Learning to Revere, Again

Awakening Awe - The Path to a Meaningful Existence

"Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence."

Henry David Thoreau

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Modernity harbors within it a strange little disease… often unnoticed, at a passing glance, but made all the more insidious as result.

A disease that doesn’t so much threaten to kill us as it threatens to cause us to live vastly inferior, spiritually and psychologically diminished lives, where much of the beauty, power, and depth of the universe goes wholly unrecognized and unexperienced, and a wealth of what makes life worth living escapes us entirely.

A disease that turns us into petty, cynical, nihilistic, and spiritless creatures who gradually take on an ever lower view of life and our fellow man, until we slowly become incapable of even envisioning or conceptualizing greatness, or the possibility of a higher type of culture, or a higher type of man.

These psychological and spiritual constraints then act like bars of a self-made prison and gradually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A disease that permanently stunts our growth—not just spiritually or psychologically, but, because the mind-body connection is so strong, a sickness that even threatens to turn us into ugly physical beings.

The "disease" I’m attempting to speak to here defies perfect description via any single term, but "universal irreverence" may come closest to the mark.

Broadly speaking, we’ve drifted into an overwhelming apathy.. a superficial approach toward life where we’ve convinced ourselves that nothing truly matters much, and anything that appears to matter is simply delusion, or something putting on airs, something that deserves to be shot down. It’s like a creeping numbing fog, dulling our senses and shrouding the world in gray indifference. Modernity attempts to sell the idea that to be ‘cool’ is to be dispassionate, detached, and perpetually unimpressed, to see nothing as sacred.. and that all who suggest otherwise are quaint or foolish. We’ve been overtaken by a cheapness and smallness and pettiness that gnaws at the spirit and mind, leaving us spiritually starved and psychologically stunted, blind to the beauty, power, and depth that once gave life its richness.

Ironically, we’ve created a situation where an endless apathetic joking about every aspect of life gradually turned life itself into a joke.

The disease I’ll be attempting to speak to here is more than mere skepticism or reductionism or materialism, certainly more than just nihilistic humor:

It’s a corrosive acid dissolving meaning and connection.. a loss of faith not just in potential and possibility, but in goodness or greatness, and in Divinity itself. It severs our connection to this higher power, it utterly blinds us to the sacred in all things.

"The modern world is desacralized. . . deprived of any sacred dimension."

Mircea Eliade

In this apathetic haze, we’ve lost the capacity to stand in genuine awe of anything. Our ancestors, who stood before God—or their ancient heroes, their Kings or great men—with great respect and a sincere desire to emulate these ideals, a desire to be good and great themselves, would perhaps be more shocked at this specific modern development than any other.

It’s as if a vacuum opened up, and strength and energy and vitality were mass-siphoned off into a void.

This isn’t progress, of any sort; it represents the most obvious backsliding in the most meaningful sense.. it’s a self-inflicted wound that strands us in a wasteland of our own making—a barren place where every noble aspiration is dismantled, every sincere gesture derided, and every hint of greatness met with a pretentiously knowing smirk. We’ve become largely incapable of envisioning a more lofty manner of living or thinking or being.. or even remembering what it feels like to be stirred by something vast and true.

Sarcasm, irony, apathy, nihilism etc. are often crutches or copes springing from a very real psychological and spiritual weakness or emptiness, which arise from a fundamental misunderstanding and devaluing of life, the universe, and ourselves.. and they’re becoming far too frequent and dominant expressions, even in our circles.

Without reverence, we’re adrift.. trapped in a cycle of ultimately hopeless despair in which nothing inspires, nothing endures, and nothing spurs us to rise. Our lives grow shallow and empty, our bonds become weaker and less deeply rooted, and our dreams gradually shrink to fit the confines of our self-made prison. We become trapped in a cycle of cynicism and despair, mocking the sacred as superstition, intellectually and academically reducing the transcendent to mere chemical reactions or social constructs.

"The mechanistic worldview has stripped nature of its sacred qualities, reducing it to a collection of inanimate objects."

