Excellent, thanks. IMHO Alastair Roberts's 2016 piece is the best single treatment of this problem. [1] Aaron Renn's long-running "Masculinist" series is the best lengthy study. [2] And, thankfully, plenty of wise and insightful women see the problem as well -- e.g. the brilliant Mary Harrington [3]
I am 100% with you on this. The feminisation of everything is a grave problem, maybe the gravest of all (there is this superb book (was it No Men in the Pews?) about the loss of men in the Catholic Church - isn't the whole gay maffia thing related to that?). If you don't see this you live under a rock.
There’s a lot going on here. The Longhouse meme itself, showing up in FT, is kind of weird. I haven’t been on Twitter that long so it’s not a surprise that I’d never heard of it, but it is a surprise that you had not. I suspect it is ephemeral, and would be a little disappointed if, for example, Totally_Teagan warranted an article in FT.
With respect to having conversations on Twitter, I get the necessity to shut down comments/replies. Mr Dreher does so as well, and seeing, inter alia, the responses to his photo with Cardinal Pell, one has to wonder or conversation can really occur on that platform.
Since joining a few months ago, I have been exposed to and interacted with some very clever thinkers, and some great entertainment, but also a frightening darkness, fed by anonymity (does my nom de plume make me an Anon, btw?) but, even deeper than that, a malevolence that makes me want to cede the space to the howling imps who dominate it.
As for the Lomghouse itself, I can make n’ary hide nor hair of it, other than that it seems to exist as a sort of nondimensional sack into which L0m3z can put various ideas or complaints. Feminization (particularly via the education system) is very real, but as the father of a teenage boy, I suspect that you also see the irrepressible masculine spirit breaking through. My own teenage son is very realistic about the culture he inhabits, but instead of bemoaning it, goes about with a wink and a nod towards his own goals, wokeness being just another thing to be overcome.
It is not "weird". It is the central metaphor of a vital discussion. The fact that you are "disappointed" at how ideas in a discussion that you are unfamiliar with are gaining currency through the writings of people you cannot name-check says more about you and the manner in which you evaluate the things you read than about the ideas themselves.
Your observation about the "necessity to shut down comments/replies" addresses nothing about whether or not it was a reasonable thing for Deneen to do in this case. All you've done is gesture towards an extreme and wholly unrelated event in order to cast aspersions upon all possibility of useful engagement on twitter. In other words, you are engaging in the prejudicially dismissive caricature of a conversation that you clearly admit you neither understand nor care to partake of.
Yes, you are "anon"; Your hand-wringing about "frightening darkness" does not absolve you of your baseless contempt. In fact, in light of your clear approval of your son's manful attitude towards the contrary ideas and negative milieus that he has to deal with, I wonder why you feel justified here in "bemoaning" the vagaries of Twitter to the point of desiring cowardly escape and more concessions of public discussion space. Shouldn't you take a cue from your son and consider such "malevolence" as you find merely "just another thing to be overcome" instead of vaguely concern-trolling ideas you "can make n'ary hide nor hair of" and backhandedly carping at those who find such ideas useful in the furthering of our common goals?
Or if you don't believe that you have any goals in common with L0mez, state your objections clearly rather than passive-aggressively mumbling how "disappointed" you that people are talking about things you've "never heard of".
Looking up Mr. Deneen and his credentials, he has the usual impressive list of educational institutions attended and requisite lofty positions held; Rutgers, B. A. in English Lit, Ph.D. in Poly-Sci, Asst. Professor at Princeton, et all. I bet I would rather enjoy his dissertation, “The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return” but alas, I will not spend $57 on Amazon to find out.
Back to the credentialism, it seems to be the rig du jour reaction to proletariats who post an article without a background from the ivory towers of academia. He goes even further when dismissing the Longhouse piece as Nietzsche-lite. I found that descriptor as confounding as you did, especially considering the content of the article vs. what Nietzsche’s personal background revealed about the man. A philosopher who began as a minister’s son, only to renounce a belief in God when his father died, is not the first name to come up in my mind after reading the Longhouse.
