There is hidden wisdom in how you build. Materials set the spirit of a place. Wood will always bend to the air, dry or moist. Stone will always be stained with what waters it is in-rusty red, creamy salts, etc. Glass always reflects the soul of the inhabitants, so keep it clean or it will reveal your lethargy. Pay close attention to materials, and they will speak to you the stories of their standing.
Have you ever wondered why Babel was built with bricks? Bricks are not a stone. They are cast in a mold, and baked with trial to conform to a shape. Babel’s bricks, therefore, were like its people: Indoctrinated to conform to a caste. Broken bricks are destroyed, not repaired. Their remains pulverized to make new bricks. For useful purposes, let us imagine brick and baker of bricks, are one. Watch closely where we go.
“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward they found a plain in Shinar[b] and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.””
-Genesis 11:1-4
If language were a form, all bricks speak one tongue. Babel did too, before it was bamboozled. Language is form. It is an architecture. And Babel was mighty in her glory. Mightier in her calls for unity upon the whole world. She wasn’t called Babel in those days, of course. We don’t know her name, but she was founded by Nimrod, so let us call it Nimropolis.
Imagine Nimropolis, all made in brick. All the people spoke the same, they built the same, and they all kept progressing, all the same. All united for this march to the stars. Truly, a progressive utopia, other than the lack of diversity. Not a soul of the city would have fathomed a fall was coming. Not a soul could imagine the bricks might crack, nor that the tower’s progress might stop. Progress itself was a god for them. And the ever growing city’s breadth, and the tower’s ever growing height, flowed directly from the forces of Unity, Progress, and Glory for all mankind. Charming…
But then the Lord determined it ought not be. In an instant, the people were scattered. We do not know what became of the tower, weather it was toppled or abandoned. What is said is that progress was halted and the people’s tongues were confused. Like bricks that fractured, the form of their language became irregular and diverse. And so, the people went their way, presumably united by what tongue they received.
Did you know the Lord never builds with bricks? Search the scriptures, and you will see. He only builds with stones. The whole of Solomon’s temple was cut stone and wood. Not a single brick used. If you see bricks at the mount today, you will be unsurprised to find they date to the Roman Temple built over Solomon’s. And yes, many a foolish man have bowed before the temple mount and kissed the bricks, not recognizing they kissed a pagan temple instead of Solomon’s. A pity.
But I digress-The Lord prefers stones. The Temple of living stones that Jesus is the cornerstone for, has not a single brick. Solomon’s temple has no bricks. In general, Bricks are a sign of moral decay…
So why stones?
Consider the stonemason. He has great skill, but he is also very limited. He cannot simply take a stone and place it, moving to the next. He must think in many dimensions. In the first dimension, he must consider the center of gravity for a stone. He will pick it up and feel it. He will judge it. Then to the second dimension, he must consider the course the stones will take. Straight and tall for a building wall, curved for a short field wall, etc etc. In the third dimension, he must consider the shape. He must work the stone. Sometimes he must chisel a troublesome part off. Sometimes he must add some mortar to compensate for a broken part. In the fourth dimension, he must consider how the stone will treat its neighbors. How will it expand or contract in the seasons? Will water set in and crack it? Will it sheer from the dirt and threaten the whole wall?
Contrary to all this, what is the lot of a brick layer? He picks up what’s provided for him, he lays it on the line made for him. He adds mortar given to him. He thinks little, does much, and goes home to drink. (In fact, Egypt used beer as one of the first forms of currency!)
For all these qualia, Stone proves a good analogy for God building his people into a structure. Both the individual stone, and it’s relationship to the structure, require an intimate specialty of the Stonemason’s judgement and parenting. God is our Stonemason, not our bricklayer.
B R I C K ◦ C A T H E D R A L S
Those familiar to reactionary thought will know of Moldbug’s Cathedral, that popular social model going around these days to describe emergent properties of our humble ruling class. If you are not, it is a general outline on the media-university priestly caste and how it operates the mechanism of statecraft upon our pitiful souls. I will not go much into it here, but now you know enough to google it yourself.
