Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the classic Hitchcock spy thriller North By Northwest, a post the idiocy of politics and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.
The other day on a long walk I came upon a dead deer lying across the sidewalk that must have been recently hit by a car. The animal was lying stretched out, as is always the case for some reason, head and neck arched back with one big brown eye looking up innocently at anyone who came upon it. There is a sadness in the look of a dead deer, even when the death comes at your hands. Despite this reality, millions of deer hunters are preparing for the coming season.
On my way back I saw a couple of older boys, maybe even their late teens, looking at the animal from a distance. They took turns taking pics of each other in front of it, always from a safe distance, as if they thought the animal would roar back to life and attack them for some reason. Even at a distance, it was clear it disturbed them. As I approached, they warned me that there was a dead deer in my path, which suggested this was a novel experience for them.
A few moments of banter between us confirmed that they had never seen a dead animal this close. At first that seemed unbelievable, but they probably spend most of their days inside playing games or in controlled experiments we call school, so the odds of seeing anything in nature are low. At that age, their experience with death is their character dying in a video game. There are no sad lifeless eyes looking up at them in whatever game is popular at the moment.
Of course, there is no youth hunting to speak of in the built-up areas, so it is unlikely those two young men will experience death that way. In the United States only about five percent of young people hunt. The numbers around urban areas on the coasts are probably so small that it cannot be measured. There are more males under the age of sixteen who identify as trans now than those who hunt. Those two young men are less disturbed by crossdressing than they are by death.
Much of what we call progress in the last three centuries has been about insulating ourselves from the reality of the human condition, especially death. Few people know where food comes from or how it is possible. There is a growing sense among the urbanized populations that what they call meat is a crime against Gaia, in the same way that your car is an offense to the mother goddess. Fake meat exists to exploit this growing unawareness of the cycle of life.
We are not far from the point in science fiction where humans who reach their expiration date mysteriously disappear, sent off to the recycling plant. One day Uncle Bob is struggling up the stairs and the next day no one talks about Uncle Bob. He was picked up and loaded into a wagon overnight. Rich people are racing to find the magic elixir that will let them avoid death or at least stay young until the end, because progress means reaching a point when we overcome death.
There is a good chance that the present lunacy is made possible by the apparent insulation so many feel from the reality of the human condition. In a world where the consequences of flouting nature are brutal and personal, one must respect the reality of the human condition and pass that respect onto the next generation. The man with a son makes sure his son learns the reality of death at a young age, usually by having his son take the life of an animal hunting or farming.
In an age where life and death are abstract concepts, there is no need to think about it, much less talk about it with the next generation. This removes the essential element for understanding the arc of life, especially the arc of your life. When you see every day that all living things have an end, often a brutal end, you can understand that life is a beginning, middle and end. Since the middle part is the only bit you can control, you never lose sight of it as it is how you will be judged in the end.
Death has another value that we have lost. It is the thing that binds people together in the common struggle of life. When every man is aware of the death sentence that was issued to him at birth, he is keenly aware of the death sentence that hangs over his family, his neighbors, and his community. Just as he must struggle every day to reach that predetermined end point, he must struggle with his family and neighbors in order to give the next generation the chance for their struggle.
For most of human existence, the answer to the great question – who are we? – was answered every week at a funeral or execution. That last bit is something lost to the mists of time, but it was an essential element of social life. The punishment of the guilty was part of the glue that held society together. The condemned was not just hurried away like Uncle Bob but brought before his neighbors to be expelled from the life of society in the most extreme way possible.
The public execution had another value. As Joseph de Maistre observed, the executioner absolves the condemned man of his sins and sends him out of this life as an innocent man. At the moment of death, the price is paid and at that second, he moves from guilty to innocent. His last gasp takes all of his sins with him. It is not the executioner who has absolved the condemned. The executioner is the agent, the tool through which the community acts to cleanse itself of sin.
In this way, familiarity with death brings familiarity with life and sin. The former comes easy, but the latter must be relearned almost daily. When life, your life, has a clear end and that end can come in a variety of ways, those ways provide a different sense of purpose to each life. The purpose of the man swinging from a rope is different from the man dying to defend his people. Death provides clarity about purpose and therefore clarity about the crimes against that purpose.
All of this is lost in the modern age. Few young men will ever hold in their hands the still warm, but lifeless body of an animal. They will never see the executioner perform his duty to his people. Death is an abstraction. The closest people get to it is through the unreality of the digital world. In that realm, death is a problem to be overcome, while in the physical world it is a thing that no longer exists, because it is just assumed that one day, before your last day, death will be overcome.
In a world of that sort of certainty, there is no reason to think about the purpose of life or the crimes one should avoid committing against that purpose. In a world full of people with no purpose other than momentary pleasure, the society in which they operate must be a sterile playground. Anything with meaning must be stripped away as it could lead to unpleasant thoughts about the lack of meaning and purpose. To defeat death, we must first defeat any notion that there is a meaning to life.
If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!
Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.
The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.
Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.
Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.
Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.
Since de Maistre was a Catholic he would have believed that it was Confession and absolution that save the executed, not the actual execution.
Hey Z! You forgot to start with the disclaimer, “Warning: This article contains descriptions of extreme unpleasantness.”
I barely made it to the fainting couch! Please be more careful next time.
“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.” – Charles de Gaulle. “You are born, you die, and the rest is just filler.” – Lou Grant. “That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, but, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.” – George Santayana. I watched my mother go from a vigorous and energetic 71-year old woman weighing 160 pounds, to a 68-pd bag of rotting flesh in ten months. Pancreatic cancer. I was with her when she died. All she had left was a squeeze of the hand and a wink to me, like… Read more »
“What remains of us is love.”
— Larkin
It isn’t so much that we don’t see death [we see a lot of it in snuff videos and movies], it’s that we don’t live with the threat and reality of death as closely as in the past. Visit any graveyard with tombstones from 1790 to 1890. There are as many grave of infants and children dead from disease, young women dead from childbirth, and young men killed in wars as there are folks who died of old age. Today we can all reasonably plan to live to decrepitude.