As to his Twitter remarks on the rise of extremism, Lom3z addressed that issue towards the end of his piece when noting the “shallow machismo” and “buffoonery” displayed by certain social influencers. As the father of four teenage sons, it is imperative to me to ensure they do not take up these destructive views in an attempt to make sense of the world.
Ending on a bright note, I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment that Mr. Deneen should be more open to public discussions, more so if he is to continue holding the mantle of ‘public intellectual.’ Kind of need a public audience for that title.
I have a teenage son and two daughters, and I am deeply committed to doing my part to work against the buffoonery. Ceding the conversation to them does nothing but attract young people to the social media preening. Thank you for reading and commenting.
The original passage where this meme comes from was this:
"Modern world not bad just because modern; and it is better than some ages in
the past. Many parts of past were as bad, or worse, than our situation, and for the
same reasons. The modern is “nothing new”: it is the return of a very ancient
subjection and brokenness under new branding, promoted by new concepts and
justifications. If you want to see our future look to Europe as it existed before
1600 BC, or much of the world as it was until recently and still is….the
communal life of the longhouse with its young men dominated and broken by
the old and sclerotic, by the matriarchs, the blob and yeast mode in human life
overtaking and subjecting all higher aspiration. Aztec “cities” with twenty
morons sleeping and eating off the floor, demagogued in the masses by blood-hungry priests with dead eyes. It is no different if they use the doxies of Reason and Logos to cart us off to this life."
"So here as elsewhere there is a kind of matriarchy,
but it works covertly, so that both the “left” and the “right” are fooled on this
point. In the end then the “left” is more correct: the worship of the titanic powers
of the earth, of the Great Mother, is connected to a kind of matriarchy, but where
they’re wrong is in imagining that this leads to any kind of freedom, that it
represents a kind of liberation from the strictures of modern civilization, the pain
of specialization, the submission to moral authority, the modern “alienation,”
and every other thing they like to blame. In fact everything that you hate about
modern life and that makes it into an Iron Prison—and I agree it is a prison—
represents a return of the endless sallow night of matriarchy. It is a return in
every way, you must understand this literally! Nietzsche says that in the modern
Europe you see the reassertion of pre-Aryan modes of life, the return of
socialism, of the longhouse, of feminism, and that this is happening also to us
internally, where the higher instincts of the spirit are being overtaken
physiologically by the retrograde and prehistoric. The life of the village and of
the primitive is one of utter subjection, total domestication and total brokenness.
The “matriarchy” that does exist, and that exerts enormous influence and power
in the social and moral realm, is only the manifestation of this brokenness of the
males. Communal solidarity absorbs and snuffs out any personal distinction or
intelligence and this task is relatively easy where it concerns the majority of the
parts of the village: the real problem becomes what to do with the young males.
In every way they represent a threat to the established customs and the
physiological torpor that benefits the old and the women. The social problem in
primitive tribes as well as most civilized and unfree societies becomes this, what
to do with the young males, their aggression, their sexual instincts: in every way
they must be broken and subsumed for the benefit of the tribe. This is more or
less easy for the majority, who lack life force in any significant quantity, harder
for the remainder, and where impossible—the fate of the outcast, or, more likely,
death. You fool yourself if you imagine that “young males are needed for
protection from external threat.” In fact most societies of the settled, primitive
and as well as civilized, are more than willing to accept the risk of submission to
an alien tribe. In a given area, if many such tribes follow this same path of selfdomestication the risk is hardly even that great in one’s own lifetime and a few
benighted, spineless “warrior” drones are sufficient to contend against similar
neighbors. But even in cases where there is great external threat from vigorous
tribes, such societies, ruled by women, the old, and the imbeciles, are willing to
rather accept subjection to the alien than to allow freedom and flourishing for
"The way of settled life is just this then: to break the
youths from early age, to take the boys and caponize them physically, mentally
and spiritually. This happens in the smallest tribes as well.
When they become
civilizations, they look much like Han China, or the sinkhole cities of the Aztecs,
Babylonians, and others. You see here why people like Evola, Jung, Guenon and
all their followers go the wrong way. There is only this: whether life is stunted
and broken by a “tradition,” or whether it is one of the very few, the rare
exception, that allows the ascent of life.
