A Lesson on Anger
A response to my last post and my attack on Vox Day, in the context of this declining empire
I’ve been reflecting a lot, about my last post and my attack on Vox Day. One commenter pointed out, maybe it is a good idea to not post anything in anger? I do consider that a general rule. There are exceptions to every rule.
At the beginning of that post I mentioned how angry I was after spending three days on ladders, painting the window trim of a local church. I spent three more days on ladders, but I talked myself out of my anger. What do I have to be angry about, really? I actually like detail painting, I find it rather like a kind of meditation. I have good work to do, great clients, the weather is beautiful (we did not have summer this summer, we had summer in September,) I have friends, plenty of good food to eat, I sleep well, I live in what remains a peaceful region, I have great readers and the numbers of my subscribers continues to grow. My last post had twice as many comments as any other post I have published. I get a little better at playing the guitar and singing each day. Life is good.
Was I really angry because I was on a ladder for three days? Well, that was mostly because I realized those first three days I underbid the job, by quite a bit. I haven’t bid a lot of church window trim painting jobs. Give it up to God (that’s not really a pun.)
Was I really angry at Vox Day? The thing about anger is, whatever I am angry about in the moment, the core of it is often something else, something deeper, some unresolved issue, something I feel helpless about, or I am angry at myself fundamentally. Vox Day and the post I questioned, “triggered” my anger. I was angry about the post, but that anger goes much deeper.
Anger is an emotion. Like all emotions, it must be felt. It must be worked through. One cannot let it rule. Anger can be good, it can be productive, it can get me out of a hole, it can spur me to right action and it can burn me to ash. Anger can destroy me. It could end my life. It can turn to bitterness and make life lost, even as I am still alive. It can make one prey to mass movements that are exceedingly destructive. It can cloud my judgement. It can lead to unnecessary harm. It can make me more easily manipulated.
If you want to know what uncontrolled anger looks like, just challenge an opinion of a typical progressive liberal. Their collective anger facilitates their being manipulated by the media, which has given us the specter of two deranged assassination attempts of Trump, and the pathologically deranged assertion that he has brought this violence upon himself. Similar callous disregard for basic human decency has lead many on the left to dismiss the damage those “trump strongholds” have suffered in the aftermath of Helene. It causes them to discount the violence perpetrated on Americans by immigrants. A progressive liberal particularly women are free to express irrational anger, but any anger presented by a man is said to be misogyny and toxic masculinity.
Many on the left, and among the intelligentsia, have begun to justify violence against their fellow Americans, even as they claim the only violence is on the right. Their anger is ruling them. If we let anger rule us, on the “right”, the resulting, inevitable clash of violence will destroy the country.
Anger uncontrolled can lead me to do a thing I can't take back, that can lead me to a place I cannot return from.1
Vox Day and his Warriors
A lot of Vox Day’s fans were angry at me. One in particular went to war against me and some of my readers. Another thing about fire is, once you start a fire it can be hard to control or put out. That post has more than twice the comments than any other post of mine, but a lot of that is a flame war between
and . What should I have expected, commenting on Vox Day’s site with fire? I attacked their leader, their guru, of course his warriors would come after me. did plenty of that on my site, defending me, when they came here to attack me. Coach Blackpill honed his skills.Their SSH guru? Vox Day is a guru? The thing Zaklog attacked me about was, I said Vox suggests his people should act more like Sigmas. Zaklog demanded I show him where Vox said that. I said it was implied, “he calls it Sigma Game, he claims to be one, he wouldn't be sellin’ it or writin’ about it if he didn't.” Vox Day might not agree but that is what gurus do, sell an ideal. He is in the business of selling the ideal of the sigma and the SSH, he is in the business of engaging young men to focus on their life and to get it together based on the SSH, Sigma is something like the ideal, whether Vox wants to admit it or not.
He is a guru/leader of men and his warriors attacked me because Vox Day is their mentor and they believe in his system, they would not stand by while I attacked him, no matter my argument.