I am not a fan of Moldbug’s Cathedral. However, I do find Mr Yarvin’s descriptions of elites accurate, albeit a repeat of older works remade for modern parlance. The issue is that a Cathedral is inherently hierarchical. It brings to mind images of popes and bishops and The Great Chain of Being. In reality, nothing of the sort exists in the contemporary structure of society. CEOs and Priests are torn down from their lofty positions of power all the time, especially for not rendering the correct verbiage - and in some cases, the correct pronoun-iage. In any other setting if I spoke vaguely to you about a class of people who became upset if you didn’t greet them correctly, or who demanded special facilities or surgeries, who faced regular insults from the plebs… well you’d likely assume I was speaking of late 18th century French nobility, not the Rainbow nation protected class today. But fret not. I am not an -ism or a -phobic. Christians having hissy fits over this are to be ridiculed. They go on and on ad infinitum about it being a sign of the end of days. Get real, I say. Nobility castes always demands this special treatment. That Moldbug’s Cathedral props these up instead of others is inconsequential. The curious thing is how they got there in the first place, not why they ask to be treated as such. That this noblex demands it is not surprising at all. Complaining about it is a distraction. Ask yourself, instead, how they got the right to ask it at all. There you will find a secret…
Something different is happening now that clearly isn’t appropriate to call a Cathedral. What is happening in hierarchy is something akin to the introduction of gunpowder. Prior, all war was all about strength and training, up until the day a peasant with a Arquebus could down an elite warrior with the flick of a flint and claim his estate. Suddenly, the walls of Constantinople were little more than speed bumps for those with canons. Today a degree, business, or generational wealth are little more than speed bumps for the Xers with a prt scr button. The managers of companies give power to them to judge as their equal. Curious. This is equality, by no mistakes or misgivings. This is the product of equality. And the Bricks are more aware than ever that they are all equal. Lord save the ones with a defect.
Liberty is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different.
-Nicolás Gómez Dávila
If something akin to a Cathedral exists, it has been toppled by this Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel is much older than Moldbug’s Cathedral. Much older, and much wiser. It has far more stable power and far more subversive abilities. It’s subverted whole cities. What’s a single cathedral to it? It was inevitable that all the wealth and power of the Cathedral would attract that floating monolith seeking a new host to suck dry. In trying to maintain its power, its stale old boomerpriest got desperate. It started conforming to the Tower’s influences and desires. It soon deemed the heretics of its youth, from a very not long ago era, to now be a legitimate holy order that will inherent its nobility-true equality that the tower demands, in exchange for its power. Now, the Cathedral is being remodeled into perfectly equal bricks. They must speak the same, act the same, and conform to their idea of truthiness. Every pleb is a private inquisition. Every man a pope. But also a heretic.
None of this is new. Rather, it was predicted by none-other than the conservative’s beloved buddy socialist, George Orwell. Long before he wrote 1984, he made a curious observation in 1945:
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
-Notes on Nationalism
Here Orwell notes a curious behavior within the Cathedral that even in WW2 was beginning to manifest: Every brick has its voice, yet every brick speaks a self-curse. Where does this behavior come from? I’ll save that for another piece. But suffice to say, it benefits power if the Bricks don’t think there is power within. I suppose there is some amusement here. To the mind of the boomerpriest, when the colours of the rainbow unite, it’s treated as if it were a straight white line. Ironic. Though, we’ll see if that holds true when the majority are no longer Straight White Anglos under this thinking. Moldbug’s Cathedral is useful, then, as a model of what was. Not for what is. And what will come in its wake, terrified Orwell enough to write 1984 three years later. Here, one finds a shadow in his future work. “Anglophobia is always liable to reversal.”
I wish to say American Puritanism is in many ways akin to this. AP is - we’ll abbreviate - how the Tower topples Cathedrals. Everyone Stone in the Cathedral wants to be as high and pure and conformist as where the Tower’s heading. But it’s curious. The harder they try, the more they get crushed-presumably to make more bricks. There are many delusions found in this, and one is liable to be called an -ism or an -ist. But history exposes this. Temperance movements made more people drunks than before. D.A.R.E. got people hooked on pot. Anti-piracy campaigns made more people sing Yo-ho. Why shouldn’t I assume anti-racist teaching will create more racists? That’s a controversial statement. But is it? It’s strange how criticizing a good goal gets assumed into being against the good goal. I am not against erasing racism. I’m against AP. AP has never made things better. AP can only consume people with a good desire and turn them into bad desires.