As a rule, life is stunted and deformed by huemans. This is why huemans are disgusting as an animal, and must be overcome. This is the “free and primitive life” of the noble savage, this is the “matriarchy” that keeps its faith to nature in “sustainable” form.
In fact the society of the grass hut is hardly sustainable: such places are rapacious of natural
resources, and often vicious to animals and vicious tyrants to people. A good
parody of such a society on a small scale is the movie The Beach. The rule of
weakness is not good but something of incredible cruelty, even cannibalism.
Cannibalism is the way of all yeast life, to which the human animal degenerates
under these conditions of gynocracy.
Cannibalism is the eternal way of those erased huemans who submit themselves to the Venus Willendorf and all “earth mammies,” because this faction of nature is a putrid evil dripping blood from its claws and seeking the dissolution of all higher life, spiritually and biologically,
to the amorphous muck of the primeval swamp.
If you traveled in Europe around
maybe 3000 BC or so you would find wise-eyed cowlike black-haired Neolithic
matrons overseeing vast villages of longhouses where lived the hueman animal,
fifty or a hundred to a room, with sheep and goats, wallowing in its own shit,
tilling the soil, eating those of its members deemed to be “chosen by the gods”—
anyone, man or woman, distinguished by vital spirit—and she might even smack
you on the head with a lingam-dildo and question your privilege as a traveler.
This is the condition of most of mankind until recently, and it is the suffocating
miasma to which the modern world is fast returning, inside and out.
But enough of this prison. I suppose you want to know of a way out, or, at
Hi, Kale. I love your podcast with Rod Dreher. I can assure you Pat Deneen has had way more than 238 tweets in his few years on Twitter. My guess is he has deleted most of them.
Deneen can get really feisty, but I'm surprised he went at First Things like that. He's pretty tight with Rusty Reno, I think.
The history of modern conservative movement is Buckley.
Buckley was a gatekeeper of the highest order. It is not really a surprise to see this kind of continued behavior from Buckley's heirs: the chained conservative commentator class who have accepted their position as losers.
It is a fantastic book and well worth your time and the $10! I just wish he'd engage rather than cordon himself off from these important conversations.
Excellent, thanks. IMHO Alastair Roberts's 2016 piece is the best single treatment of this problem. [1] Aaron Renn's long-running "Masculinist" series is the best lengthy study. [2] And, thankfully, plenty of wise and insightful women see the problem as well -- e.g. the brilliant Mary Harrington [3]
[1] https://alastairadversaria.com/2016/11/17/a-crisis-of-discourse-part-2-a-problem-of-gender/
[2] https://www.aaronrenn.com/masculinist/
[3] https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-january-2022/new-female-ascendency/
I am 100% with you on this. The feminisation of everything is a grave problem, maybe the gravest of all (there is this superb book (was it No Men in the Pews?) about the loss of men in the Catholic Church - isn't the whole gay maffia thing related to that?). If you don't see this you live under a rock.
There’s a lot going on here. The Longhouse meme itself, showing up in FT, is kind of weird. I haven’t been on Twitter that long so it’s not a surprise that I’d never heard of it, but it is a surprise that you had not. I suspect it is ephemeral, and would be a little disappointed if, for example, Totally_Teagan warranted an article in FT.
With respect to having conversations on Twitter, I get the necessity to shut down comments/replies. Mr Dreher does so as well, and seeing, inter alia, the responses to his photo with Cardinal Pell, one has to wonder or conversation can really occur on that platform.
Since joining a few months ago, I have been exposed to and interacted with some very clever thinkers, and some great entertainment, but also a frightening darkness, fed by anonymity (does my nom de plume make me an Anon, btw?) but, even deeper than that, a malevolence that makes me want to cede the space to the howling imps who dominate it.
As for the Lomghouse itself, I can make n’ary hide nor hair of it, other than that it seems to exist as a sort of nondimensional sack into which L0m3z can put various ideas or complaints. Feminization (particularly via the education system) is very real, but as the father of a teenage boy, I suspect that you also see the irrepressible masculine spirit breaking through. My own teenage son is very realistic about the culture he inhabits, but instead of bemoaning it, goes about with a wink and a nod towards his own goals, wokeness being just another thing to be overcome.
