Category Archives: Books/Media

Neoreaction: doesn’t it just roll off the tongue?

I don’t know who coined it, but it’s a nice all-encompassing term for the ideology of this part of the Internet, or at least one that doesn’t make me cringe. I realize that Heartiste was trying to be cheeky with “Dark Enlightenment,” but apparently none of the nerds who picked that phrase up got the subtext. Now it sounds like something that a 15-year old goth would come up with while browsing the discount rack at Hot Topic. “Ooooh, look at me! Look how DARK and EVIL I am!”

For the rest of us, we’re just neoreactionaries.

But what is neoreaction? Anarcho Papist author Bryce Laliberte answers the question in this debut book, an absolute must-buy for anyone interested in the predominant ideology of the ‘sphere. I don’t recommend it for absolute beginners, as Laliberte’s book assumes some basic familiarity with the writings of Mencius Moldbug and other major thinkers, but if you’ve already gotten your feet wet, Neoreaction will help you better understand how the world works.

Don’t be fooled by the book’s short length; this is a dense work that requires careful thought and a re-read or two. Laliberte begins by defining ideology itself, its purposes and how it sustains itself. From this, he carefully explains not only why neoreaction is right, but what fundamentally separates it from other ideologies; namely, the fact that it doesn’t rely on popular consensus to function, nor can it:

The human race has scarcely been civilized within its own lifetime. Isn’t this a bit ambitious? Rather overreaching? It is actually the only way to win. A staring contest is won by the one who can wait the longest. If we’re in a staring contest, we’ll win if our ideology provides for the longer-run sustainability of human civilizations. We don’t need to win in the next 10, 100, or even 1000 years. If we win even only a million years down the road, we’ll have won for millions afterward. The logic of social-historical evolution dictates it with certainty. As in war, what is determined is who is left. But as the only end of ideology is to plan for human flourishing, the securing of human flourishing in eternity is the end of ideology. As such, the ideology that lives the longest may perpetuate itself ad infinitum without fear of extinction from a competing ideology.

Laliberte’s prose is similar to his blog posts; very formal and intellectual without being showy. It won’t win any awards, but he conveys his ideas and beliefs in an erudite way. Additionally, Neoreaction is largely free of the jargon that characterizes this part of the Internet (such as “Cathedral” or “Brahmin”), giving it a greater professionality than the usual fare.

From the introduction, Laliberte moves on to define neoreaction as the only ideology capable of sustaining a civilization. As he points out, organized society is no accident; in particular, he credits the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages for setting the stage for later European glory by forbidding inbreeding and encouraging exogamous marriage. He coins the term “biopolitics” (fortunately unrelated to that fraud Foucault and his nonsense idea of “biopower”) to describe the eugenic and demographic trends that make civilization possible:

It is largely impossible for the next stages of civilization to be planned for. It usually requires a shift in ideology before the mechanisms start working that launch the given society to its next position. Indeed, the variables that affect the overall success of an ideology are so vast that it may really only be possible to distinguish them many years on: only a rare genius might see them earlier, as did Kant in his What is Enlightenment? or Marx in Das Kapital.

Laliberte lays the blame for modernism at the feet of the Protestant Reformation (or as he calls it, the “Protestant Formation”), not exactly an original assertion, but he cuts to the heart of why Protestantism was so corrosive to European culture; it represented the destruction of hierarchy. Martin Luther’s assertion of salvation through faith alone and assertion that laymen could interpret Scripture for themselves annihilated the hierarchy of the old Catholic Church. It is from this that we come to the radical egalitarianism of modern leftists, in which all races are equal, men and women are interchangeable, and no one is better than anyone else.

Even so-called conservatives and libertarians are afflicted with this disease; as Laliberte points out in his critiques of libertarianism, they assume an egalitarianism of opportunity flying in the face of racial and gender differences.

Despite Laliberte’s religious biases, his later arguments in favor of neoreaction spring from entirely logical and sensible foundations. For example, he provides a secular justification for patriarchy based in the biological realities of masculinity and femininity. Patriarchy is the only system in which both the strengths of men—risk-taking and courage—and women—child-rearing and nurturing—are used to their fullest benefit, while feminism blunts both.

All of this is a massive oversimplification of Laliberte’s ideas, by the way. Get the book for the full flavor.

If there’s one thing I’d criticize What is Neoreaction? for, it’s that it feels incomplete. While Laliberte explicitly states in the opening paragraphs that his book is not intended to be an introductory text, it could have easily become one—and thus a more valuable book—had he lengthened it by just a couple of chapters.

Still, these are all minor dings. What is Neoreaction? is absolutely worth checking out if you’ve been reading up on neoreaction and want to fully understand it or if you’re a neoreactionary who wants to better clarify your ideas.

Click here to buy What is Neoreaction?

Read Next: The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics by Anonymous Conservative

Years ago, I had a friend who worked at a bulk candy shop that had problems with employees swiping sweets when the manager’s back was turned. After theft reached an untenable level, the owner decided to change the policy to let employees have unlimited free samples. What happened? The employees would stuff themselves for a week or two, then when they got sick from overindulging, they wouldn’t steal so much as a Tootsie Roll afterwards. Losses dropped to a negligible amount.

There’s a reason why “may you have everything you wish for” was a Cherokee curse.

Life experience is inversely correlated with starry-eyed wonder. The freedom porn contingent of the ‘sphere (which I once was a part of) masturbates to the idea of FOREIGN TRAVEL! SEE THE WORLD! FUCK HOT BABES! The guys who’ve actually been there, on the other hand…

English Teacher X gets some flak for his overly cynical worldview, and I too was inclined to dismiss him somewhat on that score, before I read Vodkaberg. As his magnum opus, it’s a hilarious memoir of his experiences teaching English in Russia, but it’s also a bleak warning of the consequences of the expat lifestyle. Not the bathetic, phony “warnings” of the evils of casual sex and booze, but the sober, honest warning of burnout.

ETX got to the candy store and stuffed himself to the point of vomiting.

Vodkaberg picks up where X’s previous memoir, To Travel Hopelessly, left off; following his false start in the wasteland of Desolationgrad, X returns to Vodkaberg to work in earnest. From there, his life spirals into an endless series of one-night stands, drunken orgies and fistfights, broken up by the foibles of his degenerate co-workers and incompetent bosses:

I rolled her over and undressed her and attacked her big Slavic body with my mouth and got a condom out of my pocket and had suited up and was about to stick it in when she stood up screaming, noticing the sun was up, that she was late for work.

She got dressed and rushed off.

Oh well, I thought, and jacked off.

Unlike To Travel Hopelessly, which felt like a series of loosely related short stories, Vodkaberg is a tightly-focused memoir; it’s nearly three times as long and focuses solely on ETX’s life in Russia. The book’s chapters are subdivided by each year ETX was in Vodkaberg, bookended with statistics such as GDP and murder rate that show how Russia evolved and changed during his time there. In the year 2000, the country was dirt-poor and on the verge of collapse, with Russian girls still eagerly throwing themselves at foreigners; in 2009, when ETX left, Russia was wealthier, commercialized and an almost entirely different place.

More importantly, a decade is a long time to be fucking hordes of random girls and getting drunk.

ETX recently revealed that he intentionally wrote the book to emphasize the dark side of foreign travel, but really, the only truly dark aspect of Vodkaberg is the increasing burnout he feels as the book progresses. ETX burns through so many girls in the first half of the book that he gets to the point where he can’t even keep their names straight, while the second half details his attempts to cope with a world that is leaving him behind. His friends are getting married, the cute girls are drying up, the exchange rate has destroyed his salary, and he somehow lucks into a position as his school’s Director of Studies, which carries its own set of problems:

I thought of 15 years of shitty school administrations while I shot the crap out of the small town of Paradise, Arizona, and burned and electrocuted digital civilians, even blew up Gary Coleman, while my students took practice tests.

Part of Vodkaberg’s Bukowskian tone is probably a generational thing—English Teacher X is a GenXer talking to Millennials like myself—but he expertly conveys the ennui and sheer boredom that hedonism eventually devolves into. It’s one thing to hear that kind of thing from some cornfed Middle American who married his high school sweetheart; it’s another to hear it from a guy who was banging Marilyn Monroe lookalikes every week for the better part of a decade.

By the time he manages to flee to the Middle East, you almost feel a sense of relief.