Rupert Sheldrake

This isn’t just a personal failing; it’s a spiritual catastrophe, with the most supreme existential stakes. We risk blaspheming life and being itself—treating existence as a cosmic joke, rather than an unprecedented gift to be deeply cherished with some spiritual maturity and well justified awe. Without reverence, we’re blind to the beautiful and eternal thread subtly weaving through all things, with distracted focus stuck on minutiae and technicalities.. forever condemning ourselves to a vastly inferior state of existence.

"The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it."

Carl Jung

It’s not entirely baffling how we got here..

and it’s not exclusively due to malevolent subversiveness, and that enemy subset so obviously seeking to hijack, reorient, and reauthor our philosophies and worldviews into smaller, weaker, more pathetic forms.

No, much of it is our own doing, and our responsibility.

In a broken and subverted world full of pretentious bad actors—powerful, influential figures demanding respect despite being entirely undeserving of it—it’s no surprise we gradually learned to target every bag of hot air, and take aim at all unwarranted ego. In a sense, it’s a self-defense mechanism: if a hollow, terrible figure, especially one that so obviously hates us, gains immense power, prestige, and respect, this power will (of course) be used to terrible ends. It’s only by mocking, deriding, and savaging such types that we’re able to keep them from becoming the all-powerful figures they seek to be, and thus prevent immense harm to ourselves and all that we love in the process.

It may be a bit immature, but it’s also a spot-on summation and has become something of a well understood cultural meme, so pardon me: so much in our world over recent decades has become, as the expression goes, "fake and gay."

Those allowed access to the main stage of this theater—controlling our news media, playing the leading roles in creating our movies and video games, topping the NYT books lists, or authoring "prestigious" newspapers and magazines—are almost entirely cut from a small subset with strikingly similar political and ideological views, cut from a culture that openly despises us, and so clearly wants us gone. A subset that tends to do abysmal work because not driven by genuine creative inspiration or vital spirit or actual merit and talent, but rather by purely partisan and dogmatic alliances and hatreds.. and yet not just terrible work, profoundly insincere and incredibly soft and weak work.

Yes, this subset may be overwhelmingly Jewish, and this people may indeed lie at the "root" of this subversion, hijacking, and cultural takeover—but it’s certainly not fair to say this effort is entirely Jewish. For every few Jewish individuals, you’ll find a Richard Hanania or James Lindsay type, more than willing to stick the dagger into the back of their nation, people, or culture if it might result in greater wealth or fame; or a Mike Pompeo or Mike Johnson, so blinded by the hijacking of church leadership that they truly seem to believe we exist to dutifully worship at the feet of the Rothschild-created state of Israel; or a Jordan Peterson or Douglas Murray, supremely willing to do all in their power to paint this unique people as a superior race, whom we should be so lucky to contentedly serve without complaints.

Though this unique tribe may be the leading architects of this cultural degradation, such decline wouldn’t be the least bit possible to orchestrate if it weren’t for enthusiastic (and thoroughly corruptible) fellow travelers.. and our own laziness, excess of tolerance, and lack of vigilance.

And so, we’ve learned, from necessity, to tear down the frauds and charlatans, and everywhere be the first to loudly state that the emperor has no clothes.

In short, it’s clear why we’ve become experts at cutting pretentious, insatiable, malevolent blowhards down to size, ensuring their vision never dominates without counter fire.

However…

in the broader picture, we’ve paid an extremely steep price as result of this path. We’re not meant to be in hostile attack/defense mode, culturally and psychologically and spiritually speaking.. and it does something to a person. We’ve become terribly asymmetrical and unbalanced human beings:

Because the body and mind so seamlessly adapt to what we actually think and do throughout our day, our habits and mode of thinking literally shape us. If we look around us and see nothing but sickness on the public stage and spend all day, every day, taking shots to prevent this sickness from fully taking hold, we slowly but surely become a people that only knows sickness and decay, that only knows how to take shots—a culture that knows how to destroy, but not create.. that knows how to take people down, but not lift them up. A culture expert at irreverence, but one that has completely lost the willingness—increasingly, even the ability—to revere.

