The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of White Identity

From Israel to Trump and beyond.

Via Rua in Ghetto. Ettore Roesler Franz (c. 1880)

The "twelve tribes" were originally a caste system with twelve divisions. The ancient Indo-European concept of "race" was identical to caste, and based on performance, virtue, profession, and lineage as a cosmopolitan attribute. However, the xenophobia exhibited in Deuteronomy, Ezra, and Nehemiah represents a distinct form of "racism" from caste discrimination.

The Israelites have a promised land they are always seeking, which they are expelled forcefully from, which they cling to and wish to return to. By contrast, the Indo-Europeans are always seeking new lands, adventure, and the conquest of foreign vistas. Indo-Europeans have no homeland, no home-coming, no promised land — they are the original globalists, with an out-going spirit. The spirit of the Torah is in-going, attempting to preserve, conserve, hide, and maintain. When Israel was in Egypt, the myth goes, they negotiated for their own ghettoization in the land of Goshen, a small concentrated "pale of settlement" where Israel could remain apart from the Egyptians.

Among the Vedic nobility, mythology dictates that the greatest of men, Arjuna, prophet of God, and Bhima, incarnation of Vayu, force itself, must not only out-marry into other noble lineages, but into other species, such as demons and snake-people. These marriages are blessed by God and produce new breeds and types which become the greatest of heroes and are afforded the most glorious deaths: Ghatotkacha and Iravan.

In medieval Europe, the nobility claimed descent both from the prophet Muhammed and Genghis Khan, because of the practice of intermarriage with Islamic and Ukrainian nobility. Indo-European outmarriage remained discriminatory: sexual intercourse between a noble woman and a peasant would be outrageous.¹ But it was discriminatory on the basis of class, and not on race. By contrast, David, a humble shepherd boy, becomes king of Israel. Joseph, the most hated of his brothers, becomes the chief advisor to the Pharaoh. Within Torah mythology, the first can become last, and the last can become first, but Israel can never be allowed to mix with the nations.

The modern concepts of racism, nationalism, and populism have roots both in an Indo-European, cosmopolitan, qualitative caste system, but also separately in a Biblical "nationalism," where the least and greatest of the Israelites are considered together as a "pure" breeding pool, separate from all others. This second logic, the logic of nationalism, informed the Statutes of Kilkenny and the Welsh Penalties, which sought to entirely segregate all Irish and all Welsh from all English, without respect to class or specific lineage. These laws were poorly enforced, and intermarriage occurred frequently. Despite their failure, they exist as the earliest laws in medieval Europe which can be called "racist." The inquisition, which banned intermarriage between Christians and Conversos on the basis of blood, expanded "racism" from Britain into the Spanish empire, although it was ultimately on a religious basis, whereas in Britain, there was no religious basis for the Statutes of Kilkenny or the Welsh Penalties.

When the Spanish first arrived in South America, one of the first Papal Bulls concerning the new territories allowed for legitimate marriages between Europeans and natives. Despite the efforts of the Catholic church to prevent persecution of the natives and to Christianize them, the conquistadors and plantationists invented a racial caste system which still defines South American politics to this day. Outside of the "eugenic" tradition of aristocracy, and the "national" tradition of the Bible, the Hispanic Casta may have evolved independently and emerged situationally as a system of administration, exploitation, and slavery. One explanation for the Casta system is that it was not a European invention, but an inheritance from the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan empires, which all had their own ancient caste systems, and coincidentally enough, their own mythologies of white skinned, or even blue eyed, or bearded Gods who arrived by sea to conquer and create empires.

Similarly, when Europeans arrived in Africa, there was no European slave trade, despite the wide-spread Islamic enslavement of Europeans over centuries. It was the Africans who enticed and seduced Europeans into adopting slavery, so it may be possible that South Americans introduced the Casta system to Europeans, rather than the other way around. This is not to say that Europeans are somehow historically free of slavery and caste systems as a race. The Viking slave trade was based on the enslavement of Europeans, and selling them in the Middle East.

The Spartans are famous for their treatment of the Helots, but the Athenians owned slaves as well. The Romans owned slaves, and the Laws of Manu created the class of untouchables. Rather, the argument made here is that medieval Christianity was free from slavery as a form of "open" capital, in the same way that it had no "open" market for land. Peasants and land were both tied down to a specific location, a specific lineage, and could not be sold off or transferred easily. At the same time, medieval Christianity had a very strong concept of the "purity of lineage," but this was confined to an aristocratic concept, and never was expanded to the concept of "nation" or "race." Whether or not a medieval peasant was "purely German" or "mixed with the French" was never considered, and the nobility of different nations were allowed to freely intermarry, although some such as the Normans had a particular sense of the uniqueness of their particular lineage.

The evolution being traced here is from a cosmopolitan, eugenic, and class-based concept of breeding, to a modern "racism," in which an African prince marrying a white girl is seen as unholy or impure. Such a proposal is introduced in the American film, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967), where the "taboo" of interracial marriage is juxtaposed with an older morality, that of class-based breeding.

The shift from "inter-class" taboo to "inter-racial" taboo begins with the Norman fusion with English identity toward a colonial subjugation of the Irish and Welsh as nations. It is then infused with both African and South American norms of slavery and caste during the age of exploration.

In South America, the Casta system had numerous exceptions, blends, and never approached anything like a "one drop rule." In Puritan New England, where slavery was banned beginning in 1777, free blacks were allowed to freely participate in society and vote. The first ban on interracial marriage came in 1691 in Maryland, but bans on interracial marriage were only adopted by 38 of the eventual 50 states. Interracial marriage happened frequently between Europeans and natives, and the Louisiana Creole people managed to create new racial identities as a result of intermarriage, despite that state's strong institution of slavery.

Slave owners who impregnated their slaves often favored their children, taught them to read, and freed them. Frederick Douglas was himself the son of a slave owner. Just as Ezra and Nehemiah would rave against the intermarriage of Israel and the nations, there were also preachers in America who would rave against the sin of intermarriage, inventing myths about the "mark of Cain" to provide theological justification for racial discrimination. In appealing to the Bible as a source of justification, American slave owners were returning to an ancient source of "national" racism.

Despite the "return of racism" in the European colonies and newly independent states, class-based discrimination never disappeared. Even at the height of slavery, when slave catchers would cross into the north to kidnap escaped slaves, there was still an extreme boundary of breeding between the "southern aristocracy" and the white working class. Although the north had fewer blacks, this segregation of the "upper crust" and the working class was represented by a system of social barriers to entry. Courtship was limited to a pool of "good families," of "good reputation."

Marriage was strictly controlled by parental approval, and marriage outside of this system would be considered a scandal, and grounds for expulsion from polite society. When Joseph Pulitzer married his wife in 1878, he hid his Jewish ancestry, which shocked the family after it was revealed. However, there were never any American laws prohibiting marriages between Jews and Christians -- this was purely a question of "good lineage," "good families," "Christian character," and so on. In general, American Jews self-segregated from Christians in a mutual fashion, and the lack of Jewish identity on the part of Pulitzer was part of a revolutionary "assimilationist" movement.

With the abolition of slavery in the United States, blacks instantly became voting citizens. This was a watershed movement in the development of "white supremacy." Prior to the Civil War, society could be fairly divided into three sections: the slave owning aristocracy (roughly 20% to 30% of the population, similar to the number of whites with Bachelor's degrees today), the black slave class (sometimes up to 50% of the population) and the white working class (another 20% to 30% of the population). The Civil War was the first time in American history where the government practiced mass civilian conscription. Just as civilian conscription in revolutionary France created a popular conception of the nation, it also created a new-found sense of interdependence and class unity among white Southerners.

With the loss of Southern independence, black voting rights created a Republican political monopoly. To combat this racial block, white Democrats reconceived the Southern social division from a tripartite model, split between aristocrats, slaves, and the white working class, and fashioned a mythology of a race-based binary between blacks and whites. They declared the Democrat party the part of the white man, and the Republican party the party of the black man.

In this new racial myth, even the poor white man was, by allegiance of race, in a common cause with the rich white man, against the black man. The black was also reimagined. During slavery, blacks were depicted as silly, indolent, lazy, subservient, cowardly, comedic, rhythmic, and superstitious. These stereotypes can be seen in Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, and Aunt Jemima. With the fall of the south, a new stereotype emerged of the black as lustful, a rapist, masculine, violent, chaotic, vengeful, criminal, and lawless. The appeal made by rich whites to poor whites is that the blacks would violate white daughters. The plan of salvation was imagined as the Democrat party, which would institute segregation, crush the Republicans, and reinstate white supremacy.