Even with this bleakness, Vodkaberg still features ETX’s deeply cynical, side-splitting prose. Also unlike To Travel Hopelessly, the book has a consistent cast of characters that add depth–and dare I say tenderness—to the story. Whether it’s ETX’s cat Doofus, the middle-aged party animal Uncle Cool, or the soft harem that ETX keeps over the years—the Insane Bisexual, Pterodactyl Girl, Dark Angel, Almond Eyes—Vodkaberg becomes downright touching at points:

I was unconscious on the sofa, with my shorts around my knees, after returning at dawn from another apocalyptic drinking binge that ended with a failed attempt to masturbate, and the covers wrapped around my head. Since I didn’t hear the doorbell, he let himself in with his key, and found me just like that.

He was kind enough to close the bedroom door.

The closest thing to a problem I have with Vodkaberg is the Skype chat transcripts. Near the end of the book, ETX breaks up the action with transcripts of his IM chats with one of his girlfriends, Dark Angel. While there are some amusing gems in them, they screw with the flow of the book and caused my eyes to glaze over the screen. Also, given the length of the book, a hyperlinked table of contents in the Kindle edition would have been nice. Additionally, the book requires you to have some familiarity with To Travel Hopelessly in order to get the most out of it.

But these are very, very small problems. If you want a travel memoir that is radically different from everything else out there, that provides a nice antidote to all the SEE THE WORLD! FUCK HOT BABES! onanism, pick up Vodkaberg. It’s violently honest, funny and poignant; everything that a story is supposed to be.

Click here to buy Vodkaberg: Nine Years in Russia.

Read Next: To Travel Hopelessly: A TEFL Memoir by English Teacher X

The urge to explore is written into the Y chromosome. There’s just something about discovering foreign lands, risking death and dismemberment for a payoff that is not guaranteed, that appeals to men. The only problem with this urge is that our world has been mapped out. Save for some inaccessible pockets of the Amazon, every possible corner of the Earth, every obscure tribe and mountain range has been explored and hooked up to the sewer line of American consumerism.

The closest we can get to living like the explorers of old is heading into second-world countries to fuck the local girls.

For a glimpse into that lost world of discovery, Tent Life in Siberia is a fantastic book. An account of explorer George Kennan’s journey across Siberia around the time of the Civil War, the book catalogues his observations and experiences as one of the first Americans to explore the most remote regions of Russia. As a first-hand look at a land that had barely been touched by the outside world, it’s invaluable.

The story: at age twenty, Kennan was hired by Western Union to journey to Siberia as part of an effort to establish a overland telegraph line between Alaska and Russia, linking the Americas and Eurasia for the first time in history. The reason why you’ve never heard about this feat is because it was a failure; while Kennan and his comrades were alternately exploring Siberia and trying to survive, a transatlantic cable was successfully laid between New York and London in 1866, rendering the Russian project useless:

We all went down into the cosy, well-furnished cabin, where refreshments were set before us by the steward, and where we talked for an hour about the news of the world, from whaling in the South Pacific to dog-driving in Arctic Asia, and from Weston’s walk across the North American continent to Karakozef’s attempt to assassinate the Tsar. But it was, on our side at least, a perfunctory conversation. The news of the complete success of the Atlantic cable was as unexpected as it was disheartening, and it filled our minds to the exclusion of everything else. The world would have no use for an overland telegraph-line through Alaska and Siberia if it already possessed a working cable between London and New York.

Nonetheless, Kennan’s story stands apart due to his party’s thorough exploration of eastern Russia. Over the course of two years, he meets with the various tribes that live in Siberia, catalogues the local flora and fauna, witnesses the aurora borealis and nearly dies of starvation and exposure several times. I particularly enjoyed his account of a Korak wedding midway through the book:

…Our sudden entrance seemed to create a temporary diversion from the legitimate business of the evening. The tattooed women and shaven-headed men stared in open-mouthed astonishment at the pale-faced guests who had come unbidden to the marriage-feast, having on no wedding garments. Our faces were undeniably dirty, our blue hunting-shirts and buckskin trousers bore the marks of two months’ rough travel, in numerous rips, tears, and tatters, which were only partially masked by a thick covering of reindeer hair from our fur kukhlánkas. Our general appearance, in fact, suggested a more intimate acquaintance with dirty yurts, mountain thickets, and Siberian storms, than with the civilising influences of soap, water, razors, and needles. We bore the curious scrutiny of the assemblage, however, with the indifference of men who were used to it, and sipped our hot tea while waiting for the ceremony to begin…

Despite the age of Tent Life in Siberia, Kennan’s prose is surprisingly modern, lacking the pretension and sentiment that was endemic to pre-Twain American literature. He conveys his thoughts and observations simply and honestly, painting Czarist Siberia as a land largely unknown, even to the Russians who controlled it. Christianity and European influence had just barely begun to penetrate into Siberia, with the traditions and lives of its inhabitants largely intact, defined by its treacherous weather and isolation from the greater world:

…If any proof were needed that this system of religion is the natural outgrowth of human nature in certain conditions of barbarism, it would be furnished by the universal prevalence of Shamanism in north-eastern Siberia among so many diverse tribes of different character and different origin. The tribe of Tunguses for instance, is certainly of Chinese descent, and the tribe of Yakuts is certainly Turkish. Both came from different regions, bringing different beliefs, superstitions, and modes of thought; but, when both were removed from all disturbing agencies and subjected to the same external influences, both developed precisely the same system of religious belief. If a band of ignorant, barbarous Mahometans were transported to north-eastern Siberia, and compelled to live alone in tents, century after century, amid the wild, gloomy scenery of the Stanavoi Mountains, to suffer terrific storms whose causes they could not explain, to lose their reindeer suddenly by an epidemic disease which defied human remedies, to be frightened by magnificent auroras that set the whole universe in a blaze, and decimated by pestilences whose nature they could not understand and whose disastrous effects they were powerless to avert—they would almost inevitably lose by degrees their faith in Allah and Mahomet, and become precisely such Shamanists as the Siberian Koraks and Chukchis are today. Even a whole century of partial civilisation and Christian training cannot wholly counteract the irresistible Shamanistic influence which is exerted upon the mind by the wilder, more terrible manifestations of Nature in these lonely and inhospitable regions…

The worst part is that these tribes and ethnic groups probably don’t even exist anymore, or if they do, they are almost unrecognizable from decades of cultural destruction of both the communist and capitalist variety. Kennan’s very voyage and purpose for being in Siberia shows this; as one of the first Americans to explore this part of the world, he brought Western influence to the Koraks, the Kamchatdal and the other peoples of Siberia.

The world gets smaller with every passing day.

My criticisms of Tent Life in Siberia are two. Firstly, Kennan’s penchant for multiple page-spanning paragraphs got tiresome very quickly. Secondly, this particular edition of the book lacks the photographs of the original edition, instead substituting them with descriptions. It’s a minor thing, as Kennan’s prose was more than able to convey the beauty and danger of Siberia for me, but it’s somewhat annoying.

Other than that, Tent Life in Siberia is one of the best travel memoirs ever written, a must-read for anyone interested in Russia or who just enjoys tales of exploration in general.

Click here to buy Tent Life in Siberia (free on Kindle).

Read Next: Life is Short and So is This Book: Brief Thoughts on Making the Most of Your Life by Peter Atkins

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on January 27, 2012. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

Most of you will recognize the name H.L. Mencken, if not from his cutting, witty books and various snide observations on American culture and democracy, then from his role covering the infamous Scopes monkey trial. But who the hell is Robert Rives La Monte?

La Monte is one of those justly forgotten figures of history, a Baltimore News writer and editor for the International Socialist Review. He’s dust, compost, worm food, only remembered in relation to his interactions with people more famous than he. The only reason his name isn’t completely lost to time is because in 1910, he wrote a letter to Mencken, at the time still a relatively obscure Baltimore Sun columnist, urging him to repent his wicked, selfish ways and join him in spreading the glorious gospel of socialism. That’s right: this pipsqueak thought he could convince H.L. Mencken, consummate Nietzschean, atheist and savage critic of “Boobus Americanus,” that socialism was the way forward.

La Monte was eager for a reply from Mencken, and he got it good and hard. But he wasn’t satisfied and wrote Mencken back; the two ended up exchanging a dozen letters in total, which were collected into Men Versus the Man, published in 1911 and one of Mencken’s first books. Despite Mencken’s later popularity, Men Versus the Man went out of print relatively quickly and was lost to time, forgotten even by Mencken himself. Fortunately for us, this early classic has been brought back into print by Kevin Slaughter’s Underworld Amusements, featuring a forward by none other than John Derbyshire, who sums up the book with these two paragraphs:

The argument of Men versus the Man is one we are still having today. The content of the argument is the relative desirability of two approaches to our social life. On the one hand is proposed a society of men: a society in which none is allowed to rise too high above another, a society that subtracts great resources from the more able in an effort to raise up the less able. On the other hand is a society of the man: a society in which individuals are left to do what they can with their inherited capabilities, in conditions of maximum personal freedom and minimal state control.

