is the apex of civilisation; that everything that came before now prefigured our current dystopia, and that society naturally progresses towards this point. The moniker ‘progressive’ gives regressives an undeserved sense of superiority, as though they were an evolutionary grade above us. A ‘progressive’ will call his enemies ‘troglodytes’ even as he worships low IQ black sociopaths like George Floyd. He will speak of his enemies as ‘reactionaries’ even as he mounts neo-ultramontane assaults on scientific freedom and degrades science into some sort of quasi-Papal dogma handed down by infallible experts in ex cathedra judgements. ‘Progressive’ is more than a label; it defines how leftists understand themselves and their beliefs. One that sees himself as a reactionary believes that he holds a line long lost. He is easily given to pessimism and defeatism. A progressive believes that he is the future, that his enemies fight against the tide. He is optimistic and fights with the enthusiasm that expectation of victory brings.
Dissidents should not accept the left’s frame, but reframe political progress in meaningful terms with reference to natural progress. Let us think not in terms of right and left, but of progress and decay. Then leftism can be understood only as decay and backwardness. Natural progress is driven by competition. Among social animals, including humans, cooperation is the ultimate competitive strategy. A genuinely progressive politics should begin with an unfettered assertion of the ingroup and its interests over all others and racial solidarity. It should strive to push the ingroup forwards and upwards. Eugenics and scientific and technological advancement should be the highest goals. Knowledge must be sought for its own sake, not held back by the anti-science howling of egalitarians. A progressive should strive for ever greater heights. The very idea of affirmative action, of diversity quotas and every other measure that places the welfare of backwards outgroups over our own progress should sicken our stomachs. The high IQ, responsibility conceived family must be the ideal and the irresponsible multiplication of the stupid and impulsive curtailed.
There is no end to struggle in the natural world. Today it is not a matter of immediate individual survival, but whether we continue to evolve and advance as a society and as people or slowly decay as we portion out everything that we have already achieved to the unworthy in the name of equity. We must reclaim the notion of progress from the left. Progress is not affirmative action, critical race theory, transgenderism, multiculturalism, racial equality and censorship. These are the backwards and sick obsessions of a stagnant society too unimaginative to look to the future and obsessed with digging up the past in search of grievance fuel. Progress is the free flow of information, race science and eugenics. Progress takes us upwards; it expands our knowledge. Leftism obscures entire fields deemed ‘unethical.’ Leftism forbids even the most common sensical measures to improve man as sins against the idol of equity.
Conservatism offers no escape from decay. National Review promised to ‘stand athwart history, yelling “stop!”‘ Conservatism follows the left, shouting impotently, but eventually arriving at the same destination. The conservative has no destination of his own in mind, no goals to progress towards. National Review has achieved nothing since it was founded but magazine upon magazine of hapless protest. Our motto should not be ‘stop!’ but ‘upwards and onwards!’ We should seek not to stop progress, but to smash every postwar damn that the left built to hold it back! Smash the taboo on eugenics! Smash the taboo on racism! They have built these chains to restrain us; to lower us to the same level as the backwards troglodytes that they worship. They are not progressives, but partisans of decay! They live in constant fear for they know that we should leave their false pieties and their pets behind in the dust were we to break free! We shall bury them!