This leads to an environment in which virtually nothing can take firm and deep root, in which everyone is afraid to be genuine, sincere, or heartfelt, fearing to be shamed by the jaded, sardonic, bitter, and apathetic. In a world so filled with self-interested deceivers and charlatans, we’ve all naturally become immensely wary and skeptical. And because, atop it all, we’ve long seen supposed genuineness and sincerity being used as manipulative tools, many have now taken to mocking even the genuine article, barring its way.. and this is a terrible, ominous development, and one that deserves recognition and attention.

A positive, creative vision is an absolute necessity if we’re to accomplish anything real and lasting. Destruction alone isn’t enough—creation must be the goal.

If we’re unable to create atop the foundation and footprint of what we’ve helped topple, we’ll be locked into an endless cycle: opponents build, we raze, they rebuild, we topple, ad infinitum. What a bleak existence! A war of attrition with no victor, only exhaustion.. because there is no end to the number of enemy individuals and institutions and ideologies our opponents might prop up, with practically limitless monies and a wealth of time and energy, such a war would prove completely fruitless, and represent an endless spinning of our wheels and getting nowhere.

The irreverence that once shielded us has now shackled us, chaining us to a treadmill of negation where every step forward is just another swing of the wrecking ball. We’ve become so adept at tearing down that we’ve forgotten how to plant seeds, how to nurture, how (and why!) to stand in absolute and justified awe of something vastly greater than our own cleverness.

All-importantly, this nihilistic disease even cripples our ability to create and appreciate (even recognize) beauty.

"Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it."

Roger Scruton

Without reverence, the world is no longer a vast canvas of wonder and potential.. art becomes trivial, nature a mere commodity, the human spirit a superficial and entirely technical puzzle to dissect, not a profound and powerful mystery to honor. We lose the capacity to be stirred by the sublime—to be spoken to on the deepest level, in the most important and powerful language.

"All art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane 'recreation' to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries."

Rene Guenon

This isn’t just an aesthetic loss; it’s a theft of the spirit.

Revered beauty elevates us, reminding us of our wholly unique place in a grander narrative, sparking inspired creation, greatness. Without it, we dwell in a barren wasteland where nothing moves us, and life shrinks to hollow gestures, and the most tired and spiritless going-through-the-motions.

I’d suggest that this is one of the foremost differences between our people, historically speaking, and that powerful foreign tribe currently so dominant on the world scene: Our people have always recognized that we’re an echo or reflection or manifestation of something higher.. ‘sons of God’, children of an All-Father, created by the Divine in his image. By recognizing our fallibility and imperfection in this physical and material realm, and by having some notion of a perfect God in contrast, we’re able to seek and quest and progress from the former to the latter.. we’re able to engage in a constant refinement and improvement, and consistently become fundamentally better for it, for as long as we’re able to maintain this worldview and approach to life. On the other hand, talmudic Rabbis actually speak of defeating God himself in a rhetorical struggle (Oven of Akhnai, in Bava Metzia 59b).. with God finally admitting defeat and proclaiming ‘my sons have defeated me’. Another passage (Pesikta Rabbati 3, a medieval midrash) states that God himself must obey the decrees of the rabbis, saying "Even I (YHWH) must obey their decree, as it is written, you will decree and he will fulfill". Yes, this text actually exists.. and this is what those who embrace this book believe.

Their notion of Divine isn’t just strangely competitive and adversarial, but their conception and vision of the nature and being of God is inestimably smaller than our own.. vastly more absurd, ridiculous, imperfect. Imagine how differently this worldview would shape and orient and ‘develop’ a people!

It’s a materialist and reductionist mindset more common to this people than any other, and I’d suggest the prime cause of it all is the failure to see the face of God and the inability to hear his voice.. and becoming enamored with our own Byzantine sophistry and clever intellects, in his place. It’s roughly equivalent to atheism.

