Post-Atomic Man in the Dark Forest

A journey to hell.

From time to time,

J. Burden

and I have accused each other of inventing a concept that, thus far, neither of us have bothered to publish - what I call Psychofission Theory. I can’t remember if J has a term for the concept, but we’ve chatted about it from time to time enough that I’d call us co-inventors. I was recently reminded of this theory when Auron MacIntyre did a stream on a Stalin’s “Marxism and the National Question”. As an intro, Allow me to explain this text, to better understand just what “Psychofission” means.

As a general rule, you shouldn’t allow a political opposition to define terms, much less define you. However, I’d argue that Stalin’s views on the question “What is a nation?” bares a surprisingly heavy influence on how Americans define a nation today. In brief, Stalin opens with a refreshingly simple definition of nations:

What is a nation?

A nation is primarily a community, a definite community of people.

He expands this statement throughout the text by giving four criteria by which nations legitimize themselves today:

1. Common language

2. Common territory

3. Common economic life

4. Common psychology

Observant eyes may note that this is just a more sophisticated version of the classic claim “America is an idea” - A nation is a nation because a people say they are a nation. There is no physical reality being built upon in this definition. Nations end up as a kind of clothing one can take off and put on simply by changing their beliefs. It construes the nation as an abstraction rather than a real concrete thing.

In your own time, it may be worth pondering why Stalin and today’s conservatives overlap so much in this definition. You may come to the conclusion that Liberals and Conservatives today are nothing more than a disagreement between branches of Trotskyite thinking.

Now as to Stalin’s reasons for thinking this way, there must be some differences pointed out to modern political theories. Whereas Conservatives and Liberals violently oppose any notion that a nation should be for or by a specific ethnos, Stalin is merely observing the reality of this in his day. For example, he repeatedly uses America and Britain as an example, where Anglos inhabiting distinct geographic regions have become two separate nations, reviewing the forces that divide, and from time to time unite, various ethnicities into a single nations, or breaks singular ethnicities into multiple nations. He then makes a key turn: The difference between a nation and a state.

In the West, at least in Stalin’s Day, nations formulated out of various collections of Celts, Romans, and Germans. They formed into distinct nations in specific regions. Then, they formed States to represent them. In so doing, there is an alignment between the nation and the state. However, in the East, states formed out of diverse nations collecting together and never quite coagulating into a single people group. The Byzantine Empire ruled over Greeks, Slavs, Egyptians, Levantines, and a host of others. There was no Byzantine “people”. Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the various Jewish diasporas are reviewed as well. This distinction is important, because it explains why the nation question is problematic in the East. In his own words:

The British, French and other nations are at the same time British, etc., states … Matters proceeded somewhat differently in Eastern Europe. Whereas in the West nations developed into states, in the East multi-national states were formed, states consisting of several nationalities. Such are Austria-Hungary and Russia. In Austria, the Germans proved to be politically the most developed, and they took it upon themselves to unite the Austrian nationalities into a state. In Hungary, the most adapted for state organization were the Magyars – the core of the Hungarian nationalities – and it was they who united Hungary. In Russia, the uniting of the nationalities was undertaken by the Great Russians, who were headed by a historically formed, powerful and well-organized aristocratic military bureaucracy.

That was how matters proceeded in the East. This special method of formation of states could take place only where feudalism had not yet been eliminated, where capitalism was feebly' developed, where the nationalities which had been forced into the background had not yet been able to consolidate themselves economically into integral nations.

What is worth noting here, although Stalin does not say it outright, is that he has shown the Western State is fundamentally a flattening tool. That is, it coagulates various ethnicities, and then flattens them into a singular nation with a singular state. Over time, this state enforcing this singular nation crushes all diversity into a singular identity. Therefore, arguably, it served as the first step in atomization - the deconstruction of local polities, and their identities, into homogeneous units with a shared identity. It consumes biological collectives and forces them into a new identity under a flag.