How do I know Vox Day is a guru? It takes one to know one. I am the Chief Guardian of the Octagon Society, Order of Spiritual Alchemy. I am Chief Guardian because I have done the work and I can teach it; though I am not really in the business of teaching it, earning no money from the Order, and not even making beer money with this blog (thank you very much paid subs, I do not thank you enough.) I don’t even write about it much, but if anyone is interested you can read more about it here. I would be happy to answer any questions. It is valuable training but difficult and not for everybody.2
So was I really angry about that post from Vox Day? Yes, I was. If he is going to be teaching people the SSH, if he is going to be a leader of young men in these very challenging times, if he is going to be a mentor and teacher like a guru, I am going to hold him to a standard.
Vox used a literary piece as a sigma reference. This book and movie is not necessarily literary, but I am sure most American men on the right are at least familiar with it. This is something of what I begin to feel when I hear guys who claim to be “high status” talking about fucking other men’s wives and girlfriends.
Vox Day would say that is me being gamma dramatic. But obviously Vox Day and his post is not who or what I am really feeling anything like that kind of anger about. I have nothing really against Vox Day or his SSH necessarily, and certainly not against the men who follow him.3
Decline and Fall:
That anger is more like a feeling that builds as I contemplate WWIII, the Age of Militants, the laughter of our betters at our concern about stolen elections, nuclear war, tens of millions of military aged men crossing the border, not a few cartel, rapists, murderers and terrorists, the growing censorship regime, Washington and Wall Street increasingly acting like a foreign occupier, the building of an AI total information-control panopticon, the feds managing to make the tragedy of Helene exceedingly worse, the growing threat of the globalist, woke, neo-Marxist, managerial, technocratic deep state cabal of DC, Wall Street and the media taking or destroying everything I care about and love.
about that laughter:
William Wallace’s anger at his occupying lord was rational, insofar as he could not let the killing of his love go unanswered, to protect his soul and fend for the dignity of his people. It was irrational insofar as he became death personified, his only dream and love had been taken, feeling there was nothing else to live for he was willing to die, to kill the ones who had taken everything from him.
I imagine that might be a little how one feels, losing everything including people you love, in the aftermath of Helene, to hear the second VP debate, (after no-intro, the first question was about Israel’s right to bomb Iran) the second question about the damage by Hurricane Helene, the moderator turned it into an ideological question/accusation about climate change;
or the fake care and concern of Kamala about Helene, unplugged, writing nothing, under the Seal of the President of the United States.
or the supposed President Biden not cogent enough to even remember there was a disaster, or which of his many disasters, or the media trying to censoriously memory hole/gaslight as the tragedy unfolds, inconvenient as it is for the Clinton/Obama/Biden coalition.
It might be how someone feels, who was raped, or family and friends of someone killed by an illegal immigrant, when they hear the Cato Institute defending illegal immigrants, marginalizing the Americans they harm or kill, or the media acting like no one is harmed by illegal immigration, or that you are a racist for even talking about it in a way contrary to the official narrative. Or the third question of the VP Debate, on immigration, the 10-20million military aged mercenary army males, many with criminal intent turned into a question/accusation about mean MAGA tearing immigrant families apart.
With so much money flowing to Israel, Ukraine and illegal migrants, one might begin to wonder if the deep state is trying to provoke WWIII, and the fury of Americans with the pathological non- increasingly mal- response to Helene - compared to free housing, food and health care for 10million+ illegal immigrants, which is orders of magnitude more than the 1.4Billion FEMA outlay - to declare martial law and prevent the election? I would not even be surprised to see an October Surprise, Biden bowing out/couped out of the Office of the Presidency of the United States of America, Kamala installed; if that happens I’ve got 2-1 odds martial law is declared and the election doesn’t happen. Even if there is an election, if Kamala wins I think it is fair to assume the deep state has set it up so the preferred deep state candidate can never lose.
If the feds had been confiscating relief supplies and threatening citizen rescuers with arrest (before word got out and they were widely embarrassed), then perhaps
is right and this is indeed an American Eschaton. (Tree of Woe suggests the quite opposite here but eschaton can mean a rebirth/restoration too.)Am I angry? Anger does not begin to describe what I feel about the American regime, DC, mocking the Mandate of Heaven, thinking themselves inevitable even as they hack at the foundations of the civilization that is the basis of the empire they currently control.
