The lotus was introduced to the Western mind by Homer. Odysseus tells how his ship was blown off course and landed on an island. While his men rested, he sent a small party to investigate. These men encountered the natives, who gave them a drink made from the lotus flower, which grew on the island. It was a narcotic that put them into a languid state of bliss. So much so they had no desire to tend to their work or return home. Odysseus forced them back onto the ship and sailed away, despite their protestations.
Lord Tennyson’s poem, the title of which is the title of this post, is a retelling of Odysseus adventure among the lotus eaters. The difference is it is from the perspective of the men as they try to explain why they should stay and live a life free of toil. Living as a lotus eater means abandoning external reality and living instead in a world of appearances, as if everything is a pleasant dream. It is a world of self-delusion where everything “seems’ the same, which is why “seems” is liberally used thought the poem.
This is what came to mind reading this piece on Richard Spencer in the Atlantic. The writer, Graeme Wood, tells us so much about himself in the piece, the article could just as easily have been about him. In fact, the whole article is less about Spencer than the reaction of the writer to the very idea of Spencer. It is a style of writing common today, where the author tries to take you on their emotional journey as they encounter the subject of their piece. Often, the subject’s role in a story is only as a catalyst.
Even though the author is trying hard to put Spencer in the worst possible light, you get the sense that he is locked in an internal tug-o-war with himself. On the one hand, there is the temptation to engage the world of reality. On the other hand, there is the world of forms in which he lives, a world where everything seems right. Based on what Wood tells us about himself in the beginning of the piece. It is a safe bet he has never left the island, or at least not gone to far away from shore.
That’s why the article reads, at times, like Wood had made the journey upriver to meet Mr. Kurtz, to tell him he has been bad for business. If Spencer had mounted a few severed heads on pikes, it would have fit in perfectly with the tone of the piece. The difference is, instead of Spencer as the one muttering “The horror! The horror!” at the end, it’s Wood. He has made his journey into the heart of darkness and now munches on the lotus, hoping to never be tempted by reality again.
Therein lies part of the hysteria we see from the social justice warriors and PC enforcers running around trying to stamp out dissent. It’s not really about the dissenters. It’s not, strictly speaking, about the content. It is about the temptation. Like Tennyson’s sailors, the social justice warriors are locked in a struggle with themselves. They want to remain in the languid land of “seems” but at some level they know it is self-deception. The dissenters, the people who left the island, are a reminder of that and they hate them for it.
The old saw about people not being able to handle too much reality is certainly true. It has always been true. The reason for myths, legends and religion is to knock the hard edges off of life and give people hope and purpose. For most of human history, it has been the rulers who find ways to keep the people in a bit of a delusional fog. Whether it is bread and circuses or manufactured reasons to pull together toward a common goal, the clear-eyed people at the top have found an opiate for the people.
Today, things are upside down. It is the people that face the hard realities of life, while the managerial class sits around drunk on self-delusion, fearful that someone may introduce temptation into their world. The poor may be high on heroin, but they have no illusions about the world. The people in charge, on the other hand, are living a fantasy version of life. It’s why they are not concerned with the consequences of their polices. They simply don’t think of the consequences. They focus on how good it makes them feel.
Odysseus and his sailors eventually left the island. It was the authority of Odysseus that compelled them to leave, but they did leave. Maybe that’s what happens with the managerial class. Just as Spencer’s search for meaning has led him to identity politics, the managerial class will make a similar journey off the island. A world of low work and high pay has its attractions, but it it snot life. It offers no genuine purpose. Of course, that could mean they start a war or unleash a plague. Things can always get worse.
I got to the part where Wood says that Derbyshire was fired from NR because he was a racist, and stopped reading. It confirmed for me that Wood is a hater. I say this because it is axiomatic that whatever liberals are accusing their enemies of, it is something they themselves are most guilty of.
Yes, I marveled at that one also. It’s amazing how Woods could write that sentence and still believe he has a claim to any shred of journalistic integrity.
But of course, that’s Z-man’s point here, isn’t it?
