Discipline as Choice

We live in interesting times. Brexit, the Trump election, Canada’s flirting with blasphemy laws, and the ongoing problems in Europe. The battle for Berkeley, the missile attack on Syria, the North Korean nuclear threat. There’s no shortage of excitement in the news. Rather than the show drip of increasing tyranny on the one hand, and the little sparks of liberty here and there on the other, we’re witnessing a landslide of movement that makes the politics of the last 20 years boring by comparison. There’s a real sense that chickens are coming home to roost. It’s not occupy encampments being broken up by the cops while tea parties get harassed by the IRS, it’s people biting their nails over the prospect of World War 3 while violent leftists are engaging in street battles with non-leftists as the cops sit back and watch. It’s no time for the faint of heart.
We are increasingly defining ourselves in terms of good and evil. We stand for freedom, and that means that we are good, while the leftists are supporting a system of oppression and that makes them evil. Meanwhile, the leftists are pursuing a world in which everyone is accepted for who they are, and that makes them good, while the Nazis that they are opposing are promoting hatred, and that makes them evil. Perhaps my bias is showing, but the point is that we are defining each other in extreme terms and justifying ourselves thereby. I am not saying that each side of this culture war is equal, I do think that I am fighting for the good and that the leftists are fighting for evil, but we are all human beings and this is not a battle between angels and demons.
I’m not an angel, and I don’t know anyone that is. In fact, I can be a major asshole, am frequently rather inconsiderate, and often fail to keep my word. All that and more, yet I still play at doing moral philosophy. Richard Spencer describes himself as a collectivist, I describe myself as an individualist, but he speaks about something very important. We are not solitary animals, but tribal, like with a pack of wolves. He has stated that “individuality needs to exist in a tension with the collective,” that is to say that we are individuals, but we exist within the context of a community. That tension is not just between ourselves and our community, but within ourselves; we wish to do good and to be good, but we exist within the context of our being, which is fundamentally amoral.
Moralistic Tension:
I propose that basic, universal ethics is quite simple, and can largely be summed up with the non-aggression principle: Do not initiate force or fraud. Even with that straightforward and simple rule, there are grey areas, occasions when a threat is perceived, but that threat is not clear enough to provide certainty that a violent response is justified. For the most part, however, our moralistic misgivings are with regard to things that are not strictly unethical, but rather aesthetically distasteful or perhaps morally ambiguous. We have bad habits that displease us, but which we continue to engage in. We have an infinity of shortcomings to our ideal for ourselves for which we judge ourselves quite harshly.
The fact that we experience a moralistic tension with regard to our own behavior is quite revealing, for the reason that we do so at all is because we are able to compare ourselves to an abstract ideal, and judge whether we are living up to that ideal or not. Without that capacity, we could have no ethics at all. The danger comes in overmoralizing our behavior, because rather than compel us to be better the impact is generally that we condemn ourselves as, on some level, bad people by definition. This condemnation does not offer us much room for improvement, but rather leads to a sort of resignation. We’ll put up a front in an attempt to be accepted by our peers, but internally we feel that we don’t fundamentally measure up.
In order to be better men, we are called upon to have courage of our convictions. To have courage of our convictions requires that we have integrity, and to have integrity we must have discipline. We generally recognize that, but discipline is not a matter of being the living embodiment of rigid perfection. Discipline can mean different things in different contexts; consider the discipline of a soldier and the discipline of a spiritual leader for contrast. Regardless, no one is exempt from the condition of being human, and as such we are equipped with an unconscious mind that is a product of our primal roots, that is fundamentally uncivilized and which operates independently of our reason. From deep within our unconscious minds arise impulses, thoughts and feelings that are driving to rise to the surface.
I invite you to consider that the possibility of discipline can be found in the capacity to choose. One can train oneself to act mechanically and automatically to respond to a stimulus in a certain way, as the fighter may train to block a blow faster than the speed of thought, but this training is not the discipline but the consequence of the discipline. The discipline is the capacity to choose to get up in the morning and train rather than to sleep in. Ethics too comes from the capacity to choose, and the capacity to choose is broadened and deepened through self-knowledge. When one knows their innate drives and impulses, and habitual ways of being, therein one finds the capacity to choose.
This capacity to choose is not a matter of controlling your impulses, thoughts and feelings, for these things are like the weather – they come and go and your conscious mind does not have direct control over these things. You can, over time, shift your unconscious mind, but the coming and going of impulses, thoughts and feelings, is a part of being human and will never stop so long as you live. If you try to suppress them, they will merely metastasize and manifest as physical or psychological symptoms. Rather, you can recognize them for your passing internal weather, acknowledge them and realize that you have the choice to act on them or not. Therein, the capacity for discipline is found.
To the extent that you can let your impulses, thoughts and feelings just be what they are, passing sensations from the depths of your unconscious and not compulsions that must be acted upon, you can free yourself of the greatest source of internal strain that tends to leave us drained and defeated. What this does not accomplish is to make you a perfect person. To be a perfect person is an abstract ideal, hence not a real thing that actually exists to become. Rather, it opens up for you the possibility of personal freedom. In opening up the possibility of personal freedom, you open the possibility of action, and in the context of the present, that means action to do what is needed to create a better world for yourself and for your descendants.
Conclusion:
Why do I bring this up? Because I want to empower those fighting in the world for those things that I am fighting for – for liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and the preservation of the great Western tradition. The more energy we expend fighting ourselves, the less we have to devote to defeating our ideological enemies who would have us enslaved and condemn our future generations to a world devoid of the tradition that has created a society in which we can rise, by our choice and to the extent of our capacity, to realize our greatness as human beings.
We exist in a state of tension, and that is a natural and necessary state. We experience external tension, as our individuality contends with the necessity of acting within the context of our community, and this is necessary because we truly know ourselves only through our relationship with others. We practice ethics and social customs, and these ideally function to ease the external tensions enough to make society workable proposition. We also experience internal tension, and while this is a natural thing, if we find ourselves fighting with ourselves as our desire to be a better, stronger, more disciplined person contends with our own internal dialogue eternally judging and condemning ourselves for our perceived shortcomings, thus disempowering ourselves to take the actions needed to be better men.