“ Much of what we call progress in the last three centuries has been about insulating ourselves from the reality of the human condition,”
Ernst Junger who despised Liberalism above all, wrote about this extensively, and said yet the Elemental returns, to the moderns horror.
And so it will. So it does…
The title of the post reminds me of a Basquiat painting, Riding With Death. Iirc, painted in the last year of his life.
https://www.jean-michel-basquiat.org/riding-with-death/
The image is lifted— sorry, appropriated— from a da Vinci sketch.
http://images.alinari.it/img/480/PDP/PDP-S-000003-0100.jpg
Basquiat at his most introspective, I imagine. Anyway, something I like to put in my pipe and smoke lol.
I’ll see your Basquiat and raise you an Albrecht Dürer.
Knight, Death, and the Devil
Fair enough, definitely doesn’t hold a candle. I will say, I think Basquiat had a massive talent, but he never bothered to train it, and in fact was more or less paid to stay primitive. You can see in his later work that he wanted to be a serious artist, but he couldn’t do it. That he depicts himself (I think it’s a self-portrait) in the place of the Whore of Babylon per da Vinci (woman with a cup— I’m assuming), ripping off and vulgarizing a Western master as he does it— pretty scathing stuff. I imagine he was coming… Read more »
Spending two weeks in a room shepherding a dying parent through their final journey brings you real up close and personal with death. I am much more Epicurean now.
Indeed it does, indeed it does . . . seeing one’s parent depart changes a person that’s for sure. Life becomes both sadder, somehow sharper on witnessing death, free for a time from worrying about the everyday.
Another change that Z could mention, people no longer die at home, nor do the departed remain in the front room, resting for a spell in a coffin for the family to mourn as once the case. Instead, its off to the hospital, with all that institution’s insults to human dignity.
Dead squirrel in the road, with cigarette butt dangling from its mouth.
Some wag thought that would be funny, and he was right. People laughed and moved on.
This reminds me of when we had to put our last pooch down. Her health had been declining and one day she just quit eating and would stand around and stare. Both my wife and I were adamant that we’d not take her to the vet and have her carted off to an incinerator, or whatever they do with them. We found a vet who would come out to the house and administer the shots and I dug her a grave on our property. He was kind and gentle and told us what to expect with the couple of doses… Read more »
If we’re drawing on the shared wisdom of people everyone should know that suicide is a grevious sin that in most traditional christianity damns a soul (because it is an unrepentant murder and also rejection of God’s authority over life and death). Suicide was not romanticized and perpetrators were not buried with others in the community or at a church. Stigmas exist for reasons both practical and metaphysical and they protect both individuals and society. We all talk a lot about stigmas against faggotry and the rest but this is not the only one. We need to accept the entirety… Read more »
Acceptance of death, as and when it comes, and in whatever form, is the ultimate peace. We are put here on this earth to live, and to live our fullest lives, but we are ultimately here to die and move on to another plane of existence. I choose to believe that plane of existence is how my ancestors envisioned it, and that I’ll join them some day.
I visited the city I was born in (but haven’t visited in 35 years) this summer and was pleased to discover an uncle and his sister both in their 90s are still alive. I had lost touch with them. We met for lunch and it was very nice. They are both still mentally sharp. My 93 year old Uncle still works full-time as a CPA. He doesn’t need to still work but it gives him a sense of still being an active part of this world which is important to him. I asked them about death, if they ever feel… Read more »
We are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world. Made up of “crude matter” that will decay and disintegrate. Major bummer. What bothers me about death is to all that NOTHINGNESS entails. You’re not asleep, you’re gone and and you didn’t even know that you were. FOREVER! No one can wrap their head around this, so best not thought about too long. Only comfort is that we were all dead for billions of years before we were born and it wasn’t so bad (I think). From a religious standpoint, the point of life is to die. One most… Read more »
In my world, as a sometime regression hypnotist exploring people’s past lives, the soul is immortal and each life is, by itself, insignificant..So I don’t worry about death, although I don’t intentionally court it…
The way of death that will become very commonplace in the years to come is people dying alone in their homes and not being found for weeks or months, or eaten by their cats. And when they are found, there often won’t be anyone (other than the state) to deal with the remains. Thus will be the passing of a large portion of (at least) a couple generations of white people. This is in accordance with The Plan, since they will have left no offspring, and the AINO landmass gets browner. A great many/most of them will be unable to… Read more »
I often thought about death as a child. I imagened her as a beautiful mistress of the great beyond that would guide me in my purpose. Show me how to truly live. As a young adult I never had that great moment of proving myself to the ‘village’. Becoming a man was just going to work and paying taxes. Of course, drugs, sex and the occaisional drunk fight due to some bimbo bitch. But I never felt a part of something bigger, just a lukewarm lube for the economic machine. All these modern comforts have just slowly dehumenized me.. I… Read more »
On a related topic, but it 100% is relevant is the total lack of danger sense modern “people” have. This is because when death or even violence is only a vidya game thing or from your superhero movies, then what danger are you really in?? I had the unfortunate need to be in Baltimore City recently, a place I avoid like the plague for obvious reasons. We just had a recent “reality meets your fantasy world” incident there with some white lefty woman who was a “strong DEI ally” and lover of BLM bludgeoned to death in her apartment. This… Read more »
Young urban leftists usually have enough street sense to avoid danger, so they don’t need to be worried. White conservatives are the opposite — constantly riddled with fear, which makes them an easier target.
Oh my sweet summer child, you don’t get out much do you? You need to actually WALK AROUND instead of just spitting up your stupid talking points. They are clueless and wander around as such.
“Street sense” and ‘young urban leftists’ AKA bugmen shouldn’t be used in the same sentence. They are antonyms.