France, for instance, started as a collection of various Franks, Gauls, Romans, Goths, and a host of others. The uniqueness of these member tribes was fairly well preserved for much of France’ early history. Even in Charlemagne’s day, cities like Masillia still spoke Greek, heralding from its origins as a Greek Colony. Places in the hinter still spoke variations of Celto-Latin languages, and the Franks still spoke something Germanic. However, in the thousand years between Charlemagne to Napoleon, all of these member tribes were flattened into what we call the French people today. This was primarily done through the centralization of the French State. In historic terms, this is called the Westphalian model - a nation primarily defined by a central government that enforces a central identity: language, cultural norms, and most times religion. Westphalian models of the state stand, therefore, in contrast to medieval Christendom, in which the Pope selected kings of local powerful tribes to rule over a diverse set of peoples in geographic regions.

From this we can find three models of the state:

1. Christendom: A religious figure elects a king to lead a state from the strongest nation in a region, to protect and promote the flourishing of all nations in a distinct geographic region

2. Soviet: Multinational Socialist States where all nations are equal and free to choose their destiny in the Soviet framework

3. Westphalian: A king inherits a state which must enforce their language, territorial claims, economics, and psychology onto all nations to flatten them into one nation

Incidentally, this explains why Eastern Europe is more similar to Christendom in medieval western Europe, than the Westphalian model is similar to either. Without the formation of this flattening tool we call the Westphalian state, small n national identity persists, and with it the Friend-Enemy distinction carves out co-tribal alliances and feuds. Communism failed to flatten these into distinct homogeneous states with singular national identities. However, given the “One China” path taken in the Far East, it is not that Communism couldn’t accomplish this, but rather it was that Russian Communists wouldn’t pursue this. It was a policy that, it should be recognized, not every Soviet leader agreed with, but all had to deal with.

Since the end of World War Two, and accelerating since the end of the Cold War, the Westphalian State has entered a new phase of existence. Once the nations under their jurisdiction were flattened into a singular nation and state, directing their behaviors became easier. Without the clutter of different languages, judiciaries, economics, and psychological norms, the ability to give marching orders to a population becomes far easier. Simply control the institutions of the state, and it will obey. Whereas previously, one would have to control the institutions down to a local polity to accomplish this scale of power, the homogeneity of the Westphalian State means you need only control the top to direct the bottom. To this end, the stripping away of all identities outside the nation and state has produced a greater degree of atomization than ever seen before. Atomized individuals loyal to the state are easier to direct than regional collectives with their own internal sense of sovereignty as nations.

Let us consider the modern American Slopigarchy. When a Right and Left wing commentariat creates some new kind of slop it very quickly spreads through the entire wing of that political formula. There is no diversity in language to slow the spread. There is no diversity in legal structure to question the spread. There is no differences in economic life to avoid the spread. There is no diversity in psychology to counter the spread.

It is these chain-reactions that can be called a kind of Psychofission.

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Here, let me give a little review of some basic highschool physics and chemistry, in case you forgot. You may recall from those days the concept of Potential Energy and Kinetic Energy. Potential is the energy stored up to do work, and kinetic is the energy of the work while something is being done. The total energy of any given molecule, system, reaction, etc etc is the sum of these two energy sources. For example, the energy of a ball at the top of an elevation is the same as the energy of a ball falling to the floor. It’s simply converted some of its energy. The energy at the top of an elevation had zero kinetic, and full potential, while a falling ball has converted some of its potential energy into kinetic. When it hits the floor, kinetic energy is transferred into the Earth, and the ball is left with less total energy, but the ball-earth environment still has the same energy. No energy is created or destroyed, merely moved around. You, by eating something from the Earth, can take that energy and convert it into the motion of your arm and, by lifting the ball back up to an elevated position, you return the energy back to the ball’s potential energy. It’s a simple enough explanation for our purposes so far, but for later on, do remember one thing: the ball itself has energy too, in the form of its mass. E=mc^2.

We can actually apply this energy flow to politics, sort of. We can imagine politics as a cycle between storing up potential energy in the form of Political Capital, and the releasing of kinetic energy in the form of Political Action. For example, in the natural world it takes millions of years for heat, pressure, and dead dinosaurs to become oil. However, we burn that in mere hours in our car engines. In the Political world, history has chapters where individuals coalesce into the complex hierarchies we call civilization. This can constitute a phase of civilization where political capital is stored up. These civilizations react on contact just like molecules. Their interactions is the release of that stored energy as Political Action. This action could be war, alliances, trade, embargo, anything at all - some merge, others catalyze, others explode, etc etc.