The Birth of Supremacy

White supremacy succeeded as a political platform, combining working class populism and Southern nationalism with the interests of wealthy southern Democrats. This populist tradition gave birth to Huey Long, who declared "every man a king." The rise of the progressive movement in the north paralleled this development from inside of the Republican party, and early progressivism was hyper-racist and favored eugenics. Insofar as "working class populism" can be described as inherently leftist, or at least liberal, then liberalism is the true father of white supremacy. Insofar as progressivism was the champion of eugenics and Nordicism in the 1924 Immigration Act, then progressivism was the mother of Naziism.

These points are being shouted from the rooftops by the likes of Alex Jones, who equates them with ontological evil and the globalists. Despite the fanfare and hysteria, Jones is essentially correct that concepts like "race war" or "white nationalism" have a leftist, liberal, or progressive genealogy. Jones, along with Dinesh D'Souza, proclaims that Democrats are the real racists, and he has a point. Of course, Republicans like Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt were also truly racist, and the partisanship of these arguments is where they cease to be scholarly and begin to be polemical.

Having discovered the origins of modern racism as a "national," populist, liberal or even leftist idea, it then is logical to ask how liberalism and leftism betrayed their racist origins to become champions of anti-racism. Returning to the Norman conquest and Statutes of Kilkenny, an evolutionary theory of sociology dictates that customs, laws, and morality all arise from evolutionary pressures. That is, morality does not mutate arbitrarily, but like an economic market, it responds to incentives.

If a ruling class sees high fertility in its interest, it promotes family values. If it loses this interest because of technological developments, the basis for family values collapses. Family values then persist in an ossified or fossilized form, as an anachronism, in recalcitrant groups like the Amish and religious fundamentalists. These are like the Japanese soldiers who never heard the order for surrender. Or, more tragically, they are like a robot with instructions to make toys, who, even after an apocalypse, continues to make toys for people who no longer exist. Like the original cargo cultists, they are reading a scripture invented by elites, taking it as "the eternal word of God," and regurgitating it uncritically, as most peasant populations have done since the dawn of civilization. Their resistance to modernity is a testament to the staying power of that original "software," and the strong will of previous elites which echoes into the present day.

The Death of Supremacy

White supremacy was useful for the Democrat elite to defeat Republicans, and it was useful for progressive eugenicists. The decline of both of these avenues of usefulness will be explained in two parts.

Firstly, the Democrat party was infiltrated by progressives, imperialists, industrialists, and globalists. These words are not pejoratives, but accurately reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the

genius and president of Harvard, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson and his allies captured the Democrat party away from the particularism of Southern nationalists and made it a vehicle for American involvement in global warfare. This was a first step toward the evolution of the Democrat party away from its southern roots, and given that this was a gradual evolution, there were many aspects of Wilson which fit in with that older conception of white supremacy.

The second step for the Democrat party was the administration of FDR, which was revolutionary for its inclusion of Jewish Americans into its administration. Like Wilson, FDR made the Democrat party a vehicle for war in Europe. Like Wilson, FDR's transition away from white supremacy was not complete, and the military was not desegregated until 1948 with Truman. Just as "family values" limp on like a zombie long after their abandonment by an uncaring elite, in the same way, the Democrat party continued to be associated with Southern identity long after FDR. The next great injury to the Southern identity of the "Dixiecrats" came with the Catholic JFK, whose Catholicism flew in the face of the old KKK (which by that time was a shadow of its former self). Although it was the Republican Eisenhower who deserves credit for first using the military to enforce desegregation, JFK and his brother Robert far outdid Eisenhower. During the Ole Miss riot of 1962, the Kennedy clan deployed a massive 31,000 troops to Mississippi to destroy any hopes of Southern white independence. It was the largest deployment of troops on American soil since the Civil War. In comparison, the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest battle on American soil in history, only deployed 38,000 Confederate troops. The troops outnumbered the riotous students 5 to 1.

Kennedy's betrayal of white supremacy in the south did not totally end Dixiecrat stubbornness, but the solid south was lost when Republican Barry Goldwater declared segregation as an issue for the states, not the federal government. Richard Nixon's southern strategy finally

began to realign the south away from unwinnable third parties and toward a new loyalty to the Republican party.  Still, as recently as 1996, Bill Clinton won the former Confederate states of Tennessee, Louisiana, Florida, and Arkansas. It was only George Bush in 2000, with a massive command of the Evangelical Christian movement, who was finally able to destroy the Democrat Party in the former Confederate states. This 87 year transition, from President Wilson in 1913 to President Bush in 2000, represents the stubbornness with which Democratic white supremacy ingrained itself into the South.

