What Is America?

How can we undo the devils' bargains our civilization has made (and come to regret)?

Uncle Sam looking in the mirror with a confused look on his face

The other day, I went to a funeral for a good guy who died too young. His was another of those “deaths of despair,” a phenomenon that has become so common in America that it now has its own Wikipedia page. He had a big smile, a hearty laugh, and a gregarious personality. But he also had what one eulogist politely described as “mental health issues.” He had kept his problems to himself, until he lost that ability. He self-medicated, and that worked, for a while. Like the old Guns ‘N Roses song says, he “used to do a little, but a little wouldn’t do it, so the little got more.” You know how that story goes. You’ve probably seen it play out a few times in your own corner of this crazy world. Fortunately for him, he was able to get clean and reorient himself spiritually in a positive direction, but not before doing fatal damage to his vital organs. He died, but at least he died sober and hopeful.

His story is like so many others. What’s wrong? It’s hard to say, hence the vague term “deaths of despair.” The billboards I pass each day on my drive to work are clear signals that our culture is sick: there are endless advertisements for suicide prevention hotlines, addiction-recovery treatment centers, alcohol, weed-adjacent vapes and edibles, pain-treatment centers, debt-relief services, bankruptcy lawyers, divorce lawyers, casinos, online sports betting, gambling addiction hotlines, mental healthcare providers, etc. Like animals in a zoo, we first-world humans live in relative safety and comfort and have plenty of food; on paper we should be doing well, but for some reason, our spirits are withering. Whatever else may be the case, you can be sure that something has gone terribly wrong in a country where “despair” is responsible for millions of deaths.

From what I’ve said so far, you may have made some assumptions about the guy whose funeral I recently attended. The avatar for these deaths of despair has been, ironically (or not so ironically, once you realize how big of a PsyOp the notions of “white privilege” and “male privilege” are), the “privileged” working-class or middle-class white man from flyover country, the kind of heritage American whose ancestors fought this country’s wars and built its institutions from the ground up. That would be a reasonable assumption, but it would be wrong. Here’s the wrinkle, this particular man was a first-generation immigrant; he arrived here as a young man shortly after the U.S.S.R. tapped out and left America as the world’s sole superpower — back when everyone thought History had ended and you could unironically sing about how the future was so bright, we’d have to wear shades.

This isn’t a post about immigration. Although I do think that some small amount of immigration is good — culture can be like genetics, in that you need some cultural cross-pollination in order to prevent inbreeding — our country has gone to the opposite extreme of importing invasive wildlife en masse, with no regard for its effect on the native ecosystem, and that has obviously been catastrophic for us regular people, though of course the powers that be (who conscientiously designed this state of affairs, with malice aforethought) have managed to escape the consequences of their own policies. But once upon a time — and this really wasn’t all that long ago in most parts of America — if you lived around or worked with an immigrant from Asia or Africa or South America, you would have almost always found them to be really great people who took the duties of citizenship very seriously. They worked hard and went the extra mile to make sure they had a positive net impact on their neighborhoods and workplaces. They were grateful to the people who had built this country that had provided them with so much opportunity. They genuinely wanted to be good stewards of those opportunities. They went out of their way to be good neighbors, good coworkers, and good friends. The man whose funeral I attended was that kind of immigrant: he got married and raised his children to become responsible adults, he was involved in various religious and fraternal organizations, he worked hard, and he managed to start a business that had been going well, but like a lot of small-business owners, his livelihood took a big hit during the scamdemic, and I don’t think it ever recovered. Was that what initiated his downward spiral? Maybe. But regardless of what exactly it was that went wrong in his life, you could legitimately say that, for better or worse, he had become as thoroughly American as he could …

Like I said, this is not a post about immigration. I bring up this example because, for me, it highlights the real question: What is America? Although most of the immigrants I know who arrived prior to the year 2000 and who ended up in heartland America are probably, as a demographic, far more prosperous than similarly situated heritage Americans (thereby giving the lie to the leftist claim that America is somehow “white supremacist,” as most of these immigrants were nonwhite), they are not necessarily happier. Many are, but the deceased’s story is definitely not unique.

