Anthropology is a science that, like all sciences since the wake of Niels Bohr’s revelations, is having immense difficulties coming to terms with the idea that there is no inquisition in which an observer can be fully divorced from the observed. With social sciences, this philosophical principle goes from an innocuous exercise in lens-making into a maddening hall of mirrors that can only perpetually reflect the historical foundation placed within its reference. Many of its practitioners confuse this great echo as being totally representative of the observed, and this is embraced precisely because it empowers the observer to feel as if they are expanding a static corpus of pre-existing truths. This, if you haven’t deduced already, is a monstrous mindset to possess in the context of anthropology, which I believe is almost always reproducing a dynamic of colonial imposition by the very nature of its epistemic foundations.
It is always the benefactors of colonial wealth that perform their research with the uncomfortable, unavoidable factor that one personally profits from the study of other cultures: Not just study, but the subconscious externalization, stratification, and (later down the line) commodification of living culture into dead data. But for many, the one-dimensional aspiration of career advancement is not meaningful enough to begin cataloguing the number of reflections in the epistemic hall of mirrors. Rather, they can correctly identify that these reflections are pointing towards a trend of justification. Instead of turning away from the ugliness of its conclusion, they embrace it, feeling as if there should be no other rewards for it except the blessing of the Given.
However, they cannot continue in the exact same path of their recent ancestors, as who reveled comfortably in boasting unashamedly in the superiority of settler society over the post-apocalyptic remnants of colonized civilizations. Their academic credentials have been smeared after surging antitheses derided their claims as being manufactured to service a constructed hierarchy rather than strive towards an objective image. How must one go about perpetuating reification of status quo power without blatantly and embarrassingly falling into the pitfalls of overly earnest retreats into modernist platitudes? Sure, one can always retort a tokenized symbol of pride and arrogance that their worldview has and will always be the right one in performative debate, but even the most stubborn are aware that the brutality of European colonialism cannot be written off: It must be acknowledged in some form.
As with most things in the 21st century that have strayed far beyond their humble origins in teenage angst, a kernel-deep sense of self-disenfranchisement pollutes the watershed that has supplied the sediment that now composes the delta of our zeitgeist. Because all of us depend on the memetic river for cultural and ethical sustenance, we all host these seeds of self-deprecation within our bodies, and they’re bound to manifest in some form regardless of where our mindsets lie. In our time, this has persevered through the accumulation of generational failures over the course of the centuries following the promulgation of the colonial epoch.
As more and more people are unable to meet settler-colonial standards for personhood by sheer logistical improbability (alongside a slew of other unmentionable factors), we fertilize ourselves for the seeds to blossom into negative, masturbatory enlightenment: One that forces us into the socio-ecological niche of expendability. The glories of civilizational progress, even at the expense of the majority of human diversity, no longer appeal to us because we cannot legitimately claim inheritance to it due to its functional unsustainability: Its inability to naturally reproduce.
With this cultural backdrop, the goalpost for humanism and anthropology has decidedly shifted from proving the objective superiority of settler societies to dragging everyone else to its hellishly low standards. This is done through a fiendishly crafted retake on traditional humanism that — by envisioning itself as a reactionary counterpoint to a popularized narrative of soft primitivism among naïve progressives — finds favorability among those who are too eager to don an alternative worldview to see if it significantly changes anything.
Because ideology is a hot commodity in the Internet’s current puberty, it cannot incite meaningful change, as it’s built off flimsy anecdotal foundations rather than the unfortunately solid foundations of illusionary political folly. The same one we see embodied by our elders who have not totally experienced the perspective boondoggling we condition ourselves to on a daily basis. Adopting a new worldview based on how one feels the world has treated them for a week perfectly dangles idealism in front of us, leading us into holes that we expect to transform us when we reach the end of the line and stop digging.
A noble assumption to endure if time were indeed linear, but it seems that the only thing that further buying into the game of pretend that we play with our ideologies (functionally identical to masquerades at this point) is a recursive slide back into the surface we began our mining from. By attempting to seek the restoration of punitive justice in the annals of buried time that ideology can pilfer and catalogue, we encounter true Hades: Endless repetition of the current moment, inducing a life that feels inconsequential. Many live not realizing the path of anti-enlightenment was already undertaken for them when they thought they could accelerate their knowledge to an atmospheric layer beyond the plantationocene, but it’ll always be what comes with being developed life on a planetary system that has functionally switched its code base towards something cancerous and indifferent. Isolation leads to madness, and if a madman cannot find an adequate monastery to reside in, they are forced to return back to the parasite—veiled as community — that reproduces by masquerading lower agents. All they know is an undefinable anxiety that they attempt to soothe by reaching out and bringing down those who survive on the fringes of Capital’s nipping fury.
