Rebarbarization 2024

Rebarbarization 2024

The world is getting worse. I’d previously believed otherwise, as late as 2018. I’d thought that tolerance and freedom were gaining ground, slowly and steadily. I believed that an understanding of the voluntary society was gaining ground, that people were increasingly coming around to the revelation that freedom is the wellspring of all that is good and human in us. This changed overnight in early 2020, when the Great Panic swept us up in a medievalizing flood. Among us, the barbarians now far outnumber the humans. And when I say barbarian, I’m referring to those among us who have given in to the impulse of aggression, the reversion to a primitive me-vs-you state, the “it’s my way or else” authoritarianism. Our natural, primal state as animals, in other words. The humans are the ones who refused to relinquish the dream of freedom to this prolonged night that was suddenly thrust upon us. The humans saw what was happening, when those around them succumbed to the propaganda surrounding COVID. The change was visible: an almost instantaneous reversion to the beast that we all carry within ourselves.

In that prolonged night when Constitutional rights were erased, a grotesque metamorphosis began. Something like the metamorphosis of a butterfly, but in reverse. This process has not stopped, but seems in some areas to have picked up pace. Far too many of us, especially among the white collar classes, have fully re-barbarized. They have accepted the religion of Coercion, rejected voluntarism, and are restless for the completion of the metamorphosis. They are restless for the return of the State. All-knowing, all-powerful, that monstrous ancient collective organism from our distant past, whose blueprint resides within our DNA. They caught a glimpse of that infernal plane, and they want to return, dragging the rest of us with them.

Our animal nature yearns for the State. Our human nature understands that suppression of this drive is the key to our survival and success as a species. Too many reject their human side, without their even knowing what they’re doing. Drawn inexplicably to rebuild, and then merge with, that totalitarianism. This is what these reborn primitives, these neo-barbarians, seek in 2024. The counterrevolution, the triumph over Heaven, the reversion to sun gods, fire-eating, and human sacrifice. The State as god. High tech, totalitarian oblivion.

Author: S. Smith