Just to roll with this analogy, this means Politics, for most of human history, has been Chemical in sense. In the same way that your car engine runs on the energy released from the breakdown of hydrocarbons without destroying the individual atoms that make up the hydrocarbon, politics could be said to run on the breakdown of structures to extract energy without destroying the individuals that make up these structures. The energy to do “work” - that is to say, any political action - draws from this energy well. Once extinguished, political will collapses and the ability to do things ceases. Some new politics with more energy replaced it, and political action drew from that instead. In essence, this frames politics as a kind of chemical reaction.

But what if that energy stored up in the mass of something could be released? For the aforementioned ball, or the gasoline in your car, this would be a fission reaction. An Atomic Bomb. Whereas a 40 gallon tank of Gas might last a few hours, the energy from the mass of that 40 gallon tank of gas could last multiple generations without needing to refuel. That’s the scale of efficiency we are talking about.

So, in a bizarro 1:1 ratio, you may see why states would be very interested in tapping into this energy source in a political way. What if the energy of individual identities could be released? What would a political atomic fission reaction look like? Or, perhaps more to the point, a political atom bomb?

That is Psychofission Theory.

The division of identity itself to release pure political energy - a psychonuclear energy source. Granted, this literal comparison is just for the sake of example. However, consider the history of humanity. Have people not committed to greater scales of political action when they feel personally existentially threatened? The parallel works. Thus, if some kind of controlled release of that energy could be brought into existence, a State would theoretically have the energy for political action for multiple generations, as opposed to small reactions that constantly need to be refueled.

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Psychonuclear Fission.

When making a nuclear bomb, you can’t just shoot a neutron at something random and expect a chain reaction. The reaction depends on precise vectors of neutrons and protons to form a self-reinforcing reaction. This is only possible by firing at a dense crystalline form of a fissible material. Firing at anything else is just adding noise to noise. Firing at this refined material is initiating a kaleidoscope of reactions, where a crystal radially symmetrizes reaction into fixed, predetermined angles. One must first have an higher order of hierarchy to create the chaos of a nuclear reaction. In a sense, the fissle material must first be atomized - stripped of all uniqueness of its origin where it was mined. However, you can also enrich the material with less stable versions of the homogeneous atoms in the crystal. This boosts the reactivity, adding more controlled vectors of neutrons when the atoms split. This forms the basis of a nuclear bomb.

Western civilization is currently undergoing a Psychonuclear reaction. Individuals in western states have undergone the crucible of atomization. They are now by and large organized into a crystalline matrix, refined of all impure politics, enriched with unstable individuals to keep the reaction powerful as it spreads. The vectors of interaction, just as with neutrinos in a nuclear bomb, are predetermined, not random. Initially, you may sense a pressure to reject this claim. America, after all, is so diverse that any talk of homogenization seems folly. Yet, is that diversity heterogeneous? Consider an African American in Los Angeles, and compare him to one in New York. They listens to the same music, buy the same brands, and generally listen to the same voices. Consider a White girl from Nashville and a White girl from Oakland. Again, same music and commentaries. Both voted for Kamala and both have the same worldview. Especially in the technological age, one does not need to share the same geography to become homogeneous - rather, merely the same networks. America’s cities tend to be Blue, and the rural tends to be red, and both form distinct local homogeneities. As a result, when George Floyd dies in Minneapolis, a riot happens in Brooklyn. When Donald Trump tells a joke in Rural Pennsylvanian, a rural Californian laughs. Diverse though she is, the demographic units of the United States are, in fact, homogeneous. The material being interacted with is, in a sense, locally crystalline. Primed for chain reaction. And react she does. Let us here call these units, Crystalline Demographic Units, or CDUs.