Despite its inhuman nature, it’s thankfully all mere projection over being unable to be recipients of the colonial promise. The great algorithmic furling has already maximized the returns on the first couple generations of colonial investors, exhausting Indigenous lives so rapidly that by the time the well-meaning people of Europe arrived (being demoted from accidental aristocratic waste to intentional peasant waste), they were left to fend with the scraps that we now call middle-class living: A pale shell of the plantation ideal because there were, in the eyes of Capital, too many inconvenient Indians and not enough submissive Africans.
Because anthropology is composed mostly of the descendants of Europe’s peasant waste, they occupy a societal ontology that is always external to the Black and Indigenous experience because they at least were promised something by Capital while the latter were obstacles or begrudging compromises to its function. Therefore, the question asked by anthropology in the face of Capital is “what do I make valuable?” In the past, that was reification of Capital’s own superiority by observing societies coping with apocalypse and inferring that, through their own suffering, they are proof of the world’s universal poverty before its arrival.
That is not nearly as acceptable anymore, but anthropology doesn’t have to seek new boundaries beyond Capital in response to this, as it has entire libraries of compartmentalized “alternative” societies to pull new perspectives on the present from. The reactionaries suspect this era of Capital to be defined by what they perceive as spiritually feminine values, like family cohesion and nurture, rather than the historically “masculine” values of adventure and homesteading. Whether this is a valid interpretation of the development of neoliberal world order is unimportant (it isn’t by the way), but it characterizes the settler’s contemporary arc succinctly.
No longer is it seen as valuable to many socially conscious types to justify colonialism by what it has nurtured us with. The frustration of having the promises of that nurture broken are what’s causing many to seemingly return to a spirit of brute competition — one that feels largely undeserved given that settler society already has strength and protections most groups would only dream of — often with the secondary goal of restoring a mythologized cohesion. They say “hard times create soft men; soft men create hard times”, but this cycle in the settler’s mind is one they’ve always wrestled with: Deciding whether soft or hard primitivism is the right attitude to go with to dismiss Indigenous concerns.
It seems the only thing that’s new is a tinge of self-deprecation being undeniable, especially now that the roots hooking themselves in our soon-rotting bodies are already branching. Indeed, because settler culture is incapable of reproducing itself by being existentially defined by a continual process of violent uprooting and deterritorialization, when it finds itself in a time of crisis, it will drag down every other historically realized alternative society down into its masturbatory anti-enlightenment, assuredly knowing to do it to those who wanted nothing to do with it. If hope cannot be commodified and sold, then it must be destroyed.
Capital deems that there is no other society in history that we can look towards to better change our present; we must only extend on what is given and not borrow and reinvigorate from the good ancestors. Through an archetypal lens, this is penis envy on a world-historical scale, with a castrated settler-colonial colossus becoming increasingly unable to cope with the deep feelings of socially reproductive infertility brought about by its world-building schema. The ancestors that walked knowing nothing else except Capital’s horizon were not good ancestors because they refused to let go and transmit: Refused to impregnate the land which they had thoroughly raped.
Tension boils from this subconscious realization, and it’s the victims of the Transatlantic Project that are labeled with accusations that demean them for having some semblance of subservience or respect for the land in the same way our contemporary culture imagines the emasculation of a horny young man seemingly bending over backwards for increasingly unsatisfied women. The settler is eternally frustrated because everyone laughs when he attempts to brag about how his seed laid the foundations for our present, because we are all acutely aware of how insincere this manifestation is.
No feminine essences were caressed tenderly or reciprocated in a way that would ensure a happy gestation. We know this is a lauded lie because we all acutely feel the paternalistic absence of Capital, and we whisper to ourselves, hoping that he didn’t really just ejaculate into her and leave us when responsibility for the second, third, and fourth worlds started to creep in. To linger on patrilineal palingenesis — the nascent stage of all fascist thought — is to demand that the times when Capital felt like a supportive father return and help mold us into the archetypes we’re failing to live up to. The big problem, however, is that these archetypes necessitate the rule of unregulated violence and proclamation to be fulfilled.
In this spiritual vacuum, the latest evolution of the settler-colonial state is sensibly viewed—by the palingenesis enthusiasts — as the overburdened mother that now must make due with the uncountable disappointments that wander before her, only able to nurture through greater satisfaction industries but never mold in a way that the young colonial patriarch could. The glory that the images of a band of frontiersmen razing an Indian village — or a slaver organizing a workforce of a hundred slaves — invokes must now be relegated to actualization in ruthless regulation and bureaucracy. These archetypes must be fit into what’s perceived as mass-produced cutouts of the real, expansive nature of what it’s trying to imitate. To put it curtly, being a police officer or prison warden does not grant the same qualia of control and conquest that their colonial origins do. Sure, these jobs give what they promise eventually, but not in a way that feels spiritually fulfilling to the descendants of settlers who feel afflicted with a bad case of emotional neglect.