With this process completed, white supremacy is no longer upheld by the Democrat party as a political organ. For Republicans, the situation is more complicated, and looks more like a horseshoe. In the early 20th century, progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt were decidedly eugenicist and Nordicist. The passage of the 1924 Immigration Act was an explicit attempt to maintain America's white, Nordic character. Republican opposition to FDR came from the American isolationists, such as Charles Lindbergh, who had real sympathies for Nazi Germany. It wasn't until the bombing of Pearl Harbor that these Republicans fell in line, or had their free speech removed. After the end of the Second World War, Republicans under Eisenhower enforced desegregation at the point of the gun. As noted, the Democrat party during this time was undergoing its own ideological revolution, and despite many Democratic politicians being strong segregationists, they could not resist the elements in their own party like Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson who were determined to abandon white supremacy.

As southern white supremacists failed to abate the revolution in their own party, northern conservatives in the Republican Party called out Eisenhower as a secret communist. These conservatives were represented by the John Birch Society, who hinted at the Jewish character of communism as the instigators of desegregation. William F. Buckley, an intellectual and FBI agent, was tactfully deployed to cordon off the Birchers from polite Republican society. Buckley's new conservative movement was effective in neutralizing any effect the Birchers or their allies could have on Republican racial policy.

The Rebirth of White Identity

The paradoxical figure who reinserted white racial identity into the political mainstream was Richard Nixon. Nixon was accused by the Birchers as a dupe of an international communist conspiracy because of his efforts to normalize relations with China.²

But Nixon's reaction to the race riots of the 1960s was to dogwhistle to white southerners a codeword they were familiar with, "law and order." The Nixonian tradition of being tough on black crime was almost usurped by Clinton in the 1990s, when he and his wife, alongside other conservative Democrats like Joe Biden, cracked down on "super-predators" and funded the drug war. However, by 2000, a real shift in Democratic leadership occurred where that was no longer possible. With the defeat of Gore and Kerry by Bush, the 2007 Democratic primary became a symbolic event, where Clinton and her legacy of being "tough on crime" was defeated by none other than a young black man. The story of Obama's almost miraculous victory over Clinton is written on the back of the checkbooks of super donors, and their particular or specific motivations are too minute to be included in such a broad historical overview.

The lessons for the Republicans between Nixon and Bush was that, with the Democrat party abandoning white supremacy, a mere dog whistle or "red meat" could be thrown to the abandoned white working class to secure their loyalty. This arrangement was fairly stable until the arrival of Donald Trump. Trump's promises to ban Muslims, build a wall, abolish birthright citizenship, send them back to "shithole countries," and now to stop immigrants from "poisoning our blood," has exceeded the limits of Nixonion dogwhistling. Trump's decision to test the limits of "implicit racism" is not merely a product of his character. In previous bids for the presidency, Trump criticized Buchanan as a Nazi and was best friends with Oprah and the Clintons. What changed?

Leftists view of Trump as a racist old man, or as a racist uncle, someone with a deep sense of unease about non-whites, someone who grew up as a racist and now, after a few beers, his inner racist comes out. This picture is inconsistent with the facts of his early life, which show him as a tolerant, moderate and cosmopolitan billionaire from New York City. Leftists are unwilling to accept the idea that Trump willingly *became* racist, rather than being born this way. This act of *becoming* is not to be confused with "becoming redpilled," or reading crime statistics, or getting mugged by reality, as Ann Coulter would say. Rather, Trump sensed, intuitively or with statistics, that white anxiety in the age of Obama had reached new levels. The defeat of segregationism in the 1960s produced a defeated, suppressed, and muted white population, who bought into the color blind conservatism of Reagan and Bush. The rise of identity politics under Obama, the defeat of law and order with the trial of George Zimmerman and the Ferguson riots, the pushing of diversity, mass immigration, and Islamic terrorism created a fever pitch among voters who previously "dropped out." They were mad as hell, and Trump saw an opportunity to tap into that rage which no other politician would touch for fear of getting burned.