Political action today, rather than breaking down groups of people for energy, now breaks down individual identities. The process has long moved past mere atomization. Atomization was merely the mining of something more pure and efficient to react. Now, it runs on splitting the atomized individual itself - political action is now suicidal to the entire histories of nations. Need the Left Wing to act? React White Americans in the reaction to fuel them - literally destroy them to fuel the Left. Need White boys to die for your wars? React the Diversity Americans in the reaction - literally destroy them to fuel the Right. Need a new resource in a third world country? Demonize them as communists or fascists and literally dissolve their entire ethnos in the reaction to fuel America at large. Then, when you have what you want, you can throw the racists created from this demonization into the furnace and react them to redirect all of America’s CDUs at once. Whatever the political action is needed, The State can pick and choose what groups are reacted, and extract pure energy from splitting them. CDUs are split at an individual level to fuel the reaction. Cancel someone, destroy them utterly, to fuel one CDU, the throw someone from that CDU to fuel the other CDU. It’s raw power to get political action.

Up until recently, this reaction was highly controlled - like a nuclear power plant - through Western Media, Education, and various institutions.

However, now?

Western Society is experiencing a Psychonuclear Meltdown.

The reaction is falling out of the control of the State. It can no longer fully control what gets reacted. A brawl on a highschool driveway, or a brass mother in a park, spirals into a meltdown across multiple CDUs. The energy drives uncontrolled Political Action in ways the State cannot control. The meltdown spreads, and the State begins to cook. CDUs are primed for psychofission. Once the identity of an individual - the atomized individual split - is released, you have an enormous bank of Political Capital to spend. However, it is so much energy that it is truly a force of destruction. This can only happen on modern digital infrastructure as well. Without it, these chain reactions would never escape small towns without the State intervening. Now every hometown reaction becomes a national meltdown.

As a controlled reaction, the State could have run on this energy for centuries. As an uncontrolled meltdown, the State is quickly heading to a terminus - a nuclear bomb. When, if, it goes off, it will be more powerful than any chemical reaction ever seen before.

CDUs enter a kind of Dark Forest state. They have no option but to strike at each other in entropic total destruction just to keep the heat of their own reaction going. This is total anarchy. Total civilization death.

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Post-Atomic Man

What kind of future does the post-atomized individual face if this meltdown continues?

If he remains atomized he is sure to be prone to self-destructive reactivity. However, as things burn out and passion fades, the American Slopigarchy offers only second-by-second bouts of reactivity running on fumes - a kind of depleted uranium at societal scale that gradually fades into total dopamine tolerance. Happiness becomes impossible, and the urge to run away, or worse kill yourself, boils the last shards of identity, being is obliterated into a cold death of one’s personal internal universe. Even so much as writing a sentence or getting out of bed becomes an hour-long struggle with one’s self. Entropy reaches a maximum asymptote - any political action inflates in value towards infinity - and this foretells the death of the State. States bankrupt of political capital cannot induce any political action. They become entropic fossils - the hate of which becomes the political capital for new forces of vitality.

What are these forces of new vitality?

Something of an imagery is needed here to explain. Imagine you fall into a well. In the initial seconds of your befuddlement, the sky occupies roughly 180 degrees of your field of vision. The sky here can be thought of as a goal. You want to head towards the sky to escape the pit. But you’re not in a place to start crawling back up. You’re falling. The further you fall, the narrower these field of view becomes. However, as the visible sky decreases in its occupation of your field of view, it can also be argued that where you want to go - indeed, where you have to go to escape the pit - becomes more and more focused. Deep in the depths of entropic doom, that point becomes a fine, laser focused point to aim for. A star of hope in the abyss. The more refined the point is, the less distraction from this goal exists. Use this imagery to imagine what a force of New Vitality is. Whatever it is, wherever you land, it is the goal in a Dark Forest of unbecoming entropy.

Ok, that’s a bit of a non-answer. But something will be in that location.

Standing in contrast to the man seeking to become something by crawling out of the pit, are those unable to. Entropic people, seeking any kind of source for Political Capital, to do what little Political Action they can find.

They come in two forms. The Ghost Dancer, who passively drags people back into the pit, and the Crab Bucketeer, who actively drags them down into the pit.