Of course, there has to be remedies for these feelings, otherwise these generations would already have forcefully sought the return they so desire. Yet, because there’s no satiation that can be obtained in our world without the presence of consumerism, all of our ideas of what constitute nurture are infected with a predisposition to trend towards it. Nationalism is the modular core from which all subsequent nurturing protocols trace back to, and its ethos is very much imitative of consumerist incentive. The most poignant of it being the replacement of a naturalistically contemplative and empirical sense of need-fulfillment with an imagined set of needs that relies on induced amnesia of the recent past and being given no choice but to take cultural phenomena for granted.
This does not produce perpetually fulfilled generations but rather is designated to ensure political solidarity over ever shorter expanses of space-time, as if rotational cycles were becoming fast enough to demand such a temporally destabilizing meme. This is due to modernism being better thought of as an externally agentive (supernatural) acceleration of organizational force—filtered through the sieve of the limitations of human desire like hierarchy and domination — than as a enigmatic, cancerously rogue break in otherwise stable societal development. Once this is realized, all of human history can be seemingly reduced to easily recognizable universals of acceleration and deceleration, with (a seemingly unchanging spirit of) warfare being the consequence of the friction between the two forces.
The descendants — who haven’t yet considered the possibility that their torch to gain is one of further reciprocating the supposedly, divinely bestowed gift of acceleration to English civilization — predictably believe that they reside in relatively ahistorical times. Which, coincidentally, is also the time seen as the aptest to plunge through the plethora of diverse human societies throughout history and grant them “test runs” in our contemporary through our hyper-productive economies that allow for the individual to feasibly function as a microcosm of society.
In actuality, this headspace of ahistorical ideological playtime can only be transmitted through the atmospheric ennui that composes life under governments in a state of control and surveillance unprecedented. It feels like freedom due to the effects of epistemic momentum induced by Internet services being used to compile ideas across time and space, but this is only allowed to exist because it almost always results in inconsequentiality. All as forged by systems attempting to work around developments initially used symbiotically but have come to be antagonistic: In this case, it’s the ability of nationalism to invoke unprecedented political solidarity. Neoliberal individualism was the perfect memetic virus to corrode worker solidarity, and the status of ideology today, as brand, is a traceable conclusion of that.
Historical continuity was what nationalism promised to amend the worldwide uprooting process that refined many lineages under the colonial epoch: Much like a desperate mother tending to the bruises of a son roughed up by a prideful father. The mythos of the United States of America as a “nation of immigrants”, was a reinvented sentiment meant to guise the preexisting mythology of its foundation as a Protestant ethnostate built of Biblical razing of half of the world, one that better served the diverse masses of desperate Europeans being swallowed into the maw of self-destructive conditioning like property-as-livelihood and the event horizon of cultural null.
This creates the greatest comedy of the New World: Having access to not just one’s ancestry, but whatever significant cultural ideas that come with that reattachment, being sold back to them. And one must be certain that these real estate ancestries are thoroughly defanged and spayed, having neither the capacity to harm or reproduce. With such a predicament, it’s apparent why the world is full of so many ideologues who seem to have no clue what should constitute as dogma, as it is likely built on flimsy epistemic foundations: A collage that loses meaning as easily as it gains it.
The lineage of the West is a legacy of barbarians perpetually breaking down colonial profits into smaller and smaller morsels because it quickly dawned on them that you can only raze the world so many times. Logically, the ancestors who appeared to have had the whole table to themselves while leaving you the scraps are not honorable: Their ideas not worth passing on and their legacy worthy of damnation. The economic problem is obvious: The West has exhausted its supply of venerable ancestors as the possibility of recreating idyllic colonial conditions has eroded over time. Because there are no good ancestors left in the Western conscience, those who harbor at least a little bit of shame — towards boasting about colonial right of conquest — must turn towards the deep past of humanity where contemporary accusations hold little weight against what’s conceptualized of as the grand table of human history.
What autodidactic political science has done for ideology, the whole field of anthropology has done for the phenomena I call “alternative world exploration.” In a world where information has been preposterously proven to be commodifiable, popular anthropology functions to compartmentalize slices of human existence into more tangible items I will dub as “glimpses.” On the benefactive end of this process, anthropology only matters insofar as what results and data it can produce, which lets it fulfill its purpose to Capital as a way to decouple the study of people from actual people.
