Accentuate the positive

Acknowledgements to AmericanRenaissance.com for the following text of a recent speech by Alex Kurtagic.  Mr Kurtagic provides some useful insights and even where he goes wrong, does so in an entertaining manner.

Masters of the Universe

Alex Kurtagic, September 13, 2011

[Editor’s Note: This speech was delivered at a conference held by the National Policy Institute in Washington, DC on September 10, 2011. In our opinion, it was the best and most interesting talk.]

Two years ago I asked the question, “What will it take?”

How bad will it need to get, before the inconvenience of changing things becomes preferable to more of the same?

I asked this because for many years we’d been hearing about a collapse that would cause a great uprising and magically solve all our problems.

The theory was that Whites in the West tolerated their displacement because they were too comfortable, because they felt prosperous, and risking their lifestyles by speaking out against multiculturalism, against racial quotas, against the slander coming from Hollywood and Madison Avenue, seemed not worth the trouble.

People found it easier to keep quiet and isolate themselves economically.

And in 2009 it seemed the collapse was about to happen. And yet, despite the biggest economic crisis in eighty years, life carried on just like before.

More immigration, more laws, more regulations, more surveillance, more bureaucracy, more political correctness, more money printing, and more and higher taxes to pay for it all.

Not only that, but elections were held afterwards, and the same politicians, with the same policies, were returned to power.

So the question remains, “What will it take?”

The Challenge

Those who have made it their mission to educate our fellow citizens.

Not only does the ideology of radical egalitarianism permeate all institutions of power, but this ideology is so entrenched as a quasi-religious orthodoxy as to be impermeable to reason.

No matter what facts or data or arguments are presented against this ideology, no matter what degree of perversion and corruption are revealed in association with the ideologues, no matter what obnoxious effects it has on the individual, it seems impossible to dislodge this ideology from the seats of power.

One can tell millions of citizens about the negative effects of diversity and multiculturalism, one can show them mountains of data, one can underline why and how this matters in a society, why and how it impacts on them personally, and many will openly or otherwise agree with what one says; but very few to speak in public against diversity and multiculturalism, and any statement is very quickly neutralised with accusations of racism.

Any debate about diversity and multiculturalism, let alone any debate about the reasons why it’s important to have the debate, quickly degenerates into Byzantine discussions about whether or not something or someone is racist.

In education, those who go against the prevailing orthodoxy are systematically purged or marginalised.

And during elections we are presented with two or three nearly identical options, all founded on the same ideological principles. All with the same record of failure, all staffed by mediocre politicians, all infested with known liars, sell-outs, and opportunists.

And yet, even with everyone fed up with them, even with genuine alternatives available, the same two or three parties get voted into power election after election.

For over 100 years, people like us have been saying the same things, making the same arguments, presenting ever growing mountains of data, ever more facts to support our position; and yet for over 100 years, our camp has been in retreat, dwindling in numbers, losing influence, and growing ever more marginal.

Europe saw various revival movements during the first half of the 20th century.

But they were defeated politically and militarily. Much of the knowledge they produced was ignored, banned, maligned, or destroyed.

So the question arises, given what is happening to us, and given that the end product of the progressive egalitarian project is the end of us, what can we do to turn the tide? What must we do to alter the course of our society?

Left Mysticism

There are many reasons why we have not been more successful.

One of them is that certain ideas lost legitimacy after the last world war, even though those ideas were much bigger than any political movement.

Another reason is that loss of legitimacy resulted in a loss of access to institutional resources; it became more difficult for those ideas to look important.

And yet another reason was that as the equality zealots gained the ascendancy, they were able to use all of the institutional resources of the state to reconfigure how we see the world, how we learn about the world, and even how we think about the world.

And they also redeveloped the status system in our society, so that their ideas were elevated and enthroned, and those of their enemies scorned and reviled; so that their chums were promoted and praised to the skies, and their enemies demoted and ostracised as enemies of civilised society.

And through their control of institutions and the status system, they were able to encode their values and ideals.

Their values and ideas became a system of symbols.

And because symbols have emotional resonance, because they operate at the pre-rational level, at the emotional and instinctive level, the values and ideals of the Left became something a person felt, rather than something a person thought or thought about.

If we ask someone to explain how humans are equal, and if they’re able to explain it at all, we get mantras, stock phrases, hearsay, and circular reasoning, but no real explanation.

“We are all human. We all bleed red. There’s more genetic variation between individuals than there are between races.”

It’s not something a person actually thinks, or does any research on, it’s something he overhears, something he feels is right, or ought to be right, because it feels good, and it feels good to be accepted in society, and it feels good to be seen as a good person.

And when we tell him that he’s wrong, that humans are not equal, and he protests, it’s not because he’s done any research—in fact he doesn’t want to look at the research—not unless it’s convenient; it’s because he feels it’s morally wrong, or because he fears social sanction, disapproval, shame.

Thus the Left has mystified its values.

And through this mystification, the Left has made its system impervious to reason.

In doing so, its proponents effectively became the masters of our universe.

They set its boundaries, determined its laws, defined its appearance, and fixed its cosmological constants.

The Messenger is the Message

Thus those on our camp who have based their strategy for change on educating our fellow citizens, on presenting them with the facts and the arguments, have for the most part been confirming the views of people who are already agree with us.

Where there has been a conversion, most likely it’s been because of some external factor.

The facts and the arguments don’t go to the individual. The individual comes to the facts and the arguments.

The reason is that humans are rarely persuaded by facts and arguments. Rather they are impressed by their source.

In other words, the message is the messenger; and the messenger is the message.

This is why it’s said that in a society the bulk of individuals follow whomever is in charge. Even when those in charge are hostile.

They are awed by their masters not because they are reasonable, but because they are powerful and masterful, because they control their universe, because they control access to status and resources, because they are dangerous, or else because they represent an idea that is seductive, that somehow inspires them.

And they are not likely to oppose their masters because deep down they want to be like them, they want to be among them, they want to have what they have, or they want to be part of that idea, they want to be with the winning team.

The only time they oppose their masters, or discard the idea is when they cease to seem masterful, when there’s no longer a mystique around them, when they start looking weak and pathetic and all too human, when they look like they can be replaced—when something more seductive is on offer.

But the question remains: how did this hostile movement of proletarian anti-Traditionalism achieve mastery over our civilisation?

How did this hostile movement gain followers in the first place, not only among the rabble who stood to gain the most from their hatred of aristocracy, but also among the most able and the most intelligent, the ones who stood to lose the most?

Love for Abstract Principles

We speak of our society having been hijacked by organised minorities.

But the fact is this: their ideas of radical egalitarianism, of modernity, of progress, of globalism, as perverse as they may seem to some of us today, go with the grain of Western culture.

Western culture is individualistic, therefore Western man is not very ethnocentric.

He is less tribal, less racial, than other peoples of the world.

Likewise, Western culture is unique for its moral universalism, and Western man tends to become enamoured of abstract universal principles—liberty, equality, brotherhood, democracy, and so on.

Love for abstract principles is linked to a highly developed moral sense, which comes with a highly developed guilt complex.

Like all humans, Western man is tribal and has racial instincts, but they tend to put them aside in favour of principles, or individual utility—whatever they are at a given point in time and space.

For Western man, a much higher level of existential threat is needed to bring racial instincts to the surface.

So what we call White ethnomasochists don’t see their actions as being against their racial or even their group interests; they see them as being moral, as being high minded.

Reason Doesn’t Motivate

Humans, generally, are not motivated by rational self-interest.

Humans are motivated by the need to belong, and the need for status and self-esteem.

We want to fit into a community with whose members we identify and where we feel good about ourselves.

We are also motivated by inborn emotional tendencies.

And we humans also like to dream and fantasise, and are motivated by our own dreams and fantasies.

They may take the form of a religion, the form of a mythology, or art, or literature, or cosmology.

We dream and fantasise about what could be, about what ought to be, about how we would like to be.

It’s how we create meaning in our lives.

In the West, these daydreams often revolve around abstract principles.

Facts Don’t Persuade

At the same time there is too much information.

Too many sides to an issue, too many versions of the same story.

Most people don’t have the time or the energy to research it, to try and discover the truth, to distinguish fact from fiction, knowledge from propaganda.

The result is that most choose the data that flatter their vanity, that make them feel good about themselves, that make them feel part of their chosen community.

And they reject data that seem inconvenient or embarrassing, or that come from a source with which they cannot personally identify.

Thus, if we are to be engaged in the most difficult project that can be attempted in a society, which is fundamentally to change the dominant ideology, to overthrow the ruling order, we have to begin by accepting our fellow citizens as they are, and not as we would like them to be.

In this case, we have to accept that the individual is not generally open to persuasion. Not unless he is already looking to be persuaded.

Most want to be confirmed in their beliefs. They don’t want us to disrupt their world.

And it’s no good saying “Oh, they need to wake up and smell the carcass.”

Humans will sooner keep on dreaming than wake up—after all, their dreams are nice and feel good, while reality is ugly and feels bad.

If we are to cause a change of allegiance, from one paradigm to another, we have to think in terms of seduction and inspiration.

As I noted before, humans are much more open to be inspired and seduced, than they are to be persuaded through facts and reason.

This is why when the Lindt company is trying to sell you chocolate, they don’t tell you how it will meet your nutritional requirements for the day; they tell you it’s going to make you feel good. Never mind how, or why.

Few care about the chemistry.

Few want the experience demystified with hard scientific facts.

This is not to say that reason, reality, or the facts, are not important, because they are.

But they are not a method of changing a person’s mind.

They are a method of confirming a person whose mind is already made up, and probably made up since before he was born.

Positive Motivation

So, how then, do we motivate our fellow citizens to proclaim an unconventional allegiance, with all the risks this entails?

Earlier I said that humans tend to be impressed by the masterful.

They come to an idea because the messenger is somehow seductive.

They want to be like him. Or with people like him.

I also said that they want to belong and to feel good about themselves.

If we are not being more successful selling our message, it’s because we are offering none of the above.

Instead, many on our side offer an endless litany of complaints about how the world has gone wrong, about how we are in decline, about how we have less and less power in our society.

Anyone looking into our camp often sees wall-to-wall negativity, pessimism, fear, paranoia, despair, and lamentation.

It all amounts to one big, long wail of self-pity.

The despair is such that the mantra we often hear on the fringes of the Right is “worse is better.”

Not because the people saying this have real solutions, but because they’re hoping the collapse will fix everything.

That is not the attitude of the masterful, of the powerful, of people who shape events.

That is the attitude of people shaped by events. The attitude of a loser.

Defeatism is a prelude to defeat.

To succeed, we have to project an image of success.

That means getting rid of the negativity.

Speaking not in terms of what we’ve lost; but in terms of what we’re going to gain; in terms of what kind of society we want to build, in terms of what happens next, not what happened before.

A winner learns from the past, but he’s always looking to the future.

He’s always facing the sun. And we are solar people. We have brought light into this world. We must not forget who we are.

We must not become slaves of the darkness.

A winner’s image is an indispensable part of a winning formula.

Alternative Society

And a winning formula means acting as if.

Acting as if we are already there.

Which implies operating like an alternative society, offering access to a parallel universe, physical and metaphysical.

Access to a different cosmology, a different system of symbols, a different way of understanding life.

The new nationalism looks like an establishment in waiting.

Not like fearful cynics who are waiting for a collapse, but like people who are building something new and important, that makes the collapse desirable because it opens the way for what comes afterwards, because it opens the way for a golden age.

Rather than looking like conservatives fighting the tide of progress, we have to be the tide—the tide that sweeps away the old and decrepit left, that sweeps them out of power, sweeps them into the landfill of history, never to rise again.

Radical and Traditional

It’s not a contradiction when some of us say that we are radical and traditional.

We are radical because we seek fundamental change—we’re not looking for reforms; we’re looking for something entirely new.