For example, I am familiar with another man from a traditional culture who came to America around the same time (early 1990s). Although he likely made more money here than he had made back home (with the way currency exchange rates work), the kinds of jobs he was able to get here did not afford anything close to the relative status he’d been able to enjoy back home — he’d gone from big fish in a small pond to being lost at sea in terms of his career. Despite working hard, his wife soon ended up out-earning him, and his kids ended up getting westernized to the point of resenting him and rejecting his traditional values. On paper, the tradeoff no doubt looked good when he was over there, contemplating the glorious possibilities that would await his children in the land of milk and honey, but how devastating that realization must have been to him all those years later, when he realized that the proverbial grass really wasn’t any greener on the other side of the Atlantic, and that his children would probably have respected him and embraced his traditions if he had simply stayed home, which is where he ended up returning anyway, after his wife divorced him. As far as I know, his thoroughly westernized kids still resent him.

All of us, as we age, tend to experience generational divides and a distinctly unsettling sense of future shock, as we find ourselves navigating a culture made foreign by the passage of time.¹ This feeling of future shock has been far worse for immigrants, and the generation gap between immigrants and their American-born children is often insurmountable.

Note: this appears to have changed, as more recent immigrants arriving in heartland America have largely stopped trying to become Americans, and have instead tried to turn America into whatever Third-World shithole they just left. But it was not always like this.

Megha Lillywhite

explains this cultural shift from the perspective of older immigrants in her post about “The Great Pajeet Reckoning.”]

But again, I do not bring this up in order to discuss immigration per se, but rather to ask, what is an American? When we ask immigrants to assimilate, what are we asking them to assimilate into? Who are we hoping that they become? What is the dominant culture, and what should it be?

I remember a church service where a guest preacher, fresh from some overseas missions trip, gave a big sales pitch — I mean, sermon — on what God could do with your money if you donated it to his ministry. Afterwards, I had lunch with some people from church, including a few African immigrants I knew (they had been in America for several decades). The Africans’ perspective on that morning’s guest preacher’s presentation was interesting. “They don’t show you the places where they stay, while they’re over there,” said one man. “People see their slideshow and think they’re living in the bush, but the reality is, they live in nice, big houses and have servants waiting on them. If they showed everyone those pictures, people wouldn’t give so much money to them.”

Another person talked about how, when she went home, she started wondering if the family members (to whom she was sending a large chunk of her American income) weren’t actually doing better than she was. What she meant was, while it was technically true that her family back home were among the “half of all the global population [that] lives on less than $6.85 per day” (according to the benevolent banksters at the World Bank), they still had all their daily needs taken care of, for only $6.85. That might not buy you much in America (although it will pay for more than two months of a paid subscription to this Substack, hint hint 😉), but back home in the rural villages where some of these folks were born, $6.85 a day meant a life of, to quote the Lion King, hakuna matata, or no worries. People owned their homes outright and didn’t pay property taxes. Nobody had any student loans. There may have been far fewer comforts and conveniences available, but those that were available were relatively dirt cheap, compared to American prices, so nobody went into debt to be able to afford them. But more important than that, the rural villages still had intact families and tribal networks. However poor the people technically were, they didn’t have problems with homelessness or drug addiction or mental illness. Nobody died from “despair.”

Given all this, you might wonder why anyone would want to immigrate here, since it sounds like they’d be leaving a Third World Garden of Eden for a First World life of harder work and higher stress. Well, from what I can tell, the cultural dysfunction and corruption are insane in those countries’ cities (of course, that’s become the norm in many Western cities too). That may not matter much to you if you’re content to stay on the farm and subsist on whatever you can grow, because the government will mostly leave you alone (unless you’re a white farmer in South Africa), but … if you want to get educated and enter a profession, you will have to devote a lot of time and resources to navigating your country’s banana-republic-style politics — keeping track of whose ass you need to kiss and whom you have to bribe and who can do you a favor and whose back you need to scratch. Basically, the same kind of cancer that has been corrupting our own clownworld institutions (and which Trump was elected to clean up). And all that time and energy you spend learning how to be politically savvy in dysfunctional institutions governed by legions of petty tyrants mean time and energy that you cannot spend getting competent at whatever your profession actually is. Hence, if you are talented and intelligent and your soul recoils from dishonesty and playing silly political games, you are drawn to go west and seek your fortune in America. Of course, now that the dysfunction and corruption has become endemic in America and across the West, it raises the question: if the West is destroyed, where will the talented and hardworking people of character go to escape the banana-republic insanity?

Anyway, like I said already, I’m not writing this to discuss immigration, but to pose the question about America: what is our culture? Why are things so much more expensive here? Why is our monetary system based on debt and usury? Did we make a deal with a devil and lose something important along the way? I’m not saying that I want to live in rural Africa, but if rural Africans have something that we don’t anymore, but that we used to have not all that long ago, maybe that raises some important questions that we should be trying to answer. It does seem that rural places in general tend to be more spiritually healthy environments for human beings, and our bankster overlords know that, and so they have funneled opioids and planeloads of locust-like Somalis and Haitians and other manmade disasters towards small town America in order to make sure everything is ruined for everyone.

I used to work in a restaurant in the downtown of a small southern city, and each summer, we would get an influx of temporary workers from Eastern Europe. I don’t know who organized this program, but somehow all of these college students from the former Second World would come over to America to work for the summer, in order to make enough money to pay for their living expenses for the rest of the year back home. (Boy, if only they had programs like that in America for American students!) Obviously, their costs of living back home were far lower than our cost of living in America. Anyway, I would ask them about their perceptions of America and any culture shock they experienced. I asked one guy, who I believe was from Serbia, what was the biggest cultural difference he noted. He said that it was the way we ate food. Not, mind you, just the food itself, which was also much different, but rather the way we ate. He said that back home, meals were always a social event, and that people stopped whatever else they were doing and came together to enjoy the food and the fellowship. In America, on the other hand, people just ate hurriedly, often on the go and usually alone. That observation really stuck with me, and I’ve noticed since then that the immigrants I know do tend to place a higher emphasis on meals as a social event. America is the country that created fast food and factory farming. We’re better at producing massive quantities of calories than any other civilization in recorded history. But we typically consume those meals alone and in a state of distraction and hurry. Maybe Americans are less likely to starve than Eastern Europeans, but for all our material abundance, we have become spiritually malnourished.

Lately, the “dissident Right” has, like all such ad hoc coalitions, been comprised of some very strange political bedfellows. We’ve all seen the lies and con-artistry of the regime and rejected it, though this has obviously been for different reasons. Take the clownworld Bolshevism of the Obama/Biden era as the bogeyman that we were united in opposition against. Okay, great, we don’t want that. But what do we want?

Two negatives may equal a positive in mathematics, but not when it comes to building a healthy civilization or cultivating a rewarding life. It’s not enough just to say what’s wrong; you have to make a positive declaration about what’s right. (And here I am, coming back, 120 years later, to the challenge issued by G.K. Chesterton and the inspiration for much of his writing, as he attempted to answer it.)

There are many on the Right who act as if all we have to do is return (sorry, “RETVRN”) to the 1980s or the 1950s or the 1800s . . . but the America of those bygone eras was already on her way to becoming a 21st Century globalist dystopia. It seems the devil’s bargain was made longer ago, and on a more fundamental level, than that.

You are no doubt familiar with the Hegelian dialectic and the way it has been used by the powers that be to socially engineer the meta-narrative about our cultural evolution. It’s like a “magicians’ choice,” where we are presented a series of false binaries in order to steer us towards predetermined outcomes, while preserving the illusion these outcomes were the results of our own voluntarily choices. And so we get the false dichotomies of Capitalism vs Communism, of white nationalism vs DIEversity, of Bolshevism vs Zionism, etc. But there is a thread which runs through and ties all of these disparate ideologies and social causes together, and when you step back from it all and put it all into perspective, that thread that runs through all those competing ideologies starts to look like a leash wrapped tightly around the neck of the human spirit, or like a web of puppet strings that control the movement of our public officials.

The stories of immigrant families (at least the ones from decades ago who legitimately tried to become Americans) provide examples, on a smaller scale, of the kind of trade-offs and deals with the devil that our entire civilization seems to have made. I’ve spent a lot of time puzzling over the opening chapters of Genesis — the stories of Adam and Eve² and of Cain and Abel are endlessly fascinating and fraught with meaning on many levels — and in some way, they refer to the dynamic to which I’m referring. On the one hand, you have a staid and boring lifestyle in a traditional culture, with close-knit networks of kith and kin. This seems to be the lifestyle that most closely and fully accords with our human Nature. On the other hand, you have the promises and potential of modernity, and although this lifestyle leads to ever more artificiality and alienation from ourselves and each other, in other ways it very much does accord with some important aspects of our human Nature too. We are curious and inventive. We long to know what the forbidden fruit tastes like, and what the world looks like after you’ve tasted it. But the paradox is, whether you stay in the Garden of Eden or whether you taste the fruit and get kicked out, you wind up in the same place: a world where creativity and curiosity are stifled.

I don’t have the answer, but I think writers like G.K. Chesterton managed to create openings between our world and higher realities, such that by reading them, you can get a sense for the Truths that should be our guiding stars. For example, his Distributism cuts straight through the false dilemma of Communism vs Capitalism, which amounts to a magicians choice that leads inevitably towards greater centralization of power and profit in the hands of the elite. Under Communism, a few political elite control the economy for their own benefit, and under Capitalism, a few economic elite control the politics for their own benefit. Under either system, the regular people end up owning nothing and being ordered to be happy about it. But Distributism celebrates private property as an essential good and says that this good should be distributed as widely as possible. Concentrations of power and wealth lead to all kinds of evil, so preventing them from forming, or breaking them up once they have formed, should be done whenever possible. People need skin in the game, and economic freedom is a necessary condition for political freedom to exist. In order for people to have skin in the game and to enjoy economic freedom, they have to own property — and not just a suburban home with a 30-year mortgage and all kinds of restrictive covenants and zoning laws, but they need to own productive property that allows them to earn a livelihood. That is the ideal. Of course, like all ideals, it can never be fully realized, but if we stray too far from it, we and our civilization will suffer mightily for it.

I plan to reread Chesterton’s masterwork, The Everlasting Man, in the near future. I have struggled lately with some of the theological and historical underpinnings of traditional Christianity — and probably this is due to the deceptive nature of the “Judeo-Christian” PsyOp that has subverted our understanding of Christianity. I am leaning heavily towards Marcionism now, as I think Christ and Yahweh refer to beings as different as the Sun and the Moon, but like a lot of things, I could be wrong. But when it comes to Christ, there really is something different there, and there are profoundly true and beautiful elements of Christianity that simply do not correspond to any other religious tradition.³ Many of these things are paradoxes that some traditions capture one-side of, while mostly missing the other side, but somehow, when you get to the core of Christianity, you find the two sides of these paradoxes apparently balanced in impossible ways. An example of this is how, on the one hand, you have to have a higher standard to which you hold yourself and others, and you have to be relentlessly honest about it whenever that mark is missed. On the other hand, you absolutely have to give grace to people, including yourself, because everyone misses that mark sometimes. And this combination of maintaining high standards and giving grace presents a paradox. People on the Left usually give grace by eliminating standards. People on the Right eliminate grace in order to uphold standards. Neither can really work for long (although short-term, the sacrifice of grace for keeping standards high can lead to impressive profits and prosperity). Christ (though not “churchianity”) manages to convey a glimmer of light from a higher Reality wherein both higher standards and grace are maintained in perfect harmony.

I don’t understand that higher Reality at all, but I do know it’s more real than the problems we face in our world. I also know that our world’s problems are reaching a breaking point, and there is no merely political solution for them. These problem go a lot deeper spiritually, and go back a lot farther historically, than most of us are willing to admit. I also know that when people are so out of options that they finally acknowledge their own bankruptcy, God shows up in some surprising and transformative ways. But then again, I also know that sometimes, as with the man whose funeral I recently attended, that doesn’t happen until people are practically on their deathbed. But then, that’s the thing: I believe that you can still be legitimately optimistic,⁴ even on your deathbed.

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