The argument has been going on in one form or another for a couple of millennia. It is reasonable to hope that we might soon—in less than another century, I’d hope—attain sufficient understanding of our species to know beyond doubt which kind of society is more stable and enduring, which less likely to foster cruelty and injustice.

Men Versus the Man is a pretty interesting read for both its content and its value as one of Mencken’s first published efforts, showing that he was as witty and incisive then as when he became famous a decade later. La Monte’s letters are a slog to get through because he can’t write; as is typical of sophists, he overwrites and pads out his letters to disguise his slipshod arguments. Mencken’s replies are blistering, shredding La Monte’s points with the grace and skill of a master debater, starting out polite but eventually devolving into the pre-Internet version of a flame war as Mencken loses patience:

But this I do know: that the plan of Socialism to lift up the “producer” class to sovereignty by an act of human volition is as absurd as the old ecclesiastical plan to solve the riddles of the universe by revelation and anathema. If the thing ever comes to pass at all, it must come by slow stages and as a symptom of changes in the needs and desires of the human race. At present the race seems to stand most in need of improvements in the art of life. To the man who offers it a secret password to heaven, it gives little, for it is little interested in heaven, but for him who offers it some new scheme to attain ease and comfort—some improvement in marketing petroleum, some device for making travel safer, some new food, some new plan of investing savings—it has rewards as large as those that once went to popes and emperors. And in this favored class of services, it esteems most the unique service. To the man who makes shoes which, whatever their excellence, are no more comfortable than the shoes made at the next bench, it gives a comparatively small reward. And so, too, it has no prize for the man who raises wheat in the old, old way, and stores it in his bin. But to the man who, by inventing new machinery or by better organizing the work, improves the comfort of shoes, and to the man who buys the wheat of the farmers and hauls it craftily to where it is most needed—to these men it gives extraordinary rewards.

Like all good writers, Mencken is difficult to shoehorn: he lampooned both socialism and Christianity, exalting elitism and individualism against the mediocre majority, whether they worshipped Jesus or Marx. Reading his evisceration of La Monte is like watching an MMA fighter bash a retarded kid in the face; the kid is so hopelessly out of his league that you almost feel sorry for him. While not as biting as his later works, Men Versus the Man is still an enjoyable read and a must-have for Mencken fans. Hell, buy an extra copy and give it to your liberal and/or Christian friends for a laugh.

Click here to buy Men Versus the Man.

Read Next: No Man’s Land by Jack Donovan

My interest in A Death in Brazil was piqued when Roosh listed it as one of the books that changed his life. An experienced travel writer, Peter Robb journeyed to Brazil from Sicily over a decade ago and recorded his observations and research in this memoir, which traverses Brazilian history from the country’s founding up to the present day, weaving together politics, sex, and religion in a tapestry of drama and intrigue.

Is A Death in Brazil a life-changing book? No, but I see how it could be for some people.

Don’t get me wrong; this is a great book. But what keeps it out of the highest echelon of travel memoirs is its lack of a personal touch. A Death in Brazil is more history lesson than story, with Robb himself little more than a fringe observer to the anarchy and chaos of this nation. If you’re looking for another tale of sex, sleaze and self-discovery, this book isn’t it. If you’re looking for a twisting and gripping novelization of Brazilian history and culture, A Death in Brazil is a great read.

And to his credit, Robb knows Brazil. Starting with the Indian cultures that inhabited the country before the Europeans landed, Robb analyzes the circumstances that make the place unique. What separates Brazil from the U.S. and Canada—and indeed, the rest of Latin America—is its racially fluid and sexually charged culture. Where the color lines are policed heavily in America and Canada, Brazilians fucked each other with enough abandon—whites with blacks, blacks with Indians, Indians with whites—to create a sort of egalitarianism that persists in the face of the country’s class inequality:

What linked the masters and the slaves was sex. In Freyre’s intricately documented study, every matter of life on the sugar plantations led subtly back to sex. The sex was so deeply present in his material that Freyre hardly needed to be explicit about it. It was sex enhanced by the gorgeousness of the climate and the sweetness of the sugar, and also sex made perverse by the cruel relationship of masters to slaves, of the Roman Catholic Church to African practices and indigenous forest life. Every new theme he turned to became an aspect of sexual life. It was a very seductive picture of a slave society, a lot more complex in its reciprocities than I had ever imagined. The Brazil of the sugar plantations was, in Freyre’s account of it, profoundly influenced by the values and practices the captives had brought with them from West Africa, so that in time the culture of the Portuguese masters had been subtly but radically transformed by the ways of the people they had used as chattels. Brazil had turned into a society vastly different from that of the slave-owning states of North America through the intimacy that existed at all levels between masters—and mistresses, and the children of the Portuguese masters and mistresses—and their slaves and their slaves’ children. If in Protestant North America sex with slaves had been nasty, brutish, short and a matter of profound shame, particularly when the children were born, in the lax Catholic Brazil of the tropics, sex across the divide of race and ownership seemed to be at the very center of plantation life. Sometimes, reading Freyre, you wondered how they ever got the cane harvested and crushed and the juice boiled down.

While at times difficult to follow, as Robb buries the reader in an avalanche of dates and names, A Death in Brazil is never laborious to read thanks to his writing style. His prose is calm, collected and powerful, like waves crashing against the beach on a hot day. Robb also expertly conveys the violence and lust of Brazilian society through his accounts of events such as the War of Canudos, a civil war that occurred in the late 19th century between the government and monarchists in the northeast resistant to the changes the elite was foisting on them:

But there were too many dead. Fifteen thousand or more from the last days. Clouds of carrion birds hung in the air over Canudos and dogs howled for their fallen owners on the ground. For years afterward, whenever rains came, corpses washed up, mummified in the desert air and still dressed, some of them, in their officers’ blue republican uniforms with the red stripe. Year after year after year, every little drylands shower brought up skulls and bones that the hooves of the oxen and the mules slowly ground back into the quartz and granite. The frenzy of extermination did not allow the Counselor to lie in peace. Two days after his community was razed, the army discovered where Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel was buried and they dug him up and photographed the corpse. The picture of the dead and bearded Counselor anticipated the postmortem photographs of the bearded Che Guevara taken in Bolivia seventy years later. They hacked off the decomposing head with a knife and carried it on a pike in civilization’s victory parade through Salvador, much as Zumbi’s had been after the destruction of Palmares two hundred years before. Then, this being the age of science, his head was taken to the Medical Faculty of Bahia to be studied for abnormalities.

The one element of Brazilian culture and society that Robb conveys in the book that stuck out to me—though he himself might be unaware of it—is Brazilians’ desire to belong. Since independence in the early 19th century, Brazil’s elite has desperately wanted the country to be considered part of the West, to be on par with America and the nations of Europe. Robb writes extensively on how this desire to belong led to a massive upheaval in Brazilian society in the late 1800’s: the country abolished its monarchy and became a republic, ended slavery (the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to do so) and disavowed its genuinely multiracial heritage in line with pro-white eugenics beliefs. This caused a massive rift between the wealthier, whiter southeastern portion of the country and the northeastern part, which is poorer and blacker.

Among nations, Brazil has always been the equivalent of the little kid who desperately tries to emulate his cooler big brother and never succeeds.

This constant longing, to the point where Brazilians will upend everything to fit in, extends all the way to the present day. The true protagonist of A Death in Brazil isn’t Robb himself, but Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose rise from poor laborer in the northeast to Brazil’s presidency forms the book’s story arc. Even if you’re not a leftist, reading about Lula’s struggles and triumphs against the military and his political opponents will make you want to cheer. Nonetheless, with Lula’s election to the presidency in 2003, Robb is oddly optimistic. My view? Given that the West is in the throes of an ideology that denigrates whiteness and masculinity, it’s not surprising that the Brazilian elite would try to fit in by electing a brown leftist as their leader.

It also explains why Lula’s successor as president, Dilma Rousseff, has gone completely ovaries-to-the-wall in insane feminist reforms.

Like I said before, Robb’s relative absence from A Death in Brazil’s story and action knocks the book down several pegs. While he shares anecdotes of his experiences and observations from time to time, he’s never involved in the action itself, constantly remaining on the outside looking in. While he’s skilled at turning what could have been a boring history lesson into a thrilling and dramatic tale, the lack of his presence in the book makes it less interesting than it otherwise would have been.

Aside from this, A Death in Brazil is a grand and epic achievement, a must-read for anyone interested in Brazil as a country or just looking for an intriguing true crime-type story.