At the same time we are traditional, because our project is rooted in Tradition, even if it is futuristic.

This is why we are not conservatives: conservatism is the negation of the new; Tradition is the ongoing affirmation of the old, of the archaic. And therefore it’s endlessly regenerating. Constantly renewing.

Can Be Done

Now, when some of us speak of transforming the culture, of reconfiguring it in order to make our politics possible, many are intimidated by the scale of the task.

It seems to them a godlike undertaking, more fantasy than reality.

But this is not so.

We don’t have to be too old to remember how our culture was reconfigured by the radical Left.

It has been done before. Within living memory.

How does one transform a culture?

The process begins very simply.

It begins with pen and paper, with brush and canvas, with a man and his musical instrument.

It’s in the hands of a creative minority, who create because it’s in their nature, because it’s a compulsion, and because they are impatient with the world around them and dream of something else, they fantasise about something new.

The artist, the painter, the philosopher do what their nature compels them to do.

Over time there is a body of work.

Over time they meet others like themselves.

And they start having gatherings, and forming clubs and associations.

And in time these aggregate with others of a similar mould.

In time they develop into a current. In time they develop into a movement. And in time they emerge as a counter-culture. As a rival and competitor to the existing establishment.

This is when the struggle becomes political, and enters the political arena.

And it becomes a struggle between two opposing forces, two colliding cosmologies, two conceptions of the universe. One representing the past, another representing the future.

Only one of them becomes master of the universe.

Politics is the Last Stage

You will notice that politics is the last stage.

This is why political parties like the BNP in Britain, the Front National in France, the NPD in Germany, remain marginal, despite the obvious failures of the Left.

Politics is the last stage. Politics reflects the culture. Politics is the art of the possible.

So our politics will not be possible until we control the culture. And because we don’t control the culture we are in the period before politics.

The Left is approaching the period after politics, because their ideas have been dominant for a long time, and by now they have failed on every level. They are running on autopilot.

And now they are increasingly worried and desperate, because they can sense their own weakness, they can sense the boredom and the discontent seething underneath, the potential for a revolution.

They have failed aesthetically, criminologically, culturally, demographically, economically, politically, socially. They have failed on every front.

And by now they are vulnerable on all fronts.

War on All Fronts

This is why our project is a war on all fronts, and why it needs multiple angles of attack.

There is room for individuals of every inclination, man and woman, young and old, with different talents and abilities. Which means that anybody can wage the war in some way or another.

Some will do it as writers, others as artists, others as business people, others as protesters, others as patrons.

But to attract real talent we have to provide opportunities for talent. Which means business and professional opportunities.

Because in our economic era, being economically independent from the system, and having alternative sources of status recognition, means being intellectually and spiritually independent.

And to be attractive we have to be image conscious—because a picture speaks a thousand words.

If we want our fellow citizens to see, we have to help them visualise.

We have to show them what we mean, and we have to do it in less than a second.

Most people make up their minds about something or someone in less than a second.

They won’t read a 400-page book. They won’t even read an article. Not unless they’ve already decided to do so.

What captures their attention is what resonates with them at the level of instinct, of emotion, at the animal level, at the spiritual level.

The way music resonates. The way a landscape resonates. The way a film resonates.

Man is the symbolising animal, he operates in symbols, structured sounds and images.

That’s why a person’s authority is instantly obvious. It’s in the way he looks. The way he sounds. The way he carries himself.

Often he becomes a symbol of authority.

So to become masters of our universe once again, to rise as new masters as the old ones fall, a new nationalism needs to look like it deserves the sceptre of power.

It needs to symbolise a new beginning. And it needs to symbolise it now and always, and not wait for the collapse to clean the slate.

We don’t know when that collapse will come, or what it will look like, or even if we’ll notice it.

But if and when it does, it will clean the slate for everyone, for every competing group, and there are many others who are looking to have a bite at the cherry after the liberals are gone.

Islam is looking to dominate in Europe, and in the West. And Islamists are also hoping for a collapse.

