“At last, however, his eyes opened, and amazedly he gazed into the forest and the stillness, amazedly he gazed into himself. Then he arose quickly, like a seafarer who all at once seeth the land; and he shouted for joy: for he saw a new truth. And he spake thus to his heart: A light hath dawned upon me: I need companions—living ones; not dead companions and corpses, which I carry with me where I will. But I need living companions, who will follow me because they want to follow themselves—and to the place where I will.”

—Thus Spoke Zarathustra

They’re Not Going to Leave You Alone

All of the best men I know, the good men who are good at being men, just want to be left alone. 

The best men I know believe in individual freedom. They don’t want to control other people. The best men in America and throughout the world want to be able to do what they want, and they want other people to be able to do what they want with their own bodies and resources. They don’t want to be forced to do or say things they don’t think are right, and they don’t want to force other people to do or say things that they don’t think are right. These men understand the need for some consensus to maintain law and order and the protection of individual rights and property, but they are fundamentally anti-“fascist” and anti-totalitarian. For the most part, they want to mind their own business, and they want to limit the power of the state. They want the state to pave the roads, protect property, provide basic services, and then mind its own business and stay out of people’s personal and professional lives. 

Though the name is tainted, these are “liberal” values. Americans led the way in opposing authoritarian regimes that ruled them from far away. They understood that freedom is not anarchy but localized self-determination. They believed in the right of small groups to determine for themselves how they wanted to live. 

I’ve always believed that the people of San Francisco or Portland or Seattle have no business telling people in Alabama or even the small towns a hundred miles away from them what to do or how to live. And vice versa. Frankly, I don’t think the people in Alabama or small towns across America care how people in San Francisco or Portland or Seattle live. They may mock them, but they are content to let San Franciscans be San Franciscans, as long as San Franciscans mind their own business and leave them alone. 

Unfortunately, if the events of the year 2020 have or should have taught us anything, it is that this belief will not be reciprocated. 

Just as the conservatives of old seemed to have been kept up at night by the idea that someone, somewhere was having some kind of unapproved fun, the progressives in cities seem to be perpetually incensed by the thought that somewhere, the people they hate who live in the “backward” places they never go to are failing to worship and affirm their own sacred cows. These urban “progressives” want to force people who they don’t know (or even like) to do and say and profess the things that urban progressives believe — whether those country barbarians like it or not. 

They are tyrants, motivated by a culture of resentment against the values held by people who live in the places that, in many cases, they abandoned for big city life. These tyrants believe that they are better educated and qualified to tell everyone else what they should believe and how they should live. They share a constantly evolving utopian vision, and like the communists and fascists of the 20th Century, they’re not going to just “leave you alone.” 

Their feel-good mottos proclaim that “no one is free until everyone is free,” but what they really mean is that they won’t stop until everyone agrees with them, submits to their self-proclaimed authority, and acknowledges the expertise of their experts. That you won’t be free until you agree. And if you have to agree to be free, then you were never really free at all. 

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So many of the best men I know share a similar fantasy. They want to move to the country, or to “a little cabin in the middle of nowhere.” They want to escape to somewhere where they can be free, where they can be left alone. 

A lot of people assumed that when I wrote Becoming a Barbarian, I was telling them to go live off-grid in the wilderness somewhere. Many thought that I was doing that at Waldgang, though that was never the case. Actually, in Becoming a Barbarian, I wrote: 

“There are no more New Worlds, no readily habitable and fertile uncharted lands to discover. The reach of commercialism and its universalist monoculture is always expanding, even into unstable and untamed zones like Africa or Afghanistan, and it will keep expanding until there is a Mcdonald's in every Mosque and the world’s most volatile religion is moderated into another meaningless consumer identity. You could spend all of your resources and the best years of your life trying to fuck off to some rugged oasis, only to find a few years later that Globocorp will be bulldozing your Eden to make room for chain stores and condominiums.”

Last year, when the “pandemic” hit, I thought I’d be safe from the worst restrictions because I lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere. And we were “free(er)” there. At times. But not much. The Empire of Nothing reached out from the cities and imposed its rule in small places, too. In towns where the virus never made an impact, small businesses were still forced to close and livelihoods were destroyed. I believe that this was done purposefully and maliciously. The places that resisted were punished with restrictions that had no relationship to the presence of the virus, and if a rationale for the restrictions was needed, “experts” were sent out to “model” a reason why it was a far bigger threat in the area than it ever was. 

I finally left Oregon and moved to Utah. Many argue that the two major political parties are the same. That may be true among the major players in DC, but it was undeniable that cities in “red” states were far freer than even tiny towns in “blue” states. 

