I’d like to thank the Raw Egg Nationalist for featuring a short essay of mine in the latest issue of the Man’s World magazine, available here. If you aren’t familiar with this magazine yet, make sure to check it out. It contains the best masculine content you’ll find anywhere on the internet. Now let’s get on to the, heh, “current thing”.
Invoking the zeitgeist
Leftists have a tendency to invoke the zeitgeist (current year consensus) to argue for their positions over right-wing ones.
What do you mean you don’t support gay marriage? It’s 2016!
This presupposes two things. First, that appeals to consensus make for valid arguments (they don’t), and second, that in [the current year], the consensus of everyone (that matters) on any given issues matches the left-wing political position on it. Note that “everyone that matters” is an arbitrary category defined by these same leftists. In order to “matter”, you must endorse the consensus position. So zeitgeist invocation is really circular reasoning, but I don’t think anyone expects any better from leftists at this point.
As the zeitgeist moves ever lefter with every passing year (Cthulu always swims left), this means that every year the expected position on every political issue is also more leftist - more deranged. This gave birth to the meme “Come on man, it’s [the current year]!”:
Since the zeitgeist is ever-progressing and dynamic, so are people’s expected sensibilities. Meaning that [the current year] can be invoked ad infinitum, there is no respite, no point where the zeitgeist settles. Therefore, we actually live in the eternal [current year]. This state of affairs was very characteristic of the 2010s. Before that, the zeitgeist moved slowly. However, it seems to me that sometime in the early 2010s it started accelerating rapidly, leading to faster and faster globohomoization of social norms. Jordan Peterson was talking about “misgendering” (not using someone’s preferred pronoun) becoming a hate crime (state-enforced tr@nnyism on the individual level) in 2016 and now it’s been normalized for men to compete in women’s sports (state-enforced tr@nnyism on the societal level). In [the current year], Trans Women Are Women. I agree, they are so valid! Ugh, anyway…
Current year → Current thing
While zeitgeist invocation has not gone away, it has taken a secondary role in the 2020s, as it’s job has already been done. We have entered the decade of [current things]. And you best believe they aren’t going anywhere. We are living in the decade of the [eternal current thing]. There is no distinction between current things in the public consciousness. The transition from one to the other is seamless. Once something becomes a thing, it’s as if it was always a thing. Once it’s replaced by a new one, it’s like it never happened. We were always at war with Russia.
Covid? What’s that? We’ve been at war with Russia since 2020, bro. Masks? We always used to wear them, look, I even have this yearbook picture from 10 years ago where all of us wore masks! Masks have never been a thing? What are you a racist or something? You should really stop watching those conspiracy theorists on youtube, Anon.
I’m not sure where the current thing meme originated, likely /pol/, but it gained mainstream traction when madlad Musk posted it on twitter, predictably causing leftists to seethe at unprecedented rates:
This meme mocks the people who fall for the Cathedral’s new propaganda strategy of focusing on one event or issue - one thing - at a time and expecting the masses to follow suit. The Cathedral-endorsed position (the party line) on this thing is blasted all over (social) media across the West on a daily basis, which accomplishes two things. First, it lets people know what position they should endorse [if they want to be part of polite company] and second, because it becomes the flavor of the month topic of discussion following the news cycle, it prevents anyone from truly insulating themselves. Dissidents can’t fully ignore it, best they can do is take the opposite position. Doubly so if the current thing has actual material consequences on your life, such as having to suck it up, stop being a racist and get the vaxx. It’s just a jab!
Where things get interesting, in my opinion, is looking at the evolution of the covid narrative and trying to figure out the underlying method behind Cathedral propaganda in [the current decade].
In early 2020, when covid was still “new”, leftist media was taking the exact opposite stance of the one it assumed from April onwards. Masks didn’t work, lockdowns were ridiculous, the flu was a bigger threat than covid and anti-asian racism was the real epidemic (China flu). Headlines:
I’m not sure when exactly the narrative shifted and coalesced into the covid theatre of the past 2 years, but I iirc it was around the time Trump endorsed hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a cure for covid. That allowed the Cathedral to “fact-check” racist-sexist Trump, “debunk” his endorsement of HCQ and thus frame endorsing HCQ as a solution as “trumpist”, meaning racist and sexist. At the same time, it officially endorsed the opposite position - lockdowns, masks and social distancing as the solution to covid.
