Reviewing The New Art Right by Rachel Haywire
Reviewing Rachel Haywire's Manifesto
How do hipsters become traditionalists? Hipsters become traditionalists when the beat of progress begins to tire on them. They engage in one “cool” thing after another, until there is nothing left but a vast wasteland of references to concepts about references related to concepts. This is the postmodern clearing house aka. the genocide of meaning aka. it’s just not cool anymore. The hipster will search for something that happened before the period of mass acceptance, unless they were there during the initial incarnation of the trend aka. The Warehouse Period.
Rachel Haywire's "The New Art Right" is not a comfortable read for many shitlibs who appear to be the target audience for the book along with those who like to innovate, shock and think outside the box which is why the book also signals to the far-right, rightist progressive, NRx, BAPist and provocateur elements on our side.
Since I align with the second group, my curiosity about its contents naturally arose. My intuition may be wrong, but I believe Rachel Haywire belonged to the first one before writing it and she is certainly not a social Conservative unlike many of Right-Wing Progressives. She is more of a political individualist who is into Arts and Culture who grew disillusioned with the fake, unprogressive and hyper-static nature of many leftists and liberals. As she explains it herself:
To state that all nations share a common morality has become deceptive at best, but the very fabric of cosmopolitanism now depends on this. The right-wing bogeyman of Cultural Marxism comes to mind, as a new monoculture in which everyone who thinks exactly the same way takes dominance, and political correctness rules with an iron first in a velvet glove made of 100% organic material. The study of genetic differences among various ethnic groups was once considered to be a progressive act, exploring the human biodiversity rainbow room. Now? Don’t even go there, girlfriend!
And here:
Leftists seeks to weed out anything that is negative or difficult as a political duty. They ban words, phrases, and books because they are negative I mean fascist, I mean homophobic. Bad vibes are bad vibes are bad vibes.
Growing up in the occult scene, it seemed like everyone was some type of social activist. I was talking to people who outright admitted that they believed in nothing, while simultaneously bragging about the social causes that they supported. I should have seen the inherent contradiction right then and there.
Aaaaand here, among many other places:
The roles have now been reversed and it is no longer survival-of-the-fittest but survival-of-the-most-willing to-please. As unique and individualistic as we are, we must accept that the real way to prosper in this society is to make other people happy.
Every person knows that one’s self-expression and even genuine social progress comes at the expense (feelings, material possessions, exclusion) of someone else. However in today’s day and age society likes to pretend that everything can work just fine if we limited the speech and self-expression of people so that nobody feels hurt or excluded, as if this is remotely how people naturally behave on the market or in the state of nature.
Rachel Haywire talks about these cases throughout the book which is what made her “leave the left” (she never said that, but I assume this is what happened given her background).
If I were to pin down the ideological substance of the book so you can decide whether to give it a read or close the tab (it’s only 92 pages and my review of it is even smaller) I’ll gladly inform you that the book is about “social art” and non-conformism in relation to the present status quo of the left. In it, she attempts to synthesize the foundations for a new Artistic movement “National-Futurism”.
The draws heavy inspiration from people like Nietzsche, Max Stiner, Ayn Rand, D'Annunzio and BAP, while the text sometimes feels as though you are reading Curtis Yarvin, or it may be just a general Jewish thing (yes she is Jewish).
Among very useful things I stumbled upon while reading the book was a list of rules for rightist organizing, which I found myself agreeing with (too bad I read the book after I released my own post about right wing activism):
Learn to speak like the enemy. Get into their groove.
Rewrite the narrative. Downplay the achievements of PC culture.
Marginalize, marginalize, marginalize
Accept that the right-wing is the proletariat
Match your social status to your warrior status
Become the elite. Capitalism is as capitalism does.
Confront white people on their lack of awareness.
Leave the house.
Don‘t put down your sword.
Embrace your will to power.
Most of these rules have originally brought left to power and because they were successful, Rachel advocates that we should emulate it. Now subscribe to me if you haven’t already:
So what is Natural Futurism (at least according to the contents of the book)?