I expect not all of you are familiar with the later concept. It comes from the African American community. The idea is that any Black man who raises himself out of the Ghetto trash he was raised in, will be pulled back into the Ghetto by vengeful and jealous people. In the more broad context, after America’s Psychonuclear Meltdown, you can expect many entropic people will hate to see anybody trying to escape entropy, and actively drag them back into entropic doom. Already you see an endless cavalcade on sites like Twitter. Perhaps they are the Nazi or Anime profile picture account calling you a “Jew”, or perhaps they are the Joel-berries of the world calling you “Woke Right”, or perhaps they are the Radtrad calling you too “Liberal”. Some have even died off. We don’t see many Groypers around, for instance. Entropy is slowly dissolving their CDU into white noise. Regardless, these entropic people want you in the pit, suffering in defeat with them. The worst part about these kinds is that they can still acquire some small bouts of Political Capital, but they spend it on destroying you out of jealousy, rage, or suicidal ideation. There will be many more of these kinds as America’s Psychonuclear Meltdown proceeds.

The Ghost Dancer, on the other hand, is a truly pitiful entropic person. He still has hope, but he has no means to acquire the Political Capital to do any kind of Political Action. This concepts comes from the American Indian. Near the end of his capacity to hold Political Capital in US history, many American Indians began performing the “Ghost Dance”. This was a dance to try and ask one’s dead ancestors for the power to reclaim land. It is a kind of psychological break from reality. Without any source for Political Capital, one fills their hopes with nonexistent ones, drawing phantom Political Capital for phantom Political Action. This is the last gasps of a dying people before they are reduced to reservations and alcoholism.

In the Dark Entropic Forest, these are the primary antagonist for any kind of escape out into the light.

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Conclusion

There is no simple solution if America’s Psychonuclear Meltdown proceeds. It will end in either a full-scale psychonuclear explosion (Civil War), or an entropic wasteland. The fallout of either are these Entropic people, split down into subatomic passions of guilt, jealousy, vengeance, etc etc. These Entropic people must be avoided at all cost if you are to do literally anything. The Slopigarchy spreading from this meltdown will breed many Entropic peoples. So why stay near its radiation?

However, you can Just Do Things. It will be hard, both before and after this meltdown concludes, but you can - if you have the Will.

Let us here return to Stalin’s four distinctions of a nation, but let us recognize that in the post psychonuclear meltdown world coming, one must materialize these four distinctions in concrete facts to endure, rather than abstractions. Throw away the concept that it’s just shared ideas, and instead built it on shared realities.

1. Common language - In material terms, this means the stage. What you enjoy together with your neighbors? Where do you go to watch and perform the identity you have?

2. Common territory - In material terms, this means hearth. Who do you gather to eat and talk with in real life? Serve your neighbors where you live, and uplift them to make the burden of existence lighter.

3. Common economic life - In material terms, this means shared assets. As Christ said, give without expecting anything in return, and people will want to give back in the ways they find. Early Churches were especially strongly knit around this.

4. Common psychology - In material terms, what is the altar you gather with neighbors to hear your heritage and how God has guided your people?

In the 18th century, a man named Jan-Baptist Verlooy grew up under the French Occupation of the Netherlands. He asked similar questions on what makes the Dutch nation? From this, he recognized the Dutch was being atomized into the French Slopigarchy through places of gathering, which he identified as follows:

• The Stage - where the national mythos was produced

• The Classroom - where the national elite were produced

• The Hearth - where the national family was produced

• The Altar - where the national faith was produced

He noticed that the Dutch watched French plays in theatre, were lectured in French in the University, prayed in French at church, and eat around the hearth speaking French. He proposed to capture these spaces into the Dutch language, and thereby resurrect the Dutch ethnos. He and his compatriots succeeded in this endeavor, and thus was birthed the Flemish Movement - the revitalization of the Flemish ethnos. The ethnogenesis of this preserved the people, and made them distinct from the French once more, ultimately leading to their independence under the Belgian flag.

What are the American gathering spaces, or even let us say what are your regional gathering places? Those for New England, or Appalachia, or other such local polities? Fully embrace forming a distinct identity that sets you apart from the American Slopigarchy. This will stop atomization and cripple the psychofission that follows. Fully embrace what you want as an identity, from Christian crusader, to even a noble Pagan. I write from a Catholic perspective, but we can resolve questions of faith and truth later, when we aren’t undergoing a psychonuclear disaster. It is vital to embrace something that is real, tangible, and not just a larp in the slop.

Finally, when it’s done, just as with places like Chernobyl, build a giant containment structure, put all this psychofissile material in it, and bury it.

Forever.