I don’t pretend to understand the psychology here. Really, it makes no sense if I’m being honest. But it seems that whenever these great purity pushes occur, they cause a push-back against them that are greater. And I believe, this is how the Tower topples Pure Cathedrals. I believe that the heat of raw power within the Tower wants these movements, both right and left, as distractions from its power. It will willingly draw your attention to them instead of itself-ripping a cathedral into shards.
Yarvin wrote over a decade ago, when the boomer priesthood was consolidating the tenuous power brokerage of university and media elites. Professors with Projectors, one might say. Big PP?. But today, we see those same boomerpriests falling to the legitimized heretics they’ve brought it. The old professors are being canceled. The Old mediamen are metoo’d. Rightly so! Be honest, right wing. You’re just jealous your real balls weren’t as big as Xer’s implants to do it yourself. (As I’m sure they hate January 6th because they wanted Bastille day to be from the left) Well, don’t hate the player for beating your game. Instead relax! Enjoy the fall of the boomerpriest. If they were desperate enough to cling to their priesthood that they would legitimize the very people they oppressed, it’s of no consequence to you to watch the heretics replace them. Let them! Now everyone is asking the important questions. How can these be the priests if they are so desperate? How can this be the chapel if it is so fragile? Look at all the people! They all hold the power. We’ll call them Small PP, Pedestrians with (smart)Phones.
In some ways, Small PP resolves the problems with how Big PP can exist if all bricks are equal. We would want to imagine them as big bricks or foundations or some other structure holding everything up. Instead we see now that Big PP is the internal Bricks that house the heat of raw power. Small PP are the external bricks - The façade. They take the beatings and weathering. They get replaced regularly: Democrats or Republicans, Whigs or Tories, gays or straights - Who cares? But BigPP? When they get damaged, everyone notices. Everyone is noticing. Everyone notices a chipped brick you walk by every day. Few will notice a chipped brick 20’ above ground level. Besides, they all look the same that far away. So here, we may find something of a ruleset that governs our tower as it consumes Moldbug’s Cathedral:
2 // All the Bricks of Babel are equal.
3 // But some get to be a fireplace for Power.
4 // The Façade is disposable.
If you’re wondering why there’s no 1, be patient.
“Instead of looking for explanations for the fact of inequality, anthropologists should look for the explanation for the notion of equality.”
-Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Equality is a fascinating delusion. We put it in our constitution - “All men are created equal”- despite some being born without limbs. The statement in and of itself is clearly a lie. So it must be read as a stated desire, not a stated fact. As a desire - a mutual delusion which denies reality - Equality is useful. It is strange, is it not? By inventing this denial of our human diversity, we created a more enjoyable society where everyone was treated the same in the law. All people should be equal under the law, no? If you were a juror on a case, let’s say one where a Billionaire robbed millions, you’d probably be pretty eager to shout guilty, wouldn’t you? We can agree there. Especially if he was a political donor to your enemies, I imagine. Now, let’s say you were a juror on a case where a pennyaire robbed a dollar from the Billionaire. Oh dear. Did you feel it? Sympathy for the little guy punching up? Well, maybe you aren’t so for equality after all. I’m not. This example serves to reveal a slight contradiction in equality.
There are many holes in the poor quality tapestry we call the Enlightenment. People don’t really want equality. No one wants to be equal to a leper. They want to be equal to a chad. Here then, is another rule that governs the tower:
5 // Equality only looks up
Every Brick in the tower has a notion of equality, but it’s one direction: UP. It’s not really equality if everyone’s looking up. It’s something else we like to call equality. For towers and pyramids, true equality would be a floor. Perhaps, even a basement floor. Not a ceiling or a roof. When we talk of equality, we never pick the average of the maximum and the minimum, nor do we pick the lowest common denominator. We pick the best possible place we can see. We never think who or what will keep us up in our lofty notions of equality. We handwave terms like “automation” and “progress!”. Equality is only ever for you, for the purposes of being made equal to them, without any consideration of what’s keeping you up there.
Here in lies the delusion of the Tower of Babel: equality. Everyone wants to be equal to heaven, no one grasps the labour to get you there. If heaven is too high, people will water it down to look more like them. If they want to be high, they will conscript others to keep them up without looking down at how unequal things are. And note that the Scriptures only say they ceased building the city, not the tower. The tower still stands, as a Monolith. Think 2001 Monolith. Floating, seeking new fools to build cities to make it higher. It’s still looking for a city to finish it. It needs a population gullible to believe they can be made equal to the tower, who in turn believes it can be made equal to God. In reality, the tower wants to get as far away from the city as it can. Why else does it only build up? The city gets wide for those they need to get up. The city wants to be the tower, the tower wants to be God. Equality? No. The first Pyramid Scheme!