It is not "weird". It is the central metaphor of a vital discussion. The fact that you are "disappointed" at how ideas in a discussion that you are unfamiliar with are gaining currency through the writings of people you cannot name-check says more about you and the manner in which you evaluate the things you read than about the ideas themselves.
Your observation about the "necessity to shut down comments/replies" addresses nothing about whether or not it was a reasonable thing for Deneen to do in this case. All you've done is gesture towards an extreme and wholly unrelated event in order to cast aspersions upon all possibility of useful engagement on twitter. In other words, you are engaging in the prejudicially dismissive caricature of a conversation that you clearly admit you neither understand nor care to partake of.
Yes, you are "anon"; Your hand-wringing about "frightening darkness" does not absolve you of your baseless contempt. In fact, in light of your clear approval of your son's manful attitude towards the contrary ideas and negative milieus that he has to deal with, I wonder why you feel justified here in "bemoaning" the vagaries of Twitter to the point of desiring cowardly escape and more concessions of public discussion space. Shouldn't you take a cue from your son and consider such "malevolence" as you find merely "just another thing to be overcome" instead of vaguely concern-trolling ideas you "can make n'ary hide nor hair of" and backhandedly carping at those who find such ideas useful in the furthering of our common goals?
Or if you don't believe that you have any goals in common with L0mez, state your objections clearly rather than passive-aggressively mumbling how "disappointed" you that people are talking about things you've "never heard of".
I agree with Jeremiad Bullfrog
Looking up Mr. Deneen and his credentials, he has the usual impressive list of educational institutions attended and requisite lofty positions held; Rutgers, B. A. in English Lit, Ph.D. in Poly-Sci, Asst. Professor at Princeton, et all. I bet I would rather enjoy his dissertation, “The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return” but alas, I will not spend $57 on Amazon to find out.
Back to the credentialism, it seems to be the rig du jour reaction to proletariats who post an article without a background from the ivory towers of academia. He goes even further when dismissing the Longhouse piece as Nietzsche-lite. I found that descriptor as confounding as you did, especially considering the content of the article vs. what Nietzsche’s personal background revealed about the man. A philosopher who began as a minister’s son, only to renounce a belief in God when his father died, is not the first name to come up in my mind after reading the Longhouse.
As to his Twitter remarks on the rise of extremism, Lom3z addressed that issue towards the end of his piece when noting the “shallow machismo” and “buffoonery” displayed by certain social influencers. As the father of four teenage sons, it is imperative to me to ensure they do not take up these destructive views in an attempt to make sense of the world.
Ending on a bright note, I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment that Mr. Deneen should be more open to public discussions, more so if he is to continue holding the mantle of ‘public intellectual.’ Kind of need a public audience for that title.
I have a teenage son and two daughters, and I am deeply committed to doing my part to work against the buffoonery. Ceding the conversation to them does nothing but attract young people to the social media preening. Thank you for reading and commenting.
You should read Bronze Age Mindset!
https://www.amazon.com/Bronze-Age-Mindset-Pervert-ebook/dp/B07DJQ89TD/ref=sr_1_1?adgrpid=1340305246626025&hvadid=83769150150100&hvbmt=bp&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=85810&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=p&hvtargid=kwd-83769442186751%3Aloc-190&hydadcr=15302_10729508&keywords=the+bronze+age+mindset&qid=1677173202&sr=8-1
The original passage where this meme comes from was this:
"Modern world not bad just because modern; and it is better than some ages in
the past. Many parts of past were as bad, or worse, than our situation, and for the
same reasons. The modern is “nothing new”: it is the return of a very ancient
subjection and brokenness under new branding, promoted by new concepts and
justifications. If you want to see our future look to Europe as it existed before
1600 BC, or much of the world as it was until recently and still is….the
communal life of the longhouse with its young men dominated and broken by
the old and sclerotic, by the matriarchs, the blob and yeast mode in human life
overtaking and subjecting all higher aspiration. Aztec “cities” with twenty
morons sleeping and eating off the floor, demagogued in the masses by blood-hungry priests with dead eyes. It is no different if they use the doxies of Reason and Logos to cart us off to this life."
There are a total of 5 uses of the word "longhouse" in Bronze Age Mindset. I will post the other 4 below:
"So here as elsewhere there is a kind of matriarchy,
but it works covertly, so that both the “left” and the “right” are fooled on this
point. In the end then the “left” is more correct: the worship of the titanic powers
of the earth, of the Great Mother, is connected to a kind of matriarchy, but where
they’re wrong is in imagining that this leads to any kind of freedom, that it
represents a kind of liberation from the strictures of modern civilization, the pain
of specialization, the submission to moral authority, the modern “alienation,”
and every other thing they like to blame. In fact everything that you hate about
modern life and that makes it into an Iron Prison—and I agree it is a prison—
represents a return of the endless sallow night of matriarchy. It is a return in
every way, you must understand this literally! Nietzsche says that in the modern
Europe you see the reassertion of pre-Aryan modes of life, the return of
socialism, of the longhouse, of feminism, and that this is happening also to us
internally, where the higher instincts of the spirit are being overtaken
physiologically by the retrograde and prehistoric. The life of the village and of
the primitive is one of utter subjection, total domestication and total brokenness.
The “matriarchy” that does exist, and that exerts enormous influence and power
in the social and moral realm, is only the manifestation of this brokenness of the
males. Communal solidarity absorbs and snuffs out any personal distinction or
intelligence and this task is relatively easy where it concerns the majority of the
parts of the village: the real problem becomes what to do with the young males.
In every way they represent a threat to the established customs and the
physiological torpor that benefits the old and the women. The social problem in
primitive tribes as well as most civilized and unfree societies becomes this, what
to do with the young males, their aggression, their sexual instincts: in every way
they must be broken and subsumed for the benefit of the tribe. This is more or
less easy for the majority, who lack life force in any significant quantity, harder
for the remainder, and where impossible—the fate of the outcast, or, more likely,
death. You fool yourself if you imagine that “young males are needed for
protection from external threat.” In fact most societies of the settled, primitive
and as well as civilized, are more than willing to accept the risk of submission to
an alien tribe. In a given area, if many such tribes follow this same path of selfdomestication the risk is hardly even that great in one’s own lifetime and a few
benighted, spineless “warrior” drones are sufficient to contend against similar
neighbors. But even in cases where there is great external threat from vigorous
tribes, such societies, ruled by women, the old, and the imbeciles, are willing to
rather accept subjection to the alien than to allow freedom and flourishing for
their young men."
"The way of settled life is just this then: to break the
youths from early age, to take the boys and caponize them physically, mentally
and spiritually. This happens in the smallest tribes as well.
When they become
civilizations, they look much like Han China, or the sinkhole cities of the Aztecs,
Babylonians, and others. You see here why people like Evola, Jung, Guenon and
all their followers go the wrong way. There is only this: whether life is stunted
and broken by a “tradition,” or whether it is one of the very few, the rare
exception, that allows the ascent of life.
As a rule, life is stunted and deformed by huemans. This is why huemans are disgusting as an animal, and must be overcome. This is the “free and primitive life” of the noble savage, this is the “matriarchy” that keeps its faith to nature in “sustainable” form.
In fact the society of the grass hut is hardly sustainable: such places are rapacious of natural
resources, and often vicious to animals and vicious tyrants to people. A good
parody of such a society on a small scale is the movie The Beach. The rule of
weakness is not good but something of incredible cruelty, even cannibalism.
Cannibalism is the way of all yeast life, to which the human animal degenerates
under these conditions of gynocracy.
Cannibalism is the eternal way of those erased huemans who submit themselves to the Venus Willendorf and all “earth mammies,” because this faction of nature is a putrid evil dripping blood from its claws and seeking the dissolution of all higher life, spiritually and biologically,
to the amorphous muck of the primeval swamp.
If you traveled in Europe around
maybe 3000 BC or so you would find wise-eyed cowlike black-haired Neolithic
matrons overseeing vast villages of longhouses where lived the hueman animal,
fifty or a hundred to a room, with sheep and goats, wallowing in its own shit,
tilling the soil, eating those of its members deemed to be “chosen by the gods”—
anyone, man or woman, distinguished by vital spirit—and she might even smack
you on the head with a lingam-dildo and question your privilege as a traveler.
