An Uninvited Guest

“One day, I remember it well, the chilly winds whistled through the leafless trees, though the sky was cloudless and the sun shone brightly, he remained in his quarters nearly all the afternoon alone. “When he came out I noticed that his face was a shade paler than usual, and there seemed to be something on his mind of more than ordinary importance. Returning just after dusk, he dispatched an orderly to the quarters of the officer I mention who was presently in attendance.

“After a preliminary conversation of about half an hour, Washington, gazing upon his companion with that strange look of dignity which he alone could command, said to the latter: “‘I do not know whether it is owing to the anxiety of my mind, or what, but this afternoon as I was sitting at this table engaged in preparing a dispatch, something seemed to disturb me. Looking up, I beheld standing opposite me a singularly beautiful female. So astonished was I, for I had given strict orders not to be disturbed that it was some moments before I found language to inquire into the cause of her presence. A second, a third, and even a fourth time did I repeat my question, but received no answer from my mysterious visitor except a slight raising of her eyes.

By this time, I felt strange sensations spreading through me. I would have risen but the riveted gaze of the being before me rendered volition impossible. I assayed once more to address her, but my tongue had become useless. Even thought itself had become paralyzed. A new influence, mysterious, potent, irresistible, took possession of me. All I could do was to gaze steadily, vacantly at my unknown visitant.

Gradually the surrounding atmosphere seemed as though becoming filled with sensations, and luminous. Everything about me seemed to rarify, the mysterious visitor herself becoming more airy and yet more distinct to my sight than before. Now I began to feel as one dying, or rather to experience the sensations which I have sometimes imagined accompany dissolution. I did not think, I did not reason, I did not move; all were alike impossible. I was only conscious of gazing fixedly, vacantly at my companion.

First Threat - Revolutionary War

Presently I heard a voice saying, “Son of the Republic, look and learn,” while at the same time my visitor extended her arm eastwardly. I now beheld a heavy white vapor at some distance rising fold upon fold. This gradually dissipated, and I looked upon a strange scene.
Before me lay spread out in one vast plain all the countries of the world—Europe, Asia, Africa and America. I saw rolling and tossing between Europe and America the billows of the Atlantic, and between Asia and America lay the Pacific. “Son of the Republic,” said the same mysterious voice as before, “look and learn.”

At that moment I beheld a dark, shadowy being, like an angel, standing, or rather floating in mid-air, between Europe and America, dipping water out of the ocean in the hollow of each hand, he sprinkled some upon America with his right hand, while with his left hand he cast some on Europe. Immediately a cloud raised from these countries, and joined in mid-ocean.
For a while it remained stationary, and then moved slowly westward, until it enveloped America in its murky folds. Sharp flashes of lightning gleamed through it at intervals, and I heard the smothered groans and cries of the American people. A second time the angel dipped water from the ocean, and sprinkled it out as before. The dark cloud was then drawn back to the ocean, in whose heaving billows it sank from view.

Second Threat - American Civil War

A third time I heard the mysterious voice saying, “Son of the Republic, look and learn,” I cast my eyes upon America and beheld villages and towns and cities springing up one after another until the whole land from the Atlantic to the Pacific was dotted with them. Again, I heard the mysterious voice say, “Son of the Republic, the end of the century cometh, look and learn.”

“‘At this the dark shadowy angel turned his face southward, and from Africa I saw an ill-omened spectre approach our land. It flitted slowly over every town and city of the latter. The inhabitants presently set themselves in battle array against each other. As I continued looking I saw a bright angel, on whose brow rested a crown of light, on which was traced the word “Union,” bearing the American flag which he placed between the divided nation, and said, “Remember ye are brethren.” Instantly, the inhabitants, casting from them their weapons became friends once more, and united around the National Standard.

Third Threat - War Yet to Occur

“And again, I heard the mysterious voice saying, “Son of the Republic, look and learn.” At this the dark, shadowy angel placed a trumpet to his mouth, and blew three distinct blasts; and taking water from the ocean, he sprinkled it upon Europe, Asia and Africa.

Then my eyes beheld a fearful scene: from each of these countries arose thick, black clouds that were soon joined into one. And throughout this mass there gleamed a dark red light by which I saw hordes of armed men, who, moving with the cloud, marched by land and sailed by sea to America, which country was enveloped in the volume of cloud.

And I dimly saw these vast armies devastate the whole country and burn the villages, towns and cities that I beheld springing up. As my ears listened to the thundering of the cannon, clashing of swords, and the shouts and cries of millions in mortal combat, I heard again the mysterious voice saying, “Son of the Republic, look and learn.” When the voice had ceased, the dark shadowy angel placed his trumpet once more to his mouth, and blew a long and fearful blast.

Heaven Intervenes

“Instantly a light as of a thousand suns shone down from above me, and pierced and broke into fragments the dark cloud which enveloped America. At the same moment the angel upon whose head still shone the word Union, and who bore our national flag in one hand and a sword in the other, descended from the heavens attended by legions of white spirits. These immediately joined the inhabitants of America, who I perceived were well-nigh overcome, but who immediately taking courage again, closed up their broken ranks and renewed the battle.

Again, amid the fearful noise of the conflict, I heard the mysterious voice saying, “Son of the Republic, look and learn.” As the voice ceased, the shadowy angel for the last time dipped water from the ocean and sprinkled it upon America. Instantly the dark cloud rolled back, together with the armies it had brought, leaving the inhabitants of the land victorious.

“‘Then once more I beheld the villages, towns and cities springing up where I had seen them before, while the bright angel, planting the azure standard he had brought in the midst of them, cried with a loud voice: “While the stars remain, and the heavens send down dew upon the earth, so long shall the Union last.” And taking from his brow the crown on which blazoned the word “Union,” he placed it upon the Standard while the people, kneeling down, said, “Amen.”

Interpretation

The scene instantly began to fade and dissolve, and I at last saw nothing but the rising, curling vapor I at first beheld. This also disappearing, I found myself once more gazing upon the mysterious visitor, who, in the same voice I had heard before, said, “Son of the Republic, what you have seen is thus interpreted: Three great perils will come upon the Republic. The most fearful is the third, but in this greatest conflict the whole world united shall not prevail against her. Let every child of the Republic learn to live for his God, his land and the Union.” With these words the vision vanished, and I started from my seat and felt that I had seen a vision wherein had been shown to me the birth, progress, and destiny of the United States.

Most likely this is fiction, but often fiction possesses a kernel of truth.

George Washington S Vision Valley Forge Winter Of 1777

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Thank you for reading and God bless! — Luke Sardis

In the European West, Christianity has gradually transformed into humanism. For a long time and arduously, the God-Man diminished, and has been changed, narrowed, and finally reduced to a man: to the infallible man in Rome and the equally "infallible" man in London and Berlin. Thus did papism come into being, taking everything from Christ, along with Protestantism, which asks the least from Christ, and often nothing. Both in papism and in Protestantism, man has been put in the place of the God-Man, both as the highest value and as the highest criterion. A painful and sad correction of the God-Man's work and teaching has been accomplished. Steadily and stubbornly papism has tried to substitute the God-Man with man, until in the dogma about the infallibility of the pope—a man, the God-Man was once and for all replaced with ephemeral, "infallible" man; because with this dogma, the pope was decisively and clearly declared as something higher than not only man, but the holy Apostles, the holy Fathers, and the holy Ecumenical councils. With this kind of a departure from the God-Man, from the ecumenical Church as the God-Man organism, papism surpassed Luther, the founder of Protestantism. Thus, the first radical protest in the name of humanism against the God-Man Christ, and his God-Man organism—the Church—should be looked for in papism, not in Lutheranism. Papism is actually the first and the oldest Protestantism.

We should not do this ourselves. Papism indeed is the most radical Protestantism, because it has transferred the foundation of Christianity from the eternal God-Man to ephemeral man. And it has proclaimed this as the paramount dogma, which means: the paramount value, the paramount measure of all beings and things in the world. And the Protestants merely accepted this dogma in its essence, and worked it out in terrifying magnitude and detail. Essentially, Protestantism is nothing other than a generally applied papism. For in Protestantism, the fundamental principle of papism is brought to life by each man individually. After the example of the infallible man in Rome, each Protestant is a cloned infallible man, because he pretends to personal infallibility in matters of faith. It can be said: Protestantism is a vulgarized papism, only stripped of mystery (i.e., sacramentality), authority and power.

Through the reduction of Christianity, with all its eternal God-Man qualities, to man, Western Christianity has been turned into humanism. This may seem paradoxical, but it is true in its irresistible and unerasable historical reality. Because Western Christianity is, in its essence, the most decisive humanism; and because it has proclaimed man as infallible, and has turned the God-Man religion into a humanist religion. And that this is so is shown by the fact that the God-Man has been driven to the heavens, while his place on earth has been filled with his replacement, Vicarius Christi—the pope. What a tragic piece of illogic: to establish a replacement for the everywhere-present God and the Lord Christ! But this piece of illogic has been incarnated in Western Christianity: the Church has been transformed into a state, the pope has become a ruler, bishops have been proclaimed princes, priests have become leaders of clerical parties, the faithful have been proclaimed papal subjects. The Gospel has been replaced with the Vatican’s compilation of canon law; Evangelical ethic and methods of love have been replaced with casuistry, Jesuitry and the "holy" Inquisition. What does all this mean? With the systematic removal and destruction of everything that does not bow to the pope, even with forced conversions to the papal faith, and the burning of sinners for the glory of the meek and the mild Lord Jesus!

There is no doubt that all these facts converge into one irresistibly logical conclusion: in the West there is no Church and no God-Man, which is why there is no true God-Man society in which men are mortal brothers and immortal fellows. Humanistic Christianity is actually the most decisive protest and uprising against the God-Man Christ and all the Evangelical, God-Man values and norms. And even here is evident European man’s favored tendency, to reduce everything to man as the fundamental value and the fundamental measure. And behind that stands one idol: Menschliches Allzumenschliches. With the reduction of Christianity to humanism, Christianity has been no doubt, simplified, but also at the same time—destroyed! Now that the "gleischaltung" of Christianity with humanism has been accomplished, some in Europe are seeking a return to the God-Man Christ. However, the cries of individuals in the Protestant world—"Zuruck zum Jesus! Back to Jesus!"—are empty cries in the dark night of humanistic Christianity, which has abandoned the values and the measures of God-Man and is now suffocating in desperation and impotence. While from the depths of centuries past reverberate the bitter words of the melancholic prophet of God, Jeremiah: "Accursed is the man who puts his confidence in man!..."

In a broader historical perspective, the Western dogma about man’s infallibility is nothing other than an attempt to revive and immortalize dying humanism. It is the last transformation and final glorification of humanism. After the rationalistic Enlightenment of the 18^th century and the shortsighted positivism of the 19^th century, nothing else was left to European humanism than to fall apart in its own impotence and contradictions. But in that tragic moment, religious humanism came to its aid with its dogma about the infallibility of man saved European humanism from imminent death. And, although dogmatized, Western Christian humanism could not help absorbing all the fatal contradictions of European humanism, which are united in one single desire: to exile God-Man from the earth. Because the most important thing for humanism is for man to be the highest value and the highest measure. Man, not God-Man.

According to our own Orthodox feeling: Christianity is only Christianity through the God-Man, through His God-Man ideology and God-Man methods. That is the fundamental truth for the sake of which no compromises can be made. Only as the God-Man is Christ the highest value and the highest measure. One should be truthful and consistent to the end: if Christ is not the God-Man, then he is the most impudent fraud, because he proclaimed himself as God and the Lord. But the Evangelical historical reality irrefutably shows and proves that Jesus Christ is in everything and in all things the perfect God-Man. Therefore, one cannot be a Christian without a belief in Christ as God-Man and in the Church as His God-Man Body, in which He left His entire Miraculous Person. The saving and life-giving power of Christ’s Church lays in the eternally-living and all-present personality of the God-Man. Any substitution of the God-Man with a man, and any winnowing of Christianity in order to pick out only that which pleases a man’s individual preference and reason, turns Christianity into shallow and impotent humanism.

The outstanding importance of Christianity for making lies in its life-giving and unchangeable God-Manhood, by which it models humanity as a whole, bringing it from the darkness of non-being to the light of Pan-being. Only by its God-Man power is Christianity the salt of the earth, the salt that saves man from rotting in sin and evil. If it dissolves into various humanisms, Christianity becomes bland, becomes salt that has turned flat, useless, fit to be tossed out and trod on.

Any tendency or attempt at a "gleischaltung" of Christianity with the spirit of the times, with ephemeral movements and regimes of certain historical periods, takes away from Christianity that specific worth which makes it the singular God-Man religion in the world. In the Orthodox philosophy of society, the rule above all rules is this: do not accommodate the God-Man Christ to the spirit of the times, but rather accommodate the spirit of the times to the spirit of Christ’s eternity—Christ’s God-Manhood. Only in this way can the Church preserve the life-giving and irreplaceable personality of the God-Man Christ and remain a God-Man society, in which people fraternize and live with the help of Divine love and justice, prayer and fasting, meekness and humbleness, goodness and wisdom, charity and faith, love of God and love of one’s brother, and all the other Evangelical virtues.

According to the God-Man philosophy of life and the world, man, society, nation, and state are to accommodate themselves to the Church as the eternal ideal, but the Church must never accommodate itself to them—much less submit to them. A nation has true worth only inasmuch as it lives the Evangelical virtues and incarnates in its history the God-Man values. What applies to the nation, applies to the state as well. The goal of the nation as a whole is the same as the goal of the individual: to incarnate in one's self Evangelical justice, love, sanctity; to become a "holy people"—"God’s people"—which in its history proclaims the Divine values and virtues (1 Peter 2:9-10; 1:15-16).

