Manifest destiny
The spirit of the West is the spirit of Man
by Ross Calvin
The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there is a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All my becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
-Rilke
Thomas Paine exclaimed that we have it in our power to create the world anew. Not just within this one narrow window of American history, but in principle.
The world is coming apart at the seams. We live in a time of ambient nihilism. The only response is to build and create. Creative building is profoundly optimistic. Our inborn creative seeking is driven by a sense of what is beloved, meaningful, beautiful, or even holy. Technology, like other created things, emerges from the way we see the world, our beliefs, and our aesthetic comprehension of nature.
The holy is the uncanny, often found in the variance, behind the common supposition. The holy is not found in the supine, the regressive or the ordinary. It’s often found in moments of chaos and terror.
There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.
– Nietzsche
The great power to change through technology often means what is new does not always possess only quaint and peaceful effects. What force was resurrected at Trinity, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It’s also no coincidence that the globalization of currency racketeering emerged from out of the specter of nuclear war to project a false veneer of the manageability of natural human affairs atop the iceberg of terrifying destructive power. A war against agency and spiritual integrity has advanced stealthily by using this legitimate terror as a smokescreen.
And it does not want to let us rest. The potential for artificial intelligence, the prospect of cybernetic and genetic engineering, let alone the combination of the two, opens a new horizon of human existence that is nearly unimaginable. A dark horizon populated by a version of human nature which is itself terrifyingly foreign – or alien.
This force is still very much alive. Emergent within us. Whether we like it or not, the tremendous capacity for harm and also for creative abundance is within our bones. It is only for us to choose in what relation we want to stand to this enduring and tremendous power.
The spirit of Manifest Destiny is not a quaint historical artifact – it is the only thing sparing us from materializing nihilism into annihilation.
History is made in chaotic times. Stability and equilibrium only phase change in a nonlinear way. No perfect information exists and even if it did, humanity wouldn’t know what to do with it. So these phase changes inevitably shift according to either our misperceptions or our summoned ideals. Change is explosive, like the release of a ball under the water. Convex outcomes seek out new equilibrium traversing a no-man’s land and coursing from error to error. Circumstances move to states of the most extreme error before any new stable paradigm can be reached.
It is precisely this no-man’s land of uncertainty for which Man’s heroic creativity was installed. We are made for chaos. It is the creative will which generates the new phases of truth.
Meanwhile, by definition, mass humanity is easily propagandized. They go where you tell them. America’s destabilization begins with a swarm assault on the inner guidance system, followed by mental tchotchkes and bromides pointing towards some newly contrived equilibrium. This brand of meta-system change inevitably has its roots in a hatred of Man’s self-determination and heroic agency. In fact, tchotchke hawker Max Horkheimer described that there was no way to move the world into higher states of virtue, excellence and nobility. All that was possible was to kvetch and criticize the current thing like a nagging termagant. Karl Marx described this same spirit as a ruthless criticism of all that exists. (He also co-opted Prometheus for a totem as the force of this denaturing internal entropy.) Earth, the godless wander, shrieking “who told you that you could do that?!”
If only Zeus possesses the qualities of beauty and authority, then anything displaying it in the world is hated as illegitimate. Mass humanity can turn their doe eyes up to their perverse, craven benefactor. The Taliban and Antifa are close cousins.
And yet here we are. Manifest Destiny is still the American Creed. To lead in periods of contrived chaos and artificial scarcity. To imprint our ideals onto the void. To bulldoze our ideal onto the chiselers hocking mental tchotchkes and bromides. They are overladen with vivid, natural, inspirational power. As they are imprinted into the world, lesser values get pushed away. Noble ideals are naturally hegemonic.
California Was the West
The 1850’s gold rush into California drew people from all over the world who believed in a brighter future. They came from backwards systems into a new realm of opportunity to reach glory and riches. It was a moment of vitality and futurism, of uncovering and expansion. Success begat the psychology of success in a virtuous flywheel. California, like America, once stood for the principle that Man has agency and CAN actually do something.
After WWII, we slid into a fatalism hocked by the academy, the belief that free will isn’t possible. At the root of this fatalism was the desire to suffocate the idea of being glorious and beautiful. Neo-bolsheviks, true to form, attack everything about heroic symbolism and questing. Heroic seeking, expansionism and integrity to them are the enemy. Today, the West has seemed to forfeit its defining features: creativity, zeal and aggression. It is becoming unrecognizable. Modesty is extremified. Anonymity and smallness of identity has been elevated. Even Silicon Valley no longer taps into the spiritual, or even into gut intuitions, in order to inspire people.
The vaccine against this denaturing is a Promethean ethos which is the oldest root of the American ethos of Manifest Destiny, the ethos of imprinting our ideal onto the world. Instead, today there is the great call for optimistic grandiosity. Plainly, people are sick of fatalism – of the roach motel of the critical. American culture must not only be recast as heroic and virtuous again, but we ought to vastly surpass in brilliance what it has ever been. It is a lie and a blasphemy to say that humans cannot channel monumental energies. We must openly taunt the ideology of mediocrity by living in heroic, unequal ways. (And within this, there are few left alive who build monumental statues…).