Click here to buy A Death in Brazil.

Read Next: Roosh’s Brazil Compendium: Pickup Tips, City Guides, and Stories by Roosh V

Assuming you even know who James Burnham is at all, he probably occupies a footnote at best in your mind. A notable political theorist and activist during the mid-20th century, he began his public life as a Marxist and Trotskyist but later transitioned to conservatism, spending the latter decades of his life as a columnist for National Review. Shortly after the fall of France in World War II, he wrote The Managerial Revolution, a radical tract that deserves to be more widely read.

Burnham’s claim was that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called “managerialism”; rule by managers.

I can’t understand how this book is so ignored. Getting a hold of a copy was a real bitch for me; it’s been out of print for decades, there’s no Kindle version, and used copies go for around $40 on Amazon. Most of the top Google searches for The Managerial Revolution refer not to the book itself but George Orwell’s moronic response essay, published eight years later. I lucked out and managed to find a cheap copy of the book on Ebay… from a seller in the U.K.

Burnham’s central argument will repulse both leftists—who think that the modern world is suffering an excess of free market capitalism—and conservatives/libertarians, who think that America is one more Obamaphone away from communism. It certainly pissed off his old Marxist buddies, drunk as they were in the 1930’s on their unbelievably arrogant belief in the “historical inevitability of socialism.” Burnham’s view was that the dictatorship of the proletariat would never happen because the pincer of technological advances and increasingly complex societies meant that ruling a nation required a skill set that the proles simply did not possess:

Reality, however, as is so often the case, was rude to the optimistic expectations. Far from showing tendencies toward socialism, the Russian revolutionary society developed in a plainly contrary direction. With respect to the three decisive characteristics of socialist society—classlessness, freedom, and internationalism—Russia is immeasurably further away today than during the first years of the revolution; nor has this direction been episodic but rather a continuous development since those early years. This has occurred in direct contradiction to Marxist theory: in Russia the key conditions, as it was thought, for the advance, if not to socialism at least well into its direction, were present—the assumption of state power by a Marxist party ‘of the workers,’ and above all the supposedly crucial abolition of private property rights in the chief instruments of production.

Burnham observed that Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and the U.S. under Franklin Roosevelt were developing along parallel paths, creating an economic system in which power rested not with capitalists or workers, but managers; administrators, HR ditzes, engineers, bureaucrats, civil servants, CEOs and other figures who exist outside of the capitalist class yet are not of the proletariat. Stalin’s nomenklatura, Hitler’s vast patronage network, and the myriad agencies created by the New Deal represented this shift in power, as they were controlled neither by capitalists or by workers. The trigger for this transition was the mass unemployment sparked by the Great Depression and capitalism’s complete inability to solve it, but the foundations had been laid beforehand in the increasing scale of society and scientific advances that made large-scale organization easier:

In the earlier days of capitalism, the typical capitalist, the ideal of the ideologists before and after Adam Smith, was himself his own manager so far as there were managerial functions other than those assigned to some reliable skilled worker in the shop. He was the individual entrepreneur, who owned the whole or the greater share of a factory or mine or shop or steamship company or whatever it might be, and actively managed his own enterprise; perhaps to retire in old age in favour of management by his heirs. But, as is well known, the growth of large-scale public corporations along with the technological development of modern industry have virtually wiped such types of enterprise out of the important sections of the economy; with a few exceptions, they remain only among the ‘small businesses’ which are trivial in their historical influence.

Additionally, Burnham observes that capitalism arose in a similar fashion; a new class (in this case, the merchants) seizing power from the ruling class (the aristocracy) beginning in the 14th century, when feudalism began to wane. This transition took different forms in different countries: it was gradual in England, where the monarchy slowly lost power to Parliament and became a largely ceremonial position, or violent in the case of France, where the aristocracy was viciously overthrown. In the same way, Burnham predicted that as part of the managerial revolution, the structures of capitalist government would either be eliminated entirely—as they were in the case of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—or reduced to figureheads.

Can anyone seriously argue that that hasn’t happened in the U.S. and other “democratic” nations?

Power in America no longer rests with the elected government, but with the acronym agencies that exist beyond the voter’s control: the FBI, NSA, CIA, FEMA, the Fed, the Department of Education and so on. Despite the grandstanding of Tea Party Republicans, these agencies run themselves with minimal oversight or input from Congress, who is almost entirely powerless to control them. In fact, whenever elected officials try to exercise even the slightest amount of control over bureaucracies—as Scott Walker tried to do in Wisconsin two years ago—they always find themselves rebuffed with overwhelming force.

Burnham also predicted that the public and private sectors would effectively cease to exist as separate entities in a managerial economy. Again, looking at the comfy relationship between Washington and Wall Street, can you really argue against this? The actual capitalists on Wall Street—the shareholders—have lost big in the bank bailouts, with the stock prices of Citi and other banks cratering and shops like Bear Stearns being driven out of business entirely. It’s the managers—your Lloyd Blankfeins and Jon Corzines and Hank Paulsons—who’ve made out like bandits, giving themselves golden parachutes, stealing money from their customers and flitting back between government and the private sector as it suits them.

Despite the reference to “evident errors” on the back of my copy of The Managerial Revolution, most of Burnham’s predictions have come true, even if he got specific details wrong. For example, he envisioned a future in which the U.S., Germany and Japan would rule much of the Earth as “super-states,” with power gradually moving from sovereign states to supranational entities. Britain and France would wane and become satellite states because they clung to capitalism in the face of rising managerial empires. While Germany and Japan flamed out in World War II, the managerial state that Burnham dismissed in classic wannabe Tory fashion—Russia—became one of the world’s preeminent superpowers, jockeying with the U.S. for proxy control over Europe and the third world. As for “supranational entities,” how about the European Union, a gang of bureaucrats who have the reins on individual national governments? The U.N.? The WTO?

And this book is out of print?

The biggest flaw in Burnham’s analysis is that he’s still constrained to a certain extent by a Marxist frame, failing to take into account human motivations and stupidity. For example, he argues that Hitler’s desire for an alliance with Britain was driven solely by rational motives, as allying with Britain would allow Germany to more easily take control of Britain’s empire, which was being chipped away by America and other entities (Canada, by that point, was fully an American satrapy). He doesn’t account for Hitler’s retarded racial ideology that led him to believe he’d be leading a pan-Aryan brotherhood against those filthy evil Slavs.

But even with these mistakes, The Managerial Revolution is one of the most prescient and accurate portraits of the modern West. It’s also useful for analyzing what will happen in the future. Burnham notes that entrenched mass unemployment is one of the signs of imminent social revolution, going back to ancient Greece. If that’s the case, our managerial regime may well be in its death throes, with the massive unemployment rates in places like Spain and Greece, along with exploding underemployment in the U.S.

What will come next? I can’t say, only to say that the current system can’t last.

Click here to buy The Managerial Revolution.

Read Next: The Smell of Pines: A Long Walk with Death by James Druman

NOTE: This article was originally published at In Mala Fide on August 2, 2011. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct.

I’ve mentioned before that the defunct Moscow muckraking journal/gutter rag the eXile was one of my earliest intellectual influences. I’m still not sure whether I should be proud of that. I ran across the eXile sometime in high school under forgotten circumstances—probably just browsing the Internet aimlessly some school night—and it became my number one guilty pleasure. When nobody was looking, I was poring across the site’s articles with deer-in-headlights awe, amazed at the world that existed outside my safe and neutered America. Mark Ames’ descriptions of the non-stop orgy of Russian nightlife, Matt Taibbi’s exposure of the ruthless plutocrats plundering the country, John Dolan’s hilariously vicious book reviews, and later, Gary Brecher’s war analyses; it was beyond merely taking the red pill. It was like getting a injection of pure red, right in the main vein.

Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi were one of the greatest duos in the history of literary journalism. They complemented each other perfectly; Ames was always the superior polemicist and social critic, while Taibbi was the superior reporter and journalist. You can see this most clearly in The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia, the book they authored together: Taibbi’s chapters are exposes on the nefarious neoliberal Westerners that were colluding with the Kremlin to loot and rape Russia in the late nineties, while Ames’ chapters are about the piles of drugs he blew through and the piles of teenage girls who blew him. Ironically, ever since each left the eXile, they’ve each been trying to be like the other; Mark Ames has been trying to reinvent himself as a hard-hitting journalist with his imagining a Koch-led conspiracy around every corner, and Taibbi has been trying to position himself as the new Hunter Thompson with books like The Great Derangement taking aim at American society.