America in 2024… The mood is dark, now. There is no trust left. Nor should there be, after everything that’s happened so far this century: the pointless forever wars; the great robbery of the 2008 financial crash; the COVID lockdowns; the vaxx mandates; the stolen election of 2020; the censorship and soft HR tyranny of the Great Awokening; the visible mental decay of the ruling class, many of whom can barely string together a coherent sentence anymore; the population replacement of mass immigration; the open borders; the filth and crime and drugs flooding the streets; food price inflation, the real estate bubble, and the steady collapse in living standards.
I bring all this up to validate the anger I know you are feeling. Not to exacerbate that anger, not to inflame it, but to make you more conscious of it. Being more conscious of it you are less likely to be ruled by your anger (or afraid of it), it is less likely to come out sideways, or to turn around back at yourself; while you are more likely and able to sharpen your anger to a fine point, to be used more precisely when it is necessary. Being more conscious of my anger makes me more likely to use it more productively. Anger is like a sword, I learn to wield it or I flail about and hurt myself and others foolishly. Americans are very much in need of a more conscious, focused, sharpened to a fine point, productive anger. DC has been waging wars all over the world so long, they are now at war against most of the world and especially the American people. Your anger is justified, my fellow Americans.
Here is to your righteous anger in service to the good, true and beautiful - here is to an American Eschaton, Restoration.
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Matt Taibbi: Walter picked the story, and it’s Isaac Babel and story called My First Goose from a book that is half Journalism and half literature in a way. It’s called Red Cavalry…..
Walter Kirn: Yeah. Had to go off to the trenches and the revolutionaries in Russia, who were often people of some clerical or academic background, having to find in themselves the Bolshevik fury to press forward the revolution. And I see it today too. When I look at some of the things that happened during the George Floyd summer and so on, or in the Antifa community, I see kids often who I think were a couple of years before reading books or living laptop lives or whatever suddenly deciding that it’s very important to get out there and not just chant, but really confront the cops and so on. And in history, there’s a place for everything, I guess. But I feel like we’re in a time when the lure of violence for the intellectual is starting to grow, because it’s certainly rhetorically there.
I mean, we’re seeing people with ties on or sitting in comfortable chairs, or people like Paul Krugman increasingly, at least rhetorically, shrill and hard and brutal. And we get with the story of Babel, a full circle portrayal of what happens when you go through that. And one of the interesting points about this story is it’s called My First Goose. Why does he say My First Goose? Because there were many geese later.
Matt Taibbi: Right.
Walter Kirn: Not necessarily geese either.
Matt Taibbi: Right, people, yeah.
Walter Kirn: But people. And so it’s like my first sexual experience or my first cigarette. It suggests that many, many came later. This is where you broke the seal on some reluctance in your soul and then began a pattern. And that’s the scariest thing about the story. My First Goose, what were all the other geese?
The opposite of anger and rage is peace. Anger is a necessary and useful emotion, it can also be transformed into peace - that is spiritual alchemy. Whatever use of anger the “right” uses to right the ship of State, the end goal should be peace.
The Law of Peace
No hard feelings, expatriate Vox Day.
The punk poet John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) said "anger is an energy" in one of his songs and I agree. We are taught anger is always wrong and should be suppressed, but sometimes it is a cleansing fire that burns out all the (((dead wood))).
Nice post, William. Anger can mean a couple things:
1. Sometimes we get angry at deficiencies in other that we ourselves have. It's a mirroring effect; we hate in others what we hate in ourselves.
2. Sometimes anger can be clarifying. I was reading about parapsychology studies and one of the interesting things pointed out was that one's accuracy in parapsychology predictions went up substantially if one was feeling passionate about something, if one was emotional. I thought that was an interesting thing to note...
3. Sometimes anger is just anger at injustice, we all feel it sometimes.
So when we get angry, it's good afterwards to step back and ask why did we get angry, was it really about what triggered us or was it about ourselves? It's not always clearcut, either, but it's a good starting point...