Embodying the archetype of Prometheus in our lives by carrying the same attitudes and works and zeal, with uplifting energy, is nested in what is meant by “American.” This archetype must find its way into the beating heart of every young American. This brand of Manifest Destiny is who we are. This is a land of enriched spirits and heroic principles. We are the ones who work to awaken mankind into higher aesthetic and technological forces. And by doing it, we reclaim our birthright.
Currency Racketeering as Sacrficialist Religion
We live in an age set in contrast to every other, where we are the collateral for those who came before us. A kind of transgenerational sacrificialism of a bizarre, alien cult. And yet our strength and confidence rebuff the cult ideology, and prevent us from serving as the sacrificed. Our capacity to imprint our ideals on the world, to manifest our destiny, is the only way to right the ship once again, and allow ourselves to serve as the collateral for the future.
Humankind lives off a falsified ledger, so that he can be nihilistic without penalty and indulge in irrational exuberance without collateral. As the false ledger progresses, double spending and overspending and mis-spending persistently compound. The gap between the right and the accounting regime grows. But the collateral cannot be produced or prescribed by the sacrificialist religion, only by nobility and genius. The heroic is the only ledger reconciliation. We are entering an historic moment of paroxysm, where the mimetic can consume no longer.
Civilizational collateral, collateral which stabilizes the falsified ledgers, is produced by independent acts of asymmetric creativity, which can only be generated and discovered through acts of ideal-ization, of stamping the ideal onto the world. The species which foments metastasis in the consequences of living off false ledgers may only be stabilized and brought into the brightness of the future by bringing to bear greater and greater refinement, pressure, power, vitality and excellence.
To rescue the species from this collapse and paroxysm we need to enter into the Great Overture. The Great Overture is a work of will and truth newly-uncovered. The Great Overture is composed by works of economic power constructed by individual men of vision, which make old capital structures obsolete and replace them with such productive vitality that regime change in industrial capacity ensues. What follows this is a new zeitgeist form-fitted to the new state of industrial organization, and thus destiny unfolds.
These Schumpeterian acts of creative destruction emerge first as individually- or rarely-held aesthetic insights and a sense of beauty on the part of creative men who are willing to undergo great ordeals to defend them. These aesthetic agglomerations, whether possessing a physics or a poetic orientation, are like an ethereal or spectral envelope, standing where the factory, the gene code, the towering engine, or the work of art will someday stand. It is as though their creator’s vision is imprinted on the substrate of reality before the brickwork begins to be laid.
These original Promethean instincts to fashion and imprint ideals thus onto the world ring so true and so precious, that the disciplined work and sacrifice and pains undergone by builders are always worth it, even while lesser men would renege on their human destiny and give in. Consequently, builders possess enormous asymmetric advantage in the face of the mimetic, of the falsified ledger traders and of the sacrificers. We must not forget this deep and abiding advantage as propagandists would have us do.
Step-by-step, day by day, centimeter by centimeter, pain by pain, with excellence and ardor, and dirt under our fingernails – it is thus that the redemption of great vision and precious insight will take place. And so, in a word, love is required of us. And equally so, the feeling of the raw inescapable reality of our creative, expansionary nature which comes towards us to meet us and be met, strikes us like an unignorable electrocution, a sense of protectiveness over our fellows, and a sense of great moment, movement and zeal. The high noon of the West was built by such instincts.
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
-Rilke
The man who seeks to imprint his ideal onto the world, does so both with great vision, and with inexhaustible and precise work. He is not tragic. He is not born broken. He is full of promise and heroism and beauty. But, he is subject to the necessity of agency like the ordeal of Prometheus chained to the mountainside. A life lived by bromide, a life endeavoring to ignore being bound by this necessity of agency, is a life lived on false ledgers. It is a life lived through the inflicting of withering, degeneration, and the collapse of those around you.
America has preserved itself like a beautiful house whose best rooms are kept empty. We’ve been expecting “somebody” to come, while living in the servant quarters ourselves. We have made all that is degraded and withering the standard of our sociological estimate of existence. This is a weak age. Our virtues are often driven by our weaknesses. Equality, rather than the celebration of magnificent inequalities and a species teaming with incredible specialized gifts and achievements, is bound up in a declining culture.
Freedom itself is our covenant for this very reason, and yet freedom is found in the will to be oneself. To live as we are in all our raw and muscular capacities. The existential will is there to be responsible for the state of the self. It serves to preserve the elegant distances between us. It helps us grow more indifferent to hardship and privation, and even death/life itself, and to grow more individuated, rare and potent for the sake of the vision within. For the sake of our manifest destiny.
This Destiny, it comes with great sound, with a great song. We can hear it. A clear Spring morning on the purple mountainside, the amber valleys silent below. The sound of the rocks sliding down the quiet peak. The wind brushing over, bringing with it the sound of the distance. American Manifest Destiny is like the twang of a bowstring out of the silence, and the rushing death panic as the bolt drives through the raptor’s heart. The death blow we have just delivered is both melancholy and laden with archaic, noble sentiment. Both matter of fact and momentous. And we are alone again in the cold, rarified air, looking onward in the sunlight across the peaks and prairies and gleaming cities. This realm belongs to us.
Wrest The Flame