A “manufactured reasons to pull together toward a common goal” seems to be what the propositional nation is. To tell people of various ethnicities and belief systems to pull together under the banner of a flag for an Olympic sporting event seems to work well. For anything larger, like a nation,it will only function in times of prosperity (and even then the edges fray, since America at its pinnacle was still rife with internal tensions, re: race). The reality is that people throughout history have felt kinship and loyalty to people most like themselves, and those most likely to survive… Read more »
History shows that people exactly like one another have oftentimes held more enmity for one another than perfect strangers would. I only wish to point out that it is people most similar to me that are in the greatest need of strangling before a saner world emerges, whereas our attention is drawn to their proxies of dysfunction, leaving the schemers untouched. No African, no Asian, no Mestizo yet spent his life trying to put something over on me. I cannot envision how to defeat them either with violence or with persuasion. They represent our worser instincts all too well.
No, you are incorrect. History shows that people almost exactly like one another (with one sometimes minor difference) oftentimes have held more enmity for one-another than perfect strangers would. Freud was wrong about almost everything, but he was right about the narcissism of slight difference. Black people from the same neighborhood (and same gene pool) will kill each other over a difference in the color of their baseball cap (blue or red), and whites groups, both Christian but differing in denomination, will slaughter each other to the last man. Or at least, this was the case for quite some time… Read more »
That is exactly what I said.
“No African, no Asian, no Mestizo yet spent his life trying to put something over on me.”
Two words: Barack Obama
Barack Obama is a self-made man who worships his creator.
Either you are joking or you lost your credibility with that statement. Barack Obama is a political pop star who was manufactured for popular consumption by leftist elites in media and finance in much same way that entertainment pop stars are manufactured by Hollywood. A mediocre student at Punahou (I have an acquaintance whose father taught Obama at Punahou and describes him as a dim-witted stoner) he was groomed, if not sired, by communist agitator Frank Marshall Davis. After a brief stint at Occidental College our mediocre student Obama gained admission to the prestigious Columbia University, coincidentally home of the… Read more »
My comment was literally a joke. So yes, I’m joking. Obama is, by his own admission, a beneficiary of affirmative action.
let me summarize: vacuous gay mulatto entertains white liberals for two terms, leaving the dem party in smoking ruins.
There is nothing of importance about Barry which is not white. The only claim which Africa can make on him is an ingrained laziness.
Liberals go ape at the thought of Richard Spenser because he his liberal who likes white people, has read a few history books, and demographics charts. Otherwise there is no functional difference in Spenser’s outlook versus the average liberal. He’s a heretic of the worst the kind, because they could easily be him as well, if they were more honest.
There are two kinds of people in the world, the realists and the dreamers. The realists understand that the world we inhabit is the one we’ve got, and that the average person has little say in the bigger scheme of things. The realists work to make their own lives, and the lives of the people around them, just a little bit better, and find meaning in doing that good work. The dreamers (theme song, Lennon’s “Imagine”) have big ideas, but no way to meaningfully implement them, so they lash out and get frustrated. They blame and they criticize, they attack… Read more »
the managerial class will stop eating the lotus right up until the point someone walks up to them and sticks a spear in their liver. they can’t change, they are who they will always be. circumstances in the economy will change however, and eventually wipe out the parasites and useless. and then it all starts again.
“will keep eating the lotus”
What about all of the white dirt people who have been gorging on the lotus of agricultural subsidies, collective bargaining, disability, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment compensation, and workers’ compensation?
Perhaps it is time “someone walks up to them and sticks a spear in their liver[s].”
Collective bargaining, that old canard, you must be a libertarian or a Bush Republican. You do realize most American workers in the private sector don’t have it. You realize the current predicament of the dirt people is a direct result of the white Managerial class along with both political parties imposing their agenda on them in the form of free trade, off-shoring of jobs, industry. The importation of foreign workers and parasites. All of which has put many millions into poverty and dysfunction, ruined entire communities, etc. They have every reason to dismember and cook the managerial and political class… Read more »
There is an area on the coast, where we are considering buying a home. The economy there was ruined when the state decided to stop dredging the bay. They used to bring logs into the local sawmills. Can’t do that any more. The two counties on the coast went for Trump, which didn’t happen a lot in WA state.
And I have lived in other areas where they killed logging so they could have a tourist economy.
No, I am not a Republican, Bush, Ray-gun, Trump, or otherwise. I am not a Democrat either. Of course, today, the vast majority of private sector workers are not unionized. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2016, approximately 7.4 million private sector employees (6.4%) were unionized whereas 7.1 million (34.4%) in the public sector were unionized. However, the fact is that a significant percentage of the white workforce was unionized throughout the 20th century. In fact, at one time, from say the mid 50s to the early 60s, over a third of the workforce was unionized. The… Read more »
Just in case you’ve forgotten, unions came out of a period when it was common to live in company housing and buy your food with script at the company store. We aren’t just talking about walking away from a job. We’re talking about losing the roof over your head and not having cash you could use to buy groceries at a regular store.
I’d recommend you take a look at “The Most They Ever Had” by Rick Bragg (http://a.co/gmpLt9n).
Pathetic. Try going back and reading your own stuff with a critical eye. An unexamined life is not worth living.
Doc, what is so pathetic?
Can you cite a particular example and elaborate?
Libertarian. Why not say it, instead of making us guess? Are you ashamed of it?
Yes, I am a libertarian.
Skills don’t disappear in changing circumstances. Many of those you mention are already making part of their living in an off the grid economy that may be as much as 20% of undetected GDP. They will barter favors amongst each other while those unable to will starve.
One would think that such circumstances would be something a self described libertarian would look forward to, but considering that the individualists will not organize, they will either change their stripes and learn cooperative living or die.
Doc, above you write about examination with a critical eye.
Now, did I register a negative opinion of barter, the black market, or the off the grid economy?
As for cooperative living, it is voluntary and consensual exchange – the heart of libertarianism.
Medicare, Social Security, unemployment compensation.
Are all paid for by specific direct taxation. If you don’t pay you don’t get. They are structured in a piss poor way but it’s not welfare.
“What Peter says about Paul often tells us more about Peter than it does about Paul.”
Stated alternatively, “what Z says about libertarians often tell us more about Z than it does about libertarians.”
why don’t you fukk off mike? really. just go somewhere else you nutless gibbon.
You like being part of Z’s echo chamber?
Your opinions might be received with more grace if your handle was not so inappropriate.
Note that Zman treats the hollow pieties and monstrous hypocrisies of Lib, Con, and Tar all in the same way?
I think he believes in ruthless accuracy.
The “reasoning” of the various camps, endlessly repeated and rarely persuading, is mostly hope mixed in with a few accurate bits.
What such hoots and calls are not- is comprehensively accurate. They are none of them a description of the world as it actually is.
Z may believe in ruthless accuracy but too often his belief does not correspond with that which he writes.
I’m as libertarian a wanker as there ever was, and believe in the rightness of my ideas. But that’s not the world as it is. Not as it ever was, either. We end up being weak sisters asking everyone to be nice to each other. Asking everyone to act white. But, empathy- that revolutionary white mutation- is too recent a development. It’s only taken in about half of us. The Han, for instance, have intelligence (born of writing and winter), but not empathy. They cheat each other constantly and are ruled by threat. You can be Mother Teresa or Albert… Read more »
You are conflating libertarianism with surrender. This is a mistake often made by those who self-identify as dissident right, alt-right, as well as those who do not understand that the white man’s problems were entirely of his own making because it is the white man who has given us communism, progressivism, and socialism. It is the white man who has given us the warfare / welfare state. The libertarian, the anarchist, and the voluntaryist all reject the initiation of force, not the use of force to defend oneself or one’s family and friends. However, it has been the white man,… Read more »
Oy vey! So now (((we))’re white?
Why is my handle so inappropriate?
Please cite examples of that which I have penned being inconsistent with free enterprise, individual liberty, and the right to be left alone.
Liberty is not what you suppose it is. Most people confuse it with other things but if you are going to wear it’s handle you should find make a greater effort to discover what it is, and I am not going to do that for you.
Read the article, lotus eater.
I used to get in arguments on a Peak Oil forum. These folks wanted society to collapse and I couldn’t figure out why. It’s like the folks that claim to want anarchy. Why would anyone really want that?
It dawned on me that the reason they wanted society to collapse was to force them to live a different life. They weren’t happy with their current lives, but couldn’t bring themselves to make changes. They wanted events to make those changes for them.
interesting take.
Perfect.
” It’s like the folks that claim to want anarchy. Why would anyone really want that?”
You seem to believe that anarchy: lack of a coercive government, is the same as disorder.
Now why would you think that?
I see Spencer had his gym membership revoked when a crazed (is there any other kind?) female professor spotted him there and did the pod person screeching act.