This is how covid became politicized - if you accept the Cathedral endorsed position (trust the science), you are a reasonable, caring and rational human being. If you accept Trump’s position, you are just like him - an evil racist sexist islamophobe. Or something to that effect. The Cathedral signaled to the masses what to think about covid by associating opposition to covid theatre with the rejection of globohomo morality - if you don’t wear masks, you’re [buzzword denoting enemies of the tribe]!
The Ivermectin scandal was similarly structured. When IVM entered the mainstream discourse, lines had already been drawn. Anything not explicitly endorsed by Cathedral science (WHO, CDC, Fauci…) was being branded as a conspiracy theory or charlatan medicine. So it wasn’t very hard to put IVM in the same basket. Remember when the CNN edited Joe Rogan’s post-IVM recovery video to make him look sickly?
What I’m trying to illustrate here is the Cathedral’s careful use of framing in order to paint its opponents in as bad a light as possible. During Covid, this was done in three main ways:
associating heterodox opinions with an exemplary public enemy - Trump, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan…
associating heterodox opinions with Science-denial - one of the principal sins in the globohomo moral framework. This is either implicit (using “horse-dewormer” to treat a human disease implies you’re an uneducated redneck, uneducated rednecks don’t Trust The Science(TM)
after biden Won The Election, individual public enemies were harder to come by, so the narrative shifted into connecting anti-covid sentiments with racism and globohomophobia
The truckers’ protest in Canada was a pretty big awakening of the normies from their stupor, which is why that movement had to be explicitly linked to opposing globohomo morality. Many normies were born and raised in globohomo (molded by it), but covid hysteria is something that they merely adopted, so they were significantly less resistant to deprogramming attempts. In order to bypass this limitation, anti-covid sentiments needed to be explicitly linked to anti-globohomo sentiments, thus letting the existing deprogramming antibodies primed for the rejection of anti-globohomo statements double as a defense against covid hysteria deprogramming.
The Russia-Ukraine war followed a similar pattern. Remember how Kamala put the RUS/UKR conflict in layman’s terms?
So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for.
Sounds more like babytalk to me, but what do I know? I’m not an Expert. Recall also the “Putler” meme, where Putin was being compared to Hitler in order to quickly ferment anti-Putin and anti-Russian sentiments accross the West. Again, we see a strict polarization of possible opinions on the new current thing. You either support Ukraine in the war against Russia, and are on the right (or should I say, left?) side of history; or you’re a racist, nazi, homophobe etc. - like Vladolf Putler himself and the Orange Man before him.
Cathedral lore and its expansion
I’ve spoken about what I like to call societal reality models in a previous essay, but I’ve realized that an apt label for the concept might also be lore. Like Christian lore informs the worldview of Christians, Muslim lore informs the worldview of Muslims and the lore of those who must not be named (the bracket people) informs their worldview; so does Cathedral lore inform the worldview of normies.
Like the new testament was written as an addendum to the new testament, the Cathedral also expands its lore. There’s two key factors that cause Cathedral lore to be updated in a radically different manner however. Since the Cathedral is an officially unofficial religious institution, and globohomo is our officially unofficial religion, we don’t have a clearly defined holy text akin to the Bible. Globohomo scripture is decentralized, produced by academia and disseminated by the media. Additionally, we live in a society where information can be shared instantaneously, addendums or changes can be instantaneous, constant and inextensive. They are more akin to programming patches than book sequels.
Cathedral lore is the authority/consensus endorsed worldview on politically important subjects - in one word, it can be described as Globohomo. The 2010s were an exercise in the accumulation of Globohomo lore. From the occupy wall street movement onward, racism, sexism, misogyny and all of these buzzwords began gaining traction on the internet. They then escalated into homophobia, transphobia, now calling pedophiles “groomer” is hate speech. Globohomo has gained a coherent identity as a foundational pillar of Cathedral endorsed morality. Supporting trannies is good, calling them a man is bad. Letting blacks loot your grocery store is virtuous, calling the police on them is sinful. Of course, since academia is the Cathedral’s (and therefore Globohomo’s) powerbase, Science-denial is a cardinal sin, akin to the various -isms and -phobias.
In truth, Cathedral lore may someday expand to contain all subjects, since the personal is political, according to them. It’s just a matter of time before another issue becomes politically useful and must therefore be added to the officially unofficial lore. But, it’s not enough to make a subject politically important, it must also be made crystal clear which stance on the subject is left and which one is wrong.