To revel in the past is to invest in a glimpse with the hope that it can substitute for actual cultural enrichment adequately. To go beyond merely moping however — to begin a process of reattachment — one must project the modern nation state onto whatever slice of established human potential is within the invested glimpse. This is where the coveted relationship so many already possess with ideology begins merging with a fetishistic investment into cultures that are perpetually external to the investor. The result is an ugly and petty microcosm of colonial proxy war: Choosing what side you think has the best chance and pitting them against others in competition that often devolves into might-makes-right reasoning whenever it feels like stakes start to exist (they never).
This is the fate anthropology has doomed the breadth of human history to in the so-called information age. Instead of knowledge freely exchanging between participants in both cultures to converge on a method for healing inequalities between the two, it only exacerbates and creates sturdier epistemic and pedagogical barriers between people to hermetically seal off the very real demands and concerns they have. Entire societies and histories can be known exclusively by what self-appointed experts — most of which never even interacting with said societies — proclaim about them on a scale that seemingly abolishes hope of the receiving end breaking through.
As ideology and anthropology continue to merge, the properties of nationalism to create solidarities that logistically should not exist, but they do quite ephemerally. And with this blatant temporality, it assumes a strategic place of authority for otherwise unremarkable men to develop the portrait of a necromancer, resurrecting squelched societies for personal rhetorical advantage: Intimacy with the descendants of those societies be damned. But this is a desperate attempt at rekindling the same glory the colonist’s immediate ancestors had to determine the fate of entire societies. They are dissatisfied not because they don’t possess a strong enough collective will to better direct their lives but because they have to make due with pale imitations of their ancestral political ontologies. Instead of determining the fates of real historical actors, they are playing rhetorical chess that only fuels whatever transformative dreams are remaining in their husks.
This chess game is split between two primary points of view, both of which hinge on the compartmentalization of peoples rendering genuine reconnection irrelevant: Soft and hard primitivism. Both of these factions hash out hypothetical rhetorical battles between their various interpretations of what historical peoples were like, attempting to sell their investment as the most optimal configuration towards the highest bidder on the tightly regulated marketplace of ideas. We are no longer betting on real people but rather the fungibility of different modes of society.
Essentialists and reactionaries sell the narrative of a mythic conquering race of European steppe nomads as a convenient story to enrich the bored white suburbanite at the expense of everyone else; while progressives and liberals sell a deliberately generalized and superficial picture of Indigenous life to pay lip service without forging political intimacy necessary for that service to mean something. In place of a mobilizing nationalism like the surge of Marxist militarism in the 20th century, the West can only offer increasingly banal simulacra of the feeling of constructing alternative worlds.
Every castrated Westerner knows that, to protect their assets, they must invest in any compartmentalized society that settler-led academia can provide. Cultural revivals are less of a years-long insurgence of aesthetic forms to diversify a monotonous modernity and more of a microdosage of possibility, coming in fast and leaving with withdrawals that inflict a deeper pathology towards apocalyptic fatalism. What we are left with are capitalists-in-training speculating on the percentage of ethnic and national ontology that reside within their persons, all while forgoing any complementary relation to land because strong existential ties have proven to be nonviable for profiteering.
For a consequential example, a man like US Senator Henry L. Dawes thought of himself as a civilizational grace by granting the Lakota Sioux the possible future of allotted acreage and a life of coercive agriculture as a damage-controlling measure from the tide of mindless settler determination. And in his congressional plea, he continually danced among post-apocalyptic framework that let colonial citizens avoid instigative responsibility for the conditions that Indigenous peoples now found themselves having to navigate. Wars of retaliation are never evidence of the consequences of one’s actions but rather are confirmation of the capacity of violence, prompting equalization for the sake of rhetorical fungibility.
“We whites were not your first enemies. Why don’t you demand back the land in Minnesota where the Chippewa and others forced you from years before?” Dawes insists. “The Black Hills are a sacred land given to my people by Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka,” Sitting Bull retorts. “How very convenient to cloak your claims in spiritualism. And what would you say to the Mormons and others who believe that their god has given them Indian lands in the West?” Dawes says, hoping his point got across. “I would say they should listen to Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka,” Sitting Bull replies smugly, knowing that to accept rationale in this case would mean submitting to annihilation. Frustrated, Dawes intends to finish the Great Indian’s arrogance at once by insisting that they were not birthed from the Earth but rather came from elsewhere:
“No matter what your legends say, you didn’t sprout from the plains like spring grasses. And you didn’t coalesce out of the ether; you came out of the Minnesota woodlands armed to the teeth and set upon your fellow man. You massacred the Kiowa, the Omaha, the Ponca, the Oto, and the Pawnee without mercy. And yet, you claim the Black Hills as a private preserve bequeathed to you by the Great Spirit.”