How is this done to him when little bakeries are bankrupted for not making cakes for cute gay couples?
because the gop is a pack of perverted pussies, that’s why. they are the towel boys in the dem bathouse, nothing more.
You have such an incredible way of mapping today’s events into the eternal nature of man across history. The way you teach history and current events is really one of the things that I love about your writing. I look forward to it every day. I have a 20 year old son and he is only now beginning to realize that he has been living in a fantasy world his entire life. Somehow thinking that everything I have ever told him about hard work, personal responsibility, etc. etc. is just a set of old fables that only apply to me.… Read more »
“The people in charge, on the other hand, are living a fantasy version of life. It’s why they are not concerned with the consequences of their polices. They simply don’t think of the consequences. They focus on how good it makes them feel.” I disagree. I admit that while some of the people in charge on lower levels of control may be described by this condition, the “people in charge” know exactly what they are doing and have for centuries. The only question that remains is will they retain control of the sleeping tiger they sit upon or will they… Read more »
I suspect that future historians will note that we passed the tipping point here in the USA sometime during the past generation, and it’s been a slow slide downward ever since. If you add up the cloud inhabitants, the useful idiots, the crazies, and the parasites; they are clearly in the majority now. Our masters in DC continue to keep the plates spinning by fleecing foreign labor via phantom borrowing, but what happens when they figure our they’ve been screwed and the borrowing will never be repaid?
I suspect that future historians will be astonished by the SPEED of our downfall. Compared to past empires, America has risen higher and fallen harder and faster than anything in history. Empire life spans are definitely shortening, but Britain’s lasted 100 years. America was all-powerful by 1990, and in just 20 years threw it all away.
When Hemmingway was asked how he went bankrupt:
“How did you go bankrupt?”
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
It’s coming to a hegemon near you.
That’s democracy for you. I’m not being (entirely) flip — an aristocracy that *knows* it’s an aristocracy lives a meaningful life, just by being aristocratic. They follow fashion, sponsor art, patronize literature, all that. A lot of it was silly, but it kept them busy. These guys? They want to homogenize everything, because “elitism” is the worst sin the 1% can ever commit. It’s gonna be bad.
Z Man; Yet another great essay. I always wonder where you are going at the start and am amazed and delighted where you end up: The Land of the Lotus Eaters, is The Heart of Darkness is Cloud World inhabited by nasty, insecure, mixed Asians. Did Wood miss *any* possible opportunity to denigrate Richard Spencer as, “Not one of our kind, dear”_? And yet… Wood doesn’t know what kind he is and is drawn to Spencer’s icky ideas. So it is darkly amusing that the Han, the other half of the author’s genome, are even more culturally/ethnically/racially supremacist than Spencer… Read more »
One canard is, “without government, you get Somalia.”
No.
Blacks get Somalia.
Whites get… America.
Good Essay Mr. Z re: Graeme Wood’s Attack 1) Nazi haircut of Spencer. Look at the article (link in Z-man’s essay) and see photo of Spencer’s head. He has sideburns. The NAZI style has No sideburns. The hair is shaved off straight across the top of the ear. It is striking to see. I first saw it on a friend I met in the mid 70s who was a former Luftwaffe fighter pilot. What stories he had to tell! He was brilliant, an engineer, had married a stunning lady who was the daughter of an Atomic scientist, but he died… Read more »
post some of his stories
@kh Harry was not a mechanical engineer but he had the reputation of being the most knowledgable mechanic in the region. After the war and his finishing his university education in Germany he somehow acquired a two engine freight plane and was delivering freight in South America. He found out that the authorities in South America would demand he have certified mechanics service his plane at a significant cost. Harry came to the USA and took training in radial engine mechanics and became USA certified so he didn’t need to use the South American mechanics. Years later when I knew… Read more »
A photo of our Odysseus is here (a picture is worth a thousand words):
http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/mgc/past-conferences/home-3/keynote-speaker/
Please note his immaculately groomed resume; he’s spent a considerable amount of time burnishing it. This silly, plush manlet is as representative a member in good standing of our managerial class as one could manufacture, and thus a perfect mouthpiece for its idiotic pieties.
he looks like the love child of mickey rooney’s character in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”
Oh, my….
I let loose a loud involuntary laugh when I clicked on that link. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a picture that screams “dork” so descriptively.