Trump's victory over "conservatism as usual" was seemingly short lived. His administration fought him for four years, and his election appeal in 2020 included Kim Kardashian, prison reform, Kanye West, no border wall, more immigration, low black and Hispanic unemployment, a continued increase in opioid deaths, and an increase in human trafficking. Ironically, Trump's greatest wins in 2020 were among Hispanics, and his greatest losses were among whites. Trump believed that having "touched the stove," he could take his hand off and coast to victory.

White Identity After Trump

The future of white racial identity has been described as "inevitable" by Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk — but far from embracing this reality, they are repulsed by it. It seems as if the far right is attempting to use white identity as a bargaining chip: "give us colorblindness back, or we hit this big red button called white supremacy." It is the America right's "Samson Option," a threat to destroy America with a race war unless their more reasonable demands are satisfied. The problem with this gambit is that for the left, colorblindness is white supremacy, and therefore the bargain is a lose-lose situation. For the left, the only option is the crushing of any resistance to racial equity.

The Republican and Democrat party platforms are not eternal, and neither is race. Races come and go, and white identity is not an eternal law of nature. However, every social system responds to a set of driving incentives which can help us explain the past and predict the future. The leftist drive toward equity has the same moral core as every universalistic morality. It seeks to imperialize, to centralize, to neutralize, and to pacify. This is the role of the Vedic caste system, and its distilled form in Buddhism, of Judaism's unification of twelve tribes, of Christianity and Protestantism, and finally of liberalism and communism. These moral revolutions remove the individual agency and stifle the will of the warrior class in an evolving progression which is today reaching trans-human dimensions. Veganism is making a comeback, as is the ancient practice of eunuchry. International governance which controls and monitors each individual's physical health can be used to control their morality and their beliefs. China's social credit score is a working model for a total global slave system. Contrary to the rage of the right, slavery is the most traditional of all human institutions, and the enslavement of white people has been the prerogative of traditionalist elites since the founding of civilization.

The attempt to use white identity to throw a wrench in this system is similar to appeals to family values, or appeals to Christianity. It is the attempt to use an older software of slavery against a new software of slavery. Can such a strategy succeed?

The fall of the Catholic church in northern Europe is a story of papal overreach, and unwillingness to cooperate and compromise with the centralizing power of the monarchs. Henry VIII was named a defender of the faith for his polemics in favor of Catholicism, and it was not until the denial of a simple divorce request that the church lost its footing in England. Henry's decision was not ideological, but practical. Still, Henry could not have divested from the papacy had there not been over 150 years of reform tradition, going back to Wycliffe's Bible in 1382. This intellectual movement had no power to overthrow the Catholic church without the permission of the monarch, but when it became more convenient for Henry to throw in with the reformers over the papacy, he merely flipped the switch and history was made.

The fear of Trump is a fear of this “flipping the switch. The real question is whether or not white identity in America is akin to the Wycliffean humanism in 16th century England. Does white identity have its own Bible? Its own intellectuals? International allies? It must also be kept in mind that this question is not black and white. When the English Civil War finally kicked off, the opponents of the Catholic Church ranged from moderate Anglicans to radical Levellers, and everything in between. It is possible that a religious revolution in America, South America, or Europe may begin subtly. Henry's reform was never radical, and in his own lifetime he was merely declared the head of "English Catholicism." Even then, Catholicism briefly retook hold of the state until the Glorious Revolution of 1688. History does not always progress uniformly, but historical trends often oscillate between extremes before finally settling on a new status quo. Caesar was assassinated by the senate, and it seemed as if the dreams of a Roman Empire died with him.

Morally, white identity is parochial, populist, vengeful, reactionary, and small-minded. It lacks the vision to imagine a world with genetic engineering, and prefers the social platform of Charles Dickens over any form of aggressive eugenics. The replacement of 90% of the population during the Bell Beaker invasion of Britain shows what history is capable of without nuclear weapons, man-made viruses, or simply turning off the electric grid. If society is to "break" akin to the collapse of the Catholic church in northern Europe, is it more likely to lead to the status quo of 1885, or is it more likely to look like the age of exploration?

To ask the question is to answer it. The schisms of Luther and Calvin set in motion a chain reaction which led to European domination of the globe. If the current religion of equity on the basis of absolute genetic equality is to break down, it will not restore some earlier hobbit-like existence, with white picket fences, apple pie, and baseball, but the moral violence of that act will catapult us into an age of exploration which will dwarf the West Country Men. This exploration may not discover new land, but will discover, as Nietzsche foretold, a new kind of man, a new species of our own creation.

Marx and Engels were correct to see the coming of capitalism as creating winners and losers. The tragedy of The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) was real and horrifying. Men forced off the land and into factories produced the kind of pitiful poverty that inspired Charles Dickens to portray small boys with soup bowls with heart-wrenching sympathy. Marxism, in a great and too-perfect irony, then was employed in Russia to produce even worse human suffering during collectivization. An irony this great is not mere irony. The logic of capitalism, which used the blood, sweat, and tears of the peasantry in the foundry of industrialism, produced a reaction in the form of Marxism, which produced even more radical results, *in the same direction.* In opposition to the trans-human or anti-human revolution promised by genetic engineering, there may be a new Marxism, which declares, "humans of the world unite!" But as seductive as this appeal may seem, the underlying incentive structures may, in a similar perversion to Stalinism, accomplish much of the same under cruel irony.

The Moral Future

Some believe that happiness is the purpose of life, and those who believe in something greater. Those who prefer happiness or contentment will always pine nostalgically for the stability of yesteryear. At the most basic psychological level, nostalgia for the past is always a return to the womb, a time without challenges, a time of safety, a land before time. "Making history" and "making progress" always requires changes, and the sacrifice of things once sacred. This division, between the selfish and egoic clinging to the mother's womb, the safety of the past, and the God-centered love of beauty, of power, the Faustian spirit, is what I call the division between deep right and deep left. Both the champions of equality and the champions of white identity are playing a game they ultimately cannot win. Technology is too radical, too aristocratic, and too eugenic to allow for a return to the womb. We are simply along for the ride. Will you resist it, or embrace it? Is God in the mud, or is he in the stars?

As inevitable as technological progress seems, it is not. The history of agricultural societies in the last 10,000 years is, in most places, remarkably stagnant. Philosophy or freedom of thought is not the natural ally of entrenched powers. Gerontocracy, appeals to norms and ancestors, fear, panic, and superstition are more common than wild curiosity, scientific coldness, bravery and invention. For millennia, human tribes killed each other, almost ritualistically, without ever inventing wheels or the written word.

If there is a general collapse of global supply chains, it seems unlikely that all technological progress would be lost. Just as the Renaissance eventually rediscovered Plato hidden in Arabic translations, whatever technology we lose in a global collapse may eventually be rediscovered. What seems more dangerous is that all technology is siphoned away from genuine invention and directed inwardly toward the last man. The billion dollar healthcare industry is the result of humanity choosing, seemingly, to throw money at diseases of choice or ignorance like diabetes and heart disease instead of going to the stars. As the global population balloons, the lifeblood of human creativity is being sucked up by defective, senile, and selfish ticks. Should we pop the tick?

The metaphor of the tick is apt because it is natural. Or take the mosquito. Blood suckers will suck and suck until, literally, they explode in a shower of blood. They will suck so much that they destroy themselves in the process. This is because parasites have no regulatory mechanism for satiation, they never know when it's enough. They consume until they are physically removed, then they breed and their descendants look for new hosts. It's not the job of a parasite to self-regulate -- it is the job of the host to rip them out.

If the natural world is any example, then out-of-control social decay cannot be self regulated. We cannot expect idealogues, fanatics and moralists to say, "that's quite enough," tip their hat, and be on their way. They will blow up all of our glorious mountains to mine every last drop of lithium, and fill our air with poison in the process, and the fertilizer runoff from feeding 10 billion humans will destroy our oceans, all to make sure that "no child is left behind."

The poisoning of the environment means the destruction of the human genome. If six billion humans died, the survivors could repopulate the earth and life would go on. If our genetic code is destroyed by teratogens produced by industrial waste, then there is no recovery. We will be an entirely different species. Transhumanism is coming, either of the eugenic variety, or of the polluted variety.

In the face of death, the frivolity of life loses significance. Apocalyptic visions create an out of body experience, and the concerns of life seem far away. This sort of "nihilism" is very different from the hedonism of a video game. The gamer might see a brief flash of Lovecraftian horror, shudder, and pop a pill to forget it. There is another kind of "nihilist" who looks it in the face, looks through it, and becomes it.

1. The genre of courtly love, developed first in the 12th century, directly confronted this taboo, pairing knights with princesses.

2. [https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/01/archives/nixon-no-longer-foe-to-birchers-expresident-now-called-a-victim-not.html]