The Underdog is Just a Dog (What He Really Needs is a Good Woman)

An Essay in Which I Predict a White Swan Event

by Carl Nelson (March 2024)

 

We live in a very encumbered age. We are encumbered by our wealth, our technology, our leisure, regulations, laws, social strictures, by the Deep State for sure… but most of all, I would think, by narrative fears. What are rules and regulations but seeded narratives? And we certainly have enough of them. And there is certainly a price to be paid for breaching them. All of them are touted as solutions. But, unfortunately…

 

The chief cause of problems is solutions. —Sevaried’s Law

 

We are metaphorically bathed in cautionary tales from dawn to dusk and then far into the night. The morning news wakes us. The evening news and a myriad of TV shows put us to bed. In between, there’s all that you heard throughout the day, all pitched in the best story form manageable, often cloaked in fear – so that you would listen, attend. These are the American society’s equivalent to Mao portraits. Really, it’s easy to suspect that the only thing you might be valued for is your attention – as all these narratives require acquiescent participants. As yet, they haven’t begun to shoot us as we try to leave, or simply place our hands over our ears. But, in many current situations you must not only accede to the bureaucratic mission statement, smile and sing, you must actively proselytize for it in order to demonstrate your commitment and to remain in good standing. (For example, if this were to be published in the legacy media, it would be incumbent upon me to tip my hat to a better world through gender reassignment, destruction of the patriarchy, aid to Palestine, or some other such woke nonsense. As in Nazi Germany, it was not enough to like Hitler, you must “Seig Heil!”

 

Desire generates narrative, causing narrative’s inherent prejudice. —Bill Soames

 

Dr. Michael Nehls is a molecular geneticist, physician, and author, most recently of The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom. In a recent interview he discussed how the general human hippocampus size has been shrinking versus its general expansion in past times. The hippocampus is the clearinghouse of learning. When our hippocampal index of new neurons is positive, we are able to incorporate new information with what we know of the past; we individuate. We particularize as individuals. And when we encounter new knowledge, we first vet it for red flags as regards our current measure of wisdom. When the hippocampal index is zero or negative, the newer knowledge no longer individuates but rather simply overwrites what is there. This is how indoctrination takes root and perpetuates itself.

Fear and inflammation will prevent hippocampal neuron growth as resources are shifted elsewhere. As Dr. Nehls describes, this is how indoctrination occurs: the fear of the message prohibits neural growth, so that the present propaganda overwrites our historical memory of the past. Without a strong mental immune system (hippocampal index) which can resist fearful propagandas by comparing it with our as yet acquired wisdom – we are slaves to the current message. Dr. Nehls noted that though narrative is the food we eat in order to learn, that it is how we take in our informational nutrition – without a strong mental immunity we become slaves to the new.

The current legacy media is conducting a continual 24/7 bombardment of the foundational ethos against a populace who are hunkered down within their shrinking mandates trying to live their lives in a natural harmony with the world around them. All the while, harassing narratives seek to restrict their movements, restrict their use of energy, restrict their use of labor saving appliances, restrict their use of language and free expression, restrict the use of assembly, restrict their use of representation, restrict their use of their lawful rights, restrict, restrict, restrict… this is what narrative fear accomplishes. But it isn’t only fear which drives this, to my mind, but the confining nature of narrative itself, as the only thing narrative naturally allows is its control; like a superhighway narrative exists only to get you from here to THERE.

Currently, the poetry—the give and take, the real discussions—of our cultural life is barely surviving beneath a blitz of narrative attack: the CO2 creates global warming narrative, the 1619 Project narrative concerning the founding of the United States, the Covid-19 narrative and successive pandemic scare narratives, the Black Lives Matter narrative of systemic racism, the Feminist narrative of oppressive patriarchy, the LGBTQ narrative of sexual identity … All of these insurgent narratives (and a host of others spontaneously generated daily) are conducting strikes across what has become the wasteland of the American tradition and the poetry of the American dream.

I think it is reality which forces Conservatives to swim against this increasingly relentless modernist current—because the reality is that the human essence is poetic and not narrative. Conservatives might not like the tragic nature of our existence, but they accept and accommodate for it—even write verse affirming it. Unfortunately, most people will only submit to poetry when they are about to die, or someone dear to them has. They veer from the certain predicaments of life that much. Or as Thomas Sowell described it: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” Most would much rather enjoy the spectacle of conflict and war e.g., life as a pro sports fan.

Poetry feels impotent, but it’s an impotence with the singular clarity of an interpreted ambiguity. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Matthew 11:15. We’re all going to die, and our placements eventually be for naught. Within this framework, Conservatives are (or struggle to be) reasonable. Conservatives hold that the ancestral parents of our traditions lived and found out things making our lives more bearable and easier, which are the treasures contained within our traditions.

Others do not think this, and furthermore think it deplorable to do so, because they worship the new. What is the ‘new’ in their minds, has superseded all that was the past in the long evolutionary struggle to be the fittest, which has survived. (Reminiscent of Dr. Nehls’, vulnerable hippocampus, in which the new has overwritten all.) They certainly espouse the most dire of tooth and claw tests for all received wisdom. And yet, they act as if their own, next, untested notions were Athenas sprung direct from the forehead of Zeus. They would rather sweep uncomfortable truths and the bits of painful reality – long encountered throughout history – right under the rug, or send it off to the gulag. Doubt for them is a structural frailty, to which their narrative poses the solution – with an aphrodisiacal, whip cream like topping of power and control.

The nature of narrative is certainty. One thing leads to the next. And then it runs into a counter narrative and dispute. And then the best strategy wins. Wins what? It wins control. It says how things are. Narrative is stasis, while appearing to be its opposite. If the frozen-in-aspic nature of our current national conversation playing in the legacy media hasn’t convinced you of this … well, I will, nevertheless, lay its future out: The underdog and upper dog will tag team as ‘round and ‘round we all contend, the upper dog versus the controlled opposition. We are currently in an actual war between nothing ever happening ever again—which continually reappears with too much velocity to grasp—and the exercise of our free will and speech which currently present as an exhausting isometric exercise.

What with modern media, the daily narrative has become a continual 24/7 bombardment of the foundational ethos, pummeling the populace, who watch their modest beliefs sliced and diced daily. Before their iPhones, computers and TVs, and quivering with limited agency, they hunker down as if before beaked demons in a Bosch painting, while trying to live lives in a natural harmony with the world as they find it in their day to day existence—like having to fix things, pay bills, cook, clean, raise their kids, get along with others…

Narrative thrives in novelty and hubris, while poetry grows with humility and repetition.

 

A child kicks his leg rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding fatality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”/ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. —G.K. Chesterton

 

All of this is illustrated by the famous Dunning-Kruger graph of subjective confidence versus the accumulation of objective experience.

Higher learning fuels the initial start of the Dunning-Kruger effect graph, which is where the narrative confidence most peaks, while reality begins dissolving narrative confidence with a descending curve as soon as experience begins. And with experience, monotony begins to extinguish the blush of the new. So that even on the rebound—at the level of greatest expertise and most experience—narrative never achieves the confidence of its first blushing birth. Indeed, the Dunning-Kruger curve is a graphic representation of Yeat’s “Second Coming” wherein… 

 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

 

At one time in my life I was a medical student riding in the Medical Aid Ambulance as part of my training. One night we stopped at a home in an upscale neighborhood to pick up a very elderly woman from where she had been living with the daughter. The elderly woman was bleeding from both ends, and quite faint, but as we rushed her to the hospital she pulled at my sleeve with something urgent to say. It was quite noisy what with the sirens, motor noises, CB radios and such so I bent down close to hear, as I thought this very well might be her last words.

“I want a private room,” she said. This woman was totally absorbed in her life’s narrative of established social position. Even her approaching death could not dislodge it.

Over the intervening years, I’ve witnessed alike scenes in persons just hours from death. Like Woody Allen joked, showing off the handsome watch he’d acquired: “My uncle sold this to me on his deathbed.”

 

My mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond, poetry of many kinds … gave me great pleasure … But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry … My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive … The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness. —Charles Darwin

 

According to Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, “There are two kinds of memory: implicit and explicit.” In the simulation model, as we acquire implicit memory, our brains are re-wired, so that though we have no memory of the activity or event which caused us to develop an ability, the ability persists. So, for example, you may not remember the very subtle sequences of choices by which you determined how to ride your bike without training wheels or (more advanced) how to roll a derby hat across your back from one hand to the other—but the skill persists, nevertheless. We have acquired ‘implicit’ memory.

Explicit memory requires no such explanation but is the one most on display whenever we use whatever we can “bring to mind” to tell a story, craft an argument, or endeavor to either to win or to direct a discussion. Implict memory is what a poem resurrects. People dance, or perform, paint or sing … like a dream resurrects hidden feelings and knowledge. Implicit memory is the thing that raises those red flags when we hear what we think might be a wrong account, but we haven’t the facts yet to challenge it (something like a child’s intuition?).

We do not remember much of our dreaming, and yet the implicit memory of it helps us in our waking hours of problem solving. How many creative people remark upon finding the answer to a very difficult problem following a night’s very fertile dream? Isn’t it common knowledge that a productive way of solving a seemingly intractable problem is to “sleep on it”?

Implicit memory might declare to our hospital bound woman, that she had much more important matters to imagine on her plate that evening than whether or not she was to acquire a private room. But this would depend upon what sort of life she practiced. For to complicate matters even more, modern life, in which our experiences are more and more secondhand—has polluted the implicit memory we build from our experiences in the natural world. An endless flotsam and jetsam of media driven narrative, plus interactions from the fabulous fictional, political and social worlds distort our implicit memory, sometimes beyond all common sense. We walk about as simulacrums of ourselves, something like how the orange juice flavored liquids now offered have replaced the orange. Perhaps only the pulp of our real existence is left, as a crutch of authenticity. (To go even further down this rabbit hole, I would recommend Aaron Ames essay, “Darwin, Bureucrtese, and the Decline of Poetry.)

Increasingly we read fictions where the underlying human nature of the characters is a twisted—rather like those images one can play with using the ‘distort’ app on Photoshop, a pre-fabricated malformation. And we see all around us human relationships which also seem a perverted version of the human condition e.g. people marrying themselves, people declaring themselves to be something quite different from what they obviously are, and ‘blended’ families which are anything but familiar. The red flags are popping up all around us. And perhaps we should all turn off our TVs and put down our iPhones, and begin thinking again as if out in nature … e.g. while taking a walk in the fresh air and sunshine.

I have memories of the theatre world, sitting within our group of playwrights, and listening as another (quite “socially active”) playwright’s work was given a reading. She was a sound playwright, but her characters were made of plywood, assembled from glued chips of correct thinking, but which, it seemed were the production of her implicit memories of politically framed proper character. How does a person get this across to another person. I remember on one occasion, I chanced to suggest that “what this play needs is a Republican. You simply cannot reach the epiphany—nor a sound denouement—with the characters you have assembled.” I was already the group ‘alien’, so the remark got more laughs than the usual mystification my observations typically produced.

While narrative gives the appearance of motion—poetry, like implicit memory, only appears to be still. Actually, poetry is three dimensional. Poetry is busy connecting disparate notions and creating illumination (thinking ‘space’) through explanatory metaphor. Two things make culture move forward. The first is insight, an increase in understanding which creates value. For example, when we understand how to harness the power of steam and match that with precision engineering, we birth an industrial revolution. Napoleon and Alexander the Great, in comparison, have been smaller movers and shakers.  Nevertheless, the popular mind continues to bend the knee to Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. The second is generosity. We share our knowledge, and in this way the benefits spread, accrue, and fertilize other minds. Jesus Christ both did this, and directed us to do so. And when we share our knowledge with people who share their money in kind, things really get rolling. We’ve got a business plan, and it’s scalable. The quality of human life expands exponentially. It’s bread and fishes for everyone. (Whereas, at the furthest border of narrative we encounter Chat GPT.)

This, latter, is what occurs in what Dr. Kehls would describe as happening in the individuating, healthy hippocampus.

We’ve all heard the shouting, “Don’t just stand there, do something!”  Often necessary advice. But this is also the call of narrative, which eventually, like a rushing stream, settles into the wide river flowing into the ocean until lost in the immensity of all the other rushing narrative streams. “Full of sound and fury signifying nothing,” as Shakespeare best described it, are the rushing streams terminating in the alluvial plains, eventually to become more slim layers in the sedimentary bedrock.

“Don’t just do something, stand there.” is the sage and the poet’s admonition. And it is also the hippocampal call of individuation. More clearly put, we might warn, “Don’t just jump … think!”

Do those who write the historical accounts even notice that following the wreckage of the Napoleonic Wars, WW1, WW2, the pogroms and gulags of Communists … that puppies and flowers are still around and generally plentiful as ever? That the trilobite still endures after some 300 million years, only slightly modified as the horseshoe crab? That perhaps these resourceful creatures have nearly perfected the give and take, the tradeoffs, found that natural poetry, which create for these Paleozoic conservatives their closest approximations to a stable and scalable utopia?

 

Hubris

Humility served the trilobite well
for three hundred million years
Then someone decided tail fins
were trending and would be
a nice decorative touch
—giving birth to the horseshoe crab.

How this will turn out
is anybody’s guess.

 

But the narrative (masculine) mindset, it often seems, cannot grasp what the poetic, feminine mindset is. Narratives would seem forever too focused to understand that listening is neither subservience nor inaction, but in a horse and carriage arrangement—of enormous benefit to all.

There is a very favorite scene of mine from the play, Saving Harry (renamed Personal Growth Through Copier Sales) which I wrote. The play concerns a poet, Claude, who finds himself transplanted into the role of a copier salesperson in order to improve his own situation and also hopefully save the bacon of a senior salesperson who has recently suffered a right side stroke. In this scene, two rival salesmen have dropped by Claude’s cubicle in order to suss out the ‘new-guy’, and how he fits. That is, what is the meaning of his presence, what weakness or strength will it bring to Harry’s game, and what fallout it will have for their own. Their interrogation barely begins however, before they get so involved in sales figure dick measurements, as to completely leave Claude out of the conversation whatsoever. Claude is left, (as is the usual plight of the poet), as a spectator to what was to be his scene. I cleaved to this scene. But it always seemed to pass by the audience like a great freighter passing in the dark, with nary an eyebrow raised as to the nature of what was occurring (…which was quite nearly the pressing plea of the whole play. Sigh …).

Theatre is obsessed with the idea that every story begins with a conflict and that it is the narrative arc which traces this through its climax to its end (the denouement). What the theater often refuses to acknowledge is that generosity resolves what would otherwise continue interminably. (That the dog and underdog are a portrayal of the Ouroboros.)

And what is true generosity? It’s when one person offers another what they truly need and want. And how does the benefactor know this? By listening. Plays turn upon the entry of the feminine. Someone finally listens, and hears… the climax ensues. Oedipus finally gets it: “Gosh! This woman is my mother.” The action got married, (stupidly, as it turns out), to its mother.And that changes everything.

***

“Those who who tell the story rule society,” as our leading epigram notes.

Nevertheless, the narrative mentality might take note that the vulnerable and inoffensive flower, puppy, trilobite—the list is extensive—are still flourishing long after the sturm and drang of the narrative existence has spent its energies. (“The meek shall inherit the earth.”)

And why?

I’d guess, it’s because listening is very important for survival. (Have you ever tried telling your boss at work, this? Perhaps gotten very bold and stepped beyond the hint?)

And this is because reality is much, much more vast than our thumbnail understanding. In order for the resourceful organism to find that fertile, nurturing space in the whirl of events, a lot of listening, and a lot of juggling of the trade-offs over a very long breadth of time necessitates. Securing durable success within the realm of reality is very hard to achieve. It’s a hard bone to chew.

Truly, the human being’s greatest deficit is their hubris—and not ‘stupidity’ as is often maintained by those of the Progressive bent. In fact, it is mostly the legions of modest, or even low intelligence, which form the ballast of a traditional alignment—which keeps us from being led totally astray by the whiz-kid, book-addled intellectual. And here we should take George Orwell’s counsel: ‘There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” (To my thinking, these intellectuals might also comprise many of the trilobite’s long forgotten (deceased!) shirttail relations.)

The current cultural conversation is certainly evidence of this. To wit, we have a Supreme Court Justice who cannot define what a woman is, who nevertheless is deemed capable of parsing refined legal arguments. I would say that the chances of her decisions reflecting a common sense, which the common citizen can grasp – let alone obey—is slight.

 

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things. —G.K. Chesterton

 

Our dreams and our daily lives are continually re-wiring our brains with implicit memories of what has proved successful, as does our culture through its traditions. This is the scientific method played large—over the great expanse of history! And yet, along come those narrative-bound Progressives with the next fine idea, all loaded down with a bunch of ‘explicit’ reasons, and out goes the baby with the bathwater. And here again, G. K. Chesterton has something to say about this.

 

Chesterton’s Fence is a simple rule of thumb that suggests that you should never destroy a fence, change a rule, or do away with a tradition until you understand why it’s there in the first place. —Google

 

Even though Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism, “a moral theory that argues that actions should be judged right or wrong to the extent they increase or decrease human well being” uses all the arguments of explicit memory, it plays out finally in nihilism. Our current extroverted culture is quite biased towards rational, explicit argument for which narrative is the natural vehicular device. Poetry is the natural device of the implicit memory. When we refuse the stillness and impotence of the poet, refusing to listen, we refuse by far the voice of our acquired wisdom. Is this smart? Poets (of course) would say not.

 

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

—William Carlos Williams

 

And here I would closely associate what Williams calls “the news from poems”, with conversation with the Feminine. Poetry’s ambiguities closely align with the Feminine’s widely acknowledged wiles and fickleness.

In other words, (mine), the country Doctor Williams might be more colloquially saying, “Listen to your wife, you idiot!”

And if the reality is that the human essence is poetic and not narrative – perhaps poets might have something worthwhile to say about our situation.

This was the question which perturbed J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot’s hapless protagonist in his famous modernist poem, the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

 

T.S. Eliot’s “streets … of insidious intent” led him to this “overwhelming question” :

 

…To have bitten off the mater with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say, ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’ …

—T.S. Eliot

 

How does a poet act? How can a poet act within this modern culture of “The Hollow Men” (a later Eliot poem)?

J Alfred Prufrock seems hapless, and totally unmanned by the female targets of his ardor: those “women who come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo”. Truly these dames rule. And Alfred doubts younger “mermaids singing, each to each./I do not think that they will sing to me.”

 

The Feminist vote has always been the moving piece in our politics. —Dick Morris

 

Like the Trojans, the Deep State has made off with our Helen. And it isn’t going well. She’s off with her peers wandering grandiose rooms discussing politics and culture. She’s hardly rocking the cradle. She’s off “changing the world” … into a crazy dystopia, as it so happens.

As the old saw goes, “She was the making of that man.” When women re-discover their innate ability to animate their men folk and thereby rule the world, we may well find another thousand ships launched, and the ramparts of the Deep State overwhelmed. This is my prediction of a White Swan Event.

Narrative is the active arm of male will, and the collective will solidifies this power by being “on the right side of history”. (That is, by winning.)

The antagonist of the collective will is transcendence. It is through transcendence that the individual is joined to the great archetypes, those metaphors which define our existence. The role of the feminine is to be the fountainhead and goal of this transcendence; the Dulcinea to Don Quixote ardor. Individuals who share the same transcendent goal become a community, and then become a nation, just as grains of sand become a beach. “For Queen and Country!” Such is how the power of the feminine (poetry) solidifies and makes the world shudder.

So. What has poetry (and Conservative thought) to tell us of the crazy, upended culture we currently inhabit? Probably that the future lies in the hands of our women. Examine most disintegrating families or communities, and it is the women who are holding things together while the men fight.And that the future will probably unfold as they demand. If She blesses us to take off and discover this Newer Jerusalem, then it will probably be found.

Predicting the future is not that hard. Conservatives have long known that it will look very much like the past. Timing is really the thing.  (Just as all Marxism fails, but the question is when?) And when this is all to occur? Other than it is bound to happen eventually—because it is part of a cosmic dialectic—I haven’t a clue.

The good news is that currently women are very dissatisfied and unmoored, and so much so that near half of them are out and out unmarriageable lunatics (according to reports from the GenZ embedded males).

In this recent article, “Why Gen Z Is Ditching The Girlboss For The Tradwife” by Emma Waters, she makes note of a Julliard trained ballerina who has ditched it all for the traditional wife life.

Naysayers might point out that the woman touted is extremely wealthy. And that her ‘rebellion’ is more of a Marie Antoinette moment. I would counter though, that this is the movement of an Elite. And what the Elites choose to do, their subordinates eventually adopt. The New Helen, I expect, will of course be quite unexpected. And she might be something like this woman neo-Tradwife, or quite different. I’m just saying that she will appear, and if not soon, then later. And that it will be a blessing.

 

Table of Contents

 

Carl Nelson has recently finished a book of poetry titled, Self-Assembly, which will be published shortly, and from which the above poetry has been selected. To see this and more of his work, please visit Magic Bean Books.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast