Narrative Warfare: The Central Pillar of the Death Cult's Narrative Edifice

Alexander Macris's blog at Substack should be on your blogroll. This post from late May came to my attention last night thanks to The Last Redoubt and Men of the West Let me whet the appetite.

In the introduction to his magisterial opus After Virtue, Alasdair Macintyre describes postmodern society as having fallen into a dark age, a post-apocalyptic state. But this is not the apocalypse of Mad Max. The apocalypse has destroyed, not our technology, but our morality: “We possess simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have… lost our comprehension of morality,” he explains. Postmodern society does not know what good is.

Being unable to understand good leaves society unable to understand evil; and so instead society pathologizes it. Evil becomes a psychological state that results from personal trauma, from some crucial moment when the world failed to show someone compassion, empathy, or trust, or left them exposed to the world’s cruelty. Every postmodern villain is a victim. Behind every figure of terror we find a terrorized figure.

Darth Vader appears as a towering tyrant in Star Wars IV. But the prequels reveal that Anakin Skywalker was a victim: enslaved as a child, separated from his mother, forbidden to marry the woman he loved, rejected in his aspirations by the Jedi council, dismembered by his former mentor, and then involuntarily made into a cyborg by his new one.

Alexander goes on to talk in terms of the villains of Antiquity, the Medieval era, Modernity, and Post-Modernity and how a culture's capacity for Good depends on its ability to comprehend what Evil is and how it works. This is a very good article, and its applications beyond the political will be apparent before you finish it. Bookmark it, along with his post on Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance, to see how Post-Modern villainy gets applied in practice.

Yes, this is the load-bearing narrative structure behind the Death Cult.

Every religion must have a Devil. For the Post-Modern, this is Muh Oppreshun and the oppressor is the Devil of the Death Cult. Whomever the Cult's high priests declare to be Muh Oppressor is that Devil and--in strict accordance with Carl Schmidt's Friend/Enemy Distinction--all manner of predation may be done without guilt or shame thereupon.

This comes in the form of Repressive Tolerance, which is the machine the Death Cult employs to purge Enemies from all that they control. Piece the picture together, and you will see how this machine operates. See how it operates, and you can see how to break it: make them say the name of the authority they usurp. Empire falls.