As one of the few female voices here on the blog, and probably the only one so bluntly crude, allow me to honestly say- Mr. Wood may perhaps also be a little jealous of Mr. Spencer’s alpha male, Anglo Saxon good looks. If Richard is what Nazis look like, circa 2017, hell, sign me up! Unfortunately for Mr. Wood, he is decidedly quite unf*ckable, (apologies Zman, for using that term), but there’s really nothing else that so accurately gets to the heart of it, from a female POV. Most women would follow Richard off of a cliff, I (& vast… Read more »
How soon we forget:
“humankind can not bear very much reality”
from T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”, part 1.
Wow. Perfect examination of Western culture’s state of mind.Well done. Never ceases to amaze me how perceptive the Greeks wearing togas and sandals were of human nature. Probably because they were not addicted to electronic devices and mass media like we are today, giving them the solitude to think and ponder about the human condition.
or they were innately smarter than us.
Good read:http://thedeclination.com/of-anointed-and-laymen/
the thing is, today’s educational system is mostly a test of memorization. real life is a lot more complex than “school reality” and the ability to see disparate things and synthesize information from them, is not something that can be taught. the supposedly good life as a “knowledge worker” is actually sterile and stunting; it is prison like and inhumane. I get far more enjoyment and satisfaction from a good BM than I have gotten from my career in the last 5 years.
We’re really discussing the Media Class here. These people will not give up their power or their illusions without a struggle. They will have to be dynamited out of the way.
Barring an economic collapse/WW3/SMOD, the (((media))) is the cornerstone. Without it, the cloud people cannot brainwash the slaves. The internet and alternative media have distorted the signal from their hegemonic megaphones, but until they flee in terror, their Talmudic slave planet project will continue, with helpful crises created from whole cloth when needed to grease the skids.
They want to remain in the languid land of ‘seems’ but at some level they know it is self-deception. The dissenters, the people who left the island, are a reminder of that and they hate them for it. The old saw about people not being able to handle too much reality is certainly true. It has always been true.
Seems (ha!) like the Classical allusion that illustrates this thought is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Ooops. Looks like I screwed up the html code, but now it can’t be fixed…
the entirety of the leftist movement is to build plato’s cave — and then lock us all into it.
No, we are born in the cave and education allows us to leave. Without education we happily remain prisoners of the cave.
Roger, at the time of this post, you had a -1. I bet that cave dwelling troglodyte, karl hungus, had down-voted you.
That says more about you than it does about karl. Like a horse with blinders and a feed bag.
Again, critical examination. Above, read what karl wrote after my post regarding Z’s propensity to bash libertarians.
He wrote, “why don’t you go fukk [sic] off mike? really. just go somewhere else you nutless gibbon.”
Did you comment about his crudity?
What is this education of which you speak? Is it having my English teacher in high school spending half of class time talking about what a crook Richard Nixon is while frothing at the mouth (quite literally) and then drawing sentence diagrams on the blackboard? The only reality I learned from that was what idiots teachers tend to be.
My favorite part is the end, “but it snot life.” Man, that’s poetry right there.
The frantic losers who consume MSM products remind me more and more of a school of bait-fish or krill. The media effluvium they permit to scare them only causes them to ball-up even tighter, just like sardines or herring will when they’re spooked by a marlin’s sudden dorsal fin-flash. Or when dolphins corral them. Of course, the tighter the ball the easier it is for the predators to feed on the bait-ball from above and below. This simile is perfect because the Democrat media intends to feed on its engineered school of frenzied minnows. Watch footage of a sardine school… Read more »
Somehow, I get the feeling that Zman doesn’t care if he’s one of the Nice People.
In one of Robert Howard’s “Conan” stories, the lotus eaters of Xuthal spend their days dreaming but are eaten by a monster who preys on them. Rather than do anything about the monster, they consume more of the lotus. Thus, the city was slowly depopulated. LaFond or someone else will have to jog my memory but I believe some of them woke up and actually attacked Conan and he decided to take his chances again in the badlands.
Xuthal of the Dusk/The Slithering Shadow. Thog was the eldritch fiend,Conan was beaten to the brink of bloody death. He survived by drinking a golden elixir from a jade pitcher.
Stolen from Well’s Time Machine and the Eloi.
ok, i’ll bite; what is a “loto”?