I recently drove through Goldendale, Washington, and watched a father who owned a small restaurant look sadly out the door of his closed restaurant, hoping for a “to go” order. His family-operated restaurant used to be packed every Sunday, and it was the best place to eat in town. He had been making a decent living and living free in a small town in the middle of nowhere, four or five hours from Seattle or Olympia. I’m sure he wanted nothing to do with those cities or the people in them. I doubt his business will survive this year. It was sad to see and a terrible injustice. 

Goldendale, Washington is full of preppers and farmers and people living off-grid. I’m sure some of them are doing fine. But their community is being controlled, and their businesses are being destroyed by people hundreds of miles away, who don’t care if they live or die or are forced into bankruptcy. They might as well be colonies, ruled by foreign kings. 

You can move to a small town in the middle of nowhere and live off-grid if you want to, but the Empire of Nothing has made it clear that they’re not going to leave you alone. In the long term, there’s nowhere to run. Even now, they’re controlling the technology that you use to communicate with each other and the outside world. You can find workarounds, but these workarounds are all temporary fixes. The Empire of Nothing demands compliance and conformity. 

As I also wrote in Becoming a Barbarian…

 “The conquering narrative of the Empire of Nothing is a narrative of total unity. In exchange for accepting the narrative, the Empire offers a comforting, multicultural hospice as you pass into the void.”

I have variously identified as a “heathen” and a “pagan.” While these words are associated with belief systems, they were originally used as a pejorative insult for resistant country people who refused to conform to the mainstream beliefs of previous cosmopolitan empires. 

The people who attempt to practice the religions of ancient heathens and pagans today are called “neopagans” because their belief systems have been dead for over a thousand years. The practices of “Heathens” and “Pagans” didn’t survive. Do you really want to take a cue from them and become resistant country people? It’s not a winning strategy. 

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A lot of the men who want to escape to a cabin in the middle of nowhere idealize Thoreau’s Walden. 

While the cabin is out there, far from everything and almost everyone, it represents a passage inward—a quieting of the mind, of the din, of other voices. 

Life in the cabin is a meditation.  

Parts of Walden itself read like a mindfulness meditation script. When Thoreau muses on the songs of the whip-poor-wills or the sounds of passing trains, he is slowing down and paying attention. 

As social animals, we are continually reacting to the words and actions of other men and women, directing our attention outward. By tuning out other people and tuning into the simple sounds and sensations of being creatures who are alive in the world, we naturally turn our attention inward, and the faculties we use to assess others can be employed to analyze and better understand ourselves. 

This is a worthwhile exercise, and worth doing as an exercise — as a retreat, because it is a retreat not to, but from a man’s life. Too often, men hide from life by seeking purity in nature, like the Saint in Zarathustra who believes that he lives “a bear amongst bears, a bird amongst birds.” However, the Saint is neither a bear nor a bird, he is a man, and to be a man is to be a man among men. Is being a man any less “pure” than being a bird or a bear? 

In a character study, Robert Louis Stevenson roasted Thoreau and called him a “skulker” who was “cruel in the pursuit of goodness,” and “morbid in the pursuit of health.” 

 “…Thoreau’s content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world.”

When men talk about retiring to their little cabin in the middle of nowhere, I wonder, “What are you going to DO there?” 

“Are you going there to DIE?” 

Many forget that Thoreau only stayed in the cabin for a few years. He wrote, “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”

By all means, plan a retreat to a little cabin in the middle of nowhere. Some time spent alone chopping wood and listening to the whip-poor-wills is probably going to be good for the soul. 

But it’s not a long term strategy. 

Because, as I’ve said, even there, they’re not going to leave you alone. 

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A lot of the best men I know have escaped to the country, or they want to. However, in leaving the cities, we leave the centers of power and finance and culture creation and the media to others. 

You left the power and the money and the control of culture and the dissemination of information in the hands of the worst men and women. 

What did you think was going to happen?

We’ve allowed ourselves to be governed by people who hate us and whose values — to the extent that they even have values — are completely incompatible with our own. 

Over several generations, we’ve willingly given up the reigns of our chariots and abandoned the natural work of men — to create order and culture. 

What did you think was going to happen?

Too many of my readers have accepted cyclical models of history that conveniently absolve them of agency. It is much easier to believe that we are in some pre-ordained “bad time,” some kali yuga or dark age. 

While cultures certainly move through cycles, these models were developed in relatively finite communities. Taking a broader view, we can see that one culture may be going through a golden age while another is experiencing an internal collapse.

Things were bad enough 200 years ago that Americans fought a war for independence and self-determination. Were they in the kali yuga, too? If so, what would you call the last 200 years? Were the men who fought in the wars 200 years prior and 200 years before that also in a dark age? 

Men of every age have experienced hardships and dissolution, but it is and has always been the responsibility of men to create order in the midst of chaos.

This is our time and what’s happening now is our responsibility.

We can’t just run away to the country and let the worst men and women run the world for us and expect things to turn out well. 

And even if we do, they’re not going to leave us alone.