Which hasn’t worked. Being a writer in the Thompsonian vein requires a certain detachment from the world, the ability to closely observe others and mock them without pity or remorse. Ames can pull this off because he’s a deranged lunatic who doesn’t care about anyone but himself. If you doubt this, consider how he knocked up a teenage girl and threatened to kill her if she didn’t get an abortion, then wrote this about it:

Katya. For some reason, she still calls me. She tried pulling the oldest stunt in the book last spring. When a woman claims she can’t have an abortion because her alleged doctor allegedly told her that if she does, she’ll never have children again, call her bluff. Tell her you’ll fly to France, pick up an RU-486 pill, fly back, and pop it in her mouth over a nice dinner at Horse and Hound. You’ll accompany her to the toilet when Junior squirts out like a bowl of borscht; you’ll even flick Junior’s sardine eyes off her thighs, because U care.

That’s when she changes her tact-she tells you she can’t kill a living baby. “Kill what?!” you demand. “It’s not a baby-it’s a fucking larva!”

“But at two months, it already has hands and feet,” she protests.

“And a tail!” you reply. “And sardine eyes!”

But she won’t give, so you’re left with no choice: you threaten to kill her. That’s what I did. And it worked. At 5:30 the next morning, Katya quietly got out of bed and left my apartment, acting like a martyr.

On a brighter note, Natasha, the 15-year-old pregnant girl who thought she’d had a miscarriage at the Duck a few weeks back, finally did the Right Thing. I guarantee that her fatherless child would have grown up to be one of those elevator rapists-he had the “really stupid criminal” icon written all over his translucent forehead; now, thanks to Natasha’s sage decision, his fetal membranes are getting boiled down in some sewage treatment plant on the outskirts of town, and believe me, folks, it’s better for all of us. I’d suggest sterilizing Natasha now, for the good of society, like what the Swedes used to do to their degenerates. As far as I’m concerned, this Women’s Day, Natasha deserves one of those cheap trophy cups with the inscription: “World’s Greatest Mom!” Signed, Junior.

In contrast, Taibbi is too human and too easily empathizes with his subjects. He lacks the ability to separate himself from his surroundings and pitilessly heap on the morons he so frequently surrounds himself with. This is what makes him a talented reporter, but it makes his social commentary weak compared to Ames’. Even during the darkest segments of The Great Derangement, where he infiltrated groups like the Cornerstone Church (the church of televangelist and George Bush butt-buddy John Hagee) and 9/11 Truther circles, he always kept from unloading his entire clip on the idiots.

But that was in the past. With the advent of the ongoing global financial crisis, Matt Taibbi has finally hit his stride. His reports in Rolling Stone have been the absolute best on the Second Great Depression, the banksters driving it, and the politicians earnestly helping them rob us all. Now, he’s released a new book, Griftopia, summarizing the “bubble economy” in just over 250 pages of reporting and analysis with a simple conclusion; we are all completely and utterly fucked:

Voters who throw their emotional weight into elections they know deep down inside won’t produce real change in their lives are also indulging in a kind of fantasy. That’s why voters still dream of politicians whose primary goal is to effectively govern and maintain a thriving first world society with great international ambitions. What voters don’t realize, or don’t want to realize, is that that dream was abandoned long ago by this country’s leaders, who know the more prosaic reality and are looking beyond the fantasy, into the future, at an America plummeted into third world status.

These leaders are like the drug lords who ruled America’s ghettos in the crack age, men (and some women) interested in just two things: staying in power, and hoovering up enough of what’s left of the cash on their blocks to drive around in an Escalade or 633i for however long they have left. Our leaders know we’re turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what’s happened.

I bought Griftopia back in January, but despite its short length, I’ve only been able to read it in fits and spurts because it’s an utterly infuriating book. It’s one thing to say that the world is fucked up beyond all repair. But to read page after page detailing, in non-technical, workmanlike prose why the world is fucked up, covering every angle conceivable, every obscure piece of legislation going back decades; it’s a recipe for alcoholism and puking on your shoes. Taibbi’s book demonstrates that the rot in American society and government is so deep, so entrenched within the system, that nothing short of a revolution will get it out. And the fact that the closest thing we can muster to a revolution is the Tea Party movement—a collection of corporate cocksuckers and mean old farts trying to steal all the gubmint bullion before they die—makes me sick.

And part of the reason why Griftopia is required reading is because Taibbi articulates what few have: our political ideologies are effectively obsolete. For all of conservatives hysteria’ about how Obama is trying to destroy the American capitalist way of life, the fact of the matter is that America is already a post-capitalist society. While conservatives and liberals engage in an endless war over whether corporations or the government is more evil, at the highest echelons, the two have merged into a horrific monster busy stealing everything, including the kitchen sink, from everyone in the country. And to keep their scam going, they’ve created a two-tiered regime; one for themselves, and one for the little people (i.e. us):

There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, the government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.

The grifter class depends on these two positions getting confused in the minds of everybody else. They want the average American to believe that what government is to him, it is also to JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. To sustain this confusion, predatory banks launch expensive lobbying campaigns against even the mildest laws reining in their behavior and rely on carefully cultivated allies in that effort, like the Rick Santellis on networks like CNBC. In the narrative pushed by the Santellis, bankers are decent businessmen-citizens just trying to make an honest buck who are being chiseled by an overweening state, just like the small-town hardware-store owner forced to pay a fine for a crack in the sidewalk outside his shop.

Although Taibbi never uses the term, what he’s talking about is “anarcho-tyranny”: anarchy for the people at the top, tyranny for everyone else. Free-market capitalism for the unwashed masses, welfare state socialism for the rich. Who actually runs the government is irrelevant: whether it’s Democrats or Republicans in Congress or the White House, the true power rests with the bankers and their bootlickers, unelected star chambers like the Federal Reserve. The confusion this has engendered in the minds of ordinary Americans lies at the heart of the Tea Party, which Taibbi summarizes in his opening chapter as “fifteen million pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the small handful of banks and investment companies who advertise on Fox and CNBC.”

Like most leftists, Matt Taibbi is not a fan of the Tea Partiers—in a now-famous article for Rolling Stone published around the time Griftopia came out, he described them as being “full of shit”—but unlike most leftists, he empathizes with the Tea Partiers to a certain extent, describing the frustration with the government that many harbor as a result of what they’ve personally experienced. In the opening chapter, titled “The Grifter Archipelago; or, Why the Tea Party Doesn’t Matter,” he reports on the formation of a Tea Party chapter in Westchester County after the county was sued by the Obama administration for purportedly violating a mandate that municipalities receiving federal housing dollars to ensure that their populations were racially integrated:

This is how you get middle-class Americans pushing deregulation for rich bankers. Your average working American looks around and sees evidence of government power over his life everywhere. He pays high taxes and can’t sell a house or buy a car without paying all sorts of fees. If he owns a business, inspectors come to his workplace once a year to gouge him for something whether he’s in compliance or not. If he wants to build a shed in his backyard, he needs a permit from some local thief in the city clerk’s office.

And, who knows, he might live in a sleepy suburb like Greenburgh where the federal government has decided to install a halfway house and a bus route leading to it, so that newly released prisoners can have all their old accomplices come visit them from the city, leave condom wrappers on lawns and sidewalks, maybe commit the odd B and E or rape/murder.

This stuff happens. It’s not paranoia. There are a lot of well-meaning laws that can be manipulated, or go wrong over time, or become captive to corrupt lawyers and bureaucrats who fight not to fix the targeted social problems, but to retain their budgetary turf. Tea Party grievances against the issues are entirely legitimate and shouldn’t be dismissed. The problem is that they think the same dynamic they see locally or in their own lives – an overbearing, interventionist government that seeks to control, tax, and regulate everything it can get its hands on – operates the same everywhere.

This failure to acknowledge the “anarcho-” part of anarcho-tyranny is why the Tea Party is at best a distraction from the real issues, and at worst part of the problem. They all live in a fantasy world where it’s still 1920 and America’s movers and shakers are industrialists and business owners who create actual value. Conservatives and libertarians put on powdered wigs and paint Ayn Rand quotes on their protest signs, but they don’t realize that the players in the bubble economy are already hardcore Randroids, most notably Alan Greenspan, who Taibbi cheerfully labels “The Biggest Asshole in the Universe” and in an entire chapter, blames him for “[making] America the dissembling mess that it is today.” (And before one of you Randtards claims, “But Matt, Greenspan isn’t a real Objectivist, he got disowned by Rand and everything,” I don’t want to fucking hear it. We judge philosophies and ideologies by their real-world effects, and the evidence is that the Ayn Rand cult has been a total disaster for America.)