National Futurism is not about eugenics in the sense that it weeds people out. National Futurism weeds people in. Scientists are starting to realize that Hitler’s idea of an Aryan master race is genetics for the pre-school crowd. It is now time for us to graduate with honors. Why create blue eyes where you can create humans with open eyes? Humans who are not slaves to the herd, who are not cheerleaders of the majority, and who are not servants of equality. “Humans who are not slaves? That would stop us from being human!” This is exactly the point of National Futurism. I do not want us to remain as festering maggots, dining on the corpse of the lowest human genome, and calling it a grand opera. We could create a Nietzschean superman, thinking beyond skin and eye color, toward a leadership and power of the divine self. Literally hacking into the nation’s genetic composition, we could breed individuals who are not corrupted by the clique of individualism. A higher race of non-slaves
As National Futurists, we seek an end to the human race in its current form. Through fully rebooting the species, man can become more than a factory of domesticated animals. Every nation can become distinct, existing without the homo inferior in its genetic playground. The vision of National Futurism is to transcend the human species entirely. Human nature is a problem, and we must fix it in order to transcend our petty hate machine.
This strikes me off as a Cosmopolitan “Nietzschean Liberalism” of Banania, however Rachel Haywire does encourage White people to see race, is not against White-ethnostates and to some extent could be described as engaging in White Identity Politics herself:
It’s a strange time in history when the few have become the many, and the many have become the few. Anyone who is not a straight white male finds their culture, history, and identity being written into an endless supply of victim-literature. Meanwhile, straight white males find themselves a minority group, forging an alliance with minority groups they have little to no understanding of.
With a more evolved race of humans, all borders will become more powerful, both in a national and internal sense. We will be able to create millions of new nations, based on everything from ethnicity to anti-ethnicity to philosophy to counter-philosophy. All-white or all-otherkin, these will become nations of our own. A nation of aristocrats of the soul.
Her most unique contribution to the broader Rightist Progressive movement is in her attempt to redefine hierarchy away from material understanding towards a hierarchy valuing individual prowess and ability to transcend social expectations.
People made the mistake of identifying superiority based on physicals traits as opposed to higher values. Their superficial hierarchy games are egalitarian in that they review people based on the same factors, refusing to look at superior mental abilities and taboo levels of awareness. The homo futura must fight against the way hierarchy has been defined, or run the risk of playing by the rules of the homo inferior and its cheerleading squad of bygone Gods and Monsters.
We exterminate the weak, and when I say weak I mean subservient to the herd mindset. This slavery mindset is killing the new psychic race. Wake from your slumber. It’s time to stop claiming that cowardice is a virtue. It’s time to stop claiming that the good guy always wins.
Now, I do think she is too extreme in this view, given that we all are followers in one way and leaders in another, but I do understand the broader point, even though I feel that she has greatly overstated it. Myself, I am somewhere between a collectivist and an individualist, having gotten most of my insights from evolutionary psychology and books such as Moral Tribes by Joshua Green and any books written by Jonathan Haidt & Peter Turchin.
When you become equipped with this knowledge, you begin to see that the distinction between individualism and collectivism is largely superficial and meaningless in human social behavior. It is only important politically. The most hardcode hard-willed individualists conform in social settings when they don’t possess awareness that they are conforming. She praises social awareness multiple times in the text, equating it with consciousness that is required in order to become elevated in this new hierarchy.
I won’t go into my other critiques of this manifesto such as the assumption that hyper-individualism is good or that Rachel Haywire is not living a social-conservative lifestyle because that is just not her lifestyle and aesthetic (not everyone should be like me and it’s alright). When it comes to telling a story about liberals adopting a “conservative” mindset of stability over change, safetyism, thought control, homogenization as well as ostracization and frankly being a facade that is not living in accordance to the principles they are supposed to be standing for, the book does an excellent job:
They are, as I have put it, the Patrick Bateman’s pretending to be Mother Theresa’s. They will never broadcast their cruelty to you, because that would blow their cover. After all, the cruelest thing you can be is a faux-humanist. There is nothing more dark and evil than being a capable villain who pretends to be a hopeless Disney princess.
I do also talk about this phenomenon in my manifesto, but using a different approach.
Instead of the suffocating mainstream, Rachel Haywire presents a vision of a radically open and contrarian Artistic movement subscribing to the principles outlining earlier. I wish Rachel Haywire success in her artistic pursuit of converting Art into Politics and creating a parallel art to the oversaturated yet absolutely dead and homogenous “liberal” culture permeating all mainstream artistic developments.
I’ll leave you with this quote at the end:
When novelty-seekers begin to call themselves reactionaries, we have reached a specific turning point in history. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is irrelevant, as we can no longer pretend like our chants against oppression are being used to stop man from killing man.