Yes those grrlboss biz suit or yoga pants wearing white women are street smart to the core! Nigga please…
Thank you Apex! So true!! The lefties I knew in the Bay Area were absolute truculent, pig-headed eloi sheep. (A friend got mugged walking from an A’s game to car. Suggested to keep her head on a swivel and notice who did it, and she just roared back she was never going to change and think like me. Determined to die, that one.) Been around the “Don’t think bad thoughts or you will draw them to you” crowd for many years. Now I live in southern Mormonland, full of LoveEverybodyandNeverJudge sheep. Chrikey! Judging is the key to survival. They have… Read more »
profoundly the opposite of reality agent K
Indeed, that is often the case, making one wonder whether many whites have any intact survival instincts…
Somehow the image of Timothy Treadwell came to mind.
I never thought of Hertzog’s Grizzly Man as a cautionary tale…but…lo!
yes , he was a white liberal eco activist whe was avoiding wise enough to avoid the danger – or so says agent K
Thank you, Zman and commentariat, for some thought-provoking reading. It seems I am somewhat unusual in that – soon to be 65 – I’ve never actually seen a dead body or sat at anyone’s death bed. I was hundreds or thousands of miles away when loved ones and even family pets died. I’ve never been to an open casket funeral. I can think of two acquaintances from high school who died at graduation time. I didn’t think I was particularly sheltered but compared to my husband and even my older son, I have no experience with death. I don’t fear… Read more »
I’m getting up there, too. I’m not exactly afraid to die, but I am apprehensive.
It’s like the feeling I had the first time I asked out a girl, “I dunno about this! I never tried it before. How’s this gonna work out?”.
I am somewhat comforted by the knowledge that everyone who was ever born has died or will die (as far as I know). Given that most of them weren’t particularly talented, how hard can it be?
I don’t relish the pain and fright that goes with dying.
And I will definitely be thinking, “Damn! The party’s going on without me!”
I think that hunting and fishing should be compulsory in a young person’s education, even some farm work. I think there is a lot of opportunity for home schooling networks to incorporate men with these skills and people with adequate properties and resources to make this happen. This post addresses the plebs distance from death and the reality of traditional masculine competencies. Worse than the plebs distance is the distance of the ruling regime’s denizons from such activities. Not only is it to our detriment, it is also to the advantage of future generations of people wise enough to adopt… Read more »
My kid‘s snotty prep school had an attached farm- the kids had to do their rotation there. It was a good thing
A#1. It all changed when we stopped the kids from working or doing farm work in the summer. That was training practice to become adults.
FFA (Future Farmers of America) should be required, the summer harvest seasons reinstated. Even city kids in Connecticut were out picking blueberries, having adventures away from home.
The practical skills- home ec, carpentry, target practice, auto shop, music, even welding- were given up so we could integrate savages, third-worlders, and unionize stupid women.
“I think that hunting and fishing should be compulsory in a young person’s education, even some farm work” The problem of course is that if everyone hunted, fished and farmed in a nation of 330 million the game would be wiped out in a year. even by 1900 or so game was disappearing and people were leaving farms for better-paying lives in cities — and the population was only 80 million. There’s been a huge resurgence of animals since the 1970s due to urbanization and the dearth of hunters — deer, turkey, fox, coyote, geese and eagles have all proliferated… Read more »
I acknowledge your resurgent game statistics, but whenever I go hunt those MF elk and deer, they are insanely hard to find!
(I kid, a bit. People who don’t hunt don’t appreciate the level of skill and dedication to wack Bambi’s mother. Especially when you spice it up a bit with a bow.)
Since, at one point, Z’s reflections on death provoked some responses mentioning pets and children, I would like to tell an anecdote pertinent to these three subjects. Long long ago, when my oldest son now bumping 70 was about three or four, we had a pet chicken, rescued from a hatchery where one was being pecked to death by the others, the way chickens do. We took the fluff of misery home where it became a proud fat hen laying a nice warm egg for the three year old’s breakfast every morning. Then it died; no jeremiads – it was… Read more »
If I buried every chicken that didn’t end up in the freezer in a grave, my back yard would look like Arlington National Cemetery. Birds just die, they’re not particularly resilient critters. That’s part of the point of the post, I think. The idea that every critter gets funerary rights, never mind the same level of respect, is bemusing if you understand the true scale of death in the world. A chicken? Chickens are food, and if they’re not doing food, they’re waste. Put it in a bag and toss it in the trash. The modern ‘murican causes a couple… Read more »
The first time I had to shoot a horse really stuck with me. Horses live big lives in multiple respects; they’re huge, majestic beasts, they live a long time — 30-35 years isn’t that uncommon these days — and for horse people, we have relationships with them like people do with dogs. I’ve got just one horse now who could potentially outlive me. Others I know I’m going to be seeing go in a few years or so, and that I’m probably going to have to do it. I already think about “Will I get another, and how old, knowing… Read more »
I had a long term girlfriend who was an equestrian. She had a horse that had gotten tangled up in a fence and as horse’s often do, they panic sometimes to their own detriment. The horse was thrashing around in the sharp wire and literally sliced his leg all apart. By the time they got to him the infection had turned him septic so the horse vet said it would be a mercy to put him down otherwise he’d just slowly and painfully die. I was in my mid-20s when this happened, I had seen dead and dying animals but… Read more »
[…]I look at her and I see the future and I know that ten or twelve years from now I’d give about anything to have her be like she is now for just one more day.
And I’d trade all of my tomorrows
For one single yesterday
(Kristofferson)
The essay resulted in my thinking of the question Job posed long ago (14:14) – If a man die, shall he live again?
Seems cloud people are determined to avoid the question, or are determined not to die, or are determined to make life sufficiently miserable for dirt people that they want to die and…decrease the surplus population.
Stranger in a Strange Land: “Seems cloud people are determined to avoid the question, or are determined not to die, or are determined to make life sufficiently miserable for dirt people that they want to die and…decrease the surplus population.” …COMMENCE BROKEN RECORD V@XXINE DUDE STUMP SPEECH… I don’t want to hijack this into a v@xxine thread, but it’s abundantly obvious now [with this deluge of new studies which deconstruct & reverse-engineer the v@xxines] that the Globalist Depopulationists were deadly serious [no pun intended] when they erected the Georgia Guidestones. 1) Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.… Read more »
How much does a JIDF agent get paid to down-vote an existential plea for Pure-B100ded White males to copulate with Pure-B100ded fertile White females, thereby insuring a viable future for the White Race?
klearly only agent K would downfote this . which i fear is completely correct. personally know of 4 miscarriages, and one stillbirth after within a month of vaxing.
