Taki Magazine

Re: Stalking Game

by Evan McLaren on October 22, 2009

I’m glad Kevin used my interview to remark a little on the conceptual tension experienced by young right-wingers.

There are a variety of ways to approach the problem and each yields part of the answer. A traditionalist likely would object to Game the same way he’d object to capitalism—as naked calculation and will to power lacking any moral anchor, and that cannot function as an ultimate standard. The young radical might respond severally:

• It’s a situational problem. Insistence on obeying some sort of strictly Christian morality is a nostalgia-based anachronism. You have to deal with things based on what they are, and since the social setting at present is pervasively anarchic the individual needs the sharpest tools to get by. At the very least it makes sense to talk about that approach.

• As my interviewee pointed out, he and his tribe view Game as a tool and not as an overriding philosophy.

• And of course there’s the long-range right-wing anti-Christian response. Why take everything in the rubric of “traditional Christianity” at face value? At some level Christianity is an imposition on a more original traditional morality and needs to be viewed skeptically, since it, like more full-blown forms of egalitarianism, decorates our real natures with pretty lies.

Whatever the validity of those retorts, the traditionalist is going to look absurd if he strikes an urgent condemnatory posture. What is he doing getting this upset about Game? It’s a piece of jargon to describe an approach that responds to a man’s social condition. Something as goofy and specific as Game didn’t establish that condition—other things did. Traditionalist forces can’t gain real leverage over our social setting, so who can be blamed for attempting to navigate that setting somewhat on its own terms?

There’s something in the traditionalist critique for me, to be sure, but it very much depends on how it’s framed and applied. It loses all of its force when it’s thrown, with the full weight of a Joseph de Maistre, against everything that doesn’t sit right with the fuddy-duddy.

Kevin notes TakiMag’s “vague temperament,” and he’s right—no one here is an unqualified anything, be it a traditionalist Catholic or individualist Nietzschean or racial Darwinian. We can relax since we don’t have to worry about any one editorial line dominating the others and oversimplifying our thought and its outlet.

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