Something very crucial must be understood about Cathedral lore. Since the Cathedral is a religious institution concerned with the propagation of the secular Globohomo religion and its derived morality, it’s lore is not based on facts (observable reality). It’s based on, as Dawkins puts it, on a central delusion. However, unlike Christianity, whose God delusion is actually a merely unsubstantiated (unobservable, thus unprovable) proposition; Globohomo is predicated on the observably false propositions of universalism and progressivism, which give birth to the belief in oppression as the source of all differences - the original sin (this was covered more extensively by both Moldbug and Land). Whites are oppressing blacks through systemic racism → whites are bad, blacks are good. Men have oppressed women by forcing them into the role of homemakers → men are bad, women are good. Etcetera. Because all humans want to accumulate status, a moral framework that awards status based on oppression gives rise to the oppression olympics - the jockeying for status of various identity groups based on how well they can justify their oppression, as I’ve covered in my essays on leftist power and leftists semantics.
In practice, Globohomo morality manifests as a network of interconnected themes (intersectionality), that semi-independently exert their influence upon the outside world. But, because they are interconnected, they co-occur. If you want to be a feminist, you must also be anti-racist - with some exceptions. Each of these themes is based on a rejection/inversion of a natural state of being and has an associated exemplar, anti-exemplar and labels that denote the sin of not assigning higher status to the exemplar and thus identify enemies of the tribe. Some of them have subthemes, which indicate that the Cathedral has politicized multiple aspects of the same theme (science denial as a whole is bad, but even worse if you deny climate change or covid).
Let’s take feminism for example - its exemplar is woman and its anti-exemplar is man. The cardinal sin of not treating women as higher status than men is sexism if a man does it, internalized misogyny if a woman does it. Identity-based themes have different labels for their cardinal sin depending on group identity, the others tend to only have one. They all intersect at death worship, because any nation that implements these policies against its own people will decay and eventually die out. More on this later.
These themes however aren’t “equal” in the globohomo hierarchy (oppression olympics), in the sense that some take precedence over others, meaning the scope of trangression from rejecting them is based on which theme(s) you reject. Being a racist is, for example, worse than being a sexist. You can be a fervent feminist, but if you are found to be racist, you’re still going to be branded enemy of the tribe. Same goes for transphobic feminists, such as J.K. Rowling. Not so for the inverse - exemplifying anti-racism gives you a pass for sexism. Or in other words, blacks get the hoe pass, white women don’t get the knee-ggr pass. Eg. Drake getting no slack for beating Rihanna. However, antisemitism is even worse than racism. Kayne West became the target of public outrage after criticizing Jewish producers and record-label owners.
This also informs their propaganda machine. When the Cathedral needs to update its lore (add a new node to the network), it implements its software patches first by shoving a new issue down everyone’s throats and follows it up by creating the illusion of consensus on that issue’s interpretation. Since most of its lore is based on rejecting reality, it can’t use observable reality as a source of new lore. Instead it makes it seem like everyone on the left side of history has already made up their mind on the issue (trust the Soyence, Experts soy…) while painting everyone who rejects that consensus as an enemy of the Globohomo tribe - a racist, sexist, homophobe etc. This is often done by using a publicly visible right-wing talking point as an anti-reference (do/believe exactly opposite of what Trump does/believes). This is a phenomenon called psychological inoculation. By associating contrarian positions with a social transgression, either directly (calling them racist) or indirectly (strawmanning it into a conspiracy theory) they prepare counterpoints for the normie to use against anyone who wants to reason them out of their Cathedral induced stupor.
In short, adding a new node to the Globohomo network is done by creating a chain of association between the position on existing Globohomo themes (such as racism) and the position on the new topic du joure, so that the Cathedral endorsed position is associated with being Greta Thunberg whereas the opposite position is associated with being like her racist great-grandfather. I’ve already provided examples: Trump labelling covid as China flu, which made the media dismiss covid and jump on him with accusations of racism and the subsequent 180-degree turn when Trump endorsed hcq, which made the media double down on covid theatre while labelling him a science denier. The Cathedral endorsed position is always associated with being a good little femboy, the opposite one with being an evil racist man. Vaxx endorsed by science (good), IVM endorsed by conspiracy theorists (bad). Zelensky is a Jewish crossdresser (good), Putler is a white racist (oxymoron, and bad). And this will keep happening, at least until the end of this decade, as new psyops are implemented. And normies will sadly gobble it up, as they always do.
