“America still thinks it’s a young nation, but I don’t think it is. It should stop that. I think they’ve been young long enough. They should grow up.”
—Marlene Dietrich—
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I’ve mentioned in my About page and I’ve mentioned in other places that the way I’ve mostly managed to travel the world is through the work I’ve done as a defense contractor. I won’t say anything about specific jobs I’ve done, or what all defense contracting can entail, and it’s important to point out that the experiences of contractors can vary (sometimes wildly) from contract to contract and from country to country. But what I will say is that defense contracting as a profession can be a bug light that attracts the eccentric, the dysfunctional, the hilarious, the paranoid, the brilliant, the world-weary, the philosophical, and (not frequently but also not rarely) those who are less sane than they initially appear. Nearly everyone you encounter in that line of work is a character of some sort; permanent residents of opposite bottoms of the bell curve. When an occupation exists where mostly 22-28 year old single men are offered guns, large sums of tax-free money, and the chance of combat, in exchange for risk of death and spending a year (or years) away from home/friends/family, a society’s outliers are typically the one’s who audition.
I lay all of this foundation to say that six years ago, I had one such coworker in Israel who became a friend we’ll call Kevin.
In addition to being a contractor for a brief time, Kevin was a con artist. Or—according to his now-deleted LinkedIn—a “dynamic businessman who pushed the envelope”. Per normal overlap, being a con artist also meant Kevin was a seasoned purveyor of tall tales. Among the many things he claimed to have been in his past, the few that I remember were: Marine Force Recon, a DEA agent, a Border Patrol officer, a private detective, a rabbi, and a recognized member of a Native American tribe. When I last saw him in person, at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Kevin had paid $15 to become an ordained minister online so he could start his own megachurch scam in Houston (which ultimately failed, because when Joel Osteen ties two Bibles together and throws them over a telephone wire, he means business).
Needless to say, Kevin was incapable of keeping straight earlier lies he told that conflicted with later lies, and he never seemed to create a category in his mind of people he could lie to versus people he couldn’t. Everybody seemed to be fair game at least once. I’ll never forget the day I was a mark, when he called me and said “Guess what? I just got accepted into a Ph.D. program for Biomedical Engineering.” “No you didn’t.” “Yes I did.” “No you didn’t. You forget who you’re talking to, and I know neither of us hold even a bachelors, we’re both college dropouts.” “Ah, that’s right.” “Ah.”
But my fondest memory with Kevin was when he and I had the same day off and we rented a 2017 Mustang convertible. Driving through the Negev at 90 mph blaring Duran Duran’s “New Moon On Monday”, we raced the bedouins on their dirtbikes on our way to Egypt to see the pyramids. Our first stop was a casino across the border, where I went on to lose all but my gas money and Kevin won $500 - which, in Egypt money, made him look like the failed robber from Ocean’s 11.
Fast forward two years, long after Kevin had left the Israel contract, and I see on social media that he’s been bedazzled by a bonafide “skeeled lauver”. A Russian mail order bride named Tatiana. With a half-eyeroll I send him a message asking how the two of them met, how he knew she was right for him, etcetera etcetera, and after a brief bullshit response he sends me a picture of his fiancée—as if she’s not all over his profile—and says “She’s hot, right?”
A month later, Kevin appears on Facebook Live in a neon red suit and mustard yellow tie, exclaiming “Today’s the day! I’m off the market ladies! You had your chance!” Independence, Missouri wasn’t Las Vegas, but that didn’t stop the man on my screen from having his Las Vegas wedding. The pews of the local Lutheran chapel were decorated with pink netting, cousins or brothers were lined up as groomsmen, his father had purchased an Elvis wig and sunglasses (and I’m assuming got licensed to marry people), and a few minutes into the feed Tatiana walked down the aisle and married Kevin.
The problem with Kevin was that he thought he was the only con artist in the universe. For all his cockiness, he never anticipated that someone was likely going to get one over on him someday. And that’s exactly what Tatiana did. It turned out when she said to Kevin during her wedding vows “Yoowar my Preentz Jarming”, what she really meant was “You’re my path to citizenship.” (As these things typically go with Tatianas.) And, to make things worse, the divorce coincided with Kevin coming down with a nasty bout of credit card fraud, for which he’s now recuperating in jail.
Thinking back on all this, the cause of Kevin’s troubles was not—primarily—his dishonesty. Dishonesty is generally immoral, yes, but even so, plenty of people who are dishonest live “well” in worldly terms. No, the primary cause of Kevin’s troubles was that he was an indefatigable optimist. He always had this perplexing conviction that regardless of the things he had done, his life was always going to work out. In fact his go-to phrase for when situations looked like they could go wrong was “It always evens out.” And that tenacity of optimism—that because “things always evened out” that meant they would always even out in his favor—got Kevin’s ass kicked six ways to Sunday on numerous occasions. I strongly suspect that if Kevin had exercised greater cynicism and less optimism, even in the course of his dishonest dealings, he would at least be more fine today than he currently is. Trickery with cynicism produces shrewdness. A wicked shrewdness to be sure, but at least a shrewdness that will preserve the trickster better than trickery without cynicism. Trickery without cynicism produces dumbfuckery. And dumbfuckery gets your ass kicked.