C R A C K S ◦ I N ◦ T H E ◦ M O N O L I T H
The original people of Babel were doing very well for themselves until God showed up. They had a great thing going - at least for the observation deck. Language, it seems, was the crack in the tower that brought it all down. Once God introduced that, the bit-rate of construction orders went to 0. The ability to organize labour died. Weep for Babel’s architects, for they were the first to issue change orders.
However, there is in this a promise from God. For, as said, the Bible only says the city was no longer built. Who knows what became of the tower, but I’m going to argue now, that the tower still stands. And God’s promise to confuse all those who try to build it, too, still stands. Indeed it ever stands, and regularly the Architect of architects issues his stop orders to the rebellious contractors.
What is a crack in the tower? How does God go about creating one? Throughout history, the Tower’s Façade has fractured. We might count the most recent exposure to be the collapse of US interventionism. I actually suspect we will not see a US war for a generation now. How could anyone tolerate another war in the state we are in? The era of the US walking in with its military and toppling regimes has come to a close. Some might call this Trump’s doing, but I recall Michael McFaul’s Seven rules for regime change written while he was Obama’s ambassador to Russia:
Permit a State to become semi-autocratic, not fully autocratic
Put forth an unpopular candidate
Organize a united opposition to the candidate
Allow a regime to conduct election fraud, document it but do not intervene.
Leak it to the public through NGOs and opposition groups.
Fund various opposition groups and through backchannels, unite them.
Find sympathy from the regime’s members, have them lead the opposition.
By following these seven steps, any Cathedral can be toppled within one election cycle. You can even note Trump must have ben aware of these seven steps. He clearly tried to do them! These were written in 2012, long before Trump was even getting ready to run. He certainly got damn close to succeeding.
But Trump did not end US interventionism, he simply entered into an era when it had become obsolete. It was Michael McFaul’s work that exposed the inner bricks and collapsed the military-industrial part of the façade. Since those days, the military has been totally submissive to the US regime. All the hopes and dreams certain groups had that a general or officer would come into the sway and end the Republic were the delusions of someone a few years too late. That era had already ended by Trump’s time, and those outer bricks had become replaced.
Today, the outer bricks are not the Military Industrial Complex. They are the NGOs, the Social engineers, and the diplomatic channels the US conducts soft power through. Perhaps I lied when I said the era of US interventionism has ended. Rather, the era of it being conducted with tanks, had given way to the era of conducting it by banks.
None the less, who can deny the erratic nature of the US regime in recent years? This is a genuine mystery I have not yet figured out. Most of the regime was displeased by Trump’s victory in 2016, yet they tolerated it initially. The footage of Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump eating dinner together at the Al Smith charity event stands in strong contrast to the rapid unraveling of politics in the past two years or so. What happened? This is a genuine question. I do not know what happened. Something happened around the year 2018 that made the Tower act as if it had been exposed, and yet I cannot recall any profound moment of exposure. So I have to ask again, what happened? Trump doesn’t even seem to know. He trodded along golfing and shitting away his presidency, never ending Big Tech’s censorship, never helping Republicans nor Democrats in their various causes…nothing at all. He was completely useless for those two years from 2018 through 2020. Other than a few hand waves and gestures, I simply do not understand what happened to shift things into panic mode. A panic which remains to this day with thousands of national guardsmen guarding the capitol be cause a few drunken peasants took a shit in the temple of democracy.
None of this would makes sense on the outside. But when you consider how nearly-perfect Trump orchestrated Michael McFaul’s Seven Rules, one might begin to gain some sense as to why they freaked out: They knew these rules too, and they feared he might succeed. This is merely speculation on my part. I genuinely have no idea why they are freaking out. But I don’t have to. That they are is the reality we live within, and it’s worth speculating previous acts of the Tower when it was similarly exposed.
One might say Language was the first crack the Tower experienced. These bricks were organized under the myth of unity that Babel told itself. When it was exposed, the whole façade came down and exposed the inner bricks and their desire to use the people to get up to heaven. Their distaste for nature and its weathering seasons gave the tower it’s first pain. We can assume here one feature of the Tower. THE rule, if you will. A first rule, guarded above all other rules, learned early to man in the streets of Babel:
1 // The Tower fears nakedness
Now, for a final note, I have a conundrum. One which I would love to hear your thoughts on. Because there is one more rule to know in this first opening meditation on the Tower:
6 // The Monolith is a Lie
I use the term monolith through this. But Babel’s tower is neither a mono nor a lith. It is a Multi-Fictio. That the word for brick and fiction has the same root in Latin, I assure you, is just a coincidence. But a damn wonderful one. In reality, the Multifictio merely imitates the Monolith of God’s Cornerstone. The best it can hope for, is the finest mortar man can find, holding the best precision cut bricks, constructed just perfectly to imitate the Monolith. The many generational fictions that make up the brick’s mortar will always come into conflict, however. God promises to crack the tower, and God always does. Now let us explore the crack that’s forming.
In ordinary conditions, the inner bricks which house that fire of raw power might be thought of as the elite in any society. As generations come and go, the inner bricks are replaced with outer bricks who get the privilege of being warmed, and new bricks are inserted below for new generations of both the inner and outer bricks. A nice analogy of the classes. One might envision the Theseun nature of this tower, much like the ship, is gradually replaced. But I propose to envision this as a tower which is built from the bottom rather than the top. Bricks are squeezed into the layers below, pushing the last generation up. If you’ve ever played Sim City 4, you might recall the peculiar animation of new construction that displays this. Over time, the tower rises. The fire of Raw Power comes ever closer to heaven. God usually intervenes to prevent this.
In ordinary circumstances…
We are not in ordinary circumstances.
The Boomerbrick fears death above all else. As a brick, their fear of death contrasts the raw nihilism of their fore-bearers and their offspring. It explains much of what they do, such as sucking dry the wealth of other bricks to keep their flagellating structure going for just one more year (Read: “My pension!”). The Boomerbrick lasts long - in fact it’s lasted longer than any other brick thus far. Too long. The lower bricks have started to pile up, without much room to squeeze in. The upper bricks have started being tossed into the fire to keep them warm. A peculiar relationship exists with the boomerbrick’s inner and outer constructs: They keep each other warm, but no one else. The Theseun nature of the tower has now gone from going up, to forming something akin to a giant torus wrapping into itself.
This massive pulling and inverting is the Tower’s current crack. The consequences of this inversion should be meditated upon. The Boomerbrick is still human. They will still die within the next 30 years. But what does 30 years under a parasite do? As a brick, they all speak the same language of this fear. They manipulate laws to keep their place on the façade longer than they ought. They manipulate nations to find cheaper bricks to support them. They manipulate traditions they never valued in order to redefine the truthiness of a brick to what comfort them.
The tower will always seek to cloth itself with outer bricks. It loathes nakedness. Nakedness is a memory that it is mortal. The pain of the outside elements, the dying warmth of the fire, the fear that something might brake you…It needs its façade to feel safe. But what happens when the Façade shares this fear?
T R I P L E ◦ L A Y E R ◦ T H R E A T
Everything below this I will treat ad editable. It is a work in progress. I will leave it in its original form here, but I need to think more about it. This is the problem I do not yet have an answer to. The boomerbrick does have its inner and outer components, yet it doesn’t act like it. Instead of demanding special titles and facilities, it grabs the lower younger bricks - the Xers, LatinX, etc - and gives them the titles. It’s almost like it’s building a façade below itself rather than to the outside. Likewise, on the outside, the seemingly are building a third layer to protect themselves. They suck up various right and left wing extremists, stage them in the streets, and distract gazing eyes to it instead of its nakedness.
It is almost as if the Boomerbrick’s inner layer decided it was going to abdicate the warmth of power and give it away, and then is shocked to find this was a rather poor strategy to avoid being cast out of the tower.
This is not something I can make sense of. It is seemingly a tumor on the tower. And as it grows, the tower is starting to lean. This inversion has no rule. But it is clearly a disaster waiting to happen. And in 30 years, what will the Tower look like with this inner-brick tumor of power brokers encased and protected by outer brick radicals seeking to break each other’s neighbors?
What happens next, will be one helluva show.