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

G.K. Chesterton

I’d suggest much of our irreverence, our massively cheapened notion of God and Divinity, our increased inclination to everywhere mock and deride and pretentiously and unjustly judge the Sacred, our inability to even recognize or conceive of a higher realm of the highest and greatest things, is to some significant degree a result of the Jewish dominance of modernity, and modern thinking.

This diseased mentality is causing us to lose touch with our natural nobility, and grace.. and our recognition of the immense importance of these innate traits, of just how much they’ve separated us and marked us out as unique, historically speaking. A healthy and capable and spirited people create high culture, and that high culture further nurtures and refines their spirit, and that spirit is capable of creating ever higher culture.. when one increases, so does the other—yet when the one declines, so does the other, and what we’re facing at the moment is the threat of exponential freefall.

The best of our ancestral heritage represents not a barbaric and brutal people who managed to cultivate some nobility, but an innately noble people who allowed themselves to cultivate some ‘barbarism’ and brutality, when and where most necessary.

".. the noble soul has reverence for itself."

Friedrich Nietzsche

One of the things I think is most unfortunate in our circles is this misconception that all our people really lack is the feeling of hatred and animosity.. if only we might turn this up to the maximum, our problems would swiftly be solved, and a vastly better world would inevitably take shape as a result. I fully understand why many believe this: our modern policy of extreme ‘tolerance’, open borders, and refusal to fight for our own racial or cultural best interests or the health and well-being of our nations can so easily be misunderstood as an excess of "kindness," causing a casual observer to believe we only need more of the opposite to ‘cure’ what ails us..

yet I couldn’t possibly reject this idea any more strongly. This is an excess of softness and weakness to blame, not kindness. Genuine kindness, from a wise, far-sighted, and broad-minded perspective, would mean acting to create a world in which our children and all future generations might grow up on safe streets and live in happiness, health, and fruitful prosperity of the most fundamental and meaningful sort.

I’d suggest our people were traditionally capable of such strength and brutality because they so loved, not because they so hated. The hatred was simply a result of a truly righteous indignation at seeing all that they loved so threatened, or trampled into the dust, and standing with courage to fight those doing the trampling. In other words, the hatred was a result of love as the primary motivator.

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

G.K. Chesterton

If a thief or random attacker breaks into your home at night, it’s not so much the hatred toward the individual that primarily motivates your immediate defensive response—you don’t know the person, after all—it’s love for your family and a desire to defend them that spurs a hatred of this criminal and unjust action by this lost soul threatening them.

It’s not enough to devote your life to creating traps and pitfalls and clever means of attacking the criminal, intruder, or any enemy force. At the end of the day, the bulk of our efforts need to be toward making the home itself a beautiful and lofty place, and one truly worth defending. Both instincts are needed and valuable: the impulse to destroy enemy threats to protect all you love, and the impulse to further build, cultivate, and refine all that you love and provide it room to grow and flourish.. but the primary emphasis must always be on the latter.

This holds doubly true for our present state of affairs. Those aligned against us have a virtually unlimited and inexhaustible stockpile of capital and resources, allowing for a never-ending succession of enemy figures, ideas, or structures to be propped up for us to wail away at. But the all-important truth here is that all the time and energy spent wailing away at these propped-up figures represents time and energy not spent creating something of lasting value.

At some point in the relatively near future, we need it in us to completely ignore the noise, find a sturdy patch of solid ground in which to deeply plant our own banner, and vow to honor and defend it to the end. This will mark the most concrete turning point.. a turning point our hearts and spirits need to be ready for—a banner and ideal worthy of true reverence, and something we might hold sacred.

Francis Parker Yockey spoke of culture as ‘the total expression of a people’s soul,’ a definition I’ve always appreciated, and something we must create with love and reverence.. I strongly believe we now need to consciously and proactively recreate our culture.. a ‘new’ culture, yet modeled according to old, timeless, eternal themes.

"The Spirit of a Culture is its highest expression, its religion, its art, its philosophy."

Francis Parker Yockey

I strongly believe we need to become artists, again.. and collectively work to shape and mold this highest and most important of things: a people, and a culture. Raising a banner—and firmly planting our feet, in defense of it—would represent the first definitive step in this process.

