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thegloober · 6 years ago

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A Message To My Younger Self

I regret. I regret a lot. I wish I could have been different.

I wish I could be 17 again and know these rules.

There’s nothing wrong with regret. There’s nothing wrong with wondering how your life would have been different and better.

This is what I wish I knew:

A) DON’T DEPEND ON OTHERS FOR YOUR HAPPINESS

If you outsource your self-esteem, you’ll never be happy.

I outsourced my self-esteem to girlfriends. It was hard enough for them to handle their own self-esteem, let alone mine.

I outsourced my self-esteem to professors, thinking a good grade would make my life better. It didn’t.

Later I outsourced my self-esteem to bosses, thinking a promotion would make my life better. It didn’t.

I outsourced my self-esteem to anyone who had the power to “choose me” – publishers, TV, investors, customers.

I could’ve spent that energy developing the skills to choose myself. There is ALWAYS a back door to dreams.

When I depended on others for my own happiness I ended up trying too hard to make OTHER people happy. If they are happy, I thought, they will make me happy.

A waste of time and effort. People only cared when it was their own self-interest. I am fine with that now.

B) DON’T READ NEWS

I can’t even remember the news from when I was 17 but I always read three newspapers a day and every magazine.

Read books instead. The news when I was 17 was that Reagan was trading drugs for hostages and that Michael Jackson was going to release another album.

Knowing this has had zero effect on my life. I should have read another book about history, or a biography, or a good piece of fiction.

When you read a book, you absorb some of the 10,000 hours of expertise the author poured into the creation of that book.

When you read a news article, you are fooled into caring about something that will have zero consequence on your life.

News is about shock. Not about knowledge.

C) WAKE UP ASKING… “WHAT IF…?”

For instance, “What if I didn’t go to college and instead I wrote a book or learned how to program and started making money instead of borrowing it?”

Or, if you want to go to Harvard but were rejected: “What if I just showed up for classes there and nobody realized I wasn’t an actual student?”

“What if I took a job and started learning skills instead of arguing with my college girlfriend?”

“What if I stopped waiting to begin my life and started pursuing the things I love?”

When you start with “What if?” you start with Questions instead of Answers.

17 year olds don’t have Answers but I always thought I did. Start with Questions instead.

“What if…?” let’s you build a bridge between reality now and the desires you want.

“What if…?” let’s you step outside the path that parents, teachers, friends, society have planned for you and allows you to find your own path.

“What if..?” let’s you admit you are stupid but open-minded enough to be curious and explore the entire universe.

(Exercise: Ask 30 “what if” questions about your life. Like: What if I could make my own TV show and put it on YouTube. Or…What if I could be a professional sports anchor… what 100 steps would build that bridge? Or…What if I could invent my own cryptocurrency? What would make it unique? and so on.)

D) DON’T ARGUE

I would argue with my dad about Nicaraguan politics.

Who the heck cares now? And what change did I create by arguing? I thought I knew everything and so did he. So we wasted mindless hours arguing about something stupid and now he’s dead.

I would argue in classes about poetry or philosophy instead of learning for myself what life was like in the real world.

I would argue about the economics of poverty with other people who knew nothing about either.

Poetry is found by doing what you love, by scraping a knee when you fall, by lifting yourself up even when you’re dirty and bloody and tired and you have to start all over.

Philosophy is found when you find the edges of the comfort zone of life and make your first attempts to step outside of it.

Poverty is found when you do everything you can to succeed and you fail and you take ownership of your mistakes and you start again.

Opportunity is found not in the middle of an argument that has no outcome on life, but in the places that are least crowded, where you are exploring and finding out who you uniquely are.

E) EXERCISE THE CREATIVE MUSCLE

Nobody wants you to be creative:

“Ideas are a dime a dozen.”

“Ideas are not a business.”

“Execution is everything.”

Creativity is a muscle. You can’t have good ideas if you don’t exercise that muscle.

Every day I write down 10 ideas. Not because they are good. But because they are bad and I want to be better every day than the day before.

This morning I wrote down 10 ideas for books I could write.

Good books? No. (“The History of The World in Tweets from 2010–2018” is an example).

It’s probably the thousandth time I’ve written down book ideas. Another 2,000 times I’ve written down business ideas. Another 3,000 times I’ve written down ideas for others.

It doesn’t matter.

If I’m better at idea generation than everyone else then I will find the places that are least crowded.

F) THE BEST INVESTMENT IS IN YOURSELF… BUT DIVERSIFY

When I was 17 I had no skills. I was the high school chess champ in my state but that’s it.

When I was 23 I still had no skills and that was after college and graduate school.

When I was 26 I still had no skills and that was after a few jobs.

I finally found something.

I found “awe”.

I thought the internet was awesome. I was in awe of it’s potential. I wrote down all the things the internet could do.

So I learned skills: I learned how to program a computer (even though when I was 21 I had majored in computer science and then I went to graduate school in computer science, it was all theoretical and I never did anything that required a real skill).

But diversify your skills. Diversify the things that give you awe.

Read a lot to find the things that fascinate you.

Write down ideas every day.

Develop a skill that makes money NOW (like computer programming). Develop more than one of these if you can.

Develop skills for the future (like writing, communicating, speaking, entertaining).

I’m 50 now. I’ve invested in myself. I have skills.

But still every day I have to learn. I have to maintain. I have to keep up. I have to practice. I have to exercise.

Exercise: Start with these books. Read them:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb (and The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness by him)

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz

Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

Mindset by Carol Dweck

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Sapiens by Yuval Harari

The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz

Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson (a collection of short stories, not a religious book)

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (and The Evolution of Everything by him)

Bold by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Peak by K. Anders Ericsson

The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer (along with The Untethered Soul by him)

Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor

Mastery by Robert Greene

Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters

War of Art by Steven Pressfield (and Turning Pro)

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

Purple Cow by Seth Godin

Maus by Art Spiegelman

On Writing by Stephen King

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson (and his book Where Good Ideas Come From)

Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (and Practicing the Power of Now by him)

The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

What I Talk About When I talk about Running by Haruki Murakami

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Blue Zones by Dan Buettner

The New Evolution Diet by Art De Vany

Poking a Dead Frog by Mike Sacks

Socrates by Paul Johnson

Small Victories by Anne Lamott

Meet Your Happy Chemicals by Loretta Breuning

G) LEARN WHAT MONEY IS

Money is not about having a higher income. Or about pleasing others. Or about the economy.

The economy is for everyone else. And it’s almost impossible to get rich on income.

Money is not about investing or spending or luxury or even freedom.

Money is about arbitrage. Seeing value where other people don’t. This takes practice.

You can practice by learning a money game like poker.

Get really good at poker and you learn about people, probability, statistics, selling, arbitrage, decision making, money management, emotional control, entertainment, creativity.

Games are a safe way to practice hunting. Games are a safe way to learn about money.

I wish I had learned poker at 17 instead of at 30. Then I wouldn’t have lost all my money at 30. Much safer to lose all your money at 17 before you have two kids and a mortgage.

H) PLUS, MINUS, EQUAL

To learn anything you need a:

PLUS: a mentor (real or virtual or books) to study and emulate and learn from.

EQUALS: people who are striving with you that you can compare notes with.

MINUS: You can’t learn something unless you can explain it to a three year old. Always try to explain what you are learning.

I) THE GOOGLE RULE

Google knows nothing.

If I go to Google and want to learn about “computer programming”, Google will say, “I know nothing but here are the ten best places you can go based on my extensive research.”

Then, when I want to learn about “motorcycles” the first place I will go is Google.

Google is worth almost a trillion dollars.

Because:

They are the source of information but not the actual information. They tell you where to go.

They give credit to everyone else. They don’t say “We know”, they say “These people know and they are GREAT.”

If you use the Google Rule you’ll have more value every day.

(The first Google home page)

J) THE 1% RULE

Whatever gives you AWE, improve 1% per day at.

1% per day, compounded, equals 3800% per year.

3800% per year will make you the best in the world at everything you are interested in.

Lose 1% per day (by relying on others, by depending on institutions to help, by arguing and trying to convince people, by following society’s rules instead of your own), will mean in a year you are 3% the person you were at the beginning of the year.

(The most important rule in this post).

K) LOVE EVERYONE AS IF THEY WERE YOUR DAUGHTER

Everyone is going through a world of s*8t. All the time.

Treat everyone the way you would treat a daughter.

Love their faults and flaws. Don’t try and change them. Be sensitive to their sadness. Listen to them. Hold them if they need it. Don’t control them.

They want to be happy. Just like you.

You don’t need to love God or society or even yourself.

Just love everyone as if they were your daughter.

That’s enough advice for myself at 17.

I regret a lot of things.

It’s ok to regret.

I’m fine with where I am in life. Doesn’t mean I can’t wish I had been a little more wise when I was younger.

Is my advice good?

I don’t know. I’m not going to argue with my 17 year old self if he disagrees with me.

He was pretty stupid. He was pretty gross. He was pretty insecure and selfish and lonely.

If I had just followed a tiny bit of this advice, maybe I wouldn’t have been so lonely for so long.

What if…?

The post A Message To My Younger Self appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

The post A Message To My Younger Self was shared from BlogHyped.com.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/a-message-to-my-younger-self/

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howardschatzphotography · 6 years ago

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On Seeing: A Journal - #259 June 12th, 2018

"Above & Beyond with Adam Gopnik”

Adam Gopnik is a Renaissance Man’s Renaissance Man. A long-time staff writer at The New Yorker, he is an essayist, a critic, a playwright, a novelist, an author of children’s books…in short, the epitome of the enlightened human. I read his writing avidly, and, a few weeks ago, invited him to our studio to participate in my project “ABOVE and BEYOND.” A three-time winner of the National Magazine Award, Gopnik has amazingly broad knowledge of many areas, including: Art and art history, culture, politics, music, even sports. His first essay in The New Yorker, "Quattrocento Baseball," appeared in May of 1986, and he served as the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995. During our interview, he spoke in perfectly structured, literate English, as clear and precise as his written words. Here are some of Gopnik’s thoughts that I found especially compelling from our interview: HS: So prolific, I wonder how you organize your life. When do you write? When do you read? When do you think? When do you go to museums, see friends, have a life? You must have some efficiently organized method in order to produce as much as you do. AG: I have a very standard routine. I start drinking strong coffee early in the morning. I go off to my little study and I write for four hours. I have many sisters, one of them a distinguished psychologist, and she says that you can only do creative work intently for four hours at a stretch. So, I do four hours from nine til one, every day. I try not to do anything else. I’m just there to write. I do it in a way that makes it maximally uncomfortable for anyone else who intrudes on me, because I can only write if I’m playing extremely loud rock music from my high school years: Jethro Tull; Eric Clapton with Derek & The Dominos, that great Layla album; Jimi Hendrix; all of that music. HS: You play this music, and loudly, as you write? AG: I can’t think if I don’t have the music, that’s the funny thing. I also overheat terribly as I’m writing, so I have to keep the windows open in the middle of winter. I’ve had a series of wonderful assistants just coming out of college, and they’re sort of excited about the job. You know, “I’m going to be a writer’s assistant and see the elegance of a New Yorker writer’s life," and instead it’s just a little man, four hours a day, in a brutally cold room with incredibly loud music playing, and that’s their experience. So, they’d retreat into the hallway and spend the time talking with my wife.

HS: Where and how do you think your work has had greatest impact given the political and cultural bias of The New Yorker? AG: Writing for The New Yorker, which is a traditionally liberal magazine, of course you ask yourself a question, "what am I really affecting here?" because I’m writing to people who agree with me in advance. But, if you look at the greatest political editorialists who have ever lived, Albert Camus, for instance, they were writing themed journals that were directed to people who were inclined to agree with them in the first place. What we do, I think, as citizens, writing, is not so much to change minds as to bear witness. What you want to say is not, “here’s an argument that will convince you of the opposite of what you believe already, but here’s the kind of argument you ought to be making to the people who don’t agree with you." HS: We live in a time with a bully in the White House. And, yet, despite the mean-spirited and hypocritical behavior, there are still thirty to forty percent of Americans… AG: Who love him. HS: And my question on changing people’s minds comes from something you wrote in your wonderful book, "At the Strangers’ Gate," that was astounding. I’d like to read it and perhaps you can comment on it: "No one really surrenders an illusion in the face of a fact. We prefer the illusion to the fact. The more facts you invoke, in fact, the stronger the illusion becomes. All faith is immune to all facts to the contrary, or else we would not have such hearty faiths and such oft-resisted facts. If your faith is in life’s poetry, as ours was, a tiny room inadequate by any human standard and designed to make life borderline impossible looks appealing. The less possible it becomes the more beautiful the illusion looks. Such illusions – call them delusions; I won’t argue now – grow under the pressure of absurdity, as champagne grapes sweeten under the stress of cold ground." AG: Yes, I think that’s true. I mean, I was writing specifically there about the reality that when Martha, my then girlfriend, now wife for many years, and I moved to New York, we were enraptured with an idea of poetry, a kind of metropolitan poetry. And, the apartment we moved into was 9x11 basement room overrun by cockroaches in which there was about as little poetry as you could expect to find in the world. But, we weren’t disillusioned by it. We simply doubled-down on the myths that we were self-creating, and I think that’s generally true. You know, no one is ever argued out of a religious faith by contrary facts. No one is every argued out of a political ideology. That’s the problem we’re faced with: You can’t resist a figure like Trump by appealing to the facts, by saying he lies all the time, because the people who admire him like the fact that he lies all the time. The lies, in a certain way, are appealing to them because it gives them license to indulge their own fantasies. In other words, if somebody tells you three million people voted illegally in California, it’s an outright, absurd lie. But, that an authority figure says it gives you a right to believe in it. If your question is what do you do then, when you have a leader who is completely allergic to facts and who appeals to an audience that’s resistant to facts, I think the answer is that you can’t fantasize that you’re going to convert those folks. What happens is that you get new generations who just don’t buy it. If you think about the great social changes, the great positive social changes of our time, they tend not to happen because you have people who are entrenched in a bigoted or old-fashioned reactionary position who are converted. What tends to happen, is the young generations who come along simply don’t enlist in the bigotry.

HS: I’d like to talk about the natural history of creativity, its life-cycle. There’s sort of an apex, a fertile period of creativity, then a downturn. Recently, I heard Dylan say when asked about his seminal work of 50 years ago, "Who writes like that?!" Probably everybody’s curve is different and maybe some people have a second curve. Do you have any thoughts about that? AG: I think that any honest, creative person is bound to confess that when one looks at other artists and creative people, you tend to see that they have a high period and then a falling off period. Bob Dylan is a remarkable character, but there’s no question that the Dylan between 1966 and 1974, between Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks is the Dylan who we’ll remember. Paul McCartney is a musician of limitless melodic invention, but the McCartney we’ll remember is between 1965 and 1969. So, there’s a lot be said for the idea that artists ought to retire in a way that fighters ought to retire before they get punch-drunk and lazy-legged and all the rest of it. However, what I do think is true is that even if you accept that all creativity is cyclical and has a falling off point, there’s still an enormous value in artists persisting, because artists don’t just give us the gift of their products, they give us the gift of their example. Dylan 2018 is not writing songs the way Dylan 1968 did, but it’s wonderful to see him continuing to stand up there with his croaky voice and his little mustache bearing witness to what it is to have been Bob Dylan. HS: Do some artists have two periods of great work? AG: Yes, I think they do. Matisse did unimaginably beautiful work between 1905 and 1920; went on doing interesting, not nearly as profound work and then, suddenly, as an old man changed his medium, started using scissors instead of a paint brush and, once again, did utterly sublime work. De Kooning, another artist who had a great late blooming. Philip Roth, to take a name that doesn’t seem to sit with de Kooning and Matisse, maybe, at first, through sheer dint and intelligence continued to blaze new kinds of witness, new kinds of writing, in part, because he had the enormously smart idea that he should write about what it was like when he was young again. Instead of trying to bear witness again and again to the new world, he wrote very much about New York in the 1940s. I don’t think silence is a good answer for an artist, even if an artist is aware that it’s a general rule that you do your best work at a particular moment; the work that people will remember most. HS: What are your thoughts on the larger issues of the day, especially fake news and how, in a way, it threatens our democracy? AG: Fake news is one of those things that has managed, through the mendacious spin of a very mendacious man, to totally reverse meaning. When fake news was first talked about people meant actually manufactured fraudulent stories that were being passed around on the internet, very often to the benefit of Donald Trump. He turned it around to make it an accusation at people who were actually doing real news: CNN, The New York Times and so on, who do their work in the same flawed and imperfect way that we all do our work, but who genuinely are trying to report the world as it is. It’s Trump, the man who speaks loudest about fake news, who is the most culpable of spreading fake news… “three million people voted illegally, I had the biggest crowd," and on and on and on. So, I don’t feel fake news is as big a problem as the people crying about fake news. In other words, it’s when the governing class decides to demoralize the population by telling them they can’t believe anything that they’re being told. That’s when you get the crisis. I’m not worried about fake news. I’m worried about fake politicians.

#adamgopnik #howardschatz #journalism #newyorker #the new yorker magazine #writer #interview

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dragonsplz · 4 years ago

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tw/cw again i think?

maybe this thing will hide it a little bit? i dunno, if someone actually does stumble upon this shit let me know if i can make it so you have to actively click something to be able to see the content like idk discord spoilers? anyways a couple days i took a bar and a half of xanax plus 2x my regular dose (i have only abused my xanax once in the past because generally i was just pretty worried about running out and not having any any when i needed them but the xans pretty much stopped working so my psychiatrist put me on klonopin but ironically i’ve been too anxious to go to the walgreens to get them) anyways yeah massive amount of xanax for little me and according to my housemates i lost like three days of time and did some wack ass shit and i remember none of it but anyways i have finally returned to a state of consciousness slightly above the level of my snails’ and I Feel Good But In A Bad Way. i feel very,,,,, out of control and part of me is like you have So Much Access you really could just drop a bar every now and again and it’s like I'm craving it like i Understand vaguely what it’s probably like to have an addiction and i know if i am not careful i will have one but i don’t really care about the state of my body anymore i don’t think. at least not for now. i stopped cutting awhile ago because i moved and now there’s not really anywhere i’d be able to without somebody noticing but i also gave myself a concussion and i don’t even think i thought about doing it before i did it but anyways i don’t know if what i’m craving is some high i can’t remember or if it’s the not remembering things. i don’t like really have any concept of time so i can’t tell how long it’s been but i think i’ve generally been stoned at least once a day. sometimes i feel bad and swear it off but then like two hours later I'm on the back porch with a preroll. i think maybe thats addiction, too, but weed won’t kill me so i don’t really think about that much. anyways today after i regained consciousness (i was on the kitchen floor and was like in and out of it for two or three hours) i spent several hours just wandering back and forth from the big recliner in the living room and the kitchen because my housemates said they hadn’t been able to get me to eat for the past couple days but everything just kinda sounded disgusting. i think i managed to get down a slice and a half of three-day-old pizza. honestly i feel really bad because my grandmother sent me home after thanksgiving (dw, cover tests before and quarantine after) with the homemade rolls i really love and i think i’ve eaten maybe one and I'm honestly scared to look at them because they’ve probably gone bad by now and i just wasted food my siblings could have been eating. i didn’t even realize how much i still thought like that until i moved out. like obviously even being away i feel like that. and i think i’ve been hallucinating/having delusions but I'm scared if i tell my psychiatrist she’ll call my grandmother and tell her (and i think she already called her when i told her i was having suicidal ideations again) and/or call the authorities and have me hospitalized. so like thats scary and all and i can’t tell if maybe i’ve developed Something New or if it’s just some new fresh hell of a mixture of my depression/anxiety/ptsd and of course i want it to stop but man i am so afraid of going back into the hospital I'm already kind of a disordered eater and last time i was in the hospital i lost 10 lbs in 9 days and I Took Note Of That. also they wouldn’t let me have my binder but the girls are allowed to have bras and they misgendered me and deadnamed me but they let me have a room alone but i can’t remember if the rumor about depression during the holidays is true and i really don’t think i can afford to be roomed in a girls’ room with another actual girl-identifying person like i really think that dysphoria would kill me like i really think i would pull a kyler and man i miss kyler so bad man i was never allowed to grieve his death like my grandmother really forced me to go back to school the weekend after i found out he killed him. idk sometimes i think his suicide affected me worse than royce’s and royce lived in my dorm. i had classes with royce. but maybe it’s because i can’t really remember much from freshman year anyways. also damn this is long and i think i maybe had a point when i started writing this but it is long gone by now. i keep getting distracted by everything but when i started writing that chapbook like nothing disturbed me i got up once to make Another cup of coffee but otherwise i just sat in that recliner typing. i wrote 25 entire pages between the time that i ate the pizza and idk sometime before now but there were really no milestones between eating the pizza and now and i actually really have no concept of time so i don’t actually know how long that was but it felt like no time and forever all at once and i feel like that a lot but it might just be the weed. i think i used to use weed as a coping mechanism but now i feel that there’s no point. i said to my housemates today that i feel like if albert camus had a character that was an existential father of three with a really dark sense of humor and i feel like a good dad as this character but also i really can’t stand children like a friend of a friend asked me to babysit for her and it’s not like i didn’t have empathy like i did an interview with her at the beginning of covid when she was pregnant and i thought my senior thesis was going to be on covid and i was so excited doing the interviews like man do i have anthropology brain but never transcribed them so it’s a good thing i withdrew from the semester because my peers have all recently had their thesis deadlines and i definitely would not have met them. oh but anyways I'm sorry everything is distracting me but also what am i say I'm really just throwing this into the void of the universe via the internet so nobody is actually trying to follow this anyways it wasn’t like i didn’t have empathy for her but i knew she had other options and her child upset and disgusted and drained me of all of my energy so i said no but i don't think that makes me a horrible person. oh but anyways a tangent on a tangent i guess because i think i started this tangent intending to end the other tangent where i say i think it’s just muscle memory now and not a coping mechanism but my housemates still thinks it helps so sometimes they’ll bring me one of my prerolls which is nice and all but i can't help but think how lost they would be if i was having a really hard time and they tried to give me my vape or something but i told them i was quitting? like dw it’s not like toxic the way this is happening i promise but i don’t actually know how to phrase it in a way that doesn’t sound Like That. anyways i hope nobody finds this but if somebody does please know that while i am vaguely concerned, i am safe. at least for now.

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voxrepulsori · 7 years ago

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The French Origins of « You Will Not Replace Us »

THE NEW YORKER | 04.12.2017 | Thomas Chatterton Williams

The European thinkers behind the white-nationalist rallying cry. The Château de Plieux, a fortified castle on a hilltop in the Gascony region of southwestern France, overlooks rolling fields speckled with copses and farmhouses. A tricolor flag snaps above the worn beige stone. The northwest tower, which was built in the fourteenth century, offers an ideal position from which to survey invading hordes. Inside the château’s cavernous second-story study, at a desk heavy with books, the seventy-one-year-old owner of the property, Renaud Camus, sits at an iMac and tweets dire warnings about Europe’s demographic doom. On the sweltering June afternoon that I visited the castle, Camus—no relation to Albert—wore a tan summer suit and a tie. Several painted self-portraits hung in the study, multiplying his blue-eyed gaze. Camus has spent most of his career as a critic, novelist, diarist, and travel essayist. The only one of his hundred or so books to be translated into English, “Tricks” (1979), announces itself as “a sexual odyssey— man-to-man,” and includes a foreword by Roland Barthes. The book describes polyglot assignations from Milan to the Bronx. Allen Ginsberg said of it, “Camus’s world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.” In recent years, though, Camus’s name has been associated less with erotica than with a single poignant phrase, le grand remplacement. In 2012, he made this the title of an alarmist book. Native “white” Europeans, he argues, are being reverse-colonized by black and brown immigrants, who are flooding the Continent in what amounts to an extinction-level event. “The great replacement is very simple,” he has said. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people.” The specific identity of the replacement population, he suggests, is of less importance than the act of replacement itself. “Individuals, yes, can join a people, integrate with it, assimilate to it,” he writes in the book. “But peoples, civilizations, religions—and especially when these religions are themselves civilizations, types of society, almost States—cannot and cannot even want to . . . blend into other peoples, other civilizations.” Camus believes that all Western countries are faced with varying degrees of “ethnic and civilizational substitution.” He points to the increasing prevalence of Spanish, and other foreign languages, in the United States as evidence of the same phenomenon. Although his arguments are scarcely available in translation, they have been picked up by right-wing and white-nationalist circles throughout the English-speaking world. In July, Lauren Southern, the Canadian alt-right Internet personality, posted, on YouTube, a video titled “The Great Replacement”; it has received more than a quarter of a million views. On greatreplacement.com, a Web site maintained anonymously, the introductory text declares, “The same term can be applied to many other European peoples both in Europe and abroad . . . where the same policy of mass immigration of non-European people poses a demographic threat. Of all the different races of people on this planet, only the European races are facing the possibility of extinction in a relatively near future.” The site announces its mission as “spreading awareness” of Camus’s term, which, the site’s author concludes, is more palatable than a similar concept, “white genocide.” (A search for that phrase on YouTube yields more than fifty thousand videos.) “I don’t have any genetic conception of races,” Camus told me. “I don’t use the word ‘superior.’ ” He insisted that he would feel equally sad if Japanese culture or “African culture” were to disappear because of immigration. On Twitter, he has quipped, “The only race I hate is the one knocking on the door.” Camus’s partner arrived in the study with a silver platter, and offered fruitcake and coffee. Camus, meanwhile, told me about his “red-pill moment”—an alt-right term, derived from a scene in the film “The Matrix,” for the decision to become politically enlightened. As a child, he said, he was a “xenophile,” who was delighted to see foreign tourists flocking to the thermal baths near his home, in the Auvergne. In the late nineties, he began writing domestic travel books, commissioned by the French government. The work took him to the department of Hérault, whose capital is Montpellier. Although Camus was familiar with France’s heavily black and Arab inner suburbs, or banlieues, and their subsidized urban housing projects, known as cités, his experience in Hérault floored him. Travelling through medieval villages, he said, “you would go to a fountain, six or seven centuries old, and there were all these North African women with veils!” A demographic influx was clearly no longer confined to France’s inner suburbs and industrial regions; it was ubiquitous, and it was transforming the entire country. Camus’s problem was not, as it might be for many French citizens, that the religious symbolism of the veil clashed with some of the country’s most cherished secularist principles; it was that the veil wearers were permanent interlopers in Camus’s homeland. He became obsessed with the diminishing ethnic purity of Western Europe. Camus supports the staunchly anti-immigrant politician Marine Le Pen. He denied, however, that he was a member of the “extreme right,” saying that he was simply one of many voters who “wanted France to stay French.” In Camus’s view, Emmanuel Macron, the centrist liberal who handily defeated Le Pen in a runoff, is synonymous with the “forces of remplacement.” Macron, he noted acidly, “went to Germany to compliment Mme. Merkel on the marvellous work she did by taking in one million migrants.” Camus derides Macron, a former banker, as a representative of “direct Davos-cracy”—someone who thinks of people as “interchangeable” units within a larger social whole. “This is a very low conception of what being human is,” he said. “People are not just things. They come with their history, their culture, their language, with their looks, with their preferences.” He sees immigration as one aspect of a nefarious global process that renders obsolete everything from cuisine to landscapes. “The very essence of modernity is the fact that everything—and really everything—can be replaced by something else, which is absolutely monstrous,” he said. Camus takes William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s injunction to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop” to the furthest extent possible, and he can be recklessly unconcerned about backing up his claims. On a recent radio appearance, he took a beating from Hervé le Bras, a director emeritus at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, who said that Camus’s proclamations about ethnic substitution were based on wildly inflated statistics about the number of foreigners entering France. Afterward, Camus breezily responded on Twitter: “Since when, in history, did a people need ‘science’ to decide whether or not it was invaded and occupied?” Camus has become one of the most cited figures on the right in France. He is a regular interlocutor of such mainstream intellectuals as Alain Finkielkraut, the conservative Jewish philosopher, who has called Camus “a great writer,” and someone who has “forged an expression that is heard all the time and everywhere.” Camus also has prominent critics: the essayist and novelist Emmanuel Carrère, a longtime friend, has publicly reproached him, writing that “the argument ‘I’m at home here, not you’ ” is incompatible with “globalized justice.” Mark Lilla, the Columbia historian and scholar of the mentality of European reactionaries, described Camus as “a kind of connective tissue between the far right and the respectable right.” Camus can play the role of “respectable” reactionary because his opposition to multicultural globalism is plausibly high-minded, principally aesthetic, even well-mannered—a far cry from the manifest brutality of the skinheads and the tattooed white nationalists who could put into action the xenophobic ideas expressed in “Le Grand Remplacement.” (At a rally in Warsaw on November 11th, white-nationalist demonstrators brandished signs saying “Pray for an Islamic Holocaust” and “Pure Poland, White Poland.”) When I asked Camus whether he considered me—a black American living in Paris with a French wife and a mixed-race daughter—part of the problem, he genially replied, “There is nothing more French than an American in Paris!” He then offered me the use of his castle when he and his partner next went on a vacation. Although Camus presents his definition of “Frenchness” as reasonable and urbane, it is of a piece with a less benign perspective on ethnicity, Islam, and territory which has circulated in his country for decades. Never the sole preserve of the far right, this view was conveyed most bluntly in a 1959 letter, from Charles de Gaulle to his confidant Alain Peyrefitte, which advocates withdrawal from French Algeria: It is very good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They prove that France is open to all races and that she has a universal mission. But [it is good] on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are, after all, primarily a European people of the white race, Greek and Latin culture, and the Christian religion. De Gaulle then declares that Muslims, “with their turbans and djellabahs,” are “not French.” He asks, “Do you believe that the French nation can absorb 10 million Muslims, who tomorrow will be 20 million and the day after 40 million?” If this were to happen, he concludes, “my village would no longer be called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, but Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées!” Such worry about Muslims has been present across Europe at least since the turn of the twentieth century, when the first “guest workers” began arriving from former French colonies and from Turkey. In 1898 in Britain, Winston Churchill warned of “militant Mahommedanism,” and Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech alleged that immigration had caused a “total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.” Anxiety about immigrants of color has long been present in the United States, especially in states along the Mexican border. This feeling became widespread after 9/11, and has only intensified with subsequent terrorist acts by Islamists, the Great Recession, and the election of the first black President. Meanwhile, white populations across the world are stagnant or dwindling. In recent years, white-nationalist discourse has emerged from the recesses of the Internet into plain sight, permeating the highest reaches of the Trump Administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the White House senior adviser Stephen Miller endorse dramatic reductions in both legal and illegal immigration. The President’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has returned to his post as the executive chairman of the far-right Web site Breitbart. In a 2014 speech at the Vatican, Bannon praised European “forefathers” who kept Islam “out of the world.” President Trump, meanwhile, has made the metaphor of immigrant invasion literal by vowing to build a wall. In Europe, which in recent years has absorbed millions of migrants fleeing wars in the Middle East or crossing the Mediterranean from Africa, opposition to immigration is less a cohesive ideology than a welter of reactionary ideas and feelings. Xenophobic nationalism can be found on both the left and the right. There is not even unanimity on the superiority of Judeo-Christian culture: some European nationalists express a longing for ancient pagan practices. Anti-immigrant thinkers also cannot agree on a name for their movement. Distrust of multiculturalism and a professed interest in preserving European “purity” is often called “identitarianism,” but many prominent anti-immigrant writers avoid that construction. Camus told me that he refused to play “the game” of identity politics, and added, “Do you think that Louis XIV or La Fontaine or Racine or Châteaubriand would say, ‘I’m identitarian?’ No, they were just French. And I’m just French.” Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration, Richard Spencer, the thirty-nine-year-old white nationalist who has become the public face of the American alt-right, was sucker-punched by a protester while being interviewed on a street corner in Washington, D.C. A video of the incident went viral, but little attention was paid to what Spencer said on the clip. “I’m not a neo-Nazi,” he declared. “They kind of hate me, actually.” In order to deflect the frequent charge that he is a racist, he defines himself with the very term that Camus rejects: identitarian. The word sidesteps the question of racial superiority and co-opts the left’s inclusive language of diversity and its critique of forced assimilation in order to reclaim the right to difference—for whites. Identitarianism is a distinctly French innovation. In 1968, in Nice, several dozen far-right activists created the Research and Study Group for European Civilization, better known by its French acronym, GRECE. The think tank eventually began promoting its ideas under the rubric the Nouvelle Droite, or the New Right. One of its founders, and its most influential member, was Alain de Benoist, a hermetic aristocrat and scholar who has written more than a hundred books. In “View from the Right” (1977), Benoist declared that he and other members of GRECE considered “the gradual homogenization of the world, advocated and realized by the two-thousand-year-old discourse of egalitarian ideology, to be an evil.” The group expressed allegiance to “diversity” and “ethnopluralism”—terms that sound politically correct to American ears but had a different meaning in Benoist’s hands. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” (1999), he argued: The true wealth of the world is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples. The West’s conversion to universalism has been the main cause of its subsequent attempt to convert the rest of the world: in the past, to its religion (the Crusades); yesterday, to its political principles (colonialism); and today, to its economic and social model (development) or its moral principles (human rights). Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness. From this vantage point, both globalized Communism and globalized capitalism are equally suspect, and a “citizen of the world” is an agent of imperialism. When Benoist writes that “humanity is irreducibly plural” and that “diversity is part of its very essence,” he is not supporting the idea of a melting pot but of diversity in isolation: all Frenchmen in one territory and all Moroccans in another. It is a nostalgic and aestheticized view of the world that shows little interest in the complex economic and political forces that provoke migration. Identitarianism is a lament against change made by people fortunate enough to have been granted, through the arbitrary circumstance of birth, citizenship in a wealthy liberal democracy. Benoist’s peculiar definition of “diversity” has allowed him to take some unexpected positions. He simultaneously defends a Muslim immigrant’s right to wear the veil and opposes the immigration policies that allowed her to settle in France in the first place. In an e-mail, he told me that immigration constitutes an undeniably negative phenomenon, in part because it turns immigrants into victims, by erasing their roots. He continued, “The destiny of all the peoples of the Third World cannot be to establish themselves in the West.” In an interview in the early nineties with Le Monde, he declared that the best way to show solidarity with immigrants is by increasing trade with the Third World, so that developing countries can become “self-sufficient” enough to dissuade their citizens from seeking better lives elsewhere. These countries, he added, needed to find their own paths forward, and not follow the tyrannizing templates of the World Bank and the I.M.F. Benoist told me that, in France’s Presidential election, in May, he voted not for Marine Le Pen but for the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who shares his contempt for global capitalism. Benoist’s writing often echoes left-wing thinkers, especially the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote of “hegemony”—or the command that a regime can wield over a population by controlling its culture. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance,” Benoist argues that white Europeans should not just support restrictive immigration policies; they should oppose such diluting ideologies as multiculturalism and globalism, taking seriously “the premise that ideas play a fundamental role in the collective consciousness.” In a similar spirit, Benoist has promoted a gramscisme de droite—cultural opposition to the rampaging forces of Hollywood and multinational corporations. The French, he has said, should retain their unique traditions and not switch to “a diet of hamburgers.” Despite Benoist’s affinity for some far-left candidates, “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” has become a revered text for the extreme right across Western Europe, in the U.S., and even in Russia. The crackpot Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who promotes the ethnopluralist doctrine “Eurasianism,” has flown to Paris to meet Benoist. “I consider him to be the foremost intellectual in Europe today,” Dugin told interviewers in 2012. Earlier this year, John Morgan, an editor of Counter-Currents, a white-nationalist publishing house based in San Francisco, posted an online essay about the indebtedness of the American alt-right to European thought. He described Benoist and GRECE’s achievement as “a towering edifice of thought unparalleled anywhere else on the Right since the Conservative Revolution in Germany of the Weimar era.” Although Benoist claims not to be affiliated with the alt-right—or even to understand “what Richard Spencer can know or have learned from my thoughts”—he has travelled to Washington, D.C., to speak at the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist group run by Spencer, and he has sat for long interviews with Jared Taylor, the founder of the virulently white-supremacist magazine American Renaissance. In one exchange, Taylor, who was educated in France, asked Benoist how he saw himself “as different from identitarians.” Benoist responded, “I am aware of race and of the importance of race, but I do not give to it the excessive importance that you do.” He went on, “I am not fighting for the white race. I am not fighting for France. I am fighting for a world view. . . . Immigration is clearly a problem. It gives rise to much social pathologies. But our identity, the identity of the immigrants, all the identities in the world have a common enemy, and this common enemy is the system that destroys identities and differences everywhere. This system is the enemy, not the Other.” Benoist may not be a dogmatic thinker, but, for white people who want to think explicitly in terms of culture and race, his work provides a lofty intellectual framework. These disciples, instead of calling for an “Islamic holocaust,” can argue that rootedness in one’s homeland matters, and that immigration, miscegenation, and the homogenizing forces of neoliberal market economies collude to obliterate identities that have taken shape over hundreds of years—just as relentless development has decimated the environment. Benoist’s romantic-sounding ideas can be cherry-picked and applied to local political resentments. The writer Raphaël Glucksmann, a prominent critic of the French far right, told me that such selective appropriations have given Benoist “a huge authority among white nationalists and Fascists everywhere in the world.” Glucksmann recently met me for coffee near his home, which is off the Rue du Faubourg SaintDenis, one of the most ethnically diverse thoroughfares in Paris. The Nouvelle Droite, Glucksmann argued, adopted a traditionally German, tribal way of conceiving identity, which the Germans themselves abandoned after the Second World War. The Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt argued that “all right is the right of a particular Volk.” In a 1932 essay, “The Concept of the Political,” he posed the question that still defines the right-wing mind-set: Who is a people’s friend, and who is an enemy? For Schmitt, to identify one’s enemies was to identify one’s inner self. In another essay, he wrote, “Tell me who your enemy is, and I’ll tell you who you are.” The Nouvelle Droite was fractured, in the nineteen-nineties, by disagreements over what constituted the principal enemy of European identity. If the perceived danger was initially what Benoist described as “the ideology of sameness”—what many in France called the “Coca-Colonization” of the world—the growing presence of African and Arab immigrants caused some members of GRECE to rethink the essence of the conflict. One of the group’s founders, Guillaume Faye, a journalist with a Ph.D. from Sciences-Po, split off and began releasing explicitly racist books. In a 1998 tract, “Archeofuturism,” he argued, “To be a nationalist today is to assign this concept its original etymological meaning, ‘to defend the native members of a people.’ ” The book, which appeared in English in 2010, argues that “European people” are “under threat” and must become “politically organized for their self-defense.” Faye assures native Frenchmen that their “sub-continental motherland” is “an organic and vital part of the common folk, whose natural and historical territory—whose fortress, I would say—extends from Brest to the Bering Strait.” Faye, like Renaud Camus, is appalled by the dictates of modern statecraft, which define nationality in legal rather than ethnic terms. The liberal American writer Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in his recent book, “Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy,” quotes Camus lamenting that “a veiled woman speaking our language badly, completely ignorant of our culture” could declare that she is just as French as an “indigenous” man who is “passionate for Roman churches, and for the verbal and syntactic delicacies of Montaigne and Rousseau, for Burgundy wines, for Proust, and whose family has lived for generations in the same valley.” What appalls Camus, PolakowSuransky notes, is that “legally, if she has French nationality, she is completely correct.” Faye’s work helps to explain the rupture that has emerged in many Western democracies between the mainstream right, which may support strict enforcement of immigration limits but does not inherently object to the presence of Muslims, and the alt-right, which portrays Muslim immigration as an existential threat. In this light, the growing admiration by Western conservatives for the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is easier to comprehend. Not only do thinkers like Faye admire Putin as an emblem of proudly heterosexual white masculinity; they fantasize that Russian military might will help create a “Eurosiberian” federation of white ethno-states. “The only hope for salvation in this dark age of ours,” Faye has declared, is “a protected and self-centered continental economic space” that is capable of “curbing the rise of Islam and demographic colonization from Africa and Asia.” In Faye’s 2016 book, “The Colonisation of Europe,” he writes, of Muslims in Europe, “No solution can be found unless a civil war breaks out.” Such revolutionary right-wing talk has now migrated to America. In 2013, Steve Bannon, while he was turning Breitbart into the far right’s dominant media outlet, described himself as “a Leninist.” The reference didn’t seem like something a Republican voter would say, but it made sense to his intended audience: Bannon was signalling that the alt-right movement was prepared to hijack, or even raze, the state in pursuit of nationalist ends. (Bannon declined my request for an interview.) Richard Spencer told me, “I would say that the alt-right in the United States is radically un-conservative.” Whereas the American conservative movement celebrates “the eternal value of freedom and capitalism and the Constitution,” Spencer said, he and his followers were “willing to use socialism in order to protect our identity.” He added, “Many of the countries that lived under Soviet hegemony are actually far better off, in terms of having a protected identity, than Western Europe or the United States.” Spencer said that “clearly racialist” writers such as Benoist and Faye were “central influences” on his own thinking as an identitarian. He first discovered the work of Nouvelle Droite figures in the pages of Telos, an American journal of political theory. Most identitarians have a less scholarly bent. In 2002, a right-wing French insurrectionary, Maxime Brunerie, shot at President Jacques Chirac as he rode down the Champs- Élysées; the political group that Brunerie was affiliated with, Unité Radicale, became known as part of the identitairemovement. In 2004, a group known as the Bloc Identitaire became notorious for distributing soup containing pork to the homeless, in order to exclude Muslims and Jews. It was the sort of puerile joke now associated with alt-right pranksters in America such as Milo Yiannopoulos. Copycat groups began emerging across Europe. In 2009, a Swedish former mining executive, Daniel Friberg, founded, in Denmark, the publishing house Arktos, which is now the world’s largest distributor of far- and alt-right literature. The son of highly educated, left-leaning parents, Friberg grew up in a wealthy suburb of Gothenburg. He embraced right-wing thought after attending a diverse high school, which he described as overrun with crime. In 2016, he told the Daily Beast, “I had been taught to think multiculturalism was great, until I experienced it.” Few European nations have changed as drastically or as quickly as Sweden. Since 1960, it has added one and a half million immigrants to its population, which is currently just under ten million; a nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, has become the country’s main opposition group. During this period, Friberg began to devour books on European identity—specifically, those of Benoist and Faye, whose key works impressed him as much as they impressed Richard Spencer. When Friberg launched Arktos, he acquired the rights to books by Benoist and Faye and had them translated into Swedish and English. Spencer told me that Arktos “was a very important development” in the international popularization of far-right identitarian thought. Whether or not history really is dialectical, it can be tempting to think that decades of liberal supremacy in Europe have helped give rise to the antithesis of liberalism. In Paris, left-wing intellectuals often seem reluctant to acknowledge that the recent arrival of millions of refugees in Europe, many of them impoverished, poses any complications at all. Such blithe cosmopolitanism, especially when it is expressed by people who can easily shelter themselves from the disruptions caused by globalization, can fuel resentment toward both intellectuals and immigrants. The philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has long embodied élite opinion on the French left, sometimes falls prey to such rhetoric. A 2015 essay, which attempted to allay fears of a refugee crisis in Europe, portrayed Syrian refugees as uniformly virtuous and adaptable: “They are applicants for freedom, lovers of our promised land, our social model, and our values. They are people who cry out ‘Europe! Europe!’ the way millions of Europeans, arriving a century ago on Ellis Island, learned to sing ‘America the Beautiful.’ ” Instead of making the reasonable argument that relatively few Muslim refugees harbor extremist beliefs, Lévy took an absolutist stance, writing that it was pure “nonsense” to be concerned about an increased risk of terrorism. Too often, Lévy fights racism with sentimentalism. Lévy recently met with me at his impeccable apartment, in a sanitized neighborhood near the Champs- Élysées. In our conversation, he offered a more modulated view. “I’m not saying that France should have received all two or three million Syrian refugees,” he said. “Of course, there’s a limited space.” But France had involved itself in Syria’s civil war, by giving support to opponents of the regime, and had a responsibility to help people uprooted by it, he said. Recent debates about European identity, he noted, had left out an important concept: hospitality. “Hospitality means that there is a place—real space, scarce, limited—and that in this place you host some people and you extend a hand.” This did not mean that he wanted an end to borders: “France has some borders, a republican tradition, it is a place. But in this place we have the duty to host. You have to hold the two. A place without hosting would be a shrinking republic. Universal welcoming would be another mistake.” A necessary tension is created between “the infinite moral duty of hospitality and the limited political possibility of welcoming.” When I asked Lévy why the notion of the great replacement had resonated so widely, he dismissed it as a “junk idea.” “The Roman conquest of Gaul was a real modification of the population in France,” he went on. “There was neversomething like an ethnic French people.” Raphaël Glucksmann made a similar critique of the idea of “pure” Frenchness. He observed, “In 1315, you had an edict from the king who said anybody who walks on the soil of France becomes a franc.” This is true, but there is always a threshold at which a quantitative change becomes qualitative; migration was far less extensive in the Middle Ages than it is today. French liberals can surely make a case for immigration without pretending that nothing has changed: a country that in 1900 was almost uniformly Catholic now has more than six million Muslims. The liberal historian Patrick Boucheron, the editor of a recent surprise best-seller that highlights foreign influences on French life throughout the ages, told me that he had little patience for people who bemoan the country’s changing demographics. French people who are struggling today, he said, are victims of unfair economic policies, not Muslims, who still make up only ten per cent of the population. Indeed, only a quarter of France’s population is of immigrant origin—a percentage that, according to Boucheron, has remained stable for four decades. Boucheron sees identitarians as manipulators who have succeeded “in convincing the dominated that their problem is French identity.” For Boucheron, it’s not simply that the great replacement is a cruel idea; it’s also false. “When you oppose their figures—when you say that there were Poles and Italians coming to France in the nineteen-thirties—they say, ‘O.K., but they were Christians,’ ” he said. “So you see that behind identity there’s immigration, and behind immigration there’s hatred of Islam. Eventually, it always comes down to that.” But to deny that recent migration has brought disruptions only helps the identitarians gain traction. A humanitarian crisis has been unfolding in Paris, and it is clearly a novel phenomenon. This summer, more than two thousand African and Middle Eastern migrants were living in street encampments near the Porte de la Chapelle; eventually, the police rounded them up and dispersed them in temporary shelters. “We don’t have enough housing,” the center-right philosopher Pascal Bruckner told me. “The welfare state is at the maximum of its capabilities. We’re broke. And so what we offer to those people is what happens at Porte de la Chapelle.” Many liberals have downplayed the homeless crisis, rather than discuss potential solutions. “We turn a blind eye to this issue, just to look generous,” Bruckner said. At one point in my conversation with Lévy, he flatly declared that France “has no refugees.” Far-right figures, for their part, have relentlessly exploited Paris’s problems on social media, posting inflammatory videos that make it seem like marauding migrants have taken over every street corner. Jean-Yves Camus, a scholar of the far right in France (and no relation to Renaud Camus), told me that there is a problematic lack of candor in the way that liberals describe today’s unidirectional mass movement of peoples. “It depends what you call Frenchness,” he said. “If you think that traditional France, like we used to see in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, should survive and remain, then certainly it will not survive. This is the truth. So I think we have to admit that, contrary to what Lévy says, there has been a change.” But what, exactly, does the notion of “traditional France” imply? The France of de Gaulle—or of Racine— differs in many ways from the France of today, not just in ethnic composition. Renaud Camus recently told Vox that white people in France are living “under menace”—victims of an unchecked foreign assault “as much by black Africa as it is by Northern Islamic Africans.” Yet feminism, Starbucks, the smartphone, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, the global domination of English, EasyJet, Paris’s loss of centrality in Western cultural life—all of these developments have disrupted what it means “to be French.” The problem with identitarianism isn’t simply that it is nostalgic; it’s that it fixates on ethnicity to the exclusion of all else. The United States is not Western Europe. Not only is America full of immigrants; they are seen as part of what makes America American. Unlike France, the United States has only ever been a nation in the legal sense, even if immigration was long restricted to Europeans, and even if the Founding Fathers organized their country along the bloody basis of what we now tend to understand as white supremacy. The fact remains that, unless you are Native American, it is ludicrous for a resident of the United States to talk about “blood and soil.” And yet the country has nonetheless arrived at a moment when once unmentionable ideas have gone mainstream, and the most important political division is no longer between left and right but between globalist and nationalist. “The so-called New Right never claimed to change the world,” Alain de Benoist wrote to me. Its goal, he said, “was, rather, to contribute to the intellectual debate, to make known certain themes of reflection and thought.” On that count, it has proved a smashing success. Glucksmann summed up the Nouvelle Droite’s thinking as follows: “Let’s just win the cultural war, and then a leader will come out of it.” The belief that a multicultural society is tantamount to an anti-white society has crept out of French salons and all the way into the Oval Office. The apotheosis of right-wing Gramscism is Donald Trump. On August 11th, the Unite the Right procession marched through the campus of the University of Virginia. White-supremacist protesters mashed together Nazi and Confederate iconography while chanting variations of Renaud Camus’s grand remplacement credo: “You will not replace us”; “Jews will not replace us.” Few, if any, of these khaki-clad young men had likely heard of Guillaume Faye, Renaud Camus, or Alain de Benoist. They didn’t know that their rhetoric had been imported from France, like some dusty wine. But they didn’t need to. All they had to do was pick up the tiki torches and light them.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

This article appears in the print edition of the December 4, 2017, issue, with the headline ““You Will Not Replace Us”.”

Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contributing writer for the Times Magazine, is a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is at work on a book about racial identity.

#France #US #USA #Alain de Benoist #Renaud Camus #Guillaume Faye #Identité #identity #idenditarian #Immigration #gramscisme #gramscism

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wheniwrite28 · 7 years ago

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Tag Thing

I was tagged by @lunarxylop thanks for that. I have no idea what questions to make up! •_•

1. Post the rules

2. Answer the questions given

3. Make 11 questions of your own

4. Tag 11 people (or less lol)

Questions:

1. What is your comfort food?

Dal-Chawal, an indian version of Lentiels and Rice. Made by mum.

2. Your favorite book or books?

The Outsider by Albert Camus, it made me get into classics. And it was gifted by my favorite person.

3. What is your favorite season?

Winters- I love weakening layers, I am all for hot drinks, hot food and Indian summer is horrible. Also, winters everything is calmer and much more beautiful. Also a big fan of jackets. And beanies and caps

4. Three words to describe you.

Intelligent, talkative and loyal

5. What are your hobbies?

Reading- so much, writing, learning new things, doing puzzles, binge watching, wasting time, ha ha

6. What are you currently doing?

Watching Wynonna Earp and trying to answer these questions.

7. If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Europe or Maybe just go to Darjeeling, they have wonderful tea there.

8. How has the internet/fandom changed you?

I learnt how to be a person who doesn't need a name to be accepted by people. And I made some cool friends. :))

9. Best thing about 2017 for you so far?

New job, new home and well loads of coffee and tea.

10. Do you like cooking? If so, what’s your favorite thing to make?

Yes, it is kind of therapeutic to cook- I love making pasta, and poha, and sandwiches. All Indian style

11. Top 5 TV shows.

Supernatural, Stranger Things, Big little lies, Sherlock- S1 and S2 and The Good Wife

1.What’s your favorite piece of clothing to wear?

Jackets and Scarfs. I love all types of layers

2. The last song you heard?

River by Leon Bridges

3. What was the last thing you googled?

Can introverts become extroverts (seriously someone said they got depressed because of being introverts and I just needed to find some validation that depression is not a side effect of being introvert)

4. Coffee or tea?

Both- I don't discriminate

5. What’s the most stupid thing you’ve done as a child?

I jumped off a roof for some money. Thankfully didn't break any bone.

6. What’s your list favorite thing to do

I love to hang out with my friend, I love to read, I love to spend time with mum, cook, sometimes solve puzzles, draw and mostly spend time wasting

7. Favorite gif to use

There is an okay gif which is cool. Can't find it here.

8. Favorite food

Dal Chawal- it is just so good, and Pasta. •_•

9. Last white lie you told

I was not angry with you. Or didn't say anything.

10. Fairy or mermaid

Fairy. I don't want gills

11. Favorite Disney Movie

Inside out- I dunno if it is Disney.

1. Do you prefer DC or Marvel

2. FAVORITE thing about winter

3. Which fictional character you relate to the most

4. If you could go anywhere in the world- fictional or otherwise where would you go?

5. Gold or silver

6. Do you like pen and paper or keyboard to write/work

7. Do you think it matters what you do in life?

8. FAVORITE twitter account

9. Do you like angst or fluff

10. Last time you cuddled with someone

11. One quirk you would like the world to find normal about you

I tag bunch a people who may never answer this- @paradoxical-head @bend-me-shape-me @top-cas-bottom-dean @warlocks-and-angels

And whoever is interested. I don't know 11 people here. Sorry!

#tag things #tags #alwritesstuff #just me and me #personal

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lazilyfreshtheorist · 5 years ago

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Is there an Existential Crisis in Modern Society for Men?

I noticed this readable article. I'll give it here in excerpts. If you want to read the whole text, go to this link: KnowledgeForMen blog: Ultimate Guide to Overcoming an Existential Crisis in Modern Society

The mass of men is in the throes of a profound Existential Crisis in Modern Society

Existential Crisis in Modern Society for men it’s not hard to see how this plays out: 17.3 million Americans suffer from depression according to dbsalliance.org Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide Two-thirds of suicides caused by depression 40 million American adults suffer from anxiety according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America 75% of Americans are unhappy at work, according to Mental Health America. Despite the unprecedented abundance, safety, and opportunity of the 21st century, we are slowly starting to realize that life, regardless of your socioeconomic status or privilege, is at times very hard. “What’s the point of all of this? What is the meaning of life? Who cares we’re all going to die anyway!” This question leads to complicated and inescapable feelings and emotions. Our parents, the school system, and society did little to prepare us. These thoughts and emotions may make themselves independent. So they are uncontrollable and free them from their will. That can prevent them from mastering new challenges, trying new things, and achieving their big goals. They can lead you down a dark and twisted road of hedonic pleasure and apathy. If you are suffering from an Existential Crisis in Modern Society, there is hope. If you’re wondering how to find meaning in life, there is away. I can’t give you all of the answers or tell you how to live your life for everyone exactly is unique. Existential Crisis in Modern Society Solution: Pull back the layers of these problems one at a time and try out possible solutions. Learn to ask more practical questions. Then you can begin to overcome your existential fears. You can now live a great and joyful life where you can pick up the disturbing secrets of the human experience.

Existential Crisis in Modern Society for men definition: What is an Existential Crisis Anyways?

In the psychological community, an Existential Crisis in Modern Society is “a moment when an individual questions if their life has meaning, purpose, or value.” To show you: an Existential Crisis in Modern Society is what happens when you suddenly wake up one day and realize this.

The most frustrating part of anExistential Crisis in Modern Society is that they can strike at any moment, without warning and reason. Depression and existential despair, though frequently experienced in unison, are not the same. You can be happier than you’ve ever yet still experience an unwavering spiritual malaise about your purpose and place in this world. The term existential crisis initially derives from the work of psychoanalyst and developmental theorist Erik Erikson, who referred to an existential crisis as an “identity crisis.” And that’s where things get interesting. In an existential crisis, you begin to realize that you might not be who or what you thought you were for the past few decades of your existence. That brings into question and challenges EVERYTHING you once thought to be true. But you do not have an existential crisis without reason...read more

The Causes of Existential Crisis in Modern Society and Depression

The following sections might be hard to stomach and accept. But I encourage you to read this through to the end. It is equally uncomfortable to accept a grim medical prognosis, but necessary to find the right treatment. But it is also unpleasant to face the inevitable facts of human existence. We have to understand the root cause of our existential breakdown that we can learn how to deal with an existential crisis.

The Paradox of Abundance: Too Many Options, Too Little Time

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” ~Kierkegaard, The Father of Existentialism The most significant source of our existential dread is, quite ironically, the abundance in which we find ourselves as a species in modern society. Never before has humankind been presented with so much opportunity and possibility. Through the power of the internet, you can learn any skill and monetize any hobby from the comfort of your own home. With all the knowledge of our world, you can have, do and be what you want. And this very freedom has become a massive problem for society. Regardless of our success in any given area, we can’t help but wonder, “What if…” Everywhere we look, every person is faced with choices too plentiful and essential to count. No matter how long we think or how many times we ask “what if,” there seem to be no answers to our existential FOMO. Simply more questions.

The Decline of Community: Alone on a Rock Spinning Through a Void

We no longer have tribes or communities with whom we gain intimate familiarity. Our relationships often relegated to meaningless exchanges on social media platforms and superficial conversations with coworkers we don’t like. More than ever before, despite technological advances, we are more disconnected from our fellow humans. We are trained, from a very young age, to fear and loathe our neighbors because of their differences instead of finding camaraderie, compassion, and community in our similarities. But this wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time, we lived and died with our fellow tribe members. We lived together, hunted together, broke bread together, danced together, laughed together, and had little time to ponder the insanity of existence. Most adults report having fewer than one close friend, and many people claim that they have no one in their lives whom they could call in the event of an emergency. The coalescence of these factors has created a society in which existential depression and acute depression seem all but inevitable. When we have no one in our lives to whom we can turn In the era of media madness, we struggle to authentically connect with our fellow humans as the population scurries about in a frenzy, desperately attempting to hide behind an ego-fueled facade of perfection. Understanding this is the first step to getting over an existential crisis. Because if everyone knew the truth...read more Media Madness: The Force Multiplier of Insanity Rewind the clock less than 15 years, and you would find a world that seems completely disconnected from the one in which we now find ourselves. People mostly kept to themselves. Things like marriage, engagements, family vacations, the birth of a child, career successes, and generating wealth, for the most part, was kept private. Now come to present times. Privacy has become a distant memory. Through the advent of social media, we are given a small (and carefully manufactured) glimpse into the “realities” of the most intimate part of other people’s lives. Men showcase their latest professional successes in a never-ending highlight reel with few hardships along the way.

The Curse of Comfort: The Easy Life is No Life

“Life can be magnificent and overwhelming – that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.” ~Albert Camus And this is something humans have craved since the beginning of time. We don’t want a comfortable and banal existence where we clock in, clock out, watch TV, masturbate or have routine sex, and microwave a ready-made meal then repeat until we die. You were born into a particular culture and, as a result, had specific enemies and obstacles to overcome. Whether it was merely hunting an animal to eat that day, conquering a rival village, or merely bandying together to survive mother nature, we were born into the fight of our lives. Today, things are different in Existential Crisis in Modern Society!

A poor person today had better access to healthcare, technology, and education than even the richest men in the world just 25 years ago. You may not have a mansion, but you have a roof over your head. You may not be eating filet mignon and fresh lobster for dinner, but you are not starving. And subsisting on food stamps, government programs, and the charity has now become commonplace for many (not that I advocate this). Think about it this way. If you look at the history of human existence, it’s clear that we derive meaning and purpose from conflict and discomfort. It’s why stories like Braveheart, Gladiator, and Rudy strike such a chord in man.

The Path Forward is Worth the Fight

The Path Forward is Worth the Fight “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” ~Jean Paul Sartre Having an existential crisis is NORMAL. Having an existential crisis is a GOOD THING. Having an existential crisis is a sign of GROWTH. The fact that you are questioning your place in the world and asking how to find meaning in life doesn’t make you dumb, weak, or inferior. It makes you human–and a more intelligent and conscious human at that. But merely acknowledging your crisis is not the same as getting over an existential crisis. You must decide what you are going to do about it. It’s the path of growth, adventure, and spiritual freedom. The rest of this guide will detail the steps I took to eradicate my existential dread.

The Keys to Overcoming Existential Anxiety NOW!

Before detailing the exact steps you can take to overcome an existential crisis, you must first understand a few essential guidelines. First. Unlike depression or anxiety, an Existential Crisis in Modern Society is not contingent on any particular facet of your life, and the solutions are not fast and easy. You can be crushing it in every area of life but still feel a nagging discontent when you turn off at the end of the day, are alone, and go to sleep at night. There are no easy answers to the big questions of life. Therefore, it is essential to accept the existential challenges as they arise and to be ready to take them without knowing the exact solution. Next, you must understand that the solutions to existential anxiety and depression are not all action-based. With the other challenges in our life–like weight loss, earning more money, or ascending a chosen career ladder–the solutions are typically cut and dry. Do more of this. Do less of that. Start doing this. Stop doing that. In an existential crisis, there are no such clear actions. Most of the solutions I’m going to present are far more esoteric than they are practical. They are about adopting new beliefs and mindsets that take time to understand fully. Finally, realize that escaping the clutches of an existential crisis will not happen overnight.

Understand What Your Purpose Is

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.” ~Frederick Nietzsche All too often, people assume that their purpose is something concrete. Something preordained and fixed. The birth is not an inevitable fate that you have to pursue. You can choose your purpose. To break free from an existential breakdown, you must exercise this freedom and create meaning for yourself. And to allow that purpose to evolve as you evolve as a man. Do not wait for others to tell you how to live your life, choose the life you want to live, and pursue it with conviction.

There are no easy answers to the big questions of life. Therefore, it is similar, in your life, your purpose today will be wildly different from your use five or ten years from now. And that’s normal and a part of life. What matters is that you pursue your authentic purpose! Just do things that make your life meaningful and create meaning in your eyes. Not in the eyes of society. You will only find it in pursuit of things that are meaningful to you and in alignment with your values. But to create this purpose for yourself, you must first embrace the pain of meaninglessness. You must face the Existential Crisis in Modern Society Demons to emerge victoriously.

How to Deal with An Existential Crisis in Modern Society: Stop Numbing the Pain and Embrace It

One of the most significant pitfalls modern humans fall into is an addiction to sedation. And there is a reason our society has developed so many forms of escapism in the last several decades. Because people want to escape their lives, they want to stand out even for a brief moment from their meaningless life. To numb the pain that they feel so profoundly. But when you come down from the high... read more BRING IT ON! The pain that you feel from lacking a purpose or despising your life is the greatest gift that life can give you. It is life’s natural change agent — a guide to serve you. Not to help you escape from your life, but rather to not let life flee from you. To rid your life of an existential crisis, you must first rid your life of sedation with which so many men fall.

Avoiding an Existential Breakdown: Indecision Always Costs More in the End

The modern human has, at their fingertips, more opportunity and possibility than any human–even the richest of kings–had one hundred years ago. And this reality has led to a generation fueled plagued by indecisiveness. With so many options, we can never know when we are making the “right” decision. But the truth is... read more Become a Creator, Not a Consumer “Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.” ~Albert Camus There’s only one problem. The modern world does not encourage this creation-centric lifestyle. Instead, it pushes and peddles a materialistic agenda of consumption. From the moment we were born, we’ve inundated with ads telling us how we should look, what we should wear, where we should live, and how we should act, destroying our creativity. To keep by these social norms, we consume. We consume new homes, furniture, cars, designer clothes, overpriced jewelry, lavish vacations (that never feel relaxing), Netflix marathons, porn, and unhealthy foods.

The problem arises when one allows overconsumption to take over all of their time, energy, and stifle their ability to create. Nothing fuels depression and feelings of meaningless more than a life void of creative power. And if you want to know how to deal with an existential crisis, the best answer I can give you is to create more. Stop consuming. Start creating. And as a byproduct, you are stepping into your power and becoming the hero in your life. Creation fuels meaning. And the more you create, the more meaningful and enjoyable your life and the faster you can start getting over an existential crisis. Memento Mori “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.” ~Martin Heidegger This final section is a dark yet enlightening topic, but one that I feel you are prepared to face. Take a deep breath. Relax. I’m with you right now. The final and most profound way to escape an existential breakdown is to contemplate and meditate on the inevitability of your death. You are going to die. Everyone you love is going to die. Everyone who pisses you off right now is going to die too. We all are. It’s merely the human condition.

If there are only two things we know for sure–we are alive right now, and one day we won’t be–we only have two choices. First, we can opt-out of existence and decide that our existential angst is a disease without a cure. Or, since we’re already on this spinning rock, we can choose to make the most of it. If the worst thing that can happen is already guaranteed to arrive… Then we have nothing to fear. And when we truly embrace this fact, allowing it to penetrate us to the core, life becomes an exciting adventure. You are the hero of your life, and you can create whatever you want with it. It’s so beautiful this way. You are free to pursue your passions, to go for your dreams, to aim as high as you can without fear or shame. Make the most of your experience here. Live so vibrantly it puts you in tears of joy. Live so that the fear of death never enters your heart and accept that the only thing you have to fear truly is dying without ever having lived. My friend, don’t waste this opportunity Want to become the most reliable version of yourself? "This article originally appeared in the KnowledgeForMen blog." Read the full article

#BestWayToCureDepressionNaturally #ExistentialCrisis #ExistentialCrisisCauses #ExistentialCrisisCure #ExistentialCrisisOrDepression #ExistentialCrisisSigns #ExistentialCrisisTreatment #HowToCureDepressionNaturally

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secondstars-totheright · 6 years ago

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It's almost the middle of the semester and I'm experiencing another discomfort due to the fact that I have to look for one person to be tested for a class assignment

I can't help but think that I've had enough of this world, I've tasted the good the bad and the ugly though according to my mother this is NoTHinG compared to what she's been through

Two months ago I would probably defend myself, but recently I do agree with her, because I just couldn't imagine how I would survive if it happened to me. So yeah mom, YOU WIN!

It also occured to me about the thing Albert Camus has said,

"there is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide"

Exactly the thing that has buggin' me ever since I learn that this life is meaningless and that human beings are placed into hardship Q.S. Al-Balad [90: 4].

But I haven't find any answer as to why God forbid us human beings to kill ourselves...

All the answer in the internet only provides THE CONSEQUENCES if we kill ourselves, NOT the reason why we shouldn't.

I'm just super tired having to deal with all these mundane mortal things I didn't signed up for *well, I do (technically on some things that I wish I didn't), but, I didn't ask to live or to be put on this earth in the first place so*

Somehow I got here and I do made a lot of mistakes that I deeply regret and that I wish could rewind, but this world doesn't work like that, not on that level.

Of course there are also things I am grateful for. Whenever I saw my mom and my little sister, I couldn't help but think that if I die at any moment, I didn't mind at all, because I've already witness the most amazing thing that ever happened to my life, which is them. I always feel like I'm undeserving of them.

Ever since college I feel like there hasn't been a day that I didn't think about death or dying. I just kind of wished that God took my life so that I could get over with this life (and move on to the next one (?))

But then I think to myself... you also have no idea of what's in front of you, it could be better or worse.

This book by Mr. Quraish Shihab on the basic of Islam (Islam yang Saya Anut) and Lesley Hazleton on biography of Muhammad SAW's (PBUH) really helps me understand the most basic and profound notion of Islam and being a Muslim. I started to learn how wonderful Prophet Muhammad SAW's (PBUH) character is. I feel like nobody in this world will ever come close to how pure his soul and imaan is. MasyaAllah. And I've only been read half of the book.

I read a chapter where he was dealing with the period where God hasn't "send" him any revelation for about two years (based on the book), then came down this surah, Ad-Dhuha

“By the morning light and the dark of night, your Lord has not forsaken you Muhammad, nor does he abhor you.

The end shall be better than the beginning, and you will be satisfied.

Did he not find you an orphan and give you

shelter?

Did he not find you in error and guide you?

Did he not find you poor and enrich you?

Do not wrong the orphan, then, nor chide the beggar, but proclaim the goodness of your Lord.”

Somehow I liked the English translation better than Indonesian.

And the one that strikes me the most as of today, was this part...

"...the end shall be better than the beginning, and you will be satisfied..."

All these thoughts about how pointless and meaningless this life is, and how can I just skip this life and move on to whatever it is on the next one bc let's be honest I think I've had enough with this one... but there are indeed a mystery on how why God did create human beings and assign us down on this eart in the first place.

And then I think about that ayat from surah Ad-Dhuha, and wonder that this life on earth, this one right now, is just the beginning... and as the ayat says, "...the end shall be better than the beginning, and you will be satisfied..."

As to whatever "the end" is I think it's just that whatever come after this, shall be better than whatever this one is.

And I'm looking forward to that, may Allah keep my heart, soul, mind, and life with imaan.

Aamiin.

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jam2289 · 6 years ago

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88.9 Hey Radio, Collision of Innocence, and Me

Today we have a band that is quickly gaining popularity. Lucky for us they were helpful enough to give me some insight into their inspiration for a specific song.

Collision of Innocence was formed at the beginning of 2018. Bill from 88.9 Hey Radio messaged me and wanted me to take a look at their song "The Void". It's an excellent song, but I wasn't able to find the lyrics anywhere. So, I messaged the band on Facebook. Not only did they send me the lyrics, they also told me that the inspiration for the song had come from a message by Billy Graham. I have all of that for you, then I'll dive into the song myself and see what I pull out of it.

You can listen to the song on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/QlRBXG5ZYwc

And, here is their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/collisionofinnocence/

Ever wonder about the secrets of making connections like these? Here's how I do it, in a straightforward manner. No matter what happens there won't be complications this way because there aren't secrets or hidden agendas and then there can't be drama. Here's the message that I sent them:

- - - - - - -

I'm working on an article for 88.9 Hey Radio on your song "The Void". I haven't found the lyrics for it online. Could you send me the lyrics?

- - - - - - -

Most likely one of two things is going to happen here: 1) They're going to send you the lyrics. 2) They're never going to respond. Either way, there's nothing to fear in reaching out.

They sent me the lyrics first, which I'll show in a minute, then they sent me this:

- - - - - - -

Thanks Brother!

This song is about about the void of the human heart and how we try to fill that with a lot of things but God is the only thing that completes us. In a nutshell... there’s also an amazing article that ties it together by Billy Graham. I’ll try to find it

- - - - - - -

Well, a response doesn't get better than that. It does put some pressure on me though. Since I'll be going through and pulling my own personal meanings from the lyrics it will seem odd if I have a different perspective than the band that wrote the lyrics and Billy Graham who was the inspiration for the lyrics. I'm guessing that's going to happen though. Luckily I don't feel a strong need to agree with people or conform, and if I did I wouldn't do any writing or public speaking. It will be interesting to compare and contrast. (It reminds me a bit of the article that I wrote on Grandpa Loves Rhinos about their song "Aquaman" where I assumed it had something to do with Aquaman and I learned that I was completely wrong when I was messaging with the band after I wrote the article. It's like that, but in reverse.)

Here's what they sent me from Billy Graham:

- - - - - - -

We all have a hunger in our hearts for God — an empty place in our souls that only He can fill. The Psalmist in the Bible put it this way: “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?” (Psalm 42:2).

The problem is that instead of turning to God and letting Him fill our souls, we turn to other things — pleasure, fame, money, sex, or drugs and alcohol. Some people even turn to false philosophies or religions, hoping these will lead them to the truth and fill the empty place in their lives. For a time, they may think they’ve found what they were looking for, but in the end, they’re just as empty as they ever were. Tragically, some will even discover that they’ve almost destroyed their lives.

Only God can satisfy our inner hunger, and He will, as we turn to Him and by faith open our hearts and lives to Christ’s transforming power. God doesn’t want us to wander through life, constantly wondering who we are or why we’re here. Instead, Christ came into the world to bring us back to God, and He will, as we commit our lives to Him.

Don’t be deceived by those who urge you to take a wrong road, no matter how glamorous or famous they seem to be. Instead, make Christ the center of your life. God’s Word is true: “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?… Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live” (Isaiah 55:2-3).

- - - - - - -

Alright, now it's time for the lyrics. I think the lyrics are better than Billy Graham's quote. Here they are:

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This emptiness

Inside so cold my spirit seems dead

I long to fill this hollow void

This world can’t help it only destroys

Escape into me

And you’ll find the rest that you need

Confide in me

I’ll eclipse, surpass all of your dreams

In this dark abyss

Here I’ve found anything but bliss

Offer me their medications

For this ache they don’t know the remedy

Escape into me

And you’ll find the rest that you need

Confide in me

I’ll eclipse, surpass all of your dreams

Behold I’m coming soon

Knew you before the womb

I’ll never leave you, never deceive you

My arms are open wide

I want you by my side

Wipe away all your tears, diminish all your fears

How long will you wait? How long, so long so long I’ve been waiting

Escape into me

And you’ll find the rest that you need

Confide in me

I’ll eclipse, surpass all of your dreams

- - - - - - -

(I feel like I should have done a bigger intro, maybe something like, "For the first time being presented to the public in written format on the internet, I bring to you, direct from the band, a JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com and 88.9 Hey Radio exclusive collaboration, the lyrics for Collision of Innocence's "The Void"! You have to read it in a boxing radio announcer's voice to really get the effect. Anyway...)

I like the structure of this song. It's both obvious and subtle at the same time. I didn't realize this the first time I heard it, but I realized it as soon as I saw the written lyrics. There are two characters in this story, and they both speak from the first person perspective. Depending on which perspective you take in this song you could be one of those voices, or you could have a separate third person perspective of either a dialogue or duel monologues that are happening. What I'm talking about will become more clear as I go through it stanza by stanza.

- - - - - - -

This emptiness

Inside so cold my spirit seems dead

I long to fill this hollow void

This world can’t help it only destroys

- - - - - - -

This stanza is from the perspective of a suffering person. The first three lines are the suffering, the feeling of suffering. This type of suffering is a lack, something is missing from the person's life and they have an urge to find it to feel less empty, less spiritually dead, and less hollow. Let's dive into this a bit more because that fourth line will be its own thing.

This lack of meaning in life is common. In modern society it's even becoming pervasive. This is especially true for people that don't have to struggle to survive. You get time and energy to think about what your life is about and what your life is worth. Unfortunately, many people have a hard time finding answers to these questions. Philosophy and psychology have largely dropped the ball in this area, which is probably the most important area of life. Some people have confronted it and have useful insights, others are less useful.