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They will ask us: where are the concrete fruits of this God-Man society? How was it that precisely on the field of Orthodoxy’s radiation came about the appearance of "the most radical secularism in human history?" (Joseph Piper) Does there not also exist an Eastern "Humanism" (for ex. Caesaro-papism, etc.)? The success of atheistic social humanism on the soil of Orthodoxy: is that not proof of the "inability of Orthodoxy" to solve the most elementary social problems?

It is a fact that this world lies in evil and sin. The reduction of everything to man is in fact the atmosphere in which sinful human nature and man in general—no matter where he is located—lives and breathes, and something toward which they strive. It is, therefore, no wonder that the tides of this sinfulness, just like the tides of European pseudo-Christian poisons, from time to time wash over the Orthodox peoples as well. However, one thing is irrefutably true: the Orthodox church has never ecclesiologically dogmatized any sort of humanism, whether we are talking about Caesaro-papism or any other "ism." With the strength of its genuine and uncorrupted God-Manhood and Evangelical truthfulness, and through its constant call for repentance regarding everything that is not from God-Man, it has preserved, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the wisdom and the chastity of its heart and its soul. And by this it has remained and continues to be the "salt" of the earth, man and society. On the other hand, the tragedy of Western Christianity lies precisely in the fact that it, either by correcting the image of the God-Man, or by denying it, has attempted to once again introduce demonized humanism, so characteristic of sinful human nature, to—where? Into the heart of the God-Man organism itself—the Church, whose essence lies precisely in the freeing of man from it. And through it into all regions of life, person and society, proclaiming it as the supreme dogma, as the universal dogma. With this, the demonized intellectual pridefulness of man, hidden under the cloak of the Church, becomes the dogma of a faith without which there is no salvation! It is horrible to think it, much less say it: with this, the sole "workshop of salvation" and graduation to God-Manhood in this world, is gradually turned into a demonized "workshop" of violence over consciousness and dehumanization! A workshop of the disfigurement of God and man through the disfigurement of the God-Man!

The Orthodox Church has proclaimed no poison, no sin, no humanism, no earthly social system as dogma—neither through Councils, nor through the "Body" of the Ecumenical Church. While the west, alas, does nothing but that. The latest proof: the Second Vatican Council.

The Orthodox Faith: in it, repentance is a necessary holy virtue; and it always calls for repentance. In the West: the pseudo-Christian faith in man does not call for repentance; on the contrary, it "clerically" obligates a maintaining of its fatal-to-man homo-idolization, its pseudo-Christian humanisms, infallibilities, heresies, and it pridefully considers that in no case are these things for which one should repent.

Contemporary atheistic social humanism—ideologically and methodologically—is in everything a fruit and an invention of pseudo-Christian Europe, wed with our own sinfulness. They ask us: how did it arrive on the soil of Orthodoxy? It is God trying the endurance of the righteous, visiting the children for the sins of their fathers, and announcing the strength of His Church by taking it through fire and water. Because, according to the words of the wise-in-God Macarius of Egypt, that is the only path of true Christianity: "Wherever the Holy Spirit is, there follows, like a shadow, persecution and battle... It is necessary that the truth be persecuted." What are, on the other hand, the fruits of the God-Man society?—Saints, Martyrs, and Confessors. That is its goal, that is its meaning and design, that is the proof of its indestructible strength. Not books and libraries, systems and cities—all things that are here today and gone tomorrow. The various pseudo-Christian humanisms fill the world with books, while Orthodoxy fills it with the hallowed. Thousands and hundreds of thousands, even millions of martyrs and newly martyred, fallen for the Orthodox faith—there is the fruit of God-Man society. Thus does the famous Francois Mauriac, a Roman Catholic, on the dark horizon of the contemporary world, with each day more and more pushed into the darkness of born-in-Europe, soul-losing homo-idolatry, see only one bright spot, that gives hope for the future of this world: the bathed in the blood of the martyred and newly-martyred faith. The Orthodox faith.

But in the West? They neither know the Church, nor the path, nor the way out of the hopelessness; all is sunk in soul-losing idolatry, in love of pleasure, love of self, and love of lust. Hence in Europe we see the renaissance of polytheism. The "False Christs," false gods that have flooded Europe and are exported from it to all the marketplaces of the world, have for their main assignment the killing of the soul in man—that unique treasure of man in all the worlds, and in that way make impossible the very possibility of a genuine society.

In writing this, we are not writing the history of Europe, its virtues and faults, nor the history of the European pseudo-churches. We are merely laying out the entelechy of its ontology, descending into the pith of European intellectual pridefulness, into its demonic underground, where its black sources are, whose water threatens to poison the world. This is not a judgment of Europe but a heartfelt prayerful call to the solitary path of salvation, through repentance.

From the book The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, by Archimandrite Justin Popovich.

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Ecumenism is the common name for the pseudo-Christianity of the pseudo-Churches of Western Europe. Within it is the heart of European humanism, with Papism as its head. All of pseudo-Christianity, all of those pseudo-Churches, are nothing more than one heresy after another. Their common evangelical name is: Pan-heresy. Why? This is because through the course of history various heresies denied or deformed certain aspects of the God-man and Lord Jesus Christ; these European heresies remove Him altogether and put European man in His place. In this there is no essential difference between Papism, Protestantism, Ecumenism, and other heresies, whose name is "Legion."

Orthodox dogma, that is to say the overriding dogma of the Church, is rejected by them and replaced by the Latin heretical overriding dogma of the primacy and infallibility of the Pope, that is to say of man. From this pan-heresy heresies were born and continue to be born: the Filioque, the rejection of the invocation of the Holy Spirit, unleavened bread, the introduction of created grace, cleansing fire, superfluous works of the saints, mechanized teachings about salvation, and from this sprang mechanized teachings about life, Papocaesarism, the Inquisition, indulgences, the murder of sinners because of their sins, Jesuitism, the scholastics, the casuists, Monarchianism, and social individualism of different kinds..."

From the chapter "Humanistic Ecumenism" in Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, by Father Justin Popovich, trans. by Asterios Gerostergios (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994), p. 169.

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Thank you for reading and God bless! — Luke Sardis

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

— Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression).

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

— Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia).

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

— Essay on psychology in Politics (New York).

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

— Communist pamphlet.

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

— Letter in Tribune.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc. etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biassed judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien régime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, Gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers1. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning2. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit 3 above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations – race, battle, bread – dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing – no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective’ consideration of contemporary phenomena’ – would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry – when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech – it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash – as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4) the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink. In (5) words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning – they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another – but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: ‘(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write – feels, presumably, that he has something new to say – and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence3, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

Solomonia has shared with me your recent letter to her, and in reading it I sense in you a kindred spirit to whom a word from me might not be in vain.

It so happens that René Guénon was the chief influence in the formation of my own intellectual outlook (quite apart from the question of Orthodox Christianity). I read and studied with eagerness all his books that I could get a hold of; through his influence I studied the ancient Chinese language and resolved to do for the Chinese tradition what he had done for the Hindu; I was even able to meet and study with a genuine representative of the Chinese tradition and understood full well what he means by the difference between such authentic teachers and the mere “professors” who teach in the universities.

It was René Guénon who taught me to seek and love the Truth above all else, and to be unsatisfied with anything else; this is what finally brought me to the Orthodox Church. Perhaps a word of my experience will be of help to you to know.

For years in my studies I was satisfied with being “above all traditions” but somehow faithful to them; I went deeper into the Chinese tradition only because no one had presented it in the West from a fully traditional point of view. When I visited an Orthodox Church, it was only in order to view another “tradition”—knowing that Guénon (and one of his disciples) had described Orthodoxy as the most authentic of the Christian traditions.

However, when I entered an Orthodox Church for the first time (a Russian Church in San Francisco), something happened to me that I had not experienced in any Buddhist or other Eastern temple; something in my heart said that this was “home”, that all my search was over. I didn’t really know what this meant because the service was quite strange to me, and in a foreign language. I began to attend Orthodox services more frequently, gradually learning its language and customs, but still keeping all my basic Guénonian ideas about all the authentic spiritual traditions.

With my exposure to Orthodoxy and to Orthodox people, however, a new idea began to enter my awareness: that truth was not just an abstract idea, sought and known by the mind, but was something personal—even a Person—sought and loved by the heart. And that is how I met Christ. I am now grateful that my approach to Orthodoxy took several years and had nothing of emotional excitement about it—that was Guénon’s influence again, and it helped me to go deeper into Orthodoxy without the ups and downs that some converts encounter when they are not too ready for something as deep as Orthodoxy. My entrance into the Orthodox Church occurred at the very time I left the academic world and gave up the attempt to communicate the Chinese tradition to the Western world. My Chinese teacher also left San Francisco shortly before this—my only real contact with the Chinese tradition—and in Guénonian fashion he disappeared utterly, leaving no address. I remember him fondly, but after becoming Orthodox I saw how limited was his teaching: the Chinese spiritual teaching, he said, would disappear entirely from the world if Communism endures another ten or twenty years in China. So fragile was this tradition—but the Orthodox Christianity I had found would survive everything and endure to the end of the world—because it was not merely handed down from generation to generation, as all traditions are, but was at the same time given from God to man.

I look back fondly now on René Guénon as my first real instructor in Truth, and I only pray that you will take what is good from him and not let his limitations chain you. Even psychologically, “Eastern Wisdom” is not for us who are flesh and blood of the West; Orthodox Christianity is clearly the tradition that was given us—and it can be clearly seen in the Western Europe of the first ten centuries, before the falling away of Rome from Orthodoxy. But it also happens that Orthodoxy is not merely a “tradition” like any other, a “handing down” of spiritual wisdom from the past; it is God’s Truth here and now—it gives us immediate contact with God such as no other tradition can do. There are many truths in the other traditions, both those handed down from a past when men were closer to God, and those discovered by gifted men in the reaches of the mind; but the full Truth is only in Christianity, God’s revelation of Himself to mankind. I will take only one example: there are teachings on spiritual direction in other traditions, but none so thoroughly refined as those taught by the Orthodox Holy Fathers; and more importantly, these deceptions of the evil one and our fallen nature are so omnipresent and so thorough that no one could escape them unless the loving God revealed by Christianity were close at hand to deliver us from them. Similarly: Hindu tradition teaches many true things about the end of the Kali Yuga; but one who were merely knows these truths in the mind will be helpless to resist the temptations of those times, and many who recognize the Antichrist (Chalmakubi) when he comes will nonetheless worship him—only the power of Christ given to the heart will have strength to resist him.

It is my prayer for you that God will open your heart, and you yourself will do what you can to meet Him. You will find there happiness you never dreamed possible before; your heart will join your head in recognizing the true God, and no real truth you have ever known will be lost. May God grant it!

Feel free to write whatever is in your mind or heart.

—St. Seraphim Rose

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     "We watched you building, stone by stone,
     The well-washed cells and well-washed graves
     We shall inhabit but not own
     When Britons ever shall be slaves;
     The water’s waiting in the trough,
     The tame oats sown are portioned free,
     There is Enough, and just Enough,
     And all is ready now but we.

     "But you have not caught us yet, my lords,
     You have us still to get.
     A sorry army you’d have got,
     Its flags are rags that float and rot,
     Its drums are empty pan and pot,
     Its baggage is—an empty cot;
     But you have not caught us yet.

     "A little; and we might have slipped
     When came your rumours and your sales
     And the foiled rich men, feeble-lipped,
     Said and unsaid their sorry tales;
     Great God!  It needs a bolder brow
     To keep ten sheep inside a pen,
     And we are sheep no longer now;
     You are but Masters.  We are Men.

     "We give you all good thanks, my lords,
     We buy at easy price;
     Thanks for the thousands that you stole,
     The bribes by wire, the bets on coal,
     The knowledge of that naked whole
     That hath delivered our flesh and soul
     Out of your Paradise.

     "We had held safe your parks; but when
     Men taunted you with bribe and fee,
     We only saw the Lord of Men
     Grin like an Ape and climb a tree;
     And humbly had we stood without
     Your princely barns; did we not see
     In pointed faces peering out
     What Rats now own the granary.

     "It is too late, too late, my lords,
     We give you back your grace:
     You cannot with all cajoling
     Make the wet ditch, or winds that sting,
     Lost pride, or pawned wedding ring,
     Or drink or Death a blacker thing
     Than a smile upon your face."

— G.K. Chesterton

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ONE with the golden eagle of the morning,
Flat and flung wide above the spinning plains,
It seemed my spirit sprang and wheeled and flew.
The world went under us like a river of light.
An ecstasy of order, where each life.
Rejoicing in its law, rushed to its end:
To break itself and breed; the embattled vines.
Grassland and grainland waved their thousand spears
In one wild rhythm as they swept along,
A map of marching armies, all one way;
And ploughmen on their uplands ribbed with gold,
Went forward happy, with their backs to heaven.

Only the sacred eagle up the stream
Strove back to his beginnings; left behind
The white archaic dawns on herbless hills.
The first cold hues of chaos; like a stair
Mounted the soundless cataracts of the sun,
Seeking the sun of suns; till suddenly
The last heavens opened; for one flash I saw
Something too large and calm for sight or reason,
The Urns of Evil and Good, vast as two worlds,
And over them a larger face than Fate’s
Of that first Will that is when all was not.
But that unblinded burning eagle soared
And perched upon His thunderous right hand.
I cowered, and heard a cry torn out of me
In an unknown tongue older than all my race,
"O Father of Gods and Men ”; and saw no more.

The vulture from his dark and hairy nest
Far down the low-browed cliffs of the abyss
Stood black against the sun; a shape of shame:
A plumed eclipse; and all the ways of men
Were paved with upturned faces; masks of hate:
For that hooked head was like a horrid tool.
An instrument of torture made alive
With creaking pinions; for what end they knew:
The vulture of the vengeance of the gods.

For a red under-light on all that land,
A hell that is the underside of heaven,
Glowed from men’s struggling fires; and as I followed
That evil bird over lost battle-fields.
Where panoplied and like fallen palaces
The great and foolish kings who warred with doom
Lay sunken with their star; I saw far off.
Misshapen, against the dark red dome of sky,
A mountain on a mountain. As I gazed
The shape seemed changed: the upper mountain moved.
It heaved vast flanks ribbed like the red-ribbed hills,
Thrust down an uprooted forest with one heel
And stretched a Titan’s arm to touch the sky.
"You slay for ever, but you slay too late;
A stolen secret turns not home again.
While I lie lifted high against your wrath,
Hanged on this gibbet of rock, far down below
The fire is spreading on the earth’s dark plains
And my red stars come forth like flowers of night
And my red sun burns when your white sun dies
See where man’s watchfire dances and derides.
The sickly servile sunset crawling away:
Lo; my red banner thrashes through the air,
Nor dare your vulture peck it if he pass.”

The vulture passed, a shadow on the fire.
And the dark hills were loud with dreadful cries.

I woke; the skies were empty of the eagle.
And empty of the vulture all the abyss:
And something in the yawning silence cried
Giants and gods were dying in new dawns:
Daylight itself had deepened; there opened in it
New depths or new dimensions; stone and tree
In that strange light grew solid; as does a statue
Or many-sided monument set beside
The flattened fables on a bas-relief.
Only in dark thin lines against the dawn
The last and lingering monsters limped away.
The boys with crooked legs and cries of goats
Ran as from one pursuing; amid the weeds
Wailed the strange women, neither fish nor flesh.
And from the hoary splendours of the sea
Rose Triton with the limbs that curled like whirlpools,
Stonily staring at some sign afar.
For a new light in a new silence shone
From some new nameless quarter of the sky
Behind us on the road; and all strange things
Looked back to something stranger than themselves
And, towering still and trampling, the Last Centaur
Cried in a roar that shook the shuddering trees,
“We rode our bodies without bridle at will.
We hurled our high breasts forward on flying hooves:
Bu,t these two bodies are a simple thing
Beside that Fear that comes upon the world.
A Monster walks behind.’’ I dared not turn;
A shape lay like a shadow on the road.
I saw not but I heard; a sound more awful,
Then from the blackest cypress-close the call
Of some dark Janus shouting with two mouths:

“ I am Prometheus. I am Jupiter.
In ravening obedience down from heaven.
Hailed of my hand and by this sign alone,
My eagle comes to tear me. Touch me not.”
I lay there as one dead. But since I woke
This single world is double till I die.

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He left social media and subsequently deleted his account. Some of his writing is archived and others kindly shared some of his emails. If you have any of his work, please share it. If he hears, and wants it taken down, email me and I’ll do so.

Thank you.

“To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!”

-Charlie Chaplin

I’ve spent years now trying to wrap my head around how people can be so miserable. I didn’t understand the complaints, the anger, the stress and hopelessness that seemed to be everywhere. But then I lived as you and it’s starting to make sense now. I don’t share it, yet I think I see how you’ve been infected. Comfort kills happiness.

I was born into poverty. Real poverty. The kind where my mom taught me to steal from kids lunches at school to bring it home. The kind where you turned on the oven with the door open in the winter to sleep in the kitchen. The kind where you learned to shoplift instead of how to ride a bike as a kid.

However I’m not angry about any of that. I had to be told it was a bad thing. It never occurred to me that it was anything other than the way life was. You don’t lament what you don’t have when you don’t even know it exists. Everyone lived like that, what’s the big deal?

I could go on and on with what would be a very impressive sob story. I haven’t even touched on the child abuse stuff. But I’m not going to because what I really remember is laughter. Even though I can list a hundred examples of why it should’ve been traumatic, all I do is smile anytime I go down memory lane.

That’s the trade secret about the bottom which people know nothing about. No one has more fun than those with nothing to lose and who believe they have no chance to gain.

It was true in the PJ’s just like it was true in prison. We didn’t just smile when something made us happy. We yelled about it, others joined in, we ran in circles like mad men. You chuckle when you find something funny, we’d tackle each other and scream about it to strangers. You haven’t lived until you’ve been in a group where one guy gets a dig on someone and the rest of us are literally jumping, yelling in unison, and picking each other off the ground because we’re laughing so hard it demands a dramatic physical response.

So why can’t everyone have that? Why could we laugh and crack jokes to a man’s face after he’d been shot yet people are enraged when the price of gas goes up? Why could we laugh off the horrors that happened directly to us while the average person can’t emotionally handle something they saw on the news? We’re the ones who are supposed to be broken and traumatized. Yet you’re the ones who get divorced over money problems. Something’s wrong.

I think it’s because the middle can be poisonous. That’s where most people live, middle-class America, right? It’s where I am now. My house still feels like a castle to me. Why do I have two living rooms? My kids all had their own bedrooms, spoiled little goblins. I have a pantry that’s stocked in a way that you’d think me a doomsday prepper. But really, who cares? All of this stuff, these things, are for my family because I convinced myself that I’m supposed to provide them with ease and comfort. I love each of them dearly yet I now know none of them will ever feel the degrees of joy I’ve known in my life. They’re all very happy and comfortable, but in that unfortunate lukewarm way by which everyone out here seems to experience happiness.

The middle is a taste of all the things the world has to offer. It’s the carrot. The middle spends half their life trying to get all of the things they want so that they can spend the remainder of their life trying not to lose it. There’s no end. And that’s just the money part of it. Bills, debt, insurance, rent. Replacing furniture and appliances that once got passed to the next generation but is now cheaply made and somehow more expensive at the same time.

Then there’s the emotional and mental stagnation of the middle. Because you know what comfort is, maintaining and expanding it became an obsession. We had no air conditioning or cable TV so we poured into the streets and spent our time together. People in the middle spend their time inside isolated parts of their houses alone. Thank god for “comforts”.

What’s worse, because they haven’t lived a gutter-rats life, they lack the contrast necessary to recognize what actual suffering feels like. So, based on the middle ground scale they have available, mundane problems feel catastrophic. If you’ve never had a broken bone, a bruise is a big deal.

Here’s where people start fighting me because their troubles are the real McCoy. “No, mine is different, here’s why”. You’ll argue in favor of your woes, seeking to convince me it deserves sorrow.

Why not make fun of it? Middle people broadcast problems for the world to see, wanting sympathy. It’s because they live where people pat them on the back for their cookie cutter problems rather than at the bottom where they look down on you for complaining.

I’m not saying your troubles don’t hurt or that they’re insignificant. I’m not downplaying what you’ve been through. That’s the thing about feelings, they’re subjective to your personal experiences. It’s likely I suffered less trauma from hiding in public libraries until after closing so I can sleep there when I was homeless than you do from a utility bill shut off notice you received in the mail. It’s because, in the middle, that notice is a big deal.

Middle class isn’t just a socioeconomic status, it’s your state of being as well. Your emotional range is 5-10 whereas the bottom feels things 0-20. We may have a few degrees of sadness you don’t but the trade-off is we have a lot of degrees of happiness that aren’t on your scale.

That’s why we’re so loud, why we’re always in each other’s business, why the next man’s problems are our problems too. Share that burden brother because we’re in this trench together. You think misery loves company because sad people want to see everyone else sad too. You’re wrong. Real misery loves company because that shared pain makes the pain impotent. Misery wants to be beaten.

Quit taking the things that hurt you so seriously. Even a brush with death is hilarious if you tell the story right. It’s all subjective. It’s all in your head. You can argue with me but even if you’re right, your prize is being miserable. Congratulations. Quit letting past-tense horrors, current stresses, and potential future worries weigh you down. You’re literally living like Scrooge if those Christmas ghosts were every day of his life.

Take it from someone who’s life once sucked according to you, it’s only bad if you decide it’s bad. Learn to suffer the right and laugh at it. Pain is inescapable so you might as well learn to play with it. Currently, your understanding of happiness is getting in the way of you being happy. It’s okay, you’re allowed to choose it.

If you do, you’ll realize that suffering with a smile isn’t hiding the pain but rather a just a different kind of happiness. It’ll make sense when you get there. Trust me.

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God bless them!

https://www.orthodoxdeaf.org/

He left social media, disliking its effects, and subsequently deleted his account. Some of his writing is archived and others kindly shared some of his emails. If you have any of his work, please share it. If he hears, and wants it taken down, email me and I’ll do so.

Thank you.

“The agoge (Greek: ἀγωγή, translit. ágōgḗ in Attic Greek, or ἀγωγά, ágōgá in Doric Greek) was the training program prerequisite for Spartiate (citizen) status. Spartiate-class boys entered it at age seven, and aged out at 30. It was considered violent by the standards of the day, and was sometimes fatal.”

-Wikipedia

Let’s just get this out of the way at jump, this entire article is absolutely a challenge. I’m 100% flexing on anyone and everyone who thinks I might be flexing on them. Any of y’all who don’t like it needs to put his shutting-up gloves on and get at me.

Everyone tense? Bet. Let me justify it by getting on with it.

Let’s start by pointing out the obvious fact that it’s not supposed to be me ranting about manhood to you. I am not supposed to be the option available to go on about this topic and I sure as Hell shouldn’t be provoked into writing about it because the basic bitch nonsense guys are putting out there is so overwhelming that this manifested as a last stand, one man vs an army, situation. It’s supposed to be you guys handling this, not some past his prime Convict. This is your world after all, I’m just the new fella living in it.

It ain’t supposed to be me but since it is;

This!

Is!

Sparta!

I don’t like credentialism because I think that’s some “please listen to me” weakling bullshit. The points we make are supposed to stand on their own merit. However, since I said I was going all in on this one, I’ll go ahead and break out my bonafide’s by sharing some details about my life I’ve never revealed to y’all before.

Insofar as I know, I am the only man in the history of my state who’s ever been granted an early Judicial Release on a murder case. A criminal judge, of sound mind and judgment, chose to release me before the completion of my sentence, with no push back from the A.G.’s office and with my victims family present and verbally declining to protest.

How on God’s green earth did that happen?

It was almost entirely because I created the Agoge Rehabilitation Program utilized by my state’s prison system. I am the man at the core of a rehabilitation program established for the sole purpose of addressing the mahood dysfunctions in our criminal class that leads to criminal behavior. After its creation, running it became my institutional job assignment. Therefore, because I was paid $17 a month by the state to facilitate this program, I literally taught manhood professionally.

Am I qualified to speak?

Don’t bother answering because I don’t care.

Before I get into a very VERY brief overview of what that program entailed, you must be wondering why that would matter regarding a judge who’s considering a potential early release. Why would a Convict who’s running self-help groups in the joint get out early? That’s fair and I’d wonder at your ability to question things if you didn’t ask.

The national recidivism rate sits at about 43% of men returning to prison within the first year and approximately 82% within 10 years. The State of Ohio boasts about 31%. Graduates of this program, utilizing the limited sample size available and 5 years of data I was able to collect before stepping aside, was 13.9%.

My men got out and stayed out.

While it’s an admittedly small, complicated and potentially flawed example, it still served as an undeniable step in a positive direction.

Norway flew prison representatives to my joint to observe the influence this approach had on existing programs and now utilizes a version of it within their own correctional system.

When the Warden writes a report outlining the benefits he’s witnessed in his general population and submits it to the presiding judge and then personally shows up to the hearing, strange decisions are made.

I was released because I am that guy.

The brief history of The Agoge in its original form began with a group of men sitting on the bleachers out on the rec yard. One of the fellas was bitching about how stupid one of his programs was. “‘n this hoe like, ‘it’s okay to let it out, you’re safe here” he explained to us in a mocking woman’s voice. His was a common gripe we’d all heard and felt 1,000 times over.

People who don’t know nothing about us coming in to tell us how to be like them.

They would talk to us like we were kindergartners. Telling us how we must feel and why our lives turned out the way they did. It was like having people tell you that your accent is being spoken wrong.

But he put up with it because, just like any of us, he wanted the completion certificates to show the Parole Board. Gotta make sure they know what good little monkeys we were. None of the programs ever accomplished anything. No one ever changed or got better. We all just played along to get the certificate in our file.

Not most, literally everyone did this. Anyone caught taking a program seriously when the staff wasn’t within ear shot would’ve been humiliated. A guy would’ve been better off getting spotted wearing booty shorts. They don’t teach us, we school them. That’s the joint. You’re in our house.

“Why we fuck with it if that shit ain’t ‘bout shit?” I asked the fellas as I laid on the bleacher with my hands behind my head. Just watching the sky be blue for a bit. “We know what they doin’ wrong” I continued after a few non-committal replies, “so why don’t we jus’ do it ourselves?”

Believe it or not, most of us genuinely wanted to be better but settled on our lives just being nothing more than what they already were. Our resistance to outsiders was greater than even our sense of self preservation. We’d rather be broken than be like you.

That said, this began the process of looking into what made us US.

We obviously understood that there had to be things that made us the way we were so it became a thought exercise to pass the time. If nothing else, it was something to do to break up the monotony. Walking the track, during workouts, in the Chow Hall, the topic kept coming up. Eventually we boiled everything down to a single core issue; Manhood. We agreed that dysfunctional manhood was the problem and everything else that brought us to the joint was just in one way or another a symptom of that affliction.

So I began to jot ideas down about what to do about that and shared them with the fellas. Creating fictional programs to replace the existing ones. Thankfully I ran with some brilliant men who could understand and explain things in a way I couldn’t back then. One of which, we’ll call him Wayne, looked over my piles of ideas and said, “So you’re seeking to upend the current Freudian systems in play and replace them with something with more of a Gestaltian framework?”. I stared at him blankly for a few moments before he clarified, “your programs make the participants the center of the problem and not their environment or other people”. To this I nodded in agreement. I may not have known the terms and people, but I did understand what I saw all around me.

Approximately a hundred rewrites and a year or more later I found myself leading my first “Pack” meeting. We had written up formal proposals to present to the prison administration along with program outlines, mission statements, goals, anticipated outcomes and anything else you’d expect in a business presentation. Like I said, I knew some brilliant, well educated men. We combined that with my ability to sell anything and suddenly we were off to the races.

The Agoge took many forms in application however it all came down to one single core concept. The Agoge was men on the inside confronting men on the inside.

Not helping. Not teaching. Not guiding or listening or understanding or respecting.

Confronting.

The Agoge was a fight and everyone in the Pack fights.

You see, each group was referred to as a Pack. Once your pack was formed you stuck with it until you died or got out. Everything rehabilitation oriented fell into one group moving forward. We took their programs and inserted our method into them. Instead of a dozen different programs led by random volunteers or citizens, we took on the burden ourselves by adding aggression until it overwhelmed their “understanding”. All with the administration’s rightfully concerned “blessing”. Given its nature, we were obviously being watched very closely. We may have had a progressive Warden who was open to new ideas but that didn’t mean he was stupid.

We were given a shot at this aggressive approach where success allowed us to continue and failure to maintain control would land us in solitary confinement.

Big risks, big rewards.

Aside from infecting the existing programs, we also had group sessions like in AA. The difference being we didn’t respect each other’s stories. When I opened a topic or asked a question and a Pack member instinctively gave an excuse, the rest were encouraged to pounce on him. The groups were designed to argue, to get in each other’s faces, to reward aggressive behavior towards one and other. We trained ourselves to catch anything that sounded like an excuse or a cop out and to attack the man who said it.

After a while, none of us even thought that way anymore. We only knew how to own it. Total ownership was the only option permitted to have a voice.

Each Pack had to be run by a man who was already established within the general population. Because of the confrontational nature of the program’s design, it had to be someone the other members already knew and respected because he needed to control potentially violent situations when necessary. That’s one of the reasons outside people fell flat. They’d just show up from the really-real world and say, “Hi, my name is Bradley. I’m here to fix you by golly and make it so you silly miscreants are more like me and my wife, also Bradley.”

It had to be one of us for things to stick. It had to be someone who already carried a respected name so those participating would listen and absorb things. You can’t reach into the prison hole and pull us out no matter how good your intentions may be yet we could lift each other up onto our shoulders and push them out from inside it. One looks good on paper and the other gets shit done.

Everyone in my Pack had required weekly meetings where we hashed things out. We’d pick a member and more often than not destroy him. Everything that made him who he was from his childhood to his crimes was something we fought him over. Justify your existence.

If he didn’t show, we went and collected him as a group and it was a scene. Some examples were that my Pack had mandatory physical training. We all had to be enrolled in school/further education or a skill oriented program in one of the trades. Every man with children had to bring me letters written to their kids every single Sunday. No exceptions. I will mail them.

Everything was geared towards us becoming better while still remaining who we are. Pack members didn’t change, we grew.

You got your certificate of completion literally on your way to the parking lot the day you got out. It was absolutely useless for anything except your piece of mind. (Which is by design). The only incentive available is where you end up as a man.

While that’s all an unbelievably gross oversimplification of my tiny contribution to society, I still feel it serves to demonstrate that this isn’t my first time robbing a bank. When I go on about Manhood, it’s coming from a place where I had to be a man amongst men dealing with exactly this topic. While it is rightfully no longer mine and has evolved with new names and funding since then, it still serves as my experience in literally this arena.

I remained involved but only as a potential success story. You remained in the Pack until you died or got out for a reason. The moment I ate a cheeseburger as a free man, I was no longer qualified to be what the Agoge needs.

Through all of that development and practice, the biggest revelation I had during my time in The Agoge wasn’t what I thought it would be.

Manhood isn’t determined by the things we do but rather by the things we don’t.

“A real man charges into battle!” While that sounds good, it’s not accurate. Yes, while all guys who race towards the threat are men, that doesn’t mean that those who don’t aren’t. Those who defend the castle walls to protect the people inside are every bit the men as those out in the battlefield itself. Here manhood is determined not by one’s eagerness to fight but rather by his refusal to flee. They’re not the same.

You can not make a list of qualities or interests that determine if a guy can claim manhood or not, however it’s easy to put together a list of things which disqualify him. It doesn’t matter if he’s a damn good fighter if he’s just bullying smaller guys and beating his wife and kids. It doesn’t matter if he’s successful if that success carries no one but himself. It doesn’t matter if he’s lucky with the ladies if he’s nothing more than a regret she experiences the following day.

Because it is so easy for us to harm others or leave destruction in our wake that we can do it accidentally, it’s what we don’t do that makes us men.

That said, most of you younger fuckers haven’t had your brakes replaced in a while. Your whole life is doing everything you can rather than doing everything you should. So long as it seems like a good idea at the time, that’s all that matters. So long as you get what you want in the moment, right? Because you’re special just like everyone else. You’re going to get yours regardless of the cost to others.

That’s the predictable fallout of the self-love movement. Every time you looked up someone new was telling you to take care of yourself, to look inward, to do what brings you joy and on and on and on. Of course you’re all narcissist’s, what other outcome could there possibly be when you’re constantly coached to look at yourself? You’ve been brainwashed into thinking your happiness is all that matters and ta-da, none of you are happy.

Before you nerds use that as an excuse as to why it’s not your fault, keep in mind that it’s not a dog’s fault if it’s vicious but it has to be put down all the same. “Why” doesn’t matter. Only WHAT you do or don’t do affects the world around you.

In fact, it’s worse than that. You’re so idle and listless and without a purpose to fulfill or a struggle to overcome that you lash out and dump that emptiness onto others. So not only do you suck but you actively make the world just a little shittier for others as well.

The lizard parts of our brains are wired for survival and you have nothing to overcome. Whether you understand that or not, you resent the absence of it. Unearned ease and comfort makes us bitter. And since you’ve been programmed to only look at yourself, you overcompensate by seeking only self gratification. Yet it’s only a fleeting high and you end up right back in the listlessness you started in while searching for the next distraction.

As Agent Smith said in The Matrix, “Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program.”

Men are built to struggle and, ironically, it’s the pursuit of happiness in the absence of suffering that ensures your unhappiness.

Continuing down the rabbit hole, one of the things that caught me off guard when I got out was how unbelievably easy everything was to accomplish. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time however, looking back, I now understand that it’s because I had absolutely no competition or push back from other guys in anything I did.

Guys don’t seem able to do anything which means any man out here who can perform something as simple as initiating and holding a conversation can basically do anything he wants now. Thanks for making it easy on me, you insecure Nancy’s. You’re all so chronically on your phones that girls will basically have a stroke if a guy simply looks at them. Not a glance, I mean paying attention to her. Poor things might die in this day and age all because dudes have mailed in it.

You nerds exist in the no commitment sex phase of our societal decay and y’all still manage to go hungry at the Golden Corral of Pu-tang. You can blame your circumstances all you want but I promise it ain’t your situation son, it’s your personality. Trust me, if you were worth holding onto, someone would be gripping you like you were the last raft off the Titanic.

Blame women, your parents, your job, society, the government blah, blah, blah, all you want but it doesn’t matter. Step outside and yell who’s to blame and then hold your breath until they come and fix things for you.

Let’s say you’re right, (which you’re not) and it is someone else’s fault that you’re the True Value, Walmart knockoff of men. Now what? They don’t give a fuck that you’re a weak willed, lazy, unambitious, product sponge incel nobody. Dem villains what done you like dis go through their entire day giving you zero thoughts if they even know you exist at all.

The point is, things are what they are regardless of your personal opinions and feelings about them. You can do what needs to be done to get on with it or you can continue to be a broken, miserable husk of a dude. Video games are an obsession not because they’re fun but because they’re a distraction. Anything to drown out your own thoughts and emptiness.

To be reasonable, I get that a lot of you were born into times that flipped the concept of manhood onto its head which can only be disorienting and confusing. You were told to cry and that skinny jeans look good and that you’re not responsible for women. “Why would I pay for dinner when I don’t even have to take responsibility for getting her pregnant?”

I will absolutely concede that you’ve had few good examples, no expectations and were even misled by societal norms into this limp wristed existence you find yourself in. No father’s, no leaders, no inspiration from good men or even girls worth having. Why would you be a man? How could you be a man? Everything is stacked against you and that’s exactly the problem. You either can’t see that it shouldn’t matter if the world is against you or you’re too intimidated by it to act.

Yes, it’s still your fault.

The sooner you own the problem the sooner you can actually do something about it. You can’t fix a thing you don’t possess.

What would that process even look like? While dunkin’ on y’all is big fun for me, I’m just some guy running his mouth if I don’t offer potential solutions or at least some directions. Admitting you’re the problem is the most important step however the work doesn’t end there. In fact, it never ends.

There is no top to this mountain however anywhere along the slope is a better view than the one from the bottom.

Are y’all ready for the grueling details and 100 steps to becoming a man? Pull up a chair because this is going to be exhaustive.

Your life isn’t about you.

Thanks for coming.

Just wrap your head around that single concept and welcome to manly manhood.

Seriously, did you think something that we’ve been practicing since cavemen was going to be complicated? The complexities of manhood is nothing more than a gimmick gurus came up with to sell you books and to get clicks.

That’s what having a purpose means. It means to live for something outside of yourself. Whether it’s in your community, your family or anything where your efforts, suffering, toil and struggle improves the world you live in, it all leads to and maintains manhood. We provide, we build, we create, we protect, we teach, we jump on the grenade. Everything you attribute to the actions of a real man are things that have nothing to do with us as an individual.

You were so busy seeking happiness by looking into yourself that you didn’t realize that it’s a natural byproduct from looking into others. Men are utilitarian, we are designed from the ground up to be utilized.

If you view all things through that lense with the understanding that it’s not supposed to be about us, no matter what it is, you’ll find that it allows you to see what a real man would do in literally any situation.

Remove yourself from the equation and suddenly the solution is easy.

When I lived for myself I was a literal blight on society. A menace so great that none of you can even imagine the rippling destructive force I unleashed onto those I victimized. But one day I attached myself to a wife and children and I applied every ounce of that energy into them. I no longer thought, “what do I want to do?” But rather, “what do they need me to do?”.

When we were broke, I wouldn’t even buy myself food because I knew the money we had would run out before my next paycheck. Therefore, every penny I spent buying myself lunch at work meant we’d run out faster and they’d struggle as a result. Living that way may have meant I’d go hungry but my sense of purpose was always full.

It turns out that the strength I applied to running people over is the same strength that could be used to carry them. That single shift in my thinking changed everything forever. And do you know what? I’m happy now for the first time in my life.

Because nothing is ever about me, the longer I practiced this, the less I thought about myself. The less I thought about myself, the more attention I had to think about others. The more I thought about others, the better their lives became. The better their lives became, the more they appreciated me. The more they appreciated me, the more they thought about me. The more they thought about me, the more they showed it.

I finally felt needed, appreciated, that I mattered.

I stopped living for myself and became a real man. Not a tough guy, a man. Everything else sorted itself out all on its own. It’s literally that simple.

1. Everything is your fault

2. Nothing you do is about you

You come out a real and good man on the other side. The details don’t matter. Your individual and unique character doesn’t matter. Men come in an infinite variety of personalities, yet we all have those two points in common. Even if you don’t recognize it in yourself, if you’re a man, you practice those core tenets intuitively.

It sounds like a burden because it is however you’ll find the purpose you’re missing within it regardless of how you apply this understanding.

You’ll find the man you’re meant to be within the struggle. I’m a testament to this. Struggling for others turned me from a killer into a protector. It’ll turn you from whatever you are into what you’re built to be and with that you’ll find contentment, satisfaction and happiness.

When you live this way genuinely and without complaint, it’ll lift up the lives you touch and they will pay it forward through the lives they touch. Eventually, through exponential growth, it changes our homes, our communities, and finally our culture. Imagine the heights we’ll reach in a world where men hold others up and they do the same in an endless chain.

Start with yourself, do it today, never look back. It all works out, I promise.

I offer this as advice based on my personal perspective because it’s in your best interests. Either because you take my advice to become a better man or as a warning if you don’t because someone like me is going to cross your path at some point.

You’re not going to come out on top if it’s the latter. Men like me have purpose, you only have yourself.

The Agoge made men for the good of their society, not for themselves. They proudly suffered greatly so others wouldn’t. Remember your place and you’ll find your purpose.

Earn these shields, boys!

God bless and guide.

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Preface.

I want to preface this whole guide by saying that I am writing this from a business perspective, and it is aimed at authors who want to make a concerted effort to transition their writing into a paying career, or simply are interested in the business side of writing. Furthermore, while there are some concrete tips in this guide, it’s generally focused on strategy and mindset rather than the craft of writing a webserial.

I’ve found it very interesting how similar the mindset and approach of many of the top-grossing authors on this webpage and LitRPG Amazon is, and how stark the contrast is to the less-successful ones who are perennially treading water. Having a passion for writing and your story is the most fundamental requirement for making it as an author, but it’s not the only thing. This guide will try to showcase how to most efficiently go about turning that passion into a career.

As such, Parts 0-5 cover topics aimed at new authors on RoyalRoad, on how to set a strong foundation for your business. Parts 6 and 7 cover the actual monetization, and are aimed at authors who have “made it”. Finally, there is a Q/A at the end, where I’ve gathered my answers to some follow-up questions to this guide.

Introduction.

I chose to put together this guide for various reasons. First of all, I was kind of bored, and it seemed fun. This platform has helped me live my dream, and I hope this guide can help someone else down the road reach this point as well.

Secondly, there are no real guides on the subject any longer. Lone’s otherwise excellent guide that helped me when starting out is a bit outdated by now, and the other one is unfortunately riddled with inaccuracies. There is also so much bad advice floating around on this forum, and I felt it was time to do something more constructive than shaking my head in bemusement.

Third, the market is rapidly growing. When I started writing Defiance of the Fall, the blockbusters in the genre were making $5-7,000/mo on Patreon, and something like five people (excluding Asia ofc) could be considered making an actual living writing webnovels. Now, there are a bunch of us making over $20,000/month on Patreon alone, in addition to the piles of cash coming in from Amazon. How will things look in another three years?

I am not (only) saying this to brag, but to showcase how a small niche has become a legit career move for authors in a short few years. Writers who previously had never heard of RoyalRoad or even LitRPG are coming over in droves, hoping to use this platform to launch or reinvigorate their careers. And as such, competition has become a lot harsher.

So, while there’s more money to be earned, it’s become harder to get your hands on it.

Some people will still manage to fall ass-backward into success on this platform just by writing a good story. But as competition intensifies, it will become harder and harder to simply be “discovered”. If your goal is actually to make a living on RR, you shouldn’t leave it all up to chance.

You need to do everything in your power to improve the odds of you succeeding in this increasingly competitive marketplace.

Part 0 - Treat your writing like a business.

This is just part 0, but it is also the place where a lot of RR’s authors fail. If you’re writing intending to turn it into a career, you need to treat your writing like a job rather than a pastime or a hobby. Being an indie author is functionally the same as being a small business owner. That means you have to put the hours in, you have to grind even on days when the words are resisting being put onto paper.

And as any other small business owner, you need to wear multiple hats to get the machine going. One hat is obviously the writer-hat, but a lot of authors don’t bother wearing their business-hat, resulting in their story being good but no one reading it.

Your story is the product, but products normally don’t sell themselves. You always need to consider ways to put your product in the hands of your consumers (the readers), and at a later stage turn these consumers into paying customers (patreon/amazon/etc).

So keep this mindset in mind as we go through this guide.

Part 1 - The common questions.

When starting out, a lot of aspiring authors have many questions, wanting to make the most of their “RR launch”. Unfortunately, these authors are often met with real kaka advice when asking these kinds of questions on the RR Forums, so I figure I’ll bang these out (somewhat) quickly.

How long should a chapter be? How many chapters a week should I release?
Believe it or not, the right answer is NOT “follow your heart <3”, “there is no right answer”, or “anything between 500 and 5,000, depending on the scene.”
The correct answer is 1,500 to 2,500 for 5-7 times a week. More is better, but you need to comfortably be able to put out this every single week. Setting a clear release schedule and delivering on your promise is extremely important to growing your reader base.

Read winged wolf’s guide on the subject to set up a schedule and chapter-length that works for you.

You can be flexible in this regard. My advice is to start at the lower end and work your way up in word count as you get better acquainted with marathon writing. The first chapters of DotF were 1,500-1,800 words, 5 times a week. This has gradually increased as I gained experience, and I now comfortably release 2,800-3,200 word chapters 5 times a week.

However, DO NOT RANDOMLY DEVIATE from your established chapter length.

A very common phenomenon I see on this forum is how people’s chapters are wildly fluctuating in word count from chapter to chapter. This might be fine if you’re writing as a hobby, but it should be avoided if you’re writing as a job.

You can’t just add 50% length to chapters to “get everything you want into it”. That is the equivalent of working 50% overtime that day. You will burn yourself out long before you reach any success if you don’t learn to limit yourself and how much content you put out.

Controlling the pace and word count of your writing is a skill by itself. Learn how to round out chapters, how to portion the story into correctly-sized chunks. Suddenly releasing a massive 5,000-word chapter when you normally release 1,800-word chapters is not a sign that you’re a passionate writer.

It means you don’t know what you’re doing.

You might argue that it all evens out. Some chapters will be longer than average, and some will be shorter. Unfortunately, things don’t work that way. If your average chapter length is 2,000 words, no one will react to a 3,000-word chapter. However, you can bet you’ll get a bunch of annoyed comments if a chapter ends up being 1,000 words, only half of what your customers have come to expect.

Remember, writing your serial is your job, where you have a set amount of content that needs to be produced every day/week. If you have a good day, use that extra word count toward tomorrow’s goal, to take a Friday off, or simply boost your private stock.

How long should I keep up this schedule?
Forever.

No joke. You should keep up this schedule forever. There is a common suggestion where people are told to build up a big stockpile and release it daily for a month, which should put you on Rising Stars. After that, you can go down to your “regular schedule.”

This advice might work in two cases:

1. You’re doing this for fun, but you want at least some readers to engage with.

2. Your story is not very long, and you just need a short stint on RR before putting the story on Amazon.

But if you’re looking at stories like Azarinth Healer, Beware of Chicken, He Who Fights with Monsters, or the smash hit Defiance of the Fall, stories where the authors are making bank month after month, this is not good advice.

You will never become a heavy hitter by working hard for one month then slowing down to a crawl where you release 1-3 chapters a week. Indie Authorship is to a large degree a quantity game.

So I shouldn’t build a stockpile?
You absolutely should. A good stockpile before you start releasing your story will allow you to reach Part 5 of this guide (the watershed), while still working or studying, and without burning yourself out.

You should still aim to write as much as you release where possible. If you hit success, you can then turn some of that stockpile into Patreon Early access (more on that later). It will also be a valuable buffer in the early stages when the writing takes more time and effort.

But you shouldn’t think of the first month of the story as a hump you have to get over, where you have to work hard so you can relax later. With so much money on the table, just doing the bare minimum will never be enough. The one thing that unifies almost all the big Patreon Accounts is a high weekly output.
Sure, there are some exceptions to this rule, but you should never model your business after the weird outliers.

At what time of the day should I release?
It doesn’t seem to matter much. Just be consistent, releasing roughly the same time every day. That way you build a habit among your readers to check in at the same time for their daily dose of your story.

Part 2 - The premise.

So you want to become a (paid) author. To maximize your odds of making it, you need to write the right kind of story. Just like any other businessman, you need to do market research to find out what’s popular. Check the bestsellers on Amazon, the top stories on Novelupdates, and PtW on RR. Figure out what sells.

When it comes to writing, I won’t do a full guide, but I have a few basic rules I recommend you follow:

• Lean into the tropes – they are tropes because they are popular. Pick the ones you like, and don’t try to deconstruct or add twists to everything. Tropes can also help you with plot points, lessening the burden on you (which is very important when you’re writing big chunks of words daily).

To be clear, this doesn’t mean you ought to blindly copy others. The idea is to pick and chose the trope/setting that’s proven to garner interest and fuse it with your ideas, creating something both unique and familiar enough to get some free push/publicity. Say you have figured out an interesting power/quirk for your MC, and want it to be a big part of your story.

When bringing in the tropes to the plotting, you can ask yourself why the MC is unique. Did he get his hands on unique treasure? Did he get isekai’d and got to keep his powers from his previous life? Get unique power from a God/System on transmigration? Is he a reincarnated master either using parts of his old powers or some unique treasure he found before dying? Is he, either unbeknownst or knowingly, the descendant of some unique race/power/whatever?

These are examples of popular tropes that sort of come with their own fanbase, and even some plot points that can help you out today/in a month/years down the road. Is he unique because he’s part of a now-extinct race? Now you have a “face the enemies that extinguished said race”-arc ready to go at any time, along with the mystery of his origin. Does the power come from a unique treasure? Now the MC has a subgoal of upgrading or repairing said treasure to continue progressing.

• Stay in the middle lane. Don’t try to invent new genres or write in unpopular ones. You can import new popular tropes from Asian webnovels, but it’s a bit risky if that trope hasn’t been popularized in the west yet.

• The ABC of Webnovels is ALWAYS BE CLIFFIN’. If the readers complain, that means you’re on the right track.

• Related to my previous point; a good webnovel has to be addictive, where the readers keep wanting to come back day after day to read what your MC is up to next.

• Leave your story room to grow. The MCs of cultivation stories start in some hovel at the corner of the smallest empire of the weakest continent of a low-grade world for a reason. This goes for the ‘system’ as well. Don’t explain everything in the beginning, give it room to grow as both you and the reader find out more about the world.

Some might balk at this, feeling that the whole point of being an author is creative freedom, to write what and how you want. Well, sorry to break it to you, but until you become a bigshot, you need to cater to the market. If you make your “quirky blend of this and that, a never-before-seen deconstruction of the genre”, regardless if there’s a demand for such a story, it’s just literary masturbation.

It’s important to write what you enjoy, but it has to be something that your readers enjoy as well.

As for actually writing the story or creating a working LitRPG system, that’s for some other guides to cover.

Part 3 - Launch day.

Nothing to it. You’ve done your research and built up a stockpile. Time to launch.

Depending on how much content you can produce, set up a launch schedule that hopefully kickstart your reader base. Perhaps launch up to ten chapters over a weekend, allowing everyone to get a real taste and get hooked on your story. Go even beyond the “standard” 5-7 chapters a week until you’ve gained your footing. Those going all-out right now are often doing 2ch/day for up to two weeks.

These chapters should not be a short lull slowly building up to something. This is not traditional publishing, where the reader has already bought your book and will probably keep reading even with a slow start. You need action from the get-go, you need to make people want to read what comes next, to have them come back for more.

This is possibly why Apocalyptic LitRPG and Isekai are doing so well on this platform/in general. It has a very clear plot point right at the start, where the reader is thrown right into it. From there, the readers will be curious what kind of twist to the trope you have added to your story, where you take a beloved concept.

Part 4 - Active Growth.

In a competitive market, you need to put more effort into actively getting your name and your story out there. RoyalRoad has better discoverability than most platforms, but that doesn’t mean you can leave all the work to the algorithms.

Do review swaps and get some early reviews for your story. Promote it where you can without getting yourself banned. Perhaps do shoutout swaps with other new authors.
When you have released for a few weeks and posted maybe ~20 chapters or so, it’s time to expand your promotion. Now that you have a decent chunk of product to “sell”, it’s time to promote it to other LitRPG/cultivation communities outside RoyalRoad. Facebook, forums, Reddit, discord servers. There are a lot of places where fans of the genre gather.

This is where you have to put on your salesman-hat and be a bit shameless. Push that product, baby. Even if you don’t get direct sales, it will help you get your name out there, which might help you down the road.

Perhaps even take out ads on RoyalRoad if you have the money. From what I’m told, they can be very effective for stories on RoyalRoad. People see an interesting ad, they click, and suddenly they’re reading chapter one. A month later they’re a patron. Ezy-peazy.

Paradoxically, the RoyalRoad Forum is NOT one of the places to market your story. This place is essentially a daycare for bored or burned-out authors needing a place to vent. There are barely any readers here, so don’t get bogged down in this place.

Part 5 - The Watershed.

I’d say give it two months.

After that, it’s time to evaluate. Is your story now on Rising Stars, with good growth numbers and a healthy reader-base? Do you feel your story can go the distance? Congratulations! Jump straight to Part 6.

If not, or if you’re unsure, read on.

Ultimately, only you can determine if your story is a success or not, based on your situation and your goals. But if your story has seen some growth, but you are uncertain if it’s “enough”, you can follow a few rules of thumb to estimate it. Take your # of followers, and multiply it with 3%. That’s a decent estimate of the number of patrons you can expect to get in the short run Have you reached 3,000 followers after your stint? That means ~90 Patrons and ~$720 a month (you can check Section 6 how to calculate these things).

The bigger and more established patrons can increase this number well beyond 10% conversion, but it takes time to get to that point even if you do “everything right.” So looking at the 3% conversion along with your growth numbers, you should be able to make some projections whether the project is financially viable. For some, $720 might be more than they are making at a full-time job, depending on where in the world you live. For others, it might at least be enough to warrant further focus on the story.

After all, if you can double both the conversion rate and the number of followers over the next couple of months, you’ll be sitting at $3,000/month. That’s life-altering money for most people, where you can focus on writing full time, or at least go down to part-time on day-job to give your writing career a proper go.

However, if you have, say 400 Followers at the watershed, which translates into ~$90/month, and your numbers have kind of plateaued - then you might have a (commercial) failure on your hand. Here’s the harsh truth; if you haven’t managed to build any momentum after two-three months even after following the previous steps, chances are you never will with this story. Unfortunately, it looks like your story didn’t grip the attention of the RR reader base.

So what now?

It might be hard to hear, but sometimes you need to let go of a bad investment before it poisons everything around it. You have to fight the sunk-cost fallacy and make a decision. Make a clean break? Give it another month or finish up the current arc before throwing in the towel? Whatever you end up with, follow through.

You can try and retool it into a Kindle Unlimited release if you still have confidence in the story. Kindle Unlimited has a larger and wider audience, and what doesn’t work on RR might be a hit over there. There are many examples of RR authors making the switch and finding decent success after a weak RR run. Even if it doesn’t turn out to be a blockbuster on Amazon, it can generate a few thousand dollars which will fund your next project. But if you don’t find success with Book 1 over on KU either, it might be time to throw in the towel.

Ultimately, some businesses simply fail. My recommendation is to drop it. I’m sure a few readers will be disappointed, as will you. But if you’re candid with the fact that you can’t waste months of your time with a failed story, they will understand. You cannot guilt yourself into continuing to waste a huge chunk of your life on something that isn’t accomplishing your goals – helping you become a successful author.

However, it’s not a complete loss. If you’ve managed to consistently write for two consecutive months, your writing skill has probably shot through the roof. Use this to make your next story even better. Back to the drawing board. Once more, look at what the popular stories do, try to figure out where your story was different. Did it lack some elements? Did you mess up and write in an unpopular genre?

There is one piece of advice I cannot stress enough: DO NOT ATTEMPT A REWRITE.

Rewrites are the biggest poison to an indie author and their career. I can understand the sentiment. You’ve written for months, maybe a whole book’s worth of content. You have grown attached to your MC and the world you’ve created, and you’re thinking to yourself “if I just tinker with it a bit…”

Unfortunately, rewrites of failed stories are almost invariably failures themselves, even if the fanbase often agrees that the rewrite is superior. But remember, having a well-made product is useless for a business if no one’s buying it.

Part 6 - Monetization. (Patreon, Stripe)

This is where the fun begins!

So, you made it past the watershed that stops 99% of the stories on RoyalRoad. Amazing! Time to celebrate, and more importantly, time to start making money! The basic premise of this guide is that your goal is to maximize your income without harming the growth or longevity of your story, so that you can transition from a day job/studies into a career as a full-time writer.

There are no doubt many roads to success, but I have tried to pinpoint the methods that have worked the best for RR authors. The best ways to monetize your story will no doubt change as time passes. For now, there are two viable routes; Kindle Unlimited (and Audible) or Patreon, or a combination thereof. That doesn’t mean things won’t change in the future.

Right now, Kindle Vella is kind of a joke, but that may change over the next few years. And who knows, RoyalRoad’s own unprecedentedly slow-cooked premium feature might turn out to be a banger. But for now, KU and Patreon is the name of the game.

You can essentially go KU immediately after scrounging up enough content of your serial to repackage it into a book, and it might be a good option if you only find middling success on RoyalRoad. If you plateau at 1,000-2,000 Followers, it will most likely be extremely hard to earn a living wage on Patreon alone, so it might be a good idea to aim for a shorter running length of the story and an early KU release.

It’s also likely to be the best option if your story won’t run more than the length of 2-4 books. However, if you followed this guide and leaned into the tropes, your webserial should have the legs to go much longer than that.

Therefore, if your webnovel’s following is big enough and it can continue for years, only going Patreon in the beginning is probably the right play. Doing so will let you monetize your story without any drawbacks. More importantly, it will let you continue to expand your community and build up the chapter stockpile, following, and the money required for a proper Amazon launch in the future.
So if you think you can get a patreon going, my advice is to go for it.

So Patreon! What should I offer? Tiers? Aaaaaa-
You’re a success, a titan of industry, and it’s time to monetize! Unsure what to do? Just copy some of the big hitters. It’s not rocket science setting up a successful Patreon. If you’ve reached this part of the guide, you have already accomplished the hard part – accumulating a reader base large enough to justify monetization. Copy the tier-ladders of me/Shirtaloon/Zogarth and you’re pretty much done.

Just remember, it took time for the established patreon accounts to reach their chonky Early Access. My early access at $10 started at 15 chapters in total, and it only gradually increased to 50 chapters over years as various patreon goals were met and through other drives.

Take note, launching a Patreon means you should go all out with the marketing. Make sure your readers can’t miss it – bomb them at the start of the month. Also, I’d suggest adding various goals, such as every 50/100 new patrons – bonus chappies for everyone! Reaching certain $/month – improved tiers! The theory is pretty much the same as Twitch Subathons - get your community invested in the success of your Patreon page.

That’s pretty much it, but for those curious about the nitty-gritty on making the most of your Patreon, read on. There is a very simple formula for calculating almost any RR author’s income, no matter if their income is hidden or not.

Patreon income = K * [$ for highest early access tier] * [# of patrons]

K is a coefficient that depends on various factors, generally between 0.7 and 1. For most authors, you’ll hit pretty close to the mark by going with 0.8.
It’s a simple formula, right? More importantly, you can pretty much only affect one of the variables – [$ for highest early access tier] (you can improve your coefficient number through a few means, but that is for some advanced guide I guess).

So what’s the takeaway? If you enjoy earning a decent wage, then your full early access should be accessible at $10/month. Giving full access at $5 will almost halve your income. There are also some other things to note, namely;

• Side benefits barely add to your income. Don’t trust me? Find an author’s patreon that offers all kinds of stuff, like named characters, art, side stories, maps, at higher tiers. Compare it with the formula against a barebones patreon account only offering early access. All that extra time and effort barely translates into $.

• You might sway a couple of patrons with a nice offering, but it’s ultimately not time efficient. You’d bring in more money and supporters by focusing on your main product instead of these side projects. Your readers are supporting you to read ahead, so if you have time to do all these kinds of side missions, perhaps see if you can increase your weekly output or improve the tiers instead.

• The K coefficient is rarely higher than 1. This relates to the previous point. What does it mean? It means that if you provide full early access at your $5-tier, you will on average never earn more than $5 per patron, even if you have a $10 with all kinds of nice benefits.

• The K coefficient is rarely lower than 0.7. Why is this important? It means that your biggest tier will invariably be the one that has the biggest offering of early access. More than 90% of my Patrons are $10, because that’s where you get the most bang for the buck. It might seem odd, but ten bucks is ultimately nothing to our target audience. It’s a lunch/1 metropolitan beer/2 rural beers/a single microtransaction of a game.

• Still, this point is contingent on you not going crazy and introducing prohibitively expensive tiers. $10 seems to be the magic number.

• Patreon is mainly transactional in nature. Patreon can be used as an artist’s coffee tip jar, but you will literally only earn enough to buy a couple of cups of coffee if you treat it that way. Early access is a product that you sell through Patreon’s platform. Without a good chunk of product locked behind the paywall, you will not see any real growth. Just having one or two chapters is not enough. I often see arguments like “It works for Wandering Inn and Beware of Chicken,” but you need to look at yourself in the mirror and ask if your story has even close to their cult following.

Easy enough, right?

But remember – the moment you start accepting payment in return for your story, you are officially running a business rather than a hobby. There’s no “I’m not feeling it today” – writing is now your job, and you need to put in the work so that you can publish according to your set schedule.

If you start being flaky with your schedule, you will very quickly kill your readers’ confidence in you and lower their willingness to financially support you.

Transitioning into a business also means you need to start looking into things like incorporation and taxation. Unfortunately, I cannot give any advice on this point (never take tax advice from strangers on the internet) since every country has its own rules.

Part 7 - Monetization 2 – Electric Boogaloo. (KU/Audible)

You’ve now worked on your story for a while, you have a big stable following on RoyalRoad, a Patreon that either allows you to write full time, or at least has turned your writing into a decently lucrative side gig.

So you’ve had one monetization, what about second monetization? As mentioned at the beginning of Part 6, Patreon and KU/Audible are currently the two options for monetization. You’ve done one of them, so now it’s time to do the second.

When making the move to KU, you can approach one of the indie publishers who can deal with everything involved in such a release, but some people have found great success going at it alone.

With a publisher, you will give up a chunk of your revenue, and there is ultimately no guarantee that they’ll be able to generate more sales than if you go at it alone. Conversely, self-pubbing puts far greater demands on your ability to wear multiple hats. It’s not just about finding an artist for a cover and a good editor You HAVE TO figure out how Amazon works, marketing, ads, price points, etc etc.

I chose to go with a publisher and it worked out well for me. As such, I don’t really have any inside scoop on how to make the most out of your self-pub release. If you want to go at it yourself, there are places such as the LitRPG Author community where you can get good advice, along with guides such as wutosama’s on the steps required to turn your webserial into books.

Instead, I will use the final part of this guide on a topic that is just riddled with misinformation, and perhaps even disinformation, in this community.

Going “wide” or Kindle Unlimited exclusivity?
Going wide means avoiding the KDP Select exclusivity clauses and releasing your books on multiple platforms, often while keeping the story on RoyalRoad. Meanwhile, going with KDP Select means you can only release your book through Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, which means you also have to remove the chapters from RoyalRoad, Patreon, and any other platforms where you might crosspost the story.

This is a hotly contested topic on RoyalRoad for some reason, even if there is an overwhelming consensus in the LitRPG/ProgFantasy community in general. Simply put;

Going wide is trash. Never go wide unless you have f*ck-you money or you’re just releasing the books for fun.

I cannot stress enough how much worse going wide is, in pretty much 100% of cases for authors in our genre. Going wide will legitimately delete 80-90% of your potential paycheck, while negatively impacting other aspects of your business. And the so-called “negatives” of choosing to publish on Kindle Unlimited have been absolutely overblown, so I’ll go over them one by one.

“Exclusivity bad!”
Obviously, not being pigeonholed into using one platform would be preferable, but there is a reason new TV shows only show on one channel, why many video games release on only one console, why certain products can only be bought in certain stores. Sometimes, picking a narrower market can vastly improve your income, and KU is one of the most poignant examples of this.

Kindle Unlimited is where the vast majority of our target market is located. RoyalRoad’s reader base is just a drop in the bucket compared to Kindle Unlimited, and the gap is even bigger if you compare KU to other ebook platforms. And you get paid for every single page read on the platform, compared to RR/Patreon where you only earn money from your “superusers”.

So that’s where you need to be.

“You miss out on the readers and income from the other platforms!”
Sorry to say, there aren’t any readers on other platforms. Amazon essentially has a monopoly on LitRPG/cultivation/Progression Fantasy. I’d say that 99% of all readers are on Amazon, and of this 99%, over 80% are using Kindle Unlimited to read. The old Lorekeepers of the genre have informed me that amazon/KU “only” have ~90% of the global ebook market, rather than 99%. Most likely, smaller niches such as LitRPG are more bunched up on Amazon, pushing that % even higher, but it’s unlikely to have reached 99%.

And ask yourself, if a reader with Kindle Unlimited had to choose between a mountain of free content or having to pay for your story because you went wide, what do you think they’d choose?

If readers on RoyalRoad had to pay five bucks to unlock the first 50 chapters of your story, do you think they’d do so, or would they rather go read one of the 50,000 free stories on the platform instead?

You barely get paid on KU.
Simply false. Unless your books are unusually short, you will make as much or even more from a KU-readthrough compared to a full purchase.

“Going KU will harm your RR community and Patreon.”
This is both the most common and the dumbest argument I’ve seen put forth on this topic.

Do you know who’s NOT negatively impacted by you moving your story to Kindle Unlimited? YOUR READERS.

Releasing on Kindle Unlimited means you have to remove your old chapters, but what does that matter to your readers who are up-to-date on the story? To your Patrons who are reading early access?

So, who is impacted? Your Non-readers. You will see a decrease in new free readers finding your story on RoyalRoad, but that doesn’t matter. By the time you’ve reached monetization part two and started looking into publishing, your growth on RR would long since have plateaued already.

There is simply not too much growth to be had after you’ve done your early stint on Rising Stars where you get your name out, though it can be prolonged a while if you manage to appear on Best Rated or Popular This Week.

But even if you manage to snatch a permanent spot on the front page, you will exhaust the RR reader base soon enough. Left are only the RR readers who have consciously chosen not to read your story day after day, month after month. These people don’t matter, and you should absolutely not make business decisions based on the wants or needs of these non-paying non-customers.

If anything, going KU will reinvigorate both your RR following and your Patreon as long as you do things right. KU would connect you with a lot of new readers who love your story and want more, following you to RoyalRoad and then Patreon.

“It’s risky!”
Sure, it is a risk to make the move to KU. Kindle Unlimited is not some magical platform where everyone earns mountains of cash. Most releases fail, as businesses are wont to do. That’s life. Competition is harsh, and if you half-ass your release, you will be buried.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. More importantly, the exclusivity clauses are only for three months. Did your release fail? You can simply take the story off from KU after three months, switching over to wide distribution. You can even put the chapters back on RoyalRoad if you want. However, you should know that every single new release will bring a surge of readers to book 1 as well, but that’s only really true if it and its successor remains on KU.

Multiple-book readthrough of wide distribution is way worse since the reader has to fork up some money between every book, instead of just clicking “read next book in the series”.

TL;DR
This part transitioned into a rant, but that’s the way of the road, I guess.

So TL;DR – Don’t be a dummy by going wide. If/when you finally make the move to Amazon, do it right and release on Kindle Unlimited.

Simply put, choosing to go wide over going KU means you are prioritizing non-paying non-readers on RoyalRoad over actually paying customers on Amazon. This is obviously crazy if you’re running a business.

Why should those who want to support you have to pay full price when they can support you without additional costs through Kindle Unlimited? It’s like demanding your fans should buy your CDs to listen to your music instead of putting the songs on Spotify.

Why should you hamstring your career on the off-chance that someone wants to read your story (without paying, of course) on RoyalRoad a year after you started out?
As I said, things might change if RoyalRoad actually releases a paid feature of their own. After all, they say you lose 40% of your revenue for every extra step the customer has to go through.

But for now, KU is the final destination of an RR Author’s career.

One suggestion.
I only have one tip if you decide to take this step on your own: you absolutely cannot half-ass an Amazon release.
The success of the first book will essentially make or break the story. If your first book is a success, you now have a money-printing machine that will continue as long as your story does. If your book fails to make a splash, you will be fighting an uphill battle with every release.

So you need to go all out, especially, with the first book. Every hour and ad dollar you spend to get more people to read your first book will also yield returns for all future releases.

If you just convert your RR chapters into an epub, slap your homemade cover on it put the onto KU and hope for the best, then you’re essentially doomed.

That’s it, folks.
These are some of the insights I’ve gathered from starting multiple businesses before turning to writing about axe-wielding maniacs, and the things I’ve learned over the past years of writing Defiance of the Fall. No matter which section of this guide you currently find yourself in, I hope you’ve found some ideas or suggestions that can help you move further up the ladder of success.

It should be noted, though, that while this whole guide is centered around monetization, the most important part of writing a long-running webnovel is a passion for your work. I often see people talking about cash grabs when looking at the huge success stories, including my own, but something that unifies all the authors of the big stories is an incredible passion for their stories, the genre, and the craft.

So if you only want to get into the game for the money, you are probably better off getting a normal job instead.

Q/A (Answers gathered from the thread)

Q: How do you administrate posts and tiers on Patreon?
Unfortunately, there is no way to automate this. There are essentially two methods, depending on how tryhard you are.

The first is to go to post -> published -> edit on the chapters that needs to be unlocked for each tier. Add the tier and click save. Now the patrons can access it.

The tryhard version also needs you to go post -> published -> edit. However, in this method you first remove access for ALL tiers. Second, you edit again and add ONLY the new tier that gets access today while checking the box “notify patrons with this change”. Then you do a third edit and re-add the old tiers that should already have access, making sure you do not have the “notify patrons about this change” checked.

The benefit of the tryhard version is that all patron tiers will get an email when the new chapter is out. The benefit of the first version is that it won’t make you want to bash your head into a wall (as much). As such, I am recommending the first method. The way I generally do things are

1. Post new chapter for $10 on Patreon.
2. Post RR chapter.
3. Make a chapter release announcement on Discord (where I have a ping role for this).
4. Unlock the three chapters for $1, $3, $5-tiers

This way, the $1/$3/$5-tiers know that they’ll be able to access today’s chapter a few minutes after the RR release/after getting pinged in my discord. Meanwhile, the $10 gets actual release emails, which I guess can be considered a premium feature for my biggest supporters?

Q: Is this guide/route/career viable as a side-gig, where you maybe only put an hour or two into it per day?
A: I’m not sure, honestly. Success and being able to monetize partly hinges on standing out from the crowd, and pushing out more content is the most reliable method for this. If one could so easily earn 20k a year on a writing side gig, a lot more people would do it.

It ultimately depends on how quickly you can write and how much free time you are able to invest. I haven’t really looked into the “medium-successful” strategies, but I guess you could simply try a downscaled version of this guide. For example, instead of 5-7 chapters a week, maybe aim for 4. At 2,000 words apiece, you’d need 8k words a week. This should be manageable with a proper schedule. For example, one could do 1k words a day on weekdays and 3k words over the weekend.

This will still be a big time and energy investment, where you will essentially be working two jobs.

Q: My story is doing well on RoyalRoad, but I’m not making any money on patreon. What can I do?
If you have thousands of followers and you’ve had a good run on Rising Stars, but you’re not making any “real” money, then the problem is probably conversion rather than growth. You need to analyze why your readers are not invested enough in your story for them to want to become paying patrons. There can be so many different reasons for this, so I can’t really pinpoint it in a hypothetical scenario, but there are a bunch of things mentioned in the guide you can check off to make sure you covered all the bases.

1. Did you set up your Patreon Page correctly? (tiers, early access offers)
2. Did you promote your patron actively?
3. Did you do any campaigns like a subathon? (Bonus chapters upon reaching patron goals etc)
4. Are you offering enough chapters in early access? (if you start with just one or two chapters, few will be willing to pay any larger sums?

If the answer is yes to all of the above, the issue is probably with the story. As I mention in the guide, writing a webnovel is different from a traditional novel, so you need to make sure you keep the tempo right.
1. Is the tension high enough? (If its just slice of life chapters without any cliffs or urgency, fewer people will sub)
2. Are you leaving readers wanting more at the end of chapters? (cliffs rather than conclusions)
3. Is your story building up toward something? (big power-up, fighting arc nemesis, solving a mystery, etc etc. Teasing interesting events will get you more patrons).

As for the second string of questions, I personally wouldn’t give up on a story that has garnered thousands of followers. That’s better performance than 99,9% of stories on this platform. For example, Defiance of the Fall “only” had something like 5-6k Followers when I left Rising Stars (trending back then), yet I made over $5k the first month with Patreon. I’d rather try to fix the issues that might cause your reader-to-customer conversion ratio to be so low. To keep up the growth while figuring these things out, you can definitely take out ads, plug the story on forums/reddit etc, maybe crosspost on places like scribblehub if it’s the right genre.

I’d probably even go KU before dropping a story with this kind of following.

Q: I don’t like Patreon! Can I use services like Ko-Fi instead?
Ko-Fi is not a real option for this kind of business model for various reasons. One of them is simply that RR has Patreon integration, and the userbase of this platform is used to Patreon.

But the most important reason is VAT - Ko-Fi does not charge VAT on subscriptions. With them, you are the counterpart to the supporter, which means you would have to individually file VAT for every single transaction. No matter if we’re talking bookkeeping or administration, it’s an absolute nightmare. Therefore, it’s pretty much impossible to use platforms like Ko-Fi/Subscribestar without breaking the law.

With Patreon, they are your counterpart, and they are responsible for VAT while you simply collect the net money.

Q: How do you deal with the pressure of coming up with new things? How do you combat burnout?
I don’t feel there are any pressures to come up with things to write. The problem is rather having too many ideas, and scrapping fun concepts since the story would just become too big. There is also the arc fatigue where you’ve written a current arc for 3-4 months. You kind of want to move on to the next shiny idea, but there is still a month left to write on your current arc. During those times it’s nice to have a pretty good stash of private chapters. That way, you can start writing on the next arc and get your daily word count, while using stockpiled chapters to deal with the daily releases.

This helps with general writing fatigue as well. A lot of authors usually have multiple projects for this reason, but you can’t really do that as a webnovelist (without hobbling your career). But working on multiple arcs at once can really help you push through rough patches, or just help improve your daily word count.

Q: How should I plot a series?
There are no right answer to plotting. Part of the job is finding a sustainable method that works for you. Personally, I don’t plot too much. I know what the next few arcs will be, and I have bulletpoints of important plot points for the current arc. Often, those bulletpoints get scrapped as I come up with new and better ideas for the arc. After all, some of them last 3-5 months, and there is a lot of time to come up with new things. Other authors I know have every chapter detailed in big spreadsheets and follow it pretty faithfully.

Q: How do you deal with editing?
As for editing, there is only so much editing you can do without having it take up too much time. First, I write 60-90% of a chapter and move on. Quick and dirty to get out the daily numbers. Then, on the day of (patreon) release, I flesh out and refine the chapter until it reaches 100%. In my case, this is often ~1 week later. The reason I split it up like this is partly to return to the chapter with fresh eyes, and partly to better be able to join it with future chapters I’ve written since.

After that, I do a final editing pass for typos/flow etc. Of course, there are then two more editing passes with actual editors for the Amazon releases. I generally don’t do retroactive changes for the webnovel, but I have adjusted some things in the ebooks to better suit the later chapters/story arcs.

The part you mention about revision and cutting sounds like advice for traditional writing rather than writing webnovels. Certainly, one should avoid having a bunch of fluff in one’s story, but there are no restrictions where each part needs to be cut down and refined to the point everything fits into a book. I don’t care if a story arc balloon into 2-300k+ words, as long as I feel I can keep the chapters interesting and engaging.

Q: I was writing sub-1000-word chapters for my upcoming story. Should I fuse them into longer chapters, or keep them short so I can double the release rate?
It’s nigh impossible to say with any certainty which is better and worse. Personally, I’d most likely take another week or two to stockpile 10 chapters+ and release the first chapters at 1500 words. It’s more work, but I think it has good odds of paying off.

Reader drop-off is by far the highest in the first couple of chapters, and you want to do everything in your power to keep that drain at a minimum. There are two points of “friction” I can see with releasing incredibly short chapters at the start, both of which can lead to a higher reader loss.

First, there comes a point where the chapter’s shortness becomes an annoyance that turn some readers away. I’d say that point is around 1000 words. Any less, and some feel the story lazy/unprofessional, and even designed to game the RR algorithm.

Secondly, you can consider the first 1-2 chapters as the “ad” for your story. Many readers read one or two chapters to see if the story is in their wheelhouse. With 750-word chapters, you can only fit half the content to showcase. Some might feel nothing interesting has happened, and simply give up on the story before they get to the good stuff. This ties into the advice in the main post that you need action from the start to hook the readers and make them keep clicking “next”.

(Winged Wolf: https://www.royalroad.com/forums/thread/116110)

On another note: What would you, readers, and you, authors, like to see on a writing platform?

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Under the ground lay Old King Coal
He lay most peacefully
He ruled in might and splendour
There was none so grand as he
But men came along to tunnel him out
And topple him from his throne
The tore him down to steal his crown
For the power in the old black stone

(Chorus)
There’s fire in the heart of Old King Coal
There’s the strength of centuries in his soul
There’s a power that grows where his black blood flows
So here’s to Old King Coal

So they scratched him, hacked him, and harried him out
They ripped him from his bed
And they blasted his bones asunder
They’d sworn to see him dead
Then they carried him out to the sun’s bright light
Which blinded him in the eye
And the blood did drain from every vein
Until they’d drained him dry

(Chorus)

Then they cracked his bones on the grinding stones
How gleefully they did grind
Oh how they pulverized him
Turned him to dust so fine
Then they sprayed him into the furnace fire
And burned him in the air
With a mighty blast they burned him fast
As he prayed his final prayer

(Chorus)

And his soul cried out with a final song
As he reached his final hour
And his heart it burst with singing
So mighty was the power
And he sang the water into steam
And the steam mnade the wheels fly round
And the song ran on both pure and strong
Till the wires hummed with its sound

(Chorus)

Out of the darkness there comes light
Out of the earth comes fire
Out of the cold comes comfort
As his bones go blazing higher
And his soul flies out through the air we breathe
And down on the earth we tread
That humankind may not forget
That Old King Coal is dead

(Chorus)

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1. The Importance of the group and the possibilities.

You might think you live in a wasteland regarding your purposes, intentions, interests, and affinities. You're wrong. That's a weak mindset for you to live by, so start using these stepping stones. Stop thinking you already know everything and everyone around, for you don't. You're not unique in that sense, when you start to focus, moving, putting in the time and the effort and flipping stones over-not the stepping ones-, more possibilities appear, more doors open up. Being afraid or God forbid, being lazy, is doomed to fail. Motion creates emotion, it rhymes and it's just as true as the sun will rise again tomorrow.

The twisted mentality of the modern world “lone wolf”, some individualistic hero is just an unrealistic myth. Lone wolves are usually unadjusted losers who cannot make frens and then to cope with this they claim they don’t need them anyway. Don’t fall for this mindset, it’s time to meet your neighbor, your classmates, etc..

We'll likely face very extreme situations, and few people will be prepared for them. We'll need all the help we can get, so better to build up mutual trust relationships beforehand than facing anons dealing with people when everything has just turned chaotic. In the history of societal disasters, collapses, and radical authoritarianism are commonplace. Those who stood alone were easy prey to people who had built gangs. Remember; Apes alone strong, but Apes together are invincible.

There are many easier ways to deal with people, which we will explore here :

2. How to make new friends! - Your biggest ally: Social Excuses

The most important ally to make new friends is to understand the “Social Excuses” which are the moments in which people think it's absolutely normal to talk to strangers and won't judge you. The social excuse takes up the pressure of each social contact, basically, you have the “Excuse” to talk at that moment about that topic. Besides that, be aware that some people are too busy thinking about themselves than to spend one moment thinking about you, so don't overthink this, they are just guidelines.

To whom to talk depends on the context, mainly it’s better to approach those who are alone, if you are still too nervous to talk with girls, approach the males first of those groups, or with girls who you aren't attracted to. This is how to make friends, not how to get a girlfriend, after you have gained enough social skills, you can try that.

Moments where the “Social Excuses” are valid;

• Being the new guy or girl: In a new class, no one knows each other and everyone is eager to make friends. This is a great ‘Social Excuse’ moment. If you are new to a Church, a sports club, or a hobby group. Nobody there will find it strange that the new guy/girl strikes up a conversation with another person or question about some basic stuff, for example, schedules, activities, etc. Most people can relate to being the new person somewhere and will actively try to help you as long as you put in some effort. Other examples of situations may include but are not limited too; Language courses, dance lessons, political party meetings, volunteering, political rallies, religious meetings of various groups, etc..

• Common questions: even if you aren't new, there is always a lot of news or changes in every group which can be asked to people in those groups without any pressure, by the other hand, while sharing activities, it's easy to start a conversation with someone you have at your side, these things are natural, just asking their name it's socially acceptable.

• The Hooks: We can strategically use the first two “social excuses” to maximize its results, for example, when you are the new one, try to notice first who is the more social/the informal leader/ the more open of the group, ask them about something of the group and tell them that you are new, so they can help you to better introduce yourself to more people with less social pressure by the other hand you can always go to the official hierarchy, for example, a priest might add you to the WhatsApp group of the parish and introduce you to other people.

• Another option From Online to IRL; although this guide is mainly for in real-life interactions, we recommend in moderation, meeting up with people you meet online is a clear moment where there is an ideal ‘social excuse’ moment as you will already share the same interest, However, safety first, only meet in public places, don't share too much personal info, know the other person for a reasonable length of time before meeting to ensure you do some sort of check on the person you are about to meet.

Where you can find yourself in situations to be able to use those excuses? The previous article: How to Build a Fren Moment answers that.

3. Your second biggest ally; A positive, open, and friendly mindset.

Another important ally in making new friends is a positive and friendly mindset. The average person on this planet will almost always be friendly to friendly people. They will also respond positively to people who are positive and open. A smile, a sincere compliment, and a positive attitude open a lot of doors that are usually closed. Be ready to accept invitations from people for their activities. Be aware of this while you try to engage with people. You reap what you sow.

Take note that you shouldn't force this, you should focus on the little steps so it can come out of naturally, don't force the situation, the more you practice and talk with people, the more naturally the conversation will end up, also the more people you know and be around them, the more you will be able to figure out what is or not okay to do, so be patient.

Being open means that you should be doing questions, but in a moderated way, and also to learn to tone down your more controversial opinions. Also, be aware that when you are asked a question there are things like open and closed answers. If you just answer ‘yes” to a question it doesn’t leave a lot of room for follow-up. If you however tell “ yes, but I like this too, or sure but what’s your opinion on this topic?” By giving open answers you oil the motor of the conversation

If you follow these articles, yeah maybe you don't fit perfectly with these groups, but you are earning experience and social skills, that's the important thing, even if you don't find people exactly like you, you can find worthy allies and stepping stones to meet better people, if anything, just plant seeds.

4. Conversation 101

Once you “break the ice” with the social excuse, now it's time for some small talk. Small talk is key to striking up friendships, almost nobody wants to instantly talk about deep topics. While some people might find small talk worthless and boring, these are people who underestimate the value of small talk.

It's pretty hard to be good at small talk but here are some things to guide you into finding topics for small talk:

• Common interests and activities; When you are both at a church or sports club, you can strike up a conversation about your joint experience here. (Wow, really liked this mass, or wow this was a great football game don’t you think) These are easily accessible topics on which everyone can have an opinion.

• Things that happen around you; If there is a strange painting, a nice car, a cat in a tree, or a guy with a funny hat. You could comment on those. Look at things around you, usually, people will have noticed them too and formed an opinion on it. These are the types of things that lend themselves to small talk.

• Dynamics of groups: it might be hard when you are in a small group where everybody knows each other, especially when they talk about stuff you don't know anything about it, in this case, just ask about it or comment on something related to it. Another way is just to open another conversation with the person at your side who is not too involved in the general topic.

• Previously thought out topics; when you meet strangers, there is always the thought of “what are we going to talk about”. Especially for us who aren't very quick, observe those who you share the same groups and think about topics to talk about, pre-think some questions on that topic, or something related to their interests, etc.… This call helps to get off yourself a pressure as you know topics you want to use or not use with them.

• Personal questions: this can be kind of tricky if you don't have social skills (with the danger of asking too much or improper questions), essentially the personal questions besides the typical ones “where are you from, what you study”, it should be related in some way to the context you both are in that situation, so it fits and better to jump onto other topics related to their answers, in this case, better to ask complex questions, not just “yes or no” questions than doing more simple questions which can look like that you are doing an interview.

•Previously thought stories; you might know some funny story that happened to you or a strange story or an interesting fact about something, you can try to recycle it and tell it to the strangers you meet, if the story works with one person, usually it will work with more people. That helps to bring pre-thought small stories that you can use frequently when you're out of topics.

•Patience and Activities: Don't obsess on this topic either if you are incapable. Be patient, be involved in activities with people, and slowly, and naturally the small talk will be easier as you have more shared more time and activities with people.

•How to keep in contact with people:? after some talk with people, you might not meet them again, a good tip to maintain the contact it’s to already know some events, activities, etc.. in your area that they might be interested, even you can think about information, videos that you can send to them, commenting on that to them, it's a great way to get the phone or whatever to keep in contact with that person after it. Another important thing to acknowledge about staying in contact with people; Don’t spam them, sending multiple videos of 40 min a day to someone is far past overkilling it. Remember, as with everything in life, all in moderation!

Take charge, take initiative!

Let’s say you have followed all the tips and have become successful. You struck up conversations, it went well and you actually made a fren. They even gave you their number. Don’t forget that a friendship requires energy, commitment, and maintenance. To ensure a friendship doesn’t stay superficial but actually deepens, you need to take initiative.

Examples of things you can do with a new fren to strengthen the friendship:

- Do a joint shared activity you both enjoy, Hiking, golf, gym, church, bible study, etc; take a drink in a bar after any activity it’s great.

- Invite someone over for dinner or lunch.

Some friendships are special, with some people you don’t need an activity because you talk for hours with each other without the need to really do anything. In that case, that can also be an activity. But if it's not that kind of special friendship, then I would advise something that qualifies as an activity!

5. Don’t be scared Anon, but also don’t fear rejection;

Meeting new people can be scary. Thoughts might pop up like “what if they don’t like me?”, “what if I make it awkward?” etcetera. These are normal thoughts to feel like a human being. You shouldn’t be discouraged by them, even the most social people feel this. They just push through it and if you do too, you will see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It's never the end of the world if you weren’t able to make a friend in every conversation, plenty of days left, and plenty of people on the planet to retry. Sometimes, it just wasn’t meant to be. The person who you chose to talk to just isn’t your type. That’s not bad, it can happen. It's all about trying! all those failed attempts will train you to manage difficult people in the future.

Sometimes, a super awkward silence may fall into the conversation. You start panicking thinking it is going horrible. YOU ARE WRONG. Silence is for absolute chads, if you try to cover up every moment of silence that falls in a conversation you are going to look like an insecure person. Confident people don’t mind a silence dropping now and then, take the moment to reflect, think about what you're going to say. Don’t panic.

You occasionally will meet people who reject you very bluntly. or say nasty things while you just try to be fr

iendly. Don’t let them drag you down, it's their loss that they missed an opportunity to make a friend. Not you, you tried your best.

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This article seeks to inform the reader about group networking. On how to find 1% of people like us in the general population and more. For the sake of this guide, it mainly targets young people, if you're older just mold the content to your own situation.

The main problem with people like us, the traditionalists, Nation-loving folk, [insert your ideology] is that we won't dare to meet in the real world anymore, because we fear the unknown, we fear strangers. The digital world allows for us to proxy social interaction but we fall victim to paranoia, to "what ifs". For users we keep in contact with, we fear they may be less genuine offline, more radical than us, even possible infiltrators… Which gives off a lingering feeling that we're in trouble for supposed misbehavior. We are too dependent on the internet, we have to go to the real world, to our neighbors.

This presents a problem, how do we identify the missing link between ourselves and the bridge we build to trustworthy friends? Say there is a 1% minority of reactionaries, among a population of 30,000 students or of a general population of 500,000 inhabitants. The like-minded minority are hidden among these masses, a diamond in the rough under a constant barrage of demonization, this impedes us from direct exposure in the public sphere at large. Because we would be faced with social isolation, running around in circles, and fail the task at hand.

To confront the problem we have an effective tool at our disposal, the tool of choice is the funnel theory. The means to this method is to be selective, aim with precision towards those who show some interest in what you have to say. Start this process by adopting outgoing activities, joining clubs, attending places where you're more likely to discover the kind of people you're looking for. This is the technique to identify and get in touch with the 1% of people who may be receptive to you without them fearing for their safety. And without us wasting too much time on posters and so on. Organize dozens of small, totally public, and mainstream subgroups in several layers.

Create a real friendship with these people. The real journey in our quest to save the west are the friends we meet along the way. Strengthen this group of like-minded people by participating in a LOT of social and religious activities, keep politics to a minimum. A movement is stronger than a political group.

The Funnel Strategy:

We have to join or organize several small, public, and mainstream subgroups in several layers. First, completely mainstream but connected clubs that filter towards more restricted clubs. Next, even more, restricted clubs, and so on. We have laid out the strategy in four tiers:

• Tier 1: Mainstream Society

• Tier 2: Gatekeeping

• Tier 3: Subculture

• Tier 4: Close friends

As per the first three tiers, you can just join them, it isn't necessary to create or channel them into your group. Each of these groups functions independently of your core companions, Tier 4. In each tiered group, there is at least one other Tier 4 friend accompanying you, the objective being to collectively SPOT a person suspected of holding conservative views or the top 1% of said views within each tier. These people are then selected to integrate into your circle of friends or other tiered groups. Next, we will develop how to behave in each Tier.

How to Act in the three tiers.

• First focus on befriending people, know the people in the groups, the leaders, the activities and other groups related to this one which will allow you to bridge over to there if the first group is not suitable.

• You shouldn't go full controversial and radical, The moment the group recognizes you as a radical, you will be sidelined. Therefore focus on knowing the group's members first, before getting too open about your own beliefs.

• Respect the hierarchy, get closer to them, don't go in the group with the will of changing it. be part of their activities and help them generally. you can show you are a good guy whom they can respect.

• You should also go too to their purely social activities (like going to the bar ) even if you don't like that, they are worth it because brings people closer and makes it easier knowing the members in less time than without it.

• As soon you are inside the group and have a good knowledge of its functions and you are familiar with the group’s members you can begin to check people. In this case focus on the individuals, not the group.

Tier 1: Mainstream Society

• Normie/Average parish groups: In this case, consider asking your priest about groups of young people, and usually he will be able to direct you somewhere, this can be used as a starting point to get to know other communities in your area which are better suited, also Volunteering.

• On campus: Which is easy because everyone is a stranger at first. there are many, rugby clubs, hiking clubs, hunting, debate/political clubs long, etc... Inside them can take notice of those who are more sidelined, their topics of discussion as well.

Next, in a different setting observe their behavior while drinking, touch upon sensitive subjects, let them react, collectively test them with friends. If they pass it, then they can move on to Tier 2.

These satellite organizations have to meet the so-called "mommy criteria".

- "Where are you going?" Mom asks.

- "I'm going to play rugby/study/a dance/concert/see a movie."

These clubs need to be mainstream enough so that no one's ashamed to go there. But at the same time let everyone know that it's unusual, that it's for insiders, for enthusiasts.

Tier 2 - Gatekeeping

Continue participating in mainstream events, this time in the more conservative ones, except begin punching in the direction you wish to channel these groups:

• Conferences on historical topics counter to progressive narratives such as the truth about the French Revolution, on national heroes of your culture. Visit the monuments of your heroic past, etc.

• Pro-life groups, here there are many kinds of people but you know they take their faith seriously enough and want to do something.

• Boxing, self-defense, just going together to work out at least.

• Neoconservative parishes and religious groups. They are usually too stagnant but inside them, there are usually interesting individuals.

• Common Right-wing Political parties, go to their meetings and events, no need to join them obviously, just participate and get to know their people. The bad side of this is that they are usually not religious and too focused on mere politics, but there are good individuals inside them who are worth our time.

Inside these groups search for those among them usually holding doubts in their groups, those who are asking more questions than they should. They are the people who get eventually sidelined by the main group.

• In this tier, we include the internet, especially from Telegram, individuals of cultural and religious motivation, not radical political individuals. Here we should beware of the dangers. Better more real-life than the internet.

If they pass and aren't shocked, we move on. If not, we'll stop there.

But if it works, we are certain to speak with people with conservative and nationalist views. So we move to Tier 3.

Note : this tier 2 can be useful in finding decent women for your groups in order to make families for all but this should be secondary, you guys don't want to be known as the desperate guys looking for a girlfriend.

Tier 3 : Subculture

• Traditionalist groups and parishes.

• Reading circles, support committees.

• Militias.

These people are joining the backbone of your organization. If these people are ready, of good quality and willing, individuals selected among them are directed to Tier 4

Tier 4: Close Friends

Close-knit relationships, direct action, pure militancy.

The Funnel

It's a real funnel. We start from a stock of 30,000 potential people, reduce this to 500 people interested in history, then to 150 interested in history and the crusades, then to 80, etc....

In the end, you get the crème de la crème of conservative, etc... Very traditional people who came to you without freaking out, and then who stay because they just feel like they're in a group of buddies.

And the great advantage of this technique is also and above all: Nobody is left behind, every person can have their value. We are not only interested in the people from Tier 3 or 4, the more traditionally inclined, but we also keep in touch with ALL of the others, no purity spiral, no elitism.

• Of course, the guys in Tier 2 may not be the most traditional. But the day your core group is going to hold a mainstream ceremony for some traditional celebration, they can join

• Granted, the film club will never be a traditional stronghold, But maybe the CIVNAT of the film club can lend a hand one day just to host a friend who comes to town to give a lecture on a mainstream topic, but on a topic that will bring in a large crowd.

The groups have to manage, to "compartmentalize" the activities and maintain a silent core. Along with plenty of small, mainstream, sympathetic satellite /allied organizations.

Networking - The Social Side.

We, on the right, in general, we always lose things: we lose our friends, our family, people hate us, we lose our social value, our public image. But it has to be exactly the opposite. People have to gain by joining us. They need to have fun. They need to make friends, they need to meet a future wife, they need to gain attention, benefits, and so on.

That's exactly what makes a movement last: it becomes like a big family, where everybody wins something. That's what builds and strengthens the ties, A big chunk of the activism should be destined to do something other than politics, to strengthen everyone involved.

This should be natural, not forced, from the perspective of everyone within the network, where everyone thinks the same and helps each other, without even knowing it. That's the magic of it because everybody knows each other at two-thirds of their intimate beliefs.

If it is you who is at the heart of these social exchanges, if it is you who organizes the party, it is you who sets the "normality". If you set the framework, whatever the context, people follow. you have something to filter and select the people who follow and also identify the people who are active.

People have nothing to lose by frequenting this circle of people, even if something bad happens, you know people will stand at their side. It shouldn't be very political but everybody should agree on the same political line, and at the same time there is the core of traditionalist within all of that

You have to think of it as something purely informal. By people bringing in their friends and stuff... Only activism can't work. What works is social. Camaraderie, collective recreation.

It's time to go out and make Frens.

The next article will be about social skills for antisocial people, the importance of the group, and real-life presence, as alone and on the internet, we can't do anything.

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