Until that moment, an upside to consider..

the truth of the matter of our situation is an incredibly optimistic and hopeful one: Nature, and the timeless universal order of things, is never actually defeated. Across brief periods of time, it might be held down by some creative artifice or contrivance; it might even appear to the untrained eye to be down for the count and triumphed over. But it always springs back to life, resets the stage, and finds balance and equilibrium again, with an indomitable force no man or institution or financial behemoth could possibly hope to stand against. The extremely unnatural, disoriented, and unhealthy forces that oppose us are destined to fail because their vision and ideas are so objectively sickly and artificial. It’s because of this that it takes such an immense effort from their factions—requiring a near-total monopolization over the flow of information, near-total subversion of powerful individuals, of political and economic structures, of culture and spirit—for their side to make even the slightest lasting gains.

I think we can all intuit that these gains are grinding to a halt, now.. perhaps, even, that this figurative pendulum has now stalled in mid-air, and is about to fly the other way with immense and unstoppable inertia. And when our side begins to make real gains again, I strongly believe they’ll be extremely swift (and perhaps even relatively effortless) by comparison.

Fighting against nature is a slow and arduous task bound to fall, whereas nature restoring her health and vitality and equilibrium can often occur in a flash.

The key to definitively turning this tide is to understand our present state, our current environment, and the threats we face and the weapons being wielded against us.

This contagious spread of total and all-pervasive irreverence—very much like demoralization efforts, and cut from the same cloth—ranks among the most nefarious and brutally effective weapons wielded by those against us. It cheapens all it touches, cheapens and lessens life itself, and makes us small. A prerequisite for all greatness, all high culture, all of the most beautiful architectural creations or works of art or sculpture, or the great heroes of old, was a powerful feeling of reverence—understanding life well enough to recognize the depth and breadth of who we are, what life is, what we’re capable of, and that there is a potent and Divine strain running through this existence, capable of being intuited, grasped, modeled, and emulated.

"The poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy."

Martin Heidegger

Crucially, none of this can be forced or faked. It’s not enough just to know we should be holding things sacred. It’s like telling someone ‘just be inspired!’.. it never works this way, because such forces of nature arise naturally, organically, and in their own time… but we do need to leave the door open for them, at the very least, and maintain some recognition of the immense positive power in their arrival. In ideal circumstances, none of this requires any effort or even a conscious decision or the making of a choice.

"We think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength to revere is alive. To revere is not a thing for the petty and lowly, the incapacitated and underdeveloped. It is a matter of tremendous passion; only what flows from such passion is in the grand style."

Martin Heidegger

For those who truly see the universe—its vastness, its hidden divinity—one can’t help but naturally feel immense reverence. It isn’t a chore or a choice; it flows naturally, like a river finding its course. It’s an innate awe that comes as a result of grasping life’s magnificence, but also acts as the cause of that grasping. So we’re again in that strange territory between "cause" and "effect," containing elements of both worlds: feeling reverence causes one to respect and appreciate this unbelievable gift of life, and the appreciation of this unbelievable gift of life causes one to revere.

It’s a strange fact of life—we’re often moving upward or downward at an exponentially increasing pace and inertia. The more we move in either of these directions, the easier it becomes to move in that given direction even more quickly.

“For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away.”

The universe further rewards those already enjoying the rewards of moving closer to truth and further punishes those feeling the pain and disorientation of moving away from it. Nature is just, but she isn’t equitable, because these are most certainly not the same things—it’s impossible to be both simultaneously. In short, for those that find ways to take the first few steps down that path, all additional steps will come more easily.

Yet, this is easier said than done. We’re currently all in the midst of a spiritual crisis, stumbling through a dense and disorientating spiritual fog in modernity.. experiencing it both collectively, and to widely varying degrees as individuals.

"The modern world is characterized by a lack of metaphysical understanding, which is the root of its spiritual poverty."

