The glaring problem with the Grecofascist ‘silly right’ is that they try to LARP the ideals of a culture that was born from primitive weapons systems. Once you take the Quigley pill that nearly everything in politics and therefore high culture is downstream of ‘who’s got the best weapons?’ there’s no going back.
You sometimes hear the silly right types hope for the space-oddity fantasy of a return to Dune-style hand-to-hand sword combat, they yearn for an utterly ahistorical oddball civilization with retvrn to ‘muh phalanx’ and ‘muh Achilles’. Believing in Universal Basic BUD/S Class 234 is extremely milquetoast.
Even though there is a glorious Beauty and Truth to the Bronze Age society and culture, any attempt to translate it naively to our era will get absolutely bodied. Just as an army of ‘vitalist’, tanned, nasty physical beasts could show up to a battlefield with swords and spears only to get mowed down by muskets, that same army of vitalists could show up nowadays with machine guns and get nuked, MW2 style. The predator-prey relation of violence is a universal, God of Nature approved structure.
We live in an Anglofuturist body, and it doesn’t let random people, let alone ideologically hostile people, hold the genuinely dangerous weapons (dangerous in the sense that someone holding them could overthrow the whole political order). The only alternative is to come up with your own. And in fact this is what has happened, the modern ‘hard right’ has failed, over and over again (without even a real battle to speak of), losing to the vastly more competent and vital and clear-headed Anglofuturism, which made the atomic bomb and has been putting world-historic work into the project of violence deferral for centuries, successfully postponing the end-times (i.e. its demise) by probably a thousand years.
When ‘incels’ onanistically cower in their basements, playing video games and such, only to wake up at 35, ‘get a job’, and ‘have a family’, that’s just Anglofuturism winning easily, its edifices of social organization working like a powerful solvent, effectively stripping away the energy and fluid intelligence of youth, the only real source of potential violence that could cause upheaval of the social order. When the silly right lifts weights in the sunlight while posting on X, that’s also just Anglofuturism winning easily. In general (unless you’re an insane person) the Anglofuturists offer a very good deal.
Remember The Rise of Nuclear Fear by Spencer Weart on that old Thiel syllabus? We haven’t built any nuclear infrastructure because we’re biblically scared of it, because it’s downstream of a massive advance in weapons systems. It took Trump and Craig Wright almost a century to start getting us over our fear. The pervasiveness of the 20th century Americo-British mental image of ‘seeing a very bright light and suddenly turning into a shadow on a wall’ just meant that there could’ve been a new sheriff in town if the wrong guys got the bomb first. But our hometown sheriff, Anglofuturism dba the United States Government, won by funding ‘engineers’ to work on the new weapons system.
So if the Grecofuturists really wanted power (hint: they don’t, they just like the Art), they would be doing a helluva lot less social media promotion of nude bodybuilding and a helluva lot more autistic scifi weapons systems development projects. Wait, autistic scifi weapons systems development projects... why am I reminded of Effective Altruism?
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Quigley was a bit naive in conceiving of weapons systems as ‘things that can kinetically kill people’. This is classic academic style: the imposition of a simplifying framework to be able to say something concrete. Dead/not dead is not really a binary thing, it’s a value that varies continuously. The gooner incel may not be dead, but he might as well be. As I mentioned earlier, he’ll probably even contribute positively to society once he’s been whupped for a few decades. And if death isn’t binary, then weapons don’t have to be ‘things that actually kill people’. Weapons are really just things that can make people closer to dead, or alternatively make them more alive. Currently existing Artificial Intelligence is a really powerful weapon: it could be deployed in a media-like way to demoralize certain sorts of people, or it could be deployed in a genie-like way to grant certain users the ability to invent new kinetic weapons that inflict kinetic harm, or it could be deployed as a... you get the point.
One of the most impressive things about Anglofuturism is its ability to absorb young competitors. Much like cells, it engages effectively in endosymbiosis (a Gnon approved strategy). It once absorbed Nazi scientists, even giggling about it, and used them to go the moon. It is presently absorbing Effective Altruism. EA is a cult/ideology/political movement developing the scifi weapons system we presently call Artificial Intelligence. You could imagine it being a nation state if it had some territory.
When endosymbiosis happens, there’s a nail-biter moment where maybe the big guy won’t be able to successfully encapsulate the little guy — perhaps the little guy is small but mighty, perhaps the little guy is growing too fast and could pop the old, brittle cell wall of the big guy, etc. The pervasive AI anxiety, whether via apocalyptic fears or data center backlashes or FOMO from multibillion-dollar acquisitions, is something like the chemical signaling response of us as cells in an Anglofuturist body to the possibility of failed endosymbiosis.
These civilization-scale endosymbiotic events don’t happen often. If you’re a political thinker or actor and not looking at how EA is being encapsulated by Anglofuturism, and learning from the conditions that led to this happening, you’re completely missing the point.