The philosopher Albert Camus proposed the idea that the most important question in philosophy is "Is life worth living?" In a series of articles titled "The Most Important Question in Philosophy" I proposed the idea that there is a better question, "What makes life worth living?" Albert Camus doesn't offer great answers, really they are quite disturbing. He founded the philosophy of Absurdism as a branch of Existentialism. The basic Absurdist take on this matter is that humans have an inherent yearning for meaning in life, but there is no meaning in life. This is an absurd situation, thus Absurdism. The best answer that Camus can give is that there is also a defiance in humans that allows us to press on in the face of this absurd situation in spite of it all.

A much better discussion of this topic is handled by Viktor Frankl who founded the philosophy and psychology of Logotherapy. He's known for being a neurosurgeon and psychiatrist that survived the Nazi concentration camps. The three basic axioms of Logotherapy are: life is intrinsically meaningful (Unconditional Meaning of Life), we are capable of discovering opportunities for meaningful action (Freedom of Will), and we are motivated to want to make our lives meaningful and purposeful (Will to Meaning). There is so much that is good, useful, and relevant from Frankl here that it would be an entire article. I won't dive into all of that. Just to get a taste of some of the great insights he has you can check out the article I wrote titled "An Interesting Note of Suicide from Viktor Frankl" which is where this feeling of emptiness can lead when it's at its worst. Here's that article: http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/01/an-interesting-note-on-suicide-from.html

Now, that fourth line brings up some interesting things, controversial and debatable things. "This world can’t help it only destroys". This is a world denying stance. The idea is that the world is corrupt, a wholly corrupt manifestation of a greater and purer spiritual plane of existence. This is one of the basic tenets of Gnosticism. The Gnostic movement was quite big in early Christianity and survived for several centuries before the Catholics were able to eventually kill them off. In some ways it will always survive and humans will always come back to it. The Apostle Paul was criticized right at the founding of Christianity of being too Gnostic. At that time there was quite a mix. There was no bible, the parts of the New Testament were still being written, many pieces of writing about the accounts of Jesus were in circulation with a bunch of different factions vying for control and sway over the beliefs of the public. It was a huge deal for the early Christians trying to figure out how Jewish they were and there was a lot of integration, disintegration, and debate about that. We would think of them as a bunch of denominations now. There were many, but it was fewer than the current 34,000 different Christian denominations. It's overly simplistic to say that there are two sides to this debate, but... to avoid this article turning into a series on the history of theology I'm going to say that there are two basic takes.

One view is that the world is something to be overcome and let go of. This has some movement in modern Christianity, but it's overshadowed by the world affirming versions of Christianity. You see this same theme most clearly in the modern world in Buddhism, where the world denying factions are the major force and the world affirming versions of Buddhism are smaller. I think it might be the case that all religions have different versions of these two camps. The ideas about an ideal realm of forms is prominent in the philosopher Plato as well. (John Vervaeke is a psychologist from the University of Toronto that delves into many ancient and modern perspectives on these things in his online course "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis". It's worth a look if you want to delve deeply into it.)

This idea of a duality is easy to comprehend and comes up again and again. Some versions of Christianity raise the power of Satan up to equal, or at least challenge, that of God. That's one type of dualism in religion. Zoroastrianism has a good god and an evil god. It's a fairly straightforward idea.

The other major way for dualism to work is to have the idea of a material world and a spiritual world. We also see this type of dualism in the philosopher Descartes where the idea of the mind is separated from the body. The dualism that puts two opposing forces against each other in the world is still world affirming, they just acknowledge various corruptions from the opposing force. The dualism that posits a good plane of existence and a bad plane of existence is necessarily world denying, although there are a lot of details to those views that we aren't going to dive into here.

(The Cathars in France and Italy had this type of dualistic good spiritual world and bad material world view too. The Catholics were eventually able to wipe them out in the 14th century. But, we see here that this dualistic view of a good world and bad world is something that comes back. I'm not sure about the specific religious views of Collision of Innocence, but I'm going to guess they're Protestant because they're from the United States and there aren't that many Catholics, Anglicans, or Eastern Orthodox here. Protestants are generally considered heretics by Catholics too, although there hasn't been a major war in awhile. Really, every group considers every other group heretical. Rarely is it noted that heretics are the saviors of religion from itself, or that Moses was a heretic, Jesus was a heretic, Luther was a heretic, etc.)

Personally I try to be world affirming, but acknowledge the major limits of that view and see the perspective taken against it. I think all of these perspectives come down to different takes on modes of being that are developed in humans. The psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan calls these steps prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic. Sullivan founded Interpersonal Psychiatry, which is all about human interactions. In the first step things aren't perceived as separate. In this second step things are distinct from each other but in unclear ways. In the last step things are well defined. An adult human uses all of these modes of being to a greater or lesser extent. Limits on the personality are created by approval and disapproval of the person right from infancy. This forms two basic models of interaction, the good and the bad. This is the same basic concept we have been talking about, and this is why it exists in all people. You could also make a case that it's an archetype, as in biologically embedded in humans. That's the take from psychologist Carl Jung, but I like Sullivan's formulation more.

Wow! That was a lot. Let's look at the second stanza. I'll speed this up a bit too.

- - - - - - -

Escape into me

And you’ll find the rest that you need

Confide in me

I’ll eclipse, surpass all of your dreams

- - - - - - - -

This is not the same person talking. This is God talking to the person. That's the interesting structure that I was talking about before. These first four stanzas are a back and forth between this suffering person yearning for meaning and God.

Here we see the same call to step away from the world, to escape this place of suffering. The second line is interesting. You need rest because you are exhausted from being in the world. What's the answer to being exhausted and worn out from this material world? To escape to and confide in God. (You could also take the perspective that this "rest" is talking about something that is lacking and there is a searching for the rest of it. I like that idea, but I won't develop it here.)

The etymology of confide is revealing here. Etymology is the history of a word. The best place to look up etymologies is etymonline.com. Confide is like confidence, it comes from the Latin confidere. Con fidere literally means "with faith," or "with trust." (As a wedding officiant last year I noted this in the ceremony.)

So, that line could be translated from English into English as "Trust in me" or "Have faith in me". What will you get if you do this? You'll have all of your dreams surpassed. We don't get a reference to what dreams this entails, but if we remember that God is talking to a person searching for meaning then we get some idea.

Notice that it doesn't say you'll get all of your dreams. It says your dreams will be eclipsed and surpassed. To eclipse means to fail to appear. To surpass means to go beyond. So, to eclipse and surpass your dreams means that you definitely won't get your dreams, you're going to get something else.

Wow! There is more here. I feel like I'm not even halfway done talking about this. I think I could write a series of essays on these first two stanzas, but let's look at the third to keep things moving.

- - - - - - -

In this dark abyss

Here I’ve found anything but bliss

Offer me their medications

For this ache they don’t know the remedy

- - - - - - -

Darkness is a symbol of the lack of knowing. This is also good Gnostic symbology. In a very general way the Protestants propose that salvation is through faith. Others, namely the Catholics, propose that salvation is through works, sometimes faith and works. The Gnostics propose that salvation is through Gnosis, knowing, knowledge. I agree with that view. I just disagree as to what the knowledge is and its interaction and relation with faith and works. I lay out some of those basic ideas in my article "Theoconceptualist Theology" here: http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2018/12/theoconceptualist-theology.html

In the second line we see that what this person has been searching for is their bliss. The idea of following your bliss is associated with the mythologist Joseph Campbell. Here's a good quote from him about it:

- - - - - - -

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are �� if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

- - - - - - -

It's the idea that you are doing what you're supposed to be doing, what's important to do. This is about values.

(I can't believe I haven't talked about values yet. Really though this entire article is about values, and the song is about values, and everything every living being does is about values. So, it's in there, just under the surface.)

The idea of having an ache and seeking a remedy that's a medication works literally, but it also works great metaphorically. It works materially, where I have found the medical system to be horrible. But it also works mentally and spiritually, where many of the options we have are also a letdown. Questioning meaning and value in life is not a disease that can be fixed with drugs, it's part of being human and needs to be solved in a human way, a chemical way won't work. And other short term, simple, and quick solutions won't work either. You have to go down deep into the soul to deal with these things. (Here's something disturbing, in 2014 the best selling prescription drug in the United States was the antipsychotic Abilify. That's right, for psychotic people. It had 7.5 billion dollars in sales. Here's the thing, many or most of those sales were for people that weren't psychotic. Guess what happens when you aren't psychotic and you take antipsychotics designed to change your brain chemistry in major ways? You become psy____. Thanks big pharma, for preying on people in the throes of spiritual upheaval and offering a solution that makes the world a worse place, and makes people less healthy physically, mentally, and spiritually.)

Other than drugs, many other solutions don't work either. If your life feels empty you need to find the values that will fill that inner void. These won't be things that we usually classify under the headings of power or pleasure, but that's what many people try, and many people try those things for their entire lives. If you do that then your emptiness will never go away. There are three major types of values: creative, experiential, and attitudinal. This song is talking about taking a certain perspective on life, a religious perspective guided by God. That attitude will lead to a different experience of life. That experience will lead you to do and create things differently than you would have otherwise. And it all starts with the attitudinal value. (The framework that I presented in this paragraph is right from Viktor Frankl.)

Here's what I haven't covered yet.

- - - - - - -

Behold I’m coming soon

Knew you before the womb

I’ll never leave you, never deceive you

My arms are open wide

I want you by my side

Wipe away all your tears, diminish all your fears

How long will you wait? How long, so long so long I’ve been waiting

- - - - - - -

The thing is, I'm psychologically exhausted from writing this article. You've probably only been reading for a few minutes at this point, but I've been writing for hours. It takes a lot more time and effort to create something than it does to consume it. So, I'm going to skip the detailed analysis of this last section. I'll let you imagine what I would say about it. Or, message me, let me know what you think about it. I know the normal take on it, my take would not be the normal take, it never is. What can you see in it that might be a unique perspective?

Well, that was a pretty wild ride of an article. I'm sure that Collision of Innocence wasn't expecting anything like that when they sent me those lyrics. If there's something that you liked in this article then message me and let me know. If there's something that you don't like then you can message me about that too, I get love and hate mail about everything I write. But, I suggest that you sleep on it one day before you respond if it's a disagreement. In the heat of the moment we are less articulate.

I would like to thank all of my sponsors. (I'm just joking, I don't have any sponsors. Although, I've been thinking about setting up a donation page on my website so that people can support my work. I know there are some people place a high value on it, and with some financial support I could do more. Maybe, maybe...)

Last thought. It's amazing how powerful and deep songs are. I don't usually comment on anything having to do with the music or the sound because I don't know much about those technical areas, but I wonder what this song would be like with two singers? One for the suffering person and one for God. It might be interesting.

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You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

#music #lyrics

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