This brings me to my title: distrust optimism.
By “distrust optimism”, I do not mean shunning excitement or joy or true love or friendship. On the contrary, when such things arrive you should run to them. Without reservation. Moreover, a life spent pursuing and attaining and perfecting (as best we can) virtue and inner fortitude requires a “lightness of being” only a certain type of optimism can supply.
No, by “distrust optimism”—keeping Kevin in my mind’s eye—I mean 1) Rejecting “realizations”, “solutions”, and “opportunities” that encourage delusion or euphoria in situations where grim personal outcome is unavoidable and needs to be confronted head-on, and 2) Not expecting good things to come “no matter what”, especially if you know you’re the kind of person who lies, who gossips, who is selfish, who is led by emotions, or who has poor impulse-control. In times of certain crises (whether self-caused or brought on by others), when only sober realism will do, pie-in-the-sky optimism becomes a form of reckless endangerment.
I get that this is all a bit vague, which is why I guess now is the time to divulge that the direction I’m heading with this is that I see a rough parallel between Kevin and America.
More precisely, I see a parallel between the contrast of how Kevin saw himself versus the reality of who he was and what happened to him, and the 1950 red Chevy, picturesque-barn-in-an-open-field, John Mellencampy America that exists in the imagination of an antiquated classical liberal/Reagan “conservatism” which obscures America’s cultural and foreign policy point of no return. This is because classical liberal/Reagan “conservatism” refuses to countenance that there is a point of no return. American exceptionalism precludes it from doing so. No matter how bad the country slides into moral degeneracy, and no matter what insane choices we make abroad—this thinking goes—some ineffable Vital Core of Goodness lays buried that can never be snuffed out. Some ineffable Vital Core of Goodness can always be re-tapped into to “bring the country back”. And because this Vital Core of Goodness exists, the chickens will never come home to roost, the piper will never have to be paid, the creditor will never come to collect his pound of flesh.
This unrealistic optimism displayed by the establishment right and Trumpian right alike, stems from an unconscious conviction Americans hold more broadly.
There’s a distinctly American quality of believing—or at least wanting to believe—that the best is yet to come. (Which ties in somewhat with what I’ve written before on the Cult of Youth and Americans’ obsession with being eternally young.) As a result, there’s almost an instant dislike for the cynic. In fact, when we call someone a cynic, we don’t even think of its dictionary definition—“the belief that most people lack sincerity and operate out of self-interest”—(much less the philosophers of cynicism like Diogenes or Metrocles). When we call someone a cynic, we’re calling them bitter. A “content cynic” or “happy cynic”, most Americans would tell you, is an oxymoron. Cynics are grouchy. Cynics are not personable. Nobody likes a naysayer (a word, by the way, that originated in the American colonies in 1721). In American culture, if somebody tells you they have dreams, the only socially acceptable response is to validate them. You don’t ask questions and you certainly don’t suggest that somebody’s dream is a bad idea. We are a dream culture. We traffic in dreams. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington, his immortal words were “I have a dream.” And in a dream society, realism—especially if it leans toward the negative—is considered rude.
Instead we are optimistic. We believe in anti-aging cream, fad diets, and New Year’s Resolutions.
But worse, we still believe politicians and parties can be our saviors.
Despite two-and-a-half centuries of politics consistently failing to meet the expectations of voters cycle-after-insufferable-cycle, this is still how we look when we attend party conventions every four years:
To be sure, said optimism is far more endearing than the America-hatred displayed by entitled petulant wokescolds. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that optimism, even when inappropriate, is nicer to be around. There’s something noble about continuing to ride an aging horse. But only until the point where the horse is suffering on the ground and one refuses to shoot it.
Placing a stethoscope on the nation’s chest: Since 9/11, every citizen has been under constant digital surveillance by corporations and the government. Home ownership is, for my generation, as distant a dream as preceding generations’ dream of retiring to Maui. Stagnant wages coupled with inflation renders the purchase of groceries, rent, insurance, and gas an eternal juggling act. Parents are being told—with increasing brazenness—that their children don’t “only” belong to them, and can be taken at any time by the government school system or via medical kidnapping. In terms of foreign policy, we abandon those we promise to protect. Apparently we no longer declare war on countries that directly kill our soldiers. The FBI stages fake coup attempts to bolster the electoral chances of one major political party against the other. The CIA collaborates with—and in some cases actively assists—Mexican drug cartels. Our collective tragedy is that none of this is news to us. None of this elicits any shock. These are recurring themes on our TV networks, newspapers, and social feeds every single year without fail, along with “Wildfire rages in California”, “Female high school teacher, 21, victimizes male child, 17¾”, and “Florida man _____”. What can be said of a country that—through a combo of corrupt economic policy, corporate greed, and promotion of individual debt—has made financial independence nearly impossible for average citizens? What can be said of a country that dissolves the sacred family structure? What can be said of a country that funds armed foreign militias arbitrarily, props up dictators, kills people who don’t need to be killed, and lets people live who shouldn’t?
