As a writer