Unlike The Great Derangement, Taibbi’s previous book, Griftopia is light on expository narrative and heavy on reporting and research, which suits both his writing style and the subject matter. Being an outsider to economics (he freely admits in the first chapter that “[he didn’t] know a damn thing about high finance” prior to the economic meltdown in 2008), his prose is direct, clear and low on jargon, meaning anyone with a college education can pick this book up and understand it from beginning to end. Taibbi swears a lot, but if you can stand me, you’ll be able to take his dirty mouth just fine. And frankly, the sheer depth of the chicanery going on on Wall Street should be making everyone angry enough to curse out the gods.

Take chapter four, on the commodities bubble. The sudden spike in oil prices in mid-2008 fit perfectly into the narratives of the left and right; the left’s belief that Americans consume too much, and the right’s belief that environmentalist whackos are obstructing the supply of oil by blocking drilling for more oil offshore and in ANWR. Peak Oil cultists were having a field day, with their all-knowing swami Jim Kunstler furiously beating himself off to the collapse of American suburbia. Sino-supremacists were pounding their usual drum of “oh well, the Chinese are consuming more oil, so the rest of us will have to live with higher prices.” All of them were completely wrong: as Taibbi writes, the high price of gas and oil has nothing to do with supply or demand and everything to do with the deregulation of commodities markets in the nineties, enabling Wall Street speculators to drive up prices:

…the whole concept of taking money from pension funds and dumping it long-term into the commodities market went completely against the spirit of the delicate physical hedger/speculator balance as envisioned by the 1936 law [the Commodity Exchange Act]. The speculator was there, remember, to serve traders on both sides. He was supposed to buy corn from the grower when the cereal company wasn’t buying that day and sell corn to the cereal company when the farmer lost his crop to bugs or drought or whatever. In market language, he was supposed to “provide liquidity.”

The one thing he was not supposed to do was buy buttloads of corn and sit on it for twenty years at a time. This is not “providing liquidity.” This is actually the opposite of that. It’s hoarding.

The other problem with index investing is that it’s “long only.” In the stock market, there are people betting both for and against stocks. But in commodities, nobody invests in prices going down. “Index speculators lean only in one direction – long – and they lean with all their might,” says Masters. Meaning they push prices only in one direction: up.

The other problem with index investing is that it brings tons of money into a market where people traditionally are extremely sensitive to the prices of individual goods. When you have ten cocoa growers and ten chocolate companies buying and selling back and forth a total of half a million dollars on the commodities markets, you’re going to get a pretty accurate price for cocoa. But if you add to the money put in by these twenty real traders $10 million from index speculators, it queers the whole deal, because the speculators don’t really give a shit what the price is. They just want to buy $10 million worth of cocoa contracts and wait to see if the price goes up.

What this all means is that when money from index speculators pours into the commodities markets, it makes prices go up. In the stock markets, where again there is betting both for and against stocks (long and short betting), this would probably be a good thing. But in commodities, where almost all speculative money is betting long, betting on prices to go up, this is not a good thing – unless you’re one of the speculators…

Do you conservatives and libertarians still think that financial deregulation is a good thing? You think it’s perfectly acceptable for the Koch brothers to hoard massive amounts of oil to drive up prices? Hope you suckers enjoy paying $5.00 for a gallon of gas!

But we aren’t even halfway to America’s heart of darkness. The following chapter, “The Outsourced Highway,” reveals a truly sickening consequence of high commodities prices: the sale of America itself to “sovereign wealth funds,” most of which are based in Middle Eastern countries. The pattern goes like this:

1. Commodities speculators like the Koch brothers artificially inflate the price of oil to make more monies.
2. Joe Sixpack, hit with increasing gas and energy prices as a result, makes less money over the course of a year and subsequently pays less in taxes.
3. Joe’s local and state governments, reliant on his tax dollars, are hit with budget shortfalls.
4. To patch the holes in their budgets, said governments sell off vital parts of their infrastructure, such as highways, to sovereign wealth funds controlled by the same people laughing to the bank with Joe Sixpack’s gas money.

This is not a fucking joke. It’s happening all around you. In a notable example, several years ago, the city of Chicago sold off its parking meters to one of these sovereign wealth funds, giving up a guaranteed, continuous source of income for a paltry one-time lump sum that only lasted one budget year. Not long after, meter rates skyrocketed from $0.25 an hour to $1.20 an hour, and the meter schedule went from 9am – 6pm Mon. – Sat. to 8am – 9pm seven days a week. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was also very nearly sold to another sovereign wealth fund, but the deal died in the state legislature. Conservatives and libertarians, who love to remind us of how much they love America, are defending people partially responsible for the stripping of America’s sovereignty one stretch of interstate at a time.

And this isn’t even a quarter of the territory that Taibbi covers in Griftopia. Did you know, for instance, that Goldman Sachs almost intentionally caused a global economic meltdown three years ago during the infamous collapse of insurance giant AIG? That the bailout organized by the Bush administration was basically blood money offered after Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein threw a shit fit demanding back the money Goldman was owed by AIG? (By the way, Taibbi has offered up the best description of Goldman in the universe: “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”)

Or that Goldman was largely responsible for the dotcom bubble in the late 90′s, by knowingly taking worthless Internet startups public in violation of federal law, but got off with only a slap on the wrist?

Or that Obamacare did nothing to touch an obscure law passed in the 1940′s that allows insurance companies to screw over their clients with impunity, to the extent that when the houses of former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and former Democratic Congressman Gene Taylor were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, their insurance claims were denied because their houses were destroyed by winds and not flooding? And that they had literally no recourse aside from crying about it to Congress?

There’s more like that in Griftopia, way more. Have a bottle of Wild Turkey and a barf bucket close by when you read.

If you doubt Matt Taibbi’s prognosis that things are totally hopeless, ask yourself these questions: where do we go from here, and how do we get there? It’s obvious from Griftopia’s facts that conservatism and libertarianism are utterly worthless ideologies, whose proponents preach outdated solutions, oblivious to the ground that has shifted beneath their feet. But the flipside of conservatism, liberalism, is just as equally worthless, as Taibbi shows that so-called progressives have been effectively cowed by the Obama administration into rubber-stamping every corporate giveaway he’s done so far. It’s not unlike what Joe Bageant wrote in 2009: “one party has no heart, the other no spine.”

But there’s more to it than that. Capitalists and socialists purport to be polar opposites, but the relationship between them is more like a pair of combative siblings; they claim to hate each other, but they live under the same roof and came from the same parents. Both capitalism and socialism are products of the Industrial Revolution, predicated on the economic assumptions of that era. Socialism cannot exist without capitalism, as it feeds off of it like a barnacle, flooding in to solve the problems of poverty and suffering that it creates but its proponents refuse to acknowledge. Neither can be effectively adapted to a post-industrial age, where the bulk of wealth is not held by value creators but by glorified gamblers who play a never-ending game of roulette with peoples’ piggybanks, when even the proles are visibly divorced from the products of their labor.

For that matter, how are we supposed to fix the problem when EVERYONE from Wall Street to Washington is in on the scam? When the people who are being fucked up the ass everyday either don’t care or actually worship their rapists? What’s the point of pushing for more regulation when the supposed regulators are in bed with the people they’re supposed to be regulating? Who is the bigger degenerate, the cad doing the fucking, or the whore who lets herself be fucked?

There is no hope. America is beyond redemption. The only option is to cut your ties and get out before the excrement hits the oscillating blades. Or start learning how to work a guillotine, for the inevitable mass executions. If you haven’t already washed your hands of America, your life should be dedicated to freeing yourself before the end comes. And believe you me, it’s coming.

In the meantime, buy this book, now.

Click here to buy Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America.

Read Next: The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi

When I first published Confessions of an Online Hustler months ago, one of my friends commented to the effect of, “But aren’t there already tons of books on how to make money online?” My reply was thus: “So what? My book will succeed because it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, it’s a quality product that people will enjoy and actually use.” This is a common argument people use when they’re trying to dissuade you from doing something out of the ordinary—writing a book, working out, starting a small business etc.—bringing up the fact that most people fail or that the average so-and-so isn’t successful at it.

There’s a solution to this: don’t be average.

Average is polite-speak for “failure.” Most people are failures. Most people lack the intelligence to do anything more than punch a clock and punch their clowns at night after the wife is in bed and the lights are off. If you approach your life with apathy and boredom, then no shit you’re going to fail. Choosing to not pursue your dreams because the average moron fails at them is a tacit acknowledgement that you are a moron.

If you legitimately feel that way, then I suppose you’re doing yourself a favor by sticking to reality TV and porn, but if you’re smart and dedicated, listening to the Debbie Downers will be disastrous for you.