“Ah, you who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Ah, you who are wise in your own eyes and shrewd in your own sight! Ah, you who are heroes in drinking wine and valiant at mixing drink, who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of their rights! Therefore, as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and as dry grass sinks down in the flame, so your root will become rotten and your blossom go up like dust.”
There’s this temptation, I think, by believers in America’s Vital Core of Goodness to situate our current national situation into the optimistic story arc of Rocky III. “We’re down but not out!”, “We’re under but not over!”, somehow, some way, America is going to “remember who she is” mid-match and deliver a knockout uppercut to the institutional and cultural rot that’s long been working to finish her. And I guess the gist of this whole essay is: at what point does this kind of hope become embarrassing? At what point does this kind of hope become undignified in its naiveté?
There’s a conservatism that can exist which rejects Vital Core sentiment and which bluntly admits that nobody will save us. Not even ourselves. That no amount of desperate paddling upstream is going to keep the nation from going over the edge of the waterfall. There’s a prophetic conservatism which can insist—to all who are willing to hear it—that a death must be endured before a rebirth. To shift metaphors away from Rocky III and to Lord of the Rings: Two Towers, there’s a conservatism that should exist which states plainly that the U.S. is a Theoden without a Gandalf. That our Gríma Wormtongues will actually succeed in collapsing Rohan.
Y’all, I think the near future of America is going to be really ugly.
I believe the dissolution of the United States is an inevitability within the next 30-50 years.
I also suspect that the Vital Core of Goodness conservatives will resist this “Batman Begins Ra’s al Ghul conservatism” I’m proposing, because of our tendency to believe that the opposite of optimism is surrender. It isn’t. Rather, the inevitable collapse of the United States should be seen as an opportunity.
In my previous essay The Dark Future Of Porn, I talked at the end about the monastic option. The idea of conservative households becoming “mini monasteries” where families work to study, preserve, and cherish great literature, music, myth, architecture, and poetry, as well as practice non-coopted forms of Judaism or Christianity, so that when progressive “modernity” crumbles to ash under the weight of its own contradictions and absurdities, new generations spring up to rebuild better (and more resilient) traditional societies. Note, this monastic option is essential for conservative families moving into an uncertain future * regardless * of whether or not you think I am right about how soon the U.S. will collapse.
Yet when I speak of an opportunity for conservatives after the collapse of the United States, I also mean something else in addition to the monastic option: radical decentralization. There’s a point where “nations” become too big—in terms of population size, demographics, and plain ol’ land mass—to be nations that truly serve the desires and interests of all its citizens. Eventually, when nations become too large, the interests of portions of the population are set against the interests of other portions of the population; leading groups of people to become “nations within a nation”, and the social fabric quickly breaking down until all a large “nation” is is a mish-mashy blob of mediocre pretense. A lot of ink and airtime has been wasted preaching against homogeneity and for “diversity”, but I think homogeneity has a lot going for it (as long as said homogeneity doesn’t veer into creepy racism, and there’s no reason it has to). I think most people want to live with other people who have the same values, mores, and tastes as them, and—in direct contradiction and defiance of modern conventional wisdom—I think there’s nothing wrong with that. I think, actually, there’s something weird, irritating, and unnatural about elites, intellectuals, and media figures who think people should live in a state of anxious coexistence with others whose values, mores, and tastes are in complete opposition to their own. Post-collapse conservatives should undertake a program of non-hostile balkanization; where every town becomes its own sovereign nation, and every household—though charged implicitly with the defense of the town it’s a part of—is also a “sovereign territory” of its own. While the city-states of antiquity and the middle ages are not perfect parallels, what I’m talking about is fairly similar. Rather than Italy, you had Genoa. Rather than Germany, you had Hamburg. Rather than Greece, Athens. Etcetera etcetera.
But bringing our attention back to our situation as it currently is, America doesn’t get to order a supermodel bride (engage in bad economic policy), lie and cheat and scam everyone in sight (bad foreign policy), and ignore its enormous character flaws while deluding itself into thinking it’s inherently good (promote social degeneracy), and not have its house come crashing down someday. The chickens always come home to roost. The piper always comes to be paid. The creditor always comes to collect his pound of flesh. The two questions I end on is: 1) Will enough conservatives have a solid realistic longterm plan ready for when that happens? And 2) will those conservatives be of a conservatism that is not Lockean/classical liberal/Reagan nostalgia, but rather an authentic Judeo-Christian “Hazonian” conservatism that can endure over time and resist materialist enticements? On this front, let’s strive to be optimistic.