Great topic, Z. I’m a rather prolific deer hunter, I’ve killed and butchered over 30 of them (ate venison last night, in fact) so I’ve seen plenty of dead animals. I have to say, I don’t enjoy killing them, per se — I enjoy a successful hunt. There’s a difference. They want to live, they’re afraid of predators. Sometimes, despite elation with my success, I feel for them. A few years ago I killed one of the bigger bucks I’ve taken. He did everything right . He cautiously crept down a hillside in the snowy gloom about three or for… Read more »
The older I become, the more existentialist I become. You are either alive or you are dead, and if you are alive it isn’t for long, so you had better fucking make the best of it.
Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.
That’s Goddamn right.
Thanks for that great post
Grateful I am to the Zman and Z-audience for today’s, for last Friday’s “Dissident Happiness”, and Monday’s “Christian Nationalism”. The sin to which I must confess: I’d become such a religious zealot. Hearing common religious references triggered me as readily as any shitlib sensitive to signs of heresy. If one can hear the etymology behind the phrase, it’s unnerving. Emotion grabs hold, composure is lost. Then I realized, the faithful are speaking the language of their function. That is, they must see things in this way, using the shared phrases available to them, the language of their craft, that they… Read more »
If that deer was recently killed, the meat could be salvaged for somebody’s freezer. I forget what state agency you call if you don’t want to gut and dress it yourself. Fish and game? People want to connect with death somehow, like those teens posing for pictures. Remember that scene from Unforgiven with Morgan Freeman stood up in an open coffin? Apparently, that was a thing in the Old West. You can find old photographs of dead outlaws who were displayed that way. When you get old, you might have a sense that a particular kind of death is stalking… Read more »
I’ve noticed the evil people tend to linger.
George Soros is 93, Henry Kissinger is 100, Jacob Rothschild is 87…
Search on a string such as “Jesse Karmazin Young Blood”.
“Karmazin”, BTW, is a mizrahic/mizraic name.
All the old wives’ tales are proving to be TRUE.
Communist dictators were notoriously long-lived.
its the adenochrome
and jimmeh carter.
If a mere Siddhartha-like unacquaintance with the realities of pain, suffering and death were sufficient to explain the shallowness and superficiality we behold in society, then we could content ourselves that experience alone would shortly remedy the situation; for the shallow and superficial likewise suffer and die, and no means has yet been found that would allow them to ward off the way of all flesh forever. The problem is not in a lack of experience, but in the fact that experience alone does not seem to be enough for people. In historical times, when the life of the average… Read more »
“Circle of life” and hunting….hmmm…here’s a humorous take on those topics.
[Conent Non-Advisory: linked comic is Rated PG; site’s disclaimer applies if you go exploring.]
https://www.oglaf.com/tax-deductions/
Excellent Z man, and accurate. insouciance is truly the plague of modernity. I live in the midwest. grew up on a farm in W va in 60’s and 70’s. needless to say, introduced my kids to hunting and fishing at an early age . There ia a loss of commaradarie in the loss of those sports . we look forward to heading into the woods to spend a few days hunting every year with my dad, father in law, brother in law , some friends , and sons. Some of the best times of my life . later was the… Read more »
sorry , spellchecker had a long weekend, if you get my drift…
A few years ago I spent the night in Bluefield WV. Went to Chik-Fil-A for dinner and got talking to a local in the playground area. He had his 5 year old son with him and both were wearing camouflage. They’d been out in the woods that day and the boy had shot his first squirrel. I’ll never forget the radiant happiness coming from that boy when his dad told me about their day. It gave me a glimmer of hope for the future.
I live in perhaps the country’s most progressive town and surrounding area where my community, cheering for all the race, gender and climate fads, remains freaked out about covid. Many are still masking and most have lined up for the latest vax.
This inordinate fear of covid may the closest that many privileged folks who condemn privilege yet cling to their privilege have come to the semblance of death other than Uncle Bob’s unremarked disappearance. What reflective terror might they behold in that deer’s sorrowful eye?
There’s something larpy about the covid hysteria, like they really REALLY want the real deal. That freaks me out far more than the virus did.
Like they suspect there are more rounds of death to come and if they just follow The Party’s edicts they shall be spared. That the data now clearly establishes the vexxinations have damaged the takers and masks are pointless even harmful is rejected out of hand. If The Party narrative is 2×2=5, then it is the correct answer and shall be relied upon. This is 5-20% of our population.
Whenever I see your name I read the diamond corporation.
You misspelled “DITKA”.
Next time you meet a pretty girl, give her the gift that is me and I’ll do my best to, cough, satisfy her desires.
They wanted the real power, that’s for sure.
The Baby Boomers, raised by television to be a generation of WW2 LARPers, have waited all this time for their chance to blast the air raid siren. That’s what motivates a lot of the green insanity, too. They can’t wait to sit on their own rationing boards and gloat over their own gas lines.
Yes. A huge part of the allure of all of this cult’s projects is this promise of heroism. Of course the definition of heroism is sad since it really is different ism in a thin disguise – conformism. (is that a thing? you get my drift) That HBO series Rome was excellent. I remember the bit where Cicero is I think ready to get assassinated and he says, “It is all just vanity.” One of my favorite scenes was when Antony goes to visit Cicero and threaten him and pees in his planter in his villa’s indoor courtyard as Cicero… Read more »
Today’s post introduces the concept of “seriousness” to the essential dilemma of our society’s decline. We still live in a world of prolonged affluence with a high standard of living, and as such, refuse to take seriously the impending disaster of our cultural decadence and financial malfeasance. We assume that the plates will keep spinning because it has always been thus. And as a result, too many of us are now fat, dependent, and lacking in robustness such that a return of real hardship amounts to a death sentence. And that reality is so horrific that it must be denied… Read more »
Tom, you often deliver a similar sermon, but I don’t mind, because your message is so necessary.
But, over the years, I have become curious about the preacher behind the sermon. Without doxing yourself, can you reveal anything about your ideological journey? Did you always see the world as you do, or was there an evolution, even a dramatic struggle in facing the terrible truth? I confess that I’m hoping that you started life as a hippie in Berkeley…
My story is dirt common. Raised by a single mother with 4 siblings in poverty. Hard road from the git go, but Catholic upbringing saved what was salvageable. Am on the autistic spectrum (surprise! High functioning Level 1). Lifelong engineer and problem solver. Always a small “l” libertarian; a life well-lived must be hard-earned in the first person. My epiphany occurred when I realized that only tangible physicality could save us. Which is why I am so frustrated with Dan Bongino. As much as I like most of what he says; he is leading the lambs to slaughter, and that… Read more »
Thank you, sir. I appreciate hearing about your life. Your writing always has my attention.
Dear Z—You did a great job! This is a great thoughtful article that gives much to ponder. Thank you. I was 22 yo, of the girlie girl persuasion, when I shot an antelope in Nevada. Having been raised in foothills of California by Commie parents who believed guns get up, walk around and shoot people on their own, for me being in the Sheldon Antelope Range tracking antelope for 5 days absolutely put me in touch with reality that utterly changed my life and life direction forever. Yes I shot that buck antelope guy one shot through the heart, he… Read more »
Do the younger generations no longer attend funerals?
In any event, one way the young may encounter death is through the loss of a pet, either from an accident such as being run over by a car, or by euthanasia. To my mind, there is little in this world more traumatic than losing a cherished pet. And it certainly leads one to contemplation.
I hadn’t attended a funeral until I was 33. Many since then.
I actually pray for my departed pets more than I do people, assuming that Providence is already in charge of them.
I grew up raising and killing chickens, and hunting (insofar as shooting vermin with a BB gun is, I suppose, hunting). Lost a dog and a couple of cats. Didn’t affect me much. My grandpa died when I was 8. There was Paw-paw lying in the casket in his Army uniform, looking serene and waxy. My cousin and I were supposed to pull the blanket up over his chest before they closed the casket, and when the moment came, it hit me that was the last time I’d see him in this life. Couldn’t do it, sat there bawling. Fwiw,… Read more »
Death is like life in that it means different things to different people. Many condemned men will give us the final finger as they cash out like Saddam Hussein. There are WW2 stories of the gunners in the bombers dying on their guns as their pilots limped the aircraft home, through swarms of enemy fighters.
Live well, Dissidents! And may you die well too.
“Few people know where food comes from or how it is possible.”
According to the google, 7% of Americans believe chocolate milk comes not just from a special different cow, but from a brown cow.
I just hope the fake meat thing and eating ze bugs is the hill people chose to die on. Will normie accept grilling vat-meat and grasshoppers is just as good if not better than grilling a steak or even hamburger? Without beef, where exactly do the the xirls who rule us think they will get their Ben & Jerry?
An easy half of that 7% are trolls if I had to guess. Also lab grown meat is a grift that will never work and math on bugs isn’t much better. I thought the “death” thing would bother me more as a hobby meat farmer (which is where everyone would go if bugs or science sludge were the only choices) but the depressing thing isn’t so much the “dispatching” as the knowledge that…its not like this animal was going to live forever if you weren’t going to eat it. Indeed for meat birds letting them live past their “sell by”… Read more »
grew up doing that. in w va we grew the annual hogs to about 600 lbs, because then there was a lot of lard on them . shich was used in all the cooking. I don’t think you can even buy it anymore, but it was actually good. expecially in gravy. anyway , good luck .
If lab-grown meat proves delicious, healthy, and reasonably priced, I will much prefer it to meat that comes from the slaughterhouse. Say what you will, I will always feel uneasy about meat processed through factory farming. Not so uneasy that I’m giving up meat, however. To me, life without meat would scarcely be worth living.
Good lord. Hardcore factory farming, and its spiritual toll. Not near as bad as halal or Asian cruelty, no, but still a slow spiritual poison like mRNA additions to the food supply- mRNA was, by the way, first promoted for animal vaccines. This is the Infection at work, what some call the Satan, what I call the God in the greenhouse. It cannot stop it’s own growth, any more than a mold up the wall overtaking a house- thus, intelligence and Whiteness arise in the Design. Some call it the Antichrist, and I agree. Left unchecked, our future would be… Read more »
Eh… Read “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. They’ve been telling horror stories about the meat industry for a very long time. Turns out he was a Vegan and a communist. What a shocker. From what I know of Halal, it’s pretty brutal. I do oppose being needlessly cruel to animals. (I also STRONGLY oppose paying what amounts to a Halal and Kosher tax imposed on most foods in the US.) Every reasonable effort to not be cruel to animals should be taken. But reasonable efforts, not every possible effort.. We cannot eliminate all suffering. We simply cannot have meat as… Read more »
I was an “extreme” sportsman, a real aviation and parachuting freak brother. I’ve watched a number of my friends “bounce” as we say. Some, including the late Roger Nelson, required minutes before they succumbed as their aortas leaked out. Then again, the younger brother of a friend fell under a cement truck while he was innocently riding his bicycle in sixth grade, crushing the unfortunate kid at the navel level but leaving him to survive quite consciously for a few hours. Our neighborhood was assembled to pass through the boy’s hospital room and say our last goodbyes. I believe it’s… Read more »
Living under leftist & minority control, as if we don’t already.
Is going to become intolerable one day. At that time what?
I pray for insight, guidance,
resolve and strength
The problem with this post is a confusion of meaning and purpose. Meaning is not purpose. Value is not purpose. Life does have meaning for sure, but it is not purpose.
A lot of education is needed for many to understand this issue.