This is the condition of most of mankind until recently, and it is the suffocating
miasma to which the modern world is fast returning, inside and out.
But enough of this prison. I suppose you want to know of a way out, or, at
least, to hear of a different way of life?"
"In ancient Greek cities, only the citizens were allowed to lift weights and
work in the gym: slaves were forbidden. It’s no wonder that the robots of
Babylon seek to ban gyms for men in our time. The pathetic failure of the
“swole-left,” an entirely artificial construct promoted in a pre-planned and
coordinated way by formal organs of the left, all of this is very instructive: the
occasional exception aside, it’s not possible to be “swole-left” today. Any man
who improves his body through sun and steel will drift away from the modern
left, a program of decrepitude and resentful monstrosity. They know this and are
afraid.
I have to make this restatement now at the end of this brief manifesto:
Many are domestic animals and happy that way. I speak instead to the men
who feel stifled by this bug world.
People at all times try to domesticate each other. Language is used to clobber
and deceive others into submission and domestication. Ideas and arguments and
stories are manufactured for the same. The modern world is no different in this
regard from any wretched tribal society. I'm sure that Europe prior to the Bronze
Age, before the coming of the Aryans, was similar to modern Europe. People
lived in communal longhouses and were likely browbeaten and ruled by obese
mammies who instilled in them socialism and feminism.
Most of those so-called males of the longhouse age were probably similar to
the modern leftist "herb" who doesn't lift. Which is why those societies were so
easily conquered.
The left realizes they look weak and lame—because they are. They know
they have nothing to offer youth but submission and lectures. They know they're
unsexy and staid. If indeed young leftist men will start lifting and worshiping
beauty, they will be forced to leave the left.
The bugman pretends to be motivated by compassion, but is instead
motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful. The bugman
seeks to bury beauty under a morass of ubiquitous ugliness and garbage. So
much of the Pacific and the pristine oceans are now full of garbage and plastic.
This garbage is flowing out of cities built on piles of unimaginable filth. The
waters are polluted with birth control pills and mind-bending drugs emitted by
obese high-fructose-corn-syrup-guzzling beasts. Then of course there is the
ugliness of the people. And it's only getting uglier with the crowded, unhygienic
new cities of our age, populated by hordes of dwarf-like zombies that are
imported for slave labor and political agitation from the fly-swept latrines of the
world.
People feel they can't escape this, they know this is an aggressive method to
demoralize and oppress. When I post my images of vitality in the clear sun of a
long noon, they feel a weight lifted off them. Many feel as if they've escaped the
gravity of this trash world and returned to a time when the natural beauty of man
could be displayed, indicating this is a form of life free to develop its powers.
I believe in the right of nature. I'm bored by ideology and by wordchopping.
The images I post speak for themselves and point to a primal order that is felt by
all, in a physical sense.
When I or my followers post powerful, beautiful images of male models of
unbelievable vitality and youth, our enemies gnash their teeth in envy and
hatred, while we are exalted and inspired.
The superior, like the handsome Alexander, exert an almost magical effect
that draws others to them. Some are drawn to higher action, others to other tasks,
but all petty cares are forgotten. There is nothing that needs to be said or
elaborated, no need to intellectualize this any more than the natural attraction
wolves on the move have for their king, or bees in a hive for their queen."
Hi, Kale. I love your podcast with Rod Dreher. I can assure you Pat Deneen has had way more than 238 tweets in his few years on Twitter. My guess is he has deleted most of them.
Deneen can get really feisty, but I'm surprised he went at First Things like that. He's pretty tight with Rusty Reno, I think.
The history of modern conservative movement is Buckley.
Buckley was a gatekeeper of the highest order. It is not really a surprise to see this kind of continued behavior from Buckley's heirs: the chained conservative commentator class who have accepted their position as losers.
I did order 'Why Liberalism Failed' to read. $9.99 is a little less steep than $57. 👍
It is a fantastic book and well worth your time and the $10! I just wish he'd engage rather than cordon himself off from these important conversations.