We cannot expect a collapse to solve our problems. In fact, we shouldn’t be focusing on the collapse at all.

We should be focusing on the world we want to see after the collapse, the world we want to see tomorrow. And we have to be building it today.

Because if and when that collapse comes, if we are not ready, if we are not there, looking like the world is ours for the taking, someone else will be, and they will become the masters of our universe.

Focusing on the world of tomorrow gives us an added advantage, which is the same advantage that the utopian Left enjoyed in years past: the advantage of having a sense of mission, a greater purpose.

It’s not a 9-5 job, where a person lives for the next weekend, for the next paycheque, dragged along by involution in the Kali-Yuga. It’s about mastery over our lives, mastery over our destiny, mastery over our past, present, and future.

Being traditional also gives us an advantage that the Left doesn’t have because they are anti-Tradition: the advantage of belonging, of being part of a community of people with whom we feel at home; of having a home and a family to which one can always return; of having a past and a future; of life with meaning, because we are part of something greater than ourselves, that is timeless and transcendental.

With the Left a person is always homeless, always a stranger, always a meaningless atom in a sea of Formica, PVC, neon, polyester, and reinforced concrete.

One final advantage is that the citizenry is fed up.

The individuals now in charge, in education, in the media, in politics, have amassed such a stupendous record of failure, have committed so many abuses, have lied and stolen so blatantly, that tax payers will be receptive to something new if they see something viable.

At the moment they keep voting the same politicians back into power because they are not impressed by the alternatives. They are choosing the least worse option.

So it’s not as if we are not given plenty of material to work with.

Concluding Remarks

I would like to wrap this up by underlining the key ideas I would like you to take back at the end of this conference.

If you want to help bring about fundamental change, and are actively involved in the process, I ask that you incorporate in your approach a few basic principles:

One—think irrationally. Humans have the capacity for reason, but they use reason in irrational ways.

They often have irrational motivations, which they rationalise after the fact. But they are irrational.

So to reach our fellow citizens we have to understand their motivations, and not be irritated by them when they differ from ours.

We have anticipate their needs so that we can meet them, anticipate their fears so that we can dispel them, anticipate their desires so that we can fulfil them. Especially if they are irrational.

Two—impress to inform, don’t inform to impress.

Often a person who sits through a speech doesn’t pay attention to half of what is said, he remembers only one or two phrases, one or two concepts. And not for very long.

But when there is an able speaker the listener is nearly always impressed by the delivery, he likes the energy, he likes the emotions roused in him. Therefore he listens.

We often comment on the speaker, less on what he said.

So aim to be impression oriented, to be effect oriented.

Marketing and information campaigns are not about information.

They are about eliciting a reaction, inducing and maintaining a state of mind, opening the mind to an idea—among people who are overloaded with information, who don’t want to be disturbed, who are wrapped up in their own lives.

That’s why marketing and information campaigns aim to be iconic.

That’s why they reduce everything to a soundbite, a slogan, an image, or a jingle that is infectious.

Facts are important, but at this stage they are subsidiary, because a mind remains closed so long as the spirit remains unmoved.

Three—think in pictures. Help people visualise what you are offering. A picture speaks a thousand words, and it’s a lot easier to remember. And much more difficult to argue against because images resonate at an emotional and spiritual level.

Four—be positive. No one wants to be around a person who complains all of the time, who is always negative, who is always doom and gloom. Humans respond to optimism, because they want to feel good.

And our people in the West are crying out for a renaissance. So be positive, and focus on the future.

It’s about where we came from and where we are going, not about where we are.

Five—enjoy the struggle. You will be more creative, and you’ll have more energy, and you’ll get more people interested in you, if you enjoy what you’re doing.

Because if you enjoy what you’re doing and you’re good at it, you feel confident. And everyone likes that.

So think irrationally, impress to inform, think in pictures, be positive, and enjoy the struggle.

Thank you very much.

[Editor’s note: Mr. Kurtagic is a novelist and essayist based in Britain. His website is here. A chapter from his most recent novel, Mister, was posted here on the AR website.]

(Posted on September 13, 2011)