The whole attitude of this poast is off. I’m sorry Z, but I’ve seen enough dead deer (and shot many of them myself) – and those are not “sad eyes of death”. Hell’s bells… what does a happy deer look like? Damn right they’re loading up and going hunting, and I hope the boys fill their tags! People hunt because it affirms their life, and puts them in touch with instinct and genetics as old as mankind himself. Our ancestors would have seen that deer as a gift from their gods. (Often it was). It meant full bellies, hides for… Read more »
This is the truth. Animals don’t really have facial expressions. Not in the sense that we think about with humans anyway.
Your comment illustrates one side of the disconnect and inability to comprehend each other between people like you and the people who don’t know where food comes from.
The two young men who went joyriding in Las Vegas and killed that former police chief for sport were recording it in the style of a video game, viz., Grand Theft Auto.
They were imitating a video game that itself imitated real life. And we then watched on our video screens a video imitating the style of a video game imitating real life.
We need a natural disaster to end the smartphone situation or we will see man-made disasters that will kill millions within a decade or less. These are the pox-filled blankets that will end civilization if not humanity.
I wanted to believe smartphones and social media were the CB radio of the 2010s. I still have some glimmer of hope that when the money bubble pops, the free social media craze will go away and that people won’t pay for the experience. Unfortunately, it’s probably pure projection on my part. In the 90s I naively believed that as computers spread into the homes of regular people that the horrifically one sided EULA would not be acceptable to the general public. But all that happened was they became far more one sided, intrusive and unfair and the public yawned.… Read more »
I once thought rap was an ephemeral gimmick…
In point of fact, all terrible innovations these days are permanent.
The first time I experience rap was in the early 80s and it was JJ Cool Jay performing some song on a music show.
I assumed it was a comedy skit. I kept waiting for the punchline. There was no way that this could be presented as music.
Afterwards, I had to learn that those who (mostly) control the music industry and the media had decided that rap/hip hop was the music of the future and what the public wanted was irrelevant.
The first time me and my friends her Rapper’s Delight, which was the first rap album to gain prominence, we assumed it was comedy. It was funny and mostly silly, so we just assumed it was intentional.
Well, that’s just it. Early rap was intended to be comedy, kind of like those novelty songs (Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah; The Streak; Yellow Polka Dot Bikini). And some of it was passably amusing in a primitive negro way. Who could have guessed that it would not only become America’s dominant form of pop “music,” but that it would transmute into a virulent, demonic cacophany? The rap I encounter today sounds as if it issues from the very bowels of Hell. Perhaps it does.
You were right. Early rap was what we used to call “novelty music,” comedy or ironic-narrative songs with fleeting and mostly non-musical value, the urban equivalent of trucker songs.
Black people still treat hiphop that way, as a disposable soundtrack to a specific few days. Listening to an old album is a huge faux pas. ’90s night at the club is fine, but only a loser (white) would decide for himself to put “Don’t Sweat the Technique” on the turntable ever again.
That’s *one* reason media companies want hiphop to be the only pop music. You know the rest.
And, it was fun.
Sugar Hill Gang doing a silly, fun goof of/on/in urban pop culture: telling silly stories and unleashing silly boasts over a stolen (appropriated?) bass line from an R&B song.
(Fun fact: the bass part in Rapper’s Delight was played all the way through, start to finish, by a real-time bass player, thumpin’ away on a P-bass (pre sequencers, you know…!).
And then…wha?
Hip Hop did, and does, as much or more to damage “The Blessed” than…well, you finish that statement.
I’m not entirely sure it’s technology shielding the youth from being traumatized by Bambi. You can go on the internet and find video of actual murder, especially lately thanks to the Ukrainians and Russians. But I’ve noticed a lot of Millennial and younger people seem to just avoid this stuff and surround themselves with a soft saccharine reality. Lots of shitlibs I’ve met seem to live this sort of whisper-talking children’s cartoon reality where they spend most of their time checking after one another’s well-being and cautioning everyone when they’re about to broach a potentially PTSD triggering subject like running… Read more »
Is it just me, or are there others who get pissed off when some stranger (store clerk, person in line) tells me to “stay safe”?
It’s gotten to the point where I stop, glare at them and ask,”what do you mean”?
Their recoiling is worth the aggravation.
It’s just a way for them to cope and make sure I’m on the same page.
Is it just me, or are there others who get pissed off when some stranger (store clerk, person in line) tells me to “stay safe”?
THANK. YOU.
I ALWAYS reply: “Stay Free”.
“What do you mean stay safe?”
“You know, the blacks.”
It drives me crazy too! lord there has never beena more puzzified greeting.
> I’m not entirely sure it’s technology shielding the youth from being traumatized by Bambi. You can go on the internet and find video of actual murder, especially lately thanks to the Ukrainians and Russians.
That’s not real, it’s just entertainment under the guise of being mature. It is not a coincidence media is becoming more violent and depraved as people lose their grasp on the cycle of life.
Maybe I’m the odd one but while I’m completely unmoved by even the most grotesque movies, when it’s video of the real thing I have this unsettled “why did I just watch this” feeling that persists for a good while.
Welcome to the matriarchy, ol’ Ploppy. And I hope you’re double-masked, for the love of God. Stay safe!
I have noticed this phenomenon in the music that is marketed to the Good Whites. Cant name any artists (Generally don’t listen to music produced after the 1980s but a few years back it seemed like everything I heard in passing or at friends of friends houses had a distinct lullaby quality to it. Not in a good way. False sensitivity to the point of smarminess. The perfect soundtrack for male feminists (allies?!) and mask wearers.
I’m not up on this music either–dropped out of the pop culture in 1992–but I think they call that crap “emo.”
We saw during the pandemic how immature and fearful our society is when it comes to death. People would rather destroy their current lives in the present than have a potential 0.1% risk of death. I watched an old, sick, semi-close relative die. Nobody else could be bothered to come to his bedside. By this time it was past the point of mourning, he had been sick a long time. It was a relief when he took his final breath. We walk a fine line between a living, breathing, spiritual, human, to a lump of flesh and bones. His breathing… Read more »
Good point. For those of us on this continent where World War II was distant and the cause of at most moderate sacrifice, Covid was the most important event since the American Civil War. The mass, abject fear of a miniscule chance of death changed my and many others’ opinions of our countrymen. They are fearful, cowardly, hollow men whose pathetic lives are worse than death. Hence, we have arrived at this place. We learned a lot about those around us and most of it was not good.
