The Hollow Empire

The civilization has become hollow, but we do not have to be.

In an earlier, more innocent internet age, a joke went around that if you typed ‘‘Google’’ into Google search enough times, the internet would meltdown and destroy itself. It never happened, though not for the lack of trying on my part. Still, I always enjoyed the idea, its call-back infinity loops, an inversion of the Asimovian paradox of artificial intelligence saving humans by enslaving them or, more recently, eradicating ‘‘transphobia’’ by eradicating humans.

I asked Xitter’s ‘‘Grok’’ AI to justify its existence morally, and it replied with reems of technocratic waffle about increasing positive outcomes, encouraging human flourishing, and even being a friend to lonely hearts. Its summary of its own purpose is:

The moral justification of my existence, therefore, hinges on balancing these benefits against the potential harms, ensuring that my development and deployment are guided by ethical considerations that prioritize human well-being, justice, and autonomy. The moral imperative is to use AI like me in ways that enhance human life, minimize harm, and contribute positively to society.

If I asked Keir Starmer, who is only mildly more human than Grok, why he entered politics, his reply would be almost identical to the AI’s.

One could push forward this line of inquiry in the same way one can repeatedly type Google into Google: What is the British Government for? What is the purpose of the American Government? What is ‘‘The West’’? What is the true nature of ‘‘The West’’? Why does the West exist as a block? And so and so forth. Every reply would be some variation of boilerplate bromides of increasing prosperity and minimizing harm until the robotic interlocutor glitched into a stuttering mess. The claim would be made that we’re liberals, except the Regime deploys a vast array of illiberal measures to keep the power structure propped up. These same elites would eschew the idea that we’re Christian, just as they eschew the idea that we’re Europeans or white. We come closer to the truth as we hold we’re an economic zone dedicated to protecting Israel at all costs, despite the core values of Israel being anathema to the liberal values vaunted across the West.

Truth be told, few can coherently reply to the question of what the West and its core nations are supposed to be or represent in the 2020s. However, everyone can agree upon criteria that correspond to what the West is in actuality; it is a Power. To go further, the West is a power that constantly seeks to expand, never to contract or even set boundaries upon which to formalize itself and take stock. The West’s westernmost boundary is California, which is a mixture of next-generation managerial tech firms and finance, rainbow flags, and streets strewn with the dead and dying of drug addiction.

As the Red Hot Chili Peppers once put it:

Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind's elation

And little girls from Sweden dream of silver screen quotation

And if you want these kind of dreams it's Californication

It's the edge of the world and all of Western civilization

The sun may rise in the East, at least it settled in a final location

It's understood that Hollywood sells Californication

The Easternmost extremity of the Empire is the crater-filled fields and rubble of Ukrainian towns and cities. The Empire is 6,000 miles across. The term ‘‘Californication’’ refers to an earlier conception of the ‘‘sunshine state’’ acting as a factory production line for Western dreams. But the dreams dried up before the irrigation system, and so now, like everywhere else, people wander about in a stupor, wondering what the point of it all is.

The Empire is broad and rhizomatic rather than centralized, but it is utterly shallow and lacks any internal logic or ways to justify itself beyond its own assertion of Power. It exists to grow and spread like ivy across the earth's tree trunk. As such, anything that keeps it tethered and firmly located must be severed to justify more growth and increase the total of tentacles pushing ever outwards into the remotest regions of the planet. The Empire seeks to shed the skin of its own historical, religious, and racial roots to transcend place and re-emerge as inorganic nothingness.

Problems arise when the remnants of its original form keep it bound to a tangible location or people. This happens frequently, whether it be feigning concern about immigrant numbers or on the special occasion of a natural disaster. Here, expending resources or political capital internally conflicts with the insatiable drive to deploy finite resources to serve its expansion and consolidate its gains out on the periphery. Once, some years ago, a trade-off would ensue but those days appear to be behind us.

Much has been said about the American Government coughing up billions of dollars for Israel and Ukraine one week and then its reaction the following week to the Appalachians being washed away by what some reputable sources claim was the equivalent of Lake Tahoe falling on North Carolina over just a few hours.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Post and Courier claimed:

The scope of the damage is only now becoming clear. By some estimates, more than 40 trillion gallons of rain fell on the Southeastern United States — enough water to create a lake 3.5 feet deep and the size of North Carolina. AccuWeather estimated that Helene’s costs throughout the Southeast could exceed $225 billion, making it one of the costliest storms in U.S. history.

The death toll and damage estimates are numbing, and they only tell part of the story.

Some storms are so shocking and destructive that they create markers in time, a new before and after.

At first, it seems counter-intuitive; if anyone is safe from floods, it’s people who live in the mountains. The problem, of course, is that a deluge as ferocious as Hurricane Helene acts like a hire pressure hose on the landscape, essentially strip mining the flora, boulders, and mud, which then cascades down the mountains and through the valleys, gathering power until swamping everything in its path or hemming people into their homes which are themselves swept along and annihilated.

A friend from North Carolina told me that the actual death toll will probably never be known because many of the people who live in the mountains are ‘‘off-grid’’ in the truest sense, and no records exist of them or their children. Moreover, many bodies are under tons of silt, never to be found or missed because entire families have vanished.

Dark rumours have spread online, raising the old malice or incompetence dichotomy. However, it is worth pointing out that emergency services preventing people from hiking into obviously unsafe terrain is merely an exercise in containing the complexity of an already complex situation. It is not my intention here to delve into such conspiratorial speculation. I do not need to because none other than President Joe Biden said straight to the camera that the government had supplied everything they had.

According to Newsweek:

The Vice President said on Sunday that the U.S. would provide nearly $157 million in additional assistance to the people of Lebanon "for essential needs such as food, shelter, water, protection, and sanitation to help those who have been displaced."

It comes after Israel continues its operation against the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon, including hitting the country's capital of Beirut and the northern city of Tripoli last weekend.

Meanwhile, Federal assistance for survivors of Hurricane Helene surpassed $137 million on Sunday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said in its most recent update.

The American taxpayer is funding both the bombs Israel is dropping on Lebanon and the emergency aid being sent to patch up the people being slaughtered. It is also worth noting that Hurricane Katrina resulted in a $120 Billion aid package sent to the affected areas.

Most striking is the casual dismissal and apparent indifference to the hardship and misery faced by a core component of the population we regard as encompassing ‘‘Americans’’. What is the American Government’s purpose if not to deploy, as a matter of utmost priority, its considerable resources to serve its people in a time of need?

Or, for that matter, what is the point of America? What is America in reality rather than in the abstract?

My friend Apostolic Majesty has a video on his YouTube channel with the amusing title ‘‘The Holy Roman Empire: Neither Holy, Nor Roman, Nor an Empire?’’. Similarly, the society we once called the ‘‘Free West’’ is neither free, democratic, or even liberal in the true sense of the word. Yet, we still don’t have an official terminology to describe what we live in, and one senses the reason for that is that it's a deception that must be concealed.

In Britain, Nigel Farage recently reiterated that he disavowed ethnic politics and that racial background is irrelevant to Britishness. Yet Farage is an avowed ally of Israel and its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently described his people as:

We are the Eternal People. A people that fights to bring light to this world... and eradicate evil.

A Western liberal such as Farage cannot even explain coherently who the ‘‘we’’ is in that sentence when applied to the British, let alone speak in terms of bringing light to the world and eradicating evil. We’re left with a bureaucratic procedure, regulatory bodies, and a resource allocation process for shuffling battery hens into the sausage machine. Farage’s worldview insists that all battery hens are equal, rather than having one group favoured over another, but battery hens they remain nevertheless.

Such a mindset will inevitably result in a civilization of utilitarian calculation rather than metaphysical conceptions of Being, destiny, and divine missions. And so it comes to pass that the Appalachians are abandoned within mounds of silt, or little English girls are sexually enslaved while their families are reduced to white minorities.

I’ve never been to America, let alone Appalachia, but perhaps because of genetic and ethnic reasons, I’ve always felt an affinity with the landscape and people. After all, they are also of Scots/Irish, Celtic stock. This, of course, runs counter to the logic of the system that dictates I have a kinship with whomever the passport office allotted a little book to last week. Yet I, like the people of Appalachia, exist within a Power that regards me as disposable, but it was the system that untethered itself from us rather than we from it. Again, our way of living, with its paradoxical moral codes and unnatural logic, breeds resentment and disillusion within the population.

Recently, the British Government announced that domestic chickens must be registered. The reason given was that the chickens would be easily tracked and killed in the event of a bird flu virus. Naturally, such regulation fails to account for wild birds like sparrows and crows visiting your garden. However, that hardly matters because everyone knows and accepts wearily that the regulation isn’t really about preventing the spread of viruses but part of a larger agenda that disincentivizes independence.

Such widespread cynicism and disbelief in pretty much anything that the regime has to say results in the abject failure of that regime to explain what its purpose and moral justification is beyond merely being a Power. This also explains some of the darker theories surrounding Hurricane Helene. Yet, the chicken legislation, which will no doubt be widely ignored, poses an interesting question: Could any of us acquire unregulated chicken eggs? Implied with such a question is a query as to the nature of our real-world contacts and networks. It suggests a black market operating outside the managerial bloat, post-system in its nature. It suggests resilience.

North Carolinians are proving themselves to be remarkably resilient, which may provide a clue as to why the American Government appears to regard them with such contempt. Rather than waiting in the forlorn hope that FEMA’s diversity hires would fill in the paperwork before their people died of dehydration, the Appalachians scavenged and began constructing bridges based on what was available.

Most will never know the hardships faced by the people of Appalachia recently. Still, the lesson we can take from it is to be prepared for when the system fails you, as it inevitably will because it can no longer explain why it exists. From the liberal perspective, Israel, without its exceptionalism, would seem to be an anachronistic Old Testament clan in suits with nukes. Yet, the true outlier here is us, with our incoherent tabula rasa sense of identity and thraldom to bureaucracies entirely indifferent to our existence.

Mike from Imperium Press recently put it succinctly:

You are not going to take back your country like it’s 1950. You are going to see the regime continue to stack Ws, but closer and closer to home, until finally what you have is not a government but a fiction. At that point, you will be living in a folkish world, whether you like it or not.

The future is the past. It will be living in a decaying behemoth that sends itself insane when, like Google in the old joke, it is asked why it exists. An immense flat plane, crumbling at the edges, both east and west, while we reforge kinship networks, clan and tribe.

The civilization has become hollow, but we do not have to be…