Yes, Zelensky is black (Israelite). Actually a transwoman, but Netflix can’t get everything right.
The trouble here is that since Globohomo morality is predicated on a rejection of observable reality (in fact, it’s more or less an inversion of sane/traditional moral principles), it is necessarily morbid - it prevents a person adopting it from fulfilling his reproductive and personal interests. Thus, Globohomo is at its core a death cult, because it leads to physical, intellectual and spiritual decay:
Spiritual - inverting your aesthetic sensibilities (ugly is beautiful, beautiful is ugly) and moral compass (evil is good, good is evil) makes you accept, commit or nurture evil/ugliness.
Intellectual - Globohomo morality is predicated solely on following consensus, not on extrapolating from independent observation, which leads to intellectual dependency on authority, inability to separate truth and consensus - behaving according to a false perception of reality leads to mistaking problem for solution
Physical - the rejection of sexual dimorphism (mainly masculinity) and bodily health decays your body, makes you unable to use it to exert your will upon the physical world
Cathedral endorsed positions on pretty much every politically relevant topic will always be wrong and consequently, adopting them will speak disaster for you. More and more disaster as it keeps switching focus to more and more issues, always peddling the exact opposite of the sane position as truth. The worst part is, these current things may come and go, with people forgetting all about them once they receive their software update (we are now on Eternal Current Thing 1.2, patch notes: Fauci was replaced by Zelensky, Trump by Putler, mask emoji by Ukraine flag emoji), but their effects linger. I still see most people wearing masks and disinfecting their hands when I go to the store, the vaxx agenda is still in full swing behind the scenes and, of course, death rates are up by a significant margin compared to previous years. Inexplicably of course. The economic fallout of the RUS/UKR war will likewise be felt long after people forget all about it.
Ascetus shared the following picture recently:
This is generally a good take, except for when the current thing has actual material consequences for your life, as it was (and still is, to a lesser extent) during covid theatre. Not caring means I will be forced to get the jab. That’s obviously not an option. The goal should therefore be to become, as they say, ungovernable.
Measuring public engagement with the current thing
The above paragraph was supposed to conclude this essay, but then I received a screenshot of Ukraine vs Afghanistan on google trends (USA) from a friend:
Clearly shows the short attention span of the public. There’s a finite amount of things the public cares about and engages with. That number is generally the same as the amount of things talked about in the media: 1.
He then sent me the comparison of the most recent current things (worldwide):
Again, this shows the singlemindedness of the public. What’s even more interesting however, is the is the recent decline of searches for “ukraine”, which signifies a decrease in public engagement with the RUS/UKR war. I checked a bunch more search terms like “putler”, “russia”, “putin”, “zelensky”, “inflation”, “sanctions” to make sure. Russia mirrors Ukraine almost perfectly, the rest are way less common than Ukraine.
Ukraine searches hit a peak on Feb 24th, when they started declining. They declined below covid searches on March 13th and have been slowly declining even more since. This is to be expected. After all, the impact of Covid (theatre) was much more strongly felt by the public, so it makes sense that public engagement with it would be more perstistent and longer lasting. The war in Ukraine, on the other hand, might be shilled nonstop in the media, but its impact is more abstract and its full extent will likely be felt in the future.
This decrease in engagement is relevant, because if my theory on 2020s being the decade of the eternal current thing (of nonstop psyops/happenings) is correct, we should expect to see a new “happening” that demands everyone’s attention in the near future. There’s a couple candidates. We could see the [Cathedral] media double down on Russia vs Ukraine. Such as this (likely false flag) chemical attack:
Framing Putin for a chemical attack further demonizes him in the eyes of the public, renewing people’s outrage and engagement. If the war escalates organically, likely that no Cathedral intervention is needed.
We could see a resurgence of Covid cases, although with summer around the corner, the timing isn’t right. I do think we’ll see a Covid (or some other fake epidemic) revival, but more likely in the fall or next winter.
Leftwing twitter aka mainstream twitter aka Pedo-twitter has been put on the defensive recently because of the “ok groomer” meme. Their “debunking”, as always, takes the form of speaking power to truth, rather than vice-versa.
I’m not sure if we’re nearing a current thing shift yet, but I strongly suspect we’re going to see a new news cycle in the near future - either to revive Ukraine engagement, or to shift public consciousness to some other thing.