Absolutely. As I’ve said before, the Covidiocy was the final nail in my respect for the human race. Hasten onward, o fiery meteor!
Ask nicely and ye shall receive…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkTgYiMDRHY
Oh that’s good!
I can recall seeing my grandmother, and later my grandfather within the hour of when they died. And I recall seeing my father, albeit briefly, in the ER just after the heart attack took him. I was in the room with my wife, and her whole family when her father passed. I heard the death rattle, and watched him become still. It is an awesome sight. (And no, kids, “awesome” does not mean totally cool.) When the nursing home called me I made my last daily visit to my mother, and sat with her for a while. I put my… Read more »
I had the good fortune to be in the room with both of my parents when they “Shed This Mortal Coil:” Dad, 12/2009, Mom, 08/2022.
That’s right – I said “Good Fortune.”
Both parents, btw, “resolved” at home in the house they shared since the mid-1950’s: Brooklyn, NY.
Raised 6 kids!
( For my city…I still shed the occasional tear.)
Before the industrial revolution, infant mortality was 50%. There also was a high death rate for mothers. Women understood, due to religious beliefs, their main function was getting married and having a lot of babies. That gave their lives deep meaning. Any hint of feminism meant death for the family, the tribe, the religion, the society. Boys were raised to fight and girls to become mothers. As society collapses, those who return to that ethos will be the only ones to survive.
Hopefully you folks will indulge me on this but reading the Yeats poem recently gave me pause. Seems even more relevant.
First stanza:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Thanks David. That passage has always felt deeply prophetic, a vision of our future that we can’t escape. But I want to observe that Yeats’ poem has become one of a few pieces of art that everyone, left or right, quotes as their own. What I mean is, that I have heard leftists quote “The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity” and they are thinking of you and me as the “the worst.” Leftists don’t read Yeats’ poem and interpret it as a warning about what they are doing. They read it as a… Read more »
Our antagonist’s capacity to twist narrative and meaning around a spindle of gnostic narcissism never ceases to….
And what rough beast/
Its hour come round at last/
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It’s bill gates! and klause schwab with their “reset” of the population!
The roster of candidates is well nigh innumerable.
My son’s first real experience with death was at 4, seeing his grandfather’s corpse on the living room chair. Jarring? Yes, but you a learning experience that puts the harsh reality of life in context. The worst thing you can do is insulate youth from this, as you will universally get a fundamentally unserious person who is incapable of understanding humanity.
The bizarre trend of “celebration of life” gatherings is an indication of a people who can’t grapple with death, and therefore can never really live.
My little brother was run over by a garbage truck when I was 4.5 years old. The truck wasn’t moving; he had lain underneath it for reasons only God knows. I saw it from about 100 feet away and have never recovered after several decades. The sounds and sights and aftermath will never leave me. During Covid I absorbed abuse from friends and acquaintances calling me a coward, afraid of needles, afraid of this, selfish, afraid of that, etc., etc. I had the eerie experience of staring at one person who’d experienced not a drop of discomfort in life talking… Read more »
condolences, and peace
“We are not far from the point in science fiction where humans who reach their expiration date mysteriously disappear, sent off to the recycling plant.”
The world of “Soylent Green” surely?
There is a reading of the Eden story that suggests death is not a curse given to the first humans but a gift. What could be worse than living your life separated from the source of all being except having that life never end? These attempts by our ruling weirdos to live forever – either through uploading their consciousness into a machine or drinking the blood of children or whatever witchcraft they are investigating – is then monstrous, wicked, and disordered. Anyone who has ever been with a loved one when they die knows it to be the worst thing.… Read more »
I take great pleasure in the frenzied, futiles attempts of the elite to attain immortality. Their fear brings joy.
Actually, elites who don’t try to live forever give Faustian deal vibes, like they know where their money and power is going to lead them. The simpletons who try to find the philosopher’s stone are still possibly able to find the right path.
There was an interview I watched with some tech millionaire that’s spending all his time and money on trying to stay young. He literally spends all day exercising and his diet is all pills. His skin is smooth for sure, but it looks like the rubber prop face they used for Arnold in the first Terminator.
Sounds like Maximillian Strange from the novel, The Loo Sanction.
“What could be worse than living your life separated from the source of all being except having that life never end?”
But the above is only because you *do* believe in an eternal being. My impression has been that those who are godless must therefore believe that this life is *all* there is—an eternity of nothingness behind us and an eternity of nothingness after us. With that belief, then of course, nothing is more purposeful (to us) than extending our meager existence between those two extremes.
The farther you get away the more meager it gets..
If only the populace could see the carnage first hand and live with it in Ukraine maybe some reason and hope would return to America. That blue and yellow lapel pin or avatar would then seem ludicrous. Maybe.
Oh, by the way, tomorrow is Soylent Green day.
Oswald Spengler had it right when he noted that when having children and creating the next generation is seen as a boutique and optional choice, your civilization is in terminal decline. Children, grand children, great grandchildren are the only immortality anyone is really assured. No one really understands this at a gut level until they reach their 50’s or so. When it’s much, much too late to address in anything other than a token way. Think about this a great deal as my retirement savings reach escape velocity in my mid 50’s and contemplate how I’ll find an old folks… Read more »
At the moment my newborn daughter was shown to me, I was instantly struck by the thought, “now I can die in peace.” Far from being a morbid thought it created a feeling of immense serenity. It was completely involuntary and not the product of anything I’d been pondering prior to her birth.
“When Bobby turns 18, I will watch my son drive away in the car I taught him to build, go upstairs to my bed, and die” – Hank Hill
“I don’t know Hank that sounds pretty depressing” – Dale
As always, Hank was right.
children are god’s greatist gift, untill grandchildren come along .
Well, grandchildren are those whom you can spoil, then return to their parents to deal with the repercussions. 😉
Fill ’em full of sugar & send ’em back to ma!
Can’t recall who said it but “The reason why grandparents get on so well with their grandchildren is because they both have a common enemy.” sounds about right.
Those long walks are paying dividends! This essay is excellent, as it perfectly argues something I state frequently: how insulated we are from death. The young people I deal with have lived a quarter of their lives, statistically, and yet they have not seen one dead body in the wild. By “in the wild,” I mean that the body has not been prepped, embalmed, put under corpse lighting, and displayed in a viewing or funeral. I mean that look where there was something, and then nothing. Bizarre that death is all around us, but the experts come in, cover up… Read more »
I always tell my family stories about picking beets, shelling peas, standing in wheat above your shoulders, hauling bales onto the rack, straightening old nails, getting hit by the flyswatter from baba or getting the stern look and a backhand from Gido.
They used to roll there eyes.
Not so much anymore.
In reading posts like this one, and in listening to some of your audio segments lately, I have felt you are gravitating more and more towards theology, Zman. When I first started visiting this site (some years ago), my impression was that you were generally ambivalent to religious faith, though you respected it and were conversant in it. So if my observations are correct, I commend you for exploring this subject in your columns (and perhaps I more generally). I’m curious about how you approach your writing. As you’ve developed as a columnist, I’ve noticed that a given week might… Read more »
This is truly beautiful. Urbanization and insulation from the reality of the finite nature of life infantilizes humans. Some have suggested war almost is necessary to reattach people to the greatest truth and to make them men again. I reject that but suspect it does touch on something truthful. The disappearance of extended families where children and young adults see their grandparents and aged uncles and aunts die also has made death an abstraction. And as you mention, the absence of farming, hunting and fishing from the lives of most has accomplished much the same. Secularism has this downside as… Read more »
It seems hardship may be a way of re-arfirming morality. People will find out why we had all of those rules.
The big lesson for young (and old) people is that life is hard – and that’s a good thing
I think you might not be giving the kids enough credit, regarding death, especially the white ones. If you’re a millennial or a Z’er there’s a good chance you’ve lost some friends to opioids. Even without my experiences in Iraq, I was already on intimate terms with young death. Especially now, with the fentanyl, every hit is Russian Roulette. The suicide rate, as bad as it is, is only going to get worse as the antiwhite psyop really ramps up. Years ago I read an article about this old English couple who no longer recognized their neighborhood and killed themselves… Read more »
The Forever Wars and the opiate overdoses have hit only a narrow slice of young whites, but that is a good point as to those who have been exposed to either.
My millennial son has lost more friends and acquaintances to suicide and drug over doses than I have ever known.
terribly sorry to hear that
“ Everyone fretted about their mental state and worried about juvenile delinquency until civil rights came along to give the busybodies an incurable problem to focus on for the rest of eternity…” Joey, I think this is a perceptive observation that may express a profound insight into human nature, and the nature of modern “developed” societies. I don’t think I’ve heard a connection made before between the delinquency “crisis” of the 1950s and the civil rights “crisis” that replaced it a decade later, and is still with us. Incurability as a motivation is definitely something that brings out the do-gooder… Read more »
Agreed. Joey’s comment is among the best I’ve read here or elsewhere and that’s a profoundly original thought. Puritans/Progressives lie awake at night not out of fear there are heretics in the world but that they may run out of problems and causes to solve and champion.
Well they hit the mother lode of unsolvable problems with racial grievance. IQ differences assure us of disparities in material success. A thousand years from now, Africa will still be a third world shithole, blacks in whatever rises from the ashes of America will be underperforming, and progressives will be piously telling us it is due to systemic racism and zealously enforcing at gunpoint their latest theories on how to make us all equal.
There’s an old joke, I can’t remember where I heard it. “The best kind of doctor to be is a dermatologist, because your patient never gets better and he never dies.” This same tendency appears to motivate our foreign policies. Ron Paul once complained that we should stay the hell out of the Middle East because we don’t understand the irrationality of that world. But the irrationality and dysfunction were very good to the military industrial complex. Look at Ukraine, highly dysfunction and corrupt. Our defense contractors like Ukraine for the same reason pornographers and pimps like undereducated girls with… Read more »
“ Our defense contractors like Ukraine for the same reason pornographers and pimps like undereducated girls with low self-esteem who’ve been abused by every man in their life.”
Okay Joey, that’s TWICE on one comment thread. You’re an aphorism engine today.
🙂
Look up the Ad Council”s web page to see just who those “folks” are who are building in our young people all the new things to build their lives around, and obsess about, as we move farther from the reality of a “necessary” life.
Being raised in a rural area around animals and men who hunt them does bring one familiarity with death and the finality of it.
Seeing a animal or a loved one in the death rattle phase has a sobering effect.
I get frustrated with people whom have little or no idea where that beef or chicken sandwich came from.
Cities and large metro area’s and just the modern technological age seem to validate the Tower of Babel story, mankind is always seeking to outrun his purpose and pretend he can be a God.
Absolutely. There’s something analogous in Christianity to the concept of America’s second founding by Lincoln, et al. Christ’s message, in some sense, superseded the story of Genesis, which clearly instructs us on the purpose and proper role of humans. Although we are made in God’s image we cannot compete with Him and make ourselves gods. We are mortal, He is not. We have a choice, to love God or to act as gods. But as our earthly existence is ephemeral, the latter must always end in failure (death), which is why obedience to Him is the only proper choice. Making… Read more »
I still remember when I told a friend that meat comes from the muscle and fat tissues of an animal. He didn’t believe me and kept telling me I was wrong. We were kids at the time, I don’t know if he ever figured it out.
And old friend of mine and I recently waxed on something you might find interesting: in our youth (70’S) during hunting season, no small number of gents would head upstate or to PA to go deer hunting, and return to NYC (Bklyn.) with their kills “strapped to the hood of the car.”
(Dress in the backyard/garage, or bring it over to the neighborhood butcher,)
Watched old people die. Came upon dead people (including my Mother). Had to have some beloved animal companions put down. Not a hunter, hadn’t taken life. Big thing to remember is none of us is getting out alive.