René Guénon

A crisis further compounded by the fact that so many now conceive of the term "spiritual" as roughly equivalent to "religious," and then we proceed to expend such a great deal of our time and energy arguing over the name of the God we worship, or the technicalities of His origins, history, and attributes, or the minutiae regarding how to best live. The 100 different prominent opinions here seem to often be in a war to the death against one another, causing the spiritual sphere to ever more resemble the chaos of political squabbles. And to be fair, these technicalities and minutiae aren’t wholly unimportant and sometimes represent issues we’d be well served to someday have clarity on, in a cohesive, unified, and widely agreed manner.

That said, it’s my hope that we might try our best to see and sense the power of God on the macro level, and in the broad, until we’re someday able to work together under better and more fruitful circumstances (amidst a more clean and pure air, free from malevolent subversives) to answer many of those more narrow and specific questions.

The overwhelming majority of our ancestors believed in a higher power, and for good reason. This recognition of an ultimate power higher than ourselves helped make life vastly more beautiful, mysterious, powerful, and compelling. It enriched every aspect of our existence.. gave it substance, value, and meaning, and helped provide structure and order.

In the midst of this collective spiritual crisis, and right this moment, we may not all be able to perfectly glimpse the face of God or perfectly define exactly what this gift of life is, why it is, or precisely what’s expected of us. But we can certainly intuit hints and echoes of this power and grace—whether it’s the overwhelming love we feel for our newborn child, a breathtaking vision of nature,

"In the forest, one finds not only solitude but also a connection to the eternal, a reminder of what is truly sacred."

Ernst Junger

starry skies, or a vast and powerfully surging ocean stretching out beyond the horizon, or that unique and beautiful place within that we’re occasionally able to connect to in our quietest moments, when distracting noise is calmed and something eternal speaks.

"In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author... In divine works, on the contrary, there is an inexhaustible treasure of wonders..."

Joseph de Maistre

The one thing I’m most certain of, above all else in this life: there is something here worthy of the most deep and profound reverence. It completely defies language and quantification, to the degree that even attempting to speak of it risks lessening and weakening our understanding, and moving further from the truth.. but it can be felt and experienced at our most powerful moments—moments I’d suggest have acted as the driving force of all life and the underlying motive force of all of humanity.

“For the hand can never execute any thing higher than the character can inspire”

Emerson

The truth here is simple, and striking:

the more profound and lofty our understanding of our universe is, the more lofty and vital and powerful we are able to be, as direct result and consequence. The smaller and cheaper and petty we believe life to be, the more pathetic and impotent we will be, as result.. inevitably.

By learning to revere all that deserves reverence again, we can gradually reclaim all that we’ve lost and help restore that all-important power and vitality to life. We’ll once again be able to see the world not as some battlefield of petty grievances, but as a cathedral of limitless, daunting, boundlessly intriguing possibilities—where every act of substantive creation, every moment of connection and true resonance, every glimpse of beauty is an ode to something greater—lifting us from these tragically barren and stifled lives into something luminous and whole and timeless, acting as a bold reclamation of our birthright.

"The pure reactionary is not a dreamer of abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills."

Nicolás Dávila

Reverence isn’t merely some passive longing for a lost age; it’s an active rebellion against the spiritual death of modernity.. a defiant stride toward a world where the sacred is alive. By choosing reverence and sincerity and genuineness, we break nihilism’s grip, and in its place can shape a culture that inspires, endures, elevates… crafting culture and the world around us not out of mere habit, but out of profound devotion, raising monuments—both physical and spiritual—that genuinely reflect the majesty of existence. This is our path out of barren despair: not through endless sniping and destruction and tearing down, but through creation born of awe, through a bold return to the divine thread weaving through all things.

Even amidst the most extreme chaos, degeneration, deception, and ugliness, there are always things worth honoring, worth fighting for, as difficult as they may be to remain focused on at times... we need to consciously take up this task, again—recognizing all that’s at stake, in a world that so effectively obscures the sacred with its clamor.

We need to actively seek out all that’s most worthy, and fully cultivate our ability to revere, again.. as if our lives depended on it—ultimately, in a very real sense, they do.