But Sitting Bull was not having it, and he rebuked such a fatherless accusation:
“And who gave us the guns and powder to kill our enemies? And who traded weapons to the Chippewa and others who drove us from our home?”
Compartmentalization in the lens of the settler knowledge base is a far better fate to suffer than material annihilation, yet this is the oral tradition the fatherless settlers are alien to. Yet, the Lakota are blamed for forgoing the compartmentalized image of their culture that bastard settlers project onto them, meaning that not only are they expected to make due with the scraps left over from colonial gluttony, they’re also punished for not living up to the equally soft and hard primitive images settlers invested in.
To live as an Indian in the information age is to have digital settlers constantly disappointed that you’re not generating rhetorical value for fatherless shareholders, all while your communities suffer the continued tangible threat of colonial encroachment that defined the same discourse that involved Dawes and Sitting Bull. The time for debate to accompany impending tragedy has passed for many of the bastard descendants, so they must entertain themselves by constantly reimagining such historical scenarios, which fulfill the double goal of silencing Indigenous perspectives and lets the bastard masturbate without ever spreading his seed.
We like to think looking towards the past as a refuge from the perpetually commodified future, but the truth is that the past has already been routinely reinvented, modified, compartmentalized, and sold back to passionless people in the present as a way to compensate for the absence of ancestral veneration incurred by a lack of good ancestors. A spiritual and social investment into a surgical slice of human history is the intellectual foundation for the entirety of the neoreactionary movement and its palingenetic rhetoric. They attach themselves (often to ruin) to their hollow fetishes whereas popular progressivism merely consumes and disregards it as another festivity in the great chain of consumption, another check to the social justice shopping list.
This is the ancestor crisis that settlers all across the Western world are currently facing, and we–the descendants of the Aboriginals–are the ones who materially and epistemically bare the brunt of such longing and clinginess. It is our ancestors, their leftover knowledge, that is sentenced to death by compartmentalization while settler generational history is given the now-luxury that normally comes with being treated as a living culture. All that’s left for those outside of it is to have its value compared and measured against the gold standard of the so-called first world. For those of us in the third and fourth worlds, we are relegated to a simulacra of ideological warfare, locked within the collections of disturbed collectors or brushed aside with minimal acknowledgement like other undesirables.
The solution appears to be to forgo all investments in the anthropological market and live in culture once more: Either embracing the banality of contemporary Western society and saying goodbye to Romantic archetypes of the recent past, or channeling all transformative energy for the world back into oneself while praying to avoid the risk of meltdown. Lest the bastard descendants give up the stakes they have in the colonial enterprise and start performing their Nanissáanah religiously, they will never break away from the ontology–and archetypes within it–that brought them into the predicament of ancestral lack in the first place. For bastards to be free to become good ancestors again, they must desire a reuniting between the spirits of the dead and the bodies of the living to break the hermetic seal anthropology has placed on us.
This means they’ll also have to give up their position as authorities on the evaluation of culture and accept self-inflicted shame as a part of the healing process. Yet, I’m afraid that settlers would rather die as bastards than become the cultural fathers that colonialism could never be. And so, our ancestors lives will continue to be surgically prodded and disemboweled so that the invented traditions of modernity can keep themselves afloat with illusory fulfillment, all while some bastards become increasingly violent over the fact that all the land had been colonized already. They will keep killing to perpetually reinvent the myth of virgin wilderness in their minds, all in the hopes that their spayed seed can bring new life without having to learn foreplay.
This is why they rail against what they deem to be the motherly essence, as the mere thought of a woman having needs invokes murderous fury to an entitled son. But the son will not rightfully burn down his village; he’ll instead pursue the last culturally enriching windows and make his fatherlessness their problem. And we are dealing with that on an unprecedented scale as suburbia produces more and more wasted human potential for the descendants of the settler class. Forgive them Father, for they do know what they do, and they rejoice in it.
How do we forgive our Fathers?
Maybe in a dream
Do we forgive our Fathers for leaving us too often or forever
when we were little?Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.Do we forgive our Fathers for marrying or not marrying our Mothers?
For Divorcing or not divorcing our Mothers?And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning
for shutting doors
for speaking through walls
or never speaking
or never being silent?Do we forgive our Fathers in our age or in theirs
or their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it?If we forgive our Fathers what is left?
— How Do We Forgive Our Fathers? by Dick Lourie
