"Techno-Materialism as a Drowning Pool"

This is something thoughtful people have considered for a long time. There is such as thing as life being too easy, i.e., having no meaning for purpose to it. As an example, teenagers are notorious for being bored.

You can't get meaning or purpose from what the author calls "techno-materialism." Meaning, purpose, feeling alive - nope.

It's not just techno-materialism. It's the expansion of the State, although the State uses techno-materialism to oppress people. Even if it's not intended.

Speaking of being a teenager, I can clearly remember being bored, especially in high school. I felt like a cog in a machine, even with all the technological advances. Weekends were a different story, though.

My friends and I used to go camping a lot on the weekends. Why? It was a bit of a struggle, yet fun. But now, kids seem to do little more than play video games. This can't be a good thing.

When I was in college one male student just disappeared. There was an article in the newspaper about it. Soon it turned out he had run off and joined the Marines. I knew why he had done it. He wanted a challenge, which these days is hard to find. Even the intellectual aren't being challenged in college anymore, not with all the soft leftism.

Used to be society had rites of passage for boys, at the age of 12, in which they suffered and were introduced to the world of men - and away from the mother (which is what feminism is). And we are paying and paying for this lack.

This article was written by Mark Citadel and is from Social Matter.

Off the back of Reed Perry’s article ‘declension of the rich‘, I had that old Reactionary adage running through my head, “technological advances mask societal decay”. What does this actually mean?

To expand, this adage is to say that people will be unawares of deep structural problems in their society, even as said problems metastasize to a choking largess, because they will be according undue praise to technological advancement as a measure of civilizational success. In other words, similar to how it is prophesied in the Hindu Doctrine of the Ages that the measure of men will become their wealth, the measure of the society at large will be its level of technological development.

During the Cold War, a distinction was made to divide the world into three camps.

1. First World countries: aligned with the United States and participant in capitalist economic structure

2, Second World countries: aligned with the Soviet Union and participant in communist economic structure

3, Third World countries: non-aligned typically adhering to what were perceived as lower, undeveloped forms of economic structure

Not many people actually know this is the origin of the ‘World’ classifications for countries, mainly because it has little relevance in the post-Cold War era. However, the terms remain in popular usage, particularly ‘third world’, which has simply come to describe any country that has lower levels of technological development. For example, Laos would typically be described as a ‘third world’ country, despite the fact that it has been second world since 1975. It’s one of the few states to remain (albeit as more of a title than anything else) a declared communist, and therefore second world country.

Increasingly, this is the metric for how functional and healthy a given society is. So it makes sense that if a country is experiencing greater technological advancements, this will overshadow any other problems that might previously have been recognized and addressed. So long as we’re not scraping in the dirt like those poor brown people, then our society must be a success with a positive trajectory going forward.

This is fundamentally wrong. The technological advancement of any society, beyond a certain point, is completely irrelevant to that society’s health, and to the degree that it does have an impact, it is that untempered it is a decay accelerant.

When all of man’s ills and petty desires can be cured and secured with the push of a button, the flick of a switch, or the swipe of a screen, he ceases to be engaged in any kind of struggle. Struggle is an essential part of manhood in particular and so without it, you end up with varying degrees of feminization amongst men. Why be an ascetic when you can just watch Deepak Chopra on DVD? Why be a hero when you can just play on the joystick with a predator drone? With no counter or substitute to the paths that led man to his true virility in these dual qualities, he simply doesn’t achieve them. The level to which he fails is largely determined by his socioeconomic status, with the faux Modern elite proving the best example of full wussification. In his article, Perry points out the popularity of sodomy and other sexual deviancies in the upper echelons of our society. This is a marker of the declining health of what was already an illegitimate aristocracy.

The more man is provided for not by his labors, duties, and a spiritual/mental sustenance, but by technological comfort, the more he comes to attach the meaning in his life to this telluric source, the material wealth that he can accrue. This does not only become the means by which he lives his life, it becomes his life in and of itself. We see a very direct warning of this in Scripture.

“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.”
– John 2:15-17

In the book by Marty Glass ‘Yuga: An Anatomy of Our Fate‘, the Hindu Doctrine of the Ages is examined, and the following is said about the Dark Age that we currently reside in.

“In the Kali-Yuga we ‘get the job done’, as never before; but ‘we’ are machinery, ‘Technique’, and a machinery has nothing to say about itself, because there’s no one left to know anything and to know: there’s no one there, it’s dead. Titanic, inexhaustible, ceaselessly moving, shaping, tearing down, building up, creating and achieving. But nobody’s home. In more than one sense.”

The soul of man is entirely absent in this age, as is any connection to its origin in the Divine Realm prior to man’s Fall. The society is now enthralled to “the world” and as such reaps the consequences with eyes wide shut.

Alas, the elite caste in any given hierarchy face the same peril. They must parry the fancies of the flesh lest they be consumed by materialism and the dedication to the finite rather than the infinite. If there be three divisions of the elite caste, then they must employ methods of combating the telluric urge, even in the face of great technological prowess.

1. The priestly class must suffer the grueling trial of the ascetic life, drained by a zealous commitment to the Divine forces that they mediate to on behalf of man. They must be forever aware of their subordination to higher realms of being.

(Undermined in our age by ‘health and wealth’ spirituality focused on the success of man rather than giving glory to God. Our priests, by in large, do not fulfill the Traditional priestly role and not only in the political sense of that role)

2. The warrior class must have an eternal heroic character, tested by external threats and the constant critical eye of the aristocratic class as well as the pressures of strict masculine meritocracy.

(Undermined in our age by the creep of affirmative action in the military, and the mechanization of war which first turned conflicts into an apocalyptic battle against crude machines where the gladiatorial heroism of the past was destroyed, and then later managed to turn the art of war into a video game in which the warrior became totally detached from combat)

3. The aristocratic class has the hardest trial of all. Lacking the inherent ascetic and heroic virtues of the roles given to priest and warrior, yet with the grave responsibility of high governance, these men are at the greatest risk of corruption by the materialist strain. This can be combated through intermingling with the warrior class, high sport and hunting traditions, as well as the universal rejuvenation brought through the ‘great threat’, whether imagined or real.

(Literally everything undermines this class in our age, in fact its safe to say this class doesn’t exist. It has been usurped and replaced with demotic powers (politicians) and a depraved artistic elite represented by the modern celebrity)

I challenge the notion that atheism leads to materialism in a society, rather I think materialism leads to atheism instead, in addition to other societally degenerative tendencies which unfortunately rot the head of the fish (the elite) first. The greater we become technologically, the more incapable we are of seeing the problems that surround us. First man becomes blind to the spiritual world, ceasing to harness its power against chaotic forces, and then he becomes blind even to common sense. Obviously terrible things are allowed to occur in the name of progress, because technology has become our metric, our material well-being the be all and end all, and it will indeed end all.

In becoming a society centered around the merely physical virtues of techno-materialism, man has ceased to struggle in almost every aspect of his existence. He has plunged himself into a drowning pool thats warm waters provide the comfort that his aching limbs and mind crave, it is in essence a return to the safety of the womb with these liquid confines bearing the hallmarks of the usurping feminine principle, but water is water and we are no longer unborn. Unless we somehow manage to surface, such depths will be the death of us.