The Downside

Again.

Several years ago when I was in the middle of my EDC and firearms martial education, I was stunned about how stupid people were about these common sense things, that seem uncommon if you live in a cosmopolitain bubble. I keep forgetting how naturally curious I am and how willing I am to find out. More on that later. The result was that I wanted to help people think their way out of disappointment by preparing themselves for tragedy. It didn’t work.

In considering the downside of things as I mused this morning, I thought about my friend whose job it is to run companies that have been criminally mismanaged. There's money in that business. As there is money in police and fire work, in soldiering and in disaster relief. There is an upside to the downside and this has been fascinating to me, but not for any perverse reason. In fact, I am rather wary of that tipping point, wondering if in various parts of our society that tipping point has been past, in which it is more profitable to destroy that which is weak than to reform it. 

The fact of the matter was I couldn’t bear to be the bearer of bad and scary news. For myself, I kind of run towards whatever is falling apart. I’m the big brother who breaks up fights and the oldest of the four of us boys. There’s something of a deep dynamic at work when you’re dad was in the USMC and you know you always have three brothers at your back. I’m just as persnickety about fairness now as I was as a teen, but a bit less likely to step up and ‘what!’ somebody in the face. But I retain that dark sense of humor and that readiness to watch tragedy unfold. Or as Sun Tzu said, chillax by the riverside sitting on my shield with my sword in the sand laughing my ass off as the dead bodies of my enemies float downstream. Somewhere on Substack there’s a great story about foxes, lions and wolves. I suppose it’s fair to call me a lion in fox clothing. Yes I’d absolutely prefer every day to wear the tweed jacket and banter over sherry about how much I enjoyed Howard’s End, but those guns in my garage are fucking real. I’m a Cold War kid.

The more I read classic literature, the more I am reminded of how leveraged people desire to be in their contemporary new-wave cosmopolitain lifestyles. Nothing quite speaks to this as much as the following video in which the Millennial host hypes up a bit of the Gen Z kids and actually talks about a clothing rental service. It hits home, well like 15 years ago, when I first fell in love with American Giant. The following story is why smart people are old school conservative. All that glitters isn’t gold.

But even before that, Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age predicted a future in which everything manufactured for the masses was shite and the only quality was available to the NeoVictorian elite who were the only ones capable of the social skills required to hire loyal craftsmen. I once thought American Rulers would curate the Genius class a little better, but all of the hipsters have let me down. I think in the end it was all about gourmet coffee and Patagonia. Still, I’ll give them another chance. You gotta love bicycle mechanics no matter what. One day they’ll be as important as most of us think Elon is. Ain’t nobody going to Mars who can’t already buy half a town in Southern Italy. I’ll take Italy’s red clay any day. Hell, I’ll take Morocco.

So these days, while I still have no interest in publishing another Downside Blog, I am expecting to find a niche of wealthy and/or resourceful individuals who have grown the ability to survive the harsher cycles of life on this planet with aplomb. Days like these I look at older barrel chested men and sorta wish that I had followed that jarhead back to the ROTC office at USC. It would have been nice to get my martial education the old fashioned way, with the positive scars it would have left on my body and mind. Humph. Nice. I’m making myself laugh at myself.

In a second consideration of what has made me mentally tough, I thought a moment for the first time how different I might have turned out if I only had a big sister. Psychologically, much owes to the fact that I was the big brother, and in fact I did marry the Spousal Unit was was the oldest of three girls. Plus her father died while she was still a teen. We are an effective team and very little bullshit escapes our notice.

Thus I am that sort of reactionary. I don’t really want to be a hero and I don’t expect anything much more than the respect of having cleaned up the mess. Some days I think the old man died with the recipe and only a few of us remember when things weren’t all broken and corrupt. But maybe you read this already.

A GenX Manifesto

Here’s a story that sticks out like a sore thumb, and I’m putting it here because although I trust Elon is going to keep X running, I’d rather have it uploaded here as well.

So is that enough to make you Stoic? It should be, because cynicism is not as useful as laughter and crying. I do a bit of both in these dark days.