Notes: The Monday Taki post is up. This week is a late take on the Biden speech from Hell that is getting the memory hole treatment. Sunday Thoughts is on holiday, but there are new posts behind the green door. SubscribeStar and Substack.

There are a lot of ways people on this side of the great divide describe the difference between one side and the other. The term “red pill”, borrowed from the Matrix movies, is the most popular term, but it has lost much of it meaning. People will talk about their awakening, but the term “woke” is now owned by the crazies and therefore indicates mental illness rather than political awareness. Another popular term is “based” but like “red pill” it has been overused.

These terms generally focus on the race issue, which is more accurately stated as the biology issue or biological realism. The main bridge over the great divide is the acceptance of biological reality with regards to sex, ethnicity and race. People on this side of the great divide accept reality, with regards to the human condition, as it appears and reject the various social constructs of the orthodoxy. This makes sense as it is the most obvious and easiest to grasp.

There is another aspect to the phenomenon of waking up to the reality of the world and choosing to live in the truth. That is the nature of modern society. It takes a while, but people who make the journey to this side of the divide eventually come to figure out that the biology issue is the leaves of the tree. The root of the tree is the vast managerial system that allows a tiny minority to wield power. We do not live in a liberal democracy, but rather in a large imperial corporate state.

A useful example to illustrate the point is this long post in the Claremont Review of Books by Christopher Caldwell. As John Derbyshire has pointed out, Caldwell is a skillful social critic who has a knack for making important insights in such a way that the average reader can grasp them. He is a man who lives within the system even though he is a critic of the system. Unlike most mainstream pundits, he does not spend his days signaling against the people on this side of the divide.

Therein lies the important bit. Despite his ability and willingness to critically analyze the system in which he lives, he remains a man of the system. He is on that side of the great divide, not this one. The tell is the default position. Christopher Caldwell assumes his compatriots are mostly working from good intentions and mostly trying to get things right, even if most are highly partisan. Therefore, he can trust their depiction of events in the Ukraine and build his analysis accordingly.

In the second paragraph, he states, “Since June, thousands of computer-guided artillery rockets have been wreaking havoc behind Russian lines.” People on this side of the great divide who have bothered to follow the war will see this as material placed in the Post and Times by military contractors. The so-called “wonder weapon” narrative has been a running joke among those relying on more trustworthy sources. Even the Ukrainians have started to mock this claim.

Right after the wonder weapon narrative, is the narrative that claims Russia is a gas station run by peasants. “With western European help, Washington has used its control of the choke points of the global marketplace to impoverish Russians, in hopes of punishing Russia.” The sanctions regime has made the world poorer and the Russians have not been spared, but it has been an inconvenience. The claims from the Post and Times about the Russian economy are nonsense.

Noticeably lacking is the perspective of the Russians. The official narrative says that the Russians are reactive cavemen with no ability to think long term. That is what Caldwell assumes to be true, because his friends in the system say it is true. The truth is Russia, China and India are the long term planners. It is the West that wakes up every morning, reacts to what is happening and then gets busy fabricating new narratives so they can win the media war that day.

Because Christopher Caldwell is firmly rooted on the other side of the great divide, his analysis is inevitably controlled by it. Like the people from the movie living in the matrix, he is basing his understanding of the world on a general falsehood. He rests his analysis on a fabricated reality that serves the interests of the system but is no more connected to reality than a science fiction movie. His analysis is true as long as the rules of the system remain unchanged, which is impossible.

Notice also how Caldwell just accepts that the reason Washington has been meddling in Ukraine is they seek to promote democracy. Again, this is a conveniently self-serving claim from the people running foreign policy, but it has no basis in fact. The same people eagerly excluding vast numbers of Americans from the political system are certainly not spreading the hope and joy of democracy. Caldwell assumes the best from his friends in the system, so he accepts their claims.

None of this is to suggest Caldwell is a bad person or that he is stupid. It is that he lives in the false reality of official orthodoxy. On that side of the great divide, these things are true because they are necessary for the current narrative. On this side of the great divide, these things are false because they are false. It is the motivation behind these false narratives that is the starting point for dissident analysis, which results in an entirely different view of the war and the world.

That is what it means to be a dissident. The people who are constantly droning on about reality being a social construct are living in a social construct. Theirs is a world where things are true because the rules of the narrative require them to be true, but once the narrative is no longer operative, the rules change. It is how the people threatened violence against those refusing the Covid vaccine can so easily shift to blaming the whole fiasco on the people who criticized it.

Perhaps the better way to put it is that the last stop on the train that carries people to this side of the great divide is the understanding that the genuine crisis in the modern age is the contradiction between reality and official orthodoxy. To return to the movie trope, freedom only comes from destroying the matrix. There is no reform within it, because there is no reality within it. The myth of the modern age is that the modern age is in anyway attached to the reality of the human condition.

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