Going back to my friend and Confessions, book publishing isn’t a race where the first to the finish line wins everything. It’s not like selling vegetables, where the differences between types are negligible or nonexistent. It’s a legitimate competition where marketing and quality determine who takes home the gold. If you write a good book and market it properly, you will succeed.

Case in point: James Druman’s debut novel, The Smell of Pines.

I’m half-convinced that Druman is lying when he claims that this is his first novel; it’s simply too good to be the work of a newbie. The Smell of Pines is easily one of the best books released this year. It’s a novel that succeeds on so many levels—from story to characterization to style—that its mere existence is an iron-clad refutation of the idea that we need cloistered publishing companies in New York to determine what makes it to bookshelves.

The Smell of Pines centers on Derek Patterson, a 17-year old kid who is hiking in the woods when he slips and falls down a ledge, smacking his head open on a boulder on the way down. As he lies dying on the forest floor, the narrative shifts through a series of flashbacks starting with Derek’s early life, his mother’s suicide, his abusive stepfather Jerry, his ex-con brother Peter and more. The novel eventually opens up to incorporate multiple characters, weaving an intricate series of plots together in a melange of horror, mystery and drama:

It seemed like only yesterday when he and Valerie were sick with love, wasting entire days in bed whenever they got the chance. Back then, all that mattered was them. All they needed was each other . They’d lie through the sticky summer afternoons, having sex until their bodies were too sore to do anything but stare into one another’s eyes. Then they would have sex again.

Basically, imagine if the Coen brothers and David Lynch collaborated on a screenplay, and you have The Smell of Pines in a nutshell.

Druman effortlessly juggles all these balls through his clean prose and multilayered characterization. Every character in The Smell of Pines is depicted with a human level of ambiguity, each chapter slowly unraveling their secrets like an onion being peeled. While the book has a fair amount of violence, it’s presented logically and respectfully, and Druman never resorts to sentimentality or bathos. For example, Derek’s dark secrets contrasted with his childhood flashbacks make him a compelling and tragic (in the Greek sense) character. Even Jerry, his drunken and cruel stepfather, is depicted with humanity:

His stepfather gathered the howling puppies and threw them on the bedsprings, and Derek watched him stomp them to pieces, the thin strips of metal pushing through their little bodies. Listened to the rattle of the tired metal every time his foot came down. Saw the blood and gore on the bottom of his work boot. Shiloh lay still, her breathing labored, watching along with him.

And the grand twist of why Derek was in the woods to begin with will stun you when it’s revealed.

Furthermore, Druman’s writing style is enthralling. As the above-posted excerpts show, his prose is erudite yet never feels forced; it flows in a very conversational manner. The book’s chapters alternate between Derek’s present day perspective, which are largely driven by his internal monologue, and the more dialogue-heavy flashback segments. This keeps the book from getting stale and motivates you to keep reading; it never feels like Druman is wasting your time with filler.

Finally, Druman resists the urge to make The Smell of Pines didactic. There’s no ham-fisted moral or point where you’re handed an ideological beatdown or lesson. While the various story strands eventually converge, they do so in a realistic fashion. I was left slightly shaken at the end because the book provoked so many different feelings in me: sadness, gladness, relief.

The biggest flaw with The Smell of Pines is that the story doesn’t wrap itself up as neatly as I would have liked. While it’s still far, far better than a first-time novel has any right to be, Druman loses control of a couple of the balls he’s juggling, and we get to watch them ricochet off the wall and hit a bystander in the head. I won’t spoil it for you, but one of the story threads doesn’t really resolve itself in a satisfying fashion.

But that is a minor, minor issue. If this is a first-time effort from Druman, I’m looking forward to what he comes up with in the future. In a universe of self-published dreck, his novel stands tall like a monolith in a desert. If you enjoy emotional, involving, complex stories, you need to read The Smell of Pines.

Click here to buy The Smell of Pines: A Long Walk with Death.

Read Next: As I Walk These Broken Roads by Davis M.J. Aurini

Midway through this abysmal “art” film, Margo Stilley delivers a line that nearly sums up how I feel about this piece of shit:

Sometimes, when you kiss me, I really want to bite you. Not in a nice way; it’s like I want to hurt you. I want to bite your lip really fucking hard and make you bleed.

Spot on, sister. I want to make everyone involved with 9 Songs bleed, or at least give them a black eye.

If you’ve heard about this movie at all, it’s for one reason: the sex scenes. 9 Songs‘ claim to fame is that its sex scenes aren’t simulated; the two leads really were banging it out. And to the movie’s credit, they milk this gimmick until the udders are dry; the main characters perform just about every consenting sex act that isn’t illegal in the Western world, from footjobs to BDSM.

The only thing they forgot to include was a plot.

No, seriously: I thought Vivid was bad, but compared to 9 Songs, that movie is practically the next Blue Velvet. To give you an example of how bereft of creativity this film is, the title “9 Songs” comes from the nine songs performed live by eight indie rock bands during the movie. Gee, don’t burn too many brain cells trying to figure that one out.

The film opens with Matt (Kieran O’Brien), an English climatologist, flying over Antarctica while reminiscing about a relationship he had with the American exchange student Lisa (Stilley). They met at a rock show at Brixton Academy, or at least I think they did; most of the screen time is devoted to watching Black Rebel Motorcycle Club perform, and I don’t recall seeing either one at all during the performance. We then cut to the two of them fucking back in his grimy flat before we return to Matt waxing nostalgic over the deserted Antarctic wastes.

And this all occurs before the five minute mark.

The movie gives us absolutely no motivation to care about these characters and gives us no explanation as to why they’re together, aside from sheer physical attraction. The only thing they have in common is liking rock shows, a perfect excuse for the director to pad the length of this already skimpy (69 minutes) film out with lengthy shots of the Dandy Warhols and Franz Ferdinand performing.

All I can gather about these two lovers’ personalities is that they’re jerks. Not even entertaining jerks; just jerks. O’Brien delivers his lines with a creepy flatness that makes me wonder if he’s autistic. For example, in one of the most surreal scenes I’ve ever seen in a film, he walks in on Lisa masturbating with a Rabbit Habit and just stares at her. This scene takes up just under five minutes, Stilley panting and moaning and thrashing her way to climax and O’Brien gawking at her with an expression of utter boredom on his face. Then he just leaves without saying a word and goes back to chopping celery for dinner.

Is this supposed to be arousing? Touching? All it did was creep me out.

As for Margo Stilley, I wanted to slap her every time she opened her fucking mouth. She’s not unattractive: her thin, boyish body (indeed, there’s a scene in which she asks Matt whether she looks like a boy), chipmunk cheeks and short hair make her look like a less dumpy Lena Dunham. However, when placed in the right light (such as during the scene where O’Brien blindfolds her, ties her to the bed and goes down on her), her oddly overdeveloped bicep muscles make her look trannyish. And her voice is absolutely grating, mainly because she vacillates between the typical snotty, pious lilt that American women have and sounding like a Monty Python dork trying to impersonate an English accent.

And that sums up the movie. O’Brien and Stilley fuck a lot, drink tea afterwards, make small talk on their mundane and uninteresting lives, and go to rock concerts to dance and snort cocaine. They occasionally do something different, like skinny dipping in the freezing waters of the English Channel or getting lap dances at a strip club, but otherwise it’s the same old shit again and again and again. Their relationship peters out for reasons I can’t understand, Lisa goes back to America, and Matt is left to metaphorically fondle himself to his fond memories out in his stinking Antarctic research station.

Jesus Christ, this movie is boring. And I don’t mean “boring” in the feminist/leftist sense as a synonym for “offensive”; it’s just boring. 9 Songs manages to make sex seem as dull and uninteresting as taking a piss. It’s a conceited and lazy film that expects us to be so shocked by the sight of two actors having real sex that we’ll ignore how poorly written and uneventful the rest of it is. Once again, if you’re the kind of asshole who likes “art” films, you’ll like 9 Songs; everyone else should stop fooling themselves and go watch a real porno.

Click here to buy 9 Songs.

Read Next: Six Songs of Me

Mark Ames is one of those writers who comes up with so many original ideas and observations that the stupid shit he frequently says—whining about racism, inventing Koch conspiracies out of whole cloth—is excusable. Going Postal is a great example of why. This is easily one of the most important books in modern America, because it advances a theory that is utterly sensible, yet extraordinarily difficult to talk about in public: the idea that spree shootings aren’t random acts of violence, but the only logical response to a world that dehumanizes and enslaves us.

The idea that spree shooters aren’t simply deranged wackos is a little more acceptable now today than when Going Postal was originally published back in 2005, but it’s still largely anathema to both sides of the political spectrum. The left wants to pretend that banning guns will somehow solve the problem; never mind that as Ames demonstrates, workplace and school shootings were essentially nonexistent before the 1980’s. The right thinks that violent video games and death metal are driving kids to ventilate their own classmates, as if teenagers are brain-dead automatons who can be turned into murderers with the flip of a switch.

The idea that our society is so dysfunctional that it’s driving people to murderous rage is too horrible for Americans to contemplate.

Ames’ thesis in Going Postal is that workplace and school shootings are a modern form of slave revolts, every spree killer a Nat Turner for the Information Age. That mere sentence is enough to generate a kneejerk reaction from even the most limp-wristed peacenik liberal: “America’s standard of living is the greatest in human history! You work a cushy office job, live in an apartment with central AC and can afford to spend your free time jacking off and playing video games! Your ancestors had to shovel shit for fourteen hours a day just to put food on the table, so quit bitching, you pussy!”

This kneejerk reaction is possible because our culture has done a great job of hiding the reality of slavery in the antebellum South. As Ames discovered, the Northern Puritan idea of slavery being an inhumanly oppressive institution is false:

Most slaves lived by a dull schedule of work, recreation and sleep. Slaves generally weren’t kept behind barbed wire or cuffed to a ball and chain (except as punishment in the rare case that they tried to escape). Instead, many slaves were allowed to walk into town (they had to carry their identity papers with them), permitted to visit slaves at other plantations, and given leisure time, so long as it did not affect the slave’s work habits. Many slaves were even paid cash or allowed to sell excess crops like serfs or sharecroppers. They used the money to buy clothes and goods, to court a spouse, to raise a family, or in some cases to buy their own freedom.

Ames contends that the reason why the U.S. had so few slave revolts compared to other countries in Latin America or the Caribbean is because American slave owners developed foolproof psychological techniques for making their slaves docile and obedient. Their methods of psychological control are virtually identical to the ways that modern corporations condition their workers, including making slaves believe that their masters’ interests are the same as their own and giving them a surprising amount of personal freedom (as detailed above). Additionally, Ames points out that Southerners and even Northerners to a certain extent legitimately believed that they were doing Africans a favor by enslaving them, which deprived slave uprisings of a context in which they could be framed. Without this context, slave revolts of the kind led by Nat Turner could be dismissed as acts of psychotic, pointless murder, or blamed on scapegoats such as the Catholic Church.

But if spree shootings are the same thing as slave revolts, why the sudden uptick in the past three decades?

The answer: Ronald Reagan. When Reagan became president in 1981, his administration transformed the American workplace—and to a lesser extent, public schools—into a cutthroat competition, where workers are forced to work longer hours for less pay, all to make the rich richer. He crushed unions (literally in the case of PATCO), supported outsourcing and downsizing, and encouraged corporations and employers to slash their workers’ pay and benefits. And as it turns out, there was absolutely no rational basis for this, as the conservative/libertarian claim that the economy was ailing under Jimmy Carter was a complete and utter lie:

…The truth of the matter is that on a macroeconomic level, the difference between the Carter era and the Reagan era was minimal. For instance, economic growth during the Carter administration averaged 2.8 percent annually, while under Reagan, from 1982 to 1989, growth average 3.2 percent. Was it really worth killing ourselves over that extra .4 percent of growth? For a lucky few, yes. On the other key economic gauge, unemployment, the Carter years were actually better than Reagan’s, averaging 6.7 percent annually during his “malaise-stricken” term as compared to an average 7.3 percent unemployment rate during the glorious eight-year reign of Ronald Reagan. Under Carter, people worked less, got far more benefits, had greater job security, and the country grew almost the same annual average rate as under Reagan. On the other hand, according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1996, under Reagan life got worse for those who had it worse: the number of people below the poverty level increased in almost every year from 1981 (31.8 million) to 1992 (39.3 million).

As it turns out, the only people who were suffering during Carter’s presidency were the rich. The indignity of only being able to afford two summer homes instead of three was too much for them to bear, so they pushed for the election of a president who would let them rape and loot as much as they wanted. And we’re living in the world they created, a world in which 90 percent of college grads are forced to move back home, where health insurance is increasingly impossible to obtain, and where sociopaths like Donald Trump and Jack Welch are regarded as folk heroes for humiliating their employees and firing them in mass layoffs.

The spree shooters are the people who’ve decided that they’re not going to take it anymore.

Workplace shootings began among Postal Service employees (hence the phrase “going postal”) because the USPS was the first victim of Reagan-style slash-and-burn economics. Under Richard Nixon, the Postal Service was forced to become profitable (a requirement never imposed on any other government agency), which resulted in a series of employee benefit cuts and a new crop of sociopathic managers seizing control. Post office shootings were blithely dismissed by the public until 1989, when Louisville, Kentucky-based Standard Gravure employee Joseph Wesbecker became the poster boy for workplace rage:

The presses churned, moans and cries were muffled. Bodies lay strewn from the white-collar elevator entrance on one end of the building all the way to the opposite end, the break room. The company was destroyed. His mission accomplished, Wesbecker stepped out of the press room, pulled out his German SIG-Sauer 9mm semiautomatic, put it up to his face, and pulled the trigger. After nearly thirty minutes, the first modern private workplace massacre in American history, the rage murder that would spawn so many, had ended. Seven were killed, twenty were wounded.

Ames demolishes virtually every myth about spree shootings, from the idea that shooters can be profiled—there have been shooters from every racial group, bachelor shooters and married shooters, and even some women shooters—to the claim that their targets are random; Wesbecker and other shooters deliberately spared certain employees and targeted others. The goal of a workplace or school shooting is to destroy the school or company the shooter is subjected to, which means murdering the people who run it and work for it.

And given that every single employer in America is equally inhumane to its employees, the libertarian cliche of “if you don’t like your job, get another one” is bullshit.

Fans of Ames’ other writing will be surprised by the tone he takes in Going Postal; I certainly was. His writing style is devoid of his usual vitriol, assuming an almost sympathetic tone. Despite this, his prose still is great to read; this is no dry academic work, with cutting jokes and cultural references from The Simpsons to Heathers all over the place.

Ames’ analysis of school shooters such as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold makes Going Postal doubly worth the price of admission. Much like how he destroyed the American workplace, Reagan’s education policies also ruined public schools by placing an undue emphasis on standardized test scores and college admittance, a policy that has continued all the way up to the present day with Bush’s No Child Left Behind. I can attest to this: AP classes, SAT prep courses and the like were hugely popular at my old high school due to the obsession with academic achievement. Add to this a school environment where “popular” kids are allowed or even encouraged to bully other kids—as was the case at Columbine—and many of the bullied kids simply snap.

The most chilling aspect of Going Postal, in my opinion, was Ames’ notes on how schools and corporations have reacted to spree shootings: by doubling down on the policies that caused them in the first place. People shocked at how 9/11 unleashed our current regime of invasive TSA strip-searches and NSA spying haven’t been paying attention to how the private sector has been deploying similar policies for two decades in the form of security badges, reading employees’ private emails, and fostering an environment where workers are encouraged to stab each other in the back. As for schools, we have “zero tolerance” policies leading to elementary school kids getting arrested for biting a Pop Tart into the shape of the gun and anonymous tip lines that let bullies snitch on the poor schmucks they humiliate on a daily basis.

It’s almost like we’re unwilling to accept that the entire structure of our society is completely fucked!

Going Postal’s biggest flaw is that it ignores the role of mass immigration in worsening life for American workers. Because Ames is a leftist, he’s blind to how the plutocrats he rails against use immigrants to lower wages and reduce benefits for their employees, whether it’s agribusiness lying about “crops rotting in the field” or Zuckerberg agitating for more Indian wage-slave programmers to be brought in on H1-B visas. Indeed, Ames briefly bashes former California governor Pete Wilson for being “anti-immigrant,” even though Wilson’s policies against illegal aliens were a boon to the poorest Californians.

The fact that all of the Koch-funded libertarians infesting our discourse—from Megan McArdle to Bryan Caplan—are in favor of open borders should give Ames pause.

Despite this oversight, Going Postal is a groundbreaking and amazing book, a must-read for anyone who wants to better understand the clusterfuck that is modern America. It’s not a happy book, nor is it a book that provides solutions. Are there any solutions? Even today, with the Reaganomics economy in shambles with no relief in sight, Americans by and large are still screaming “Thank you sir, may I have another?” at their corporate slavemasters. Not even the “socialist” Obama wants to touch the sick workplace and school culture in this country.

If this is how America ends, then frankly, you morons deserve it.

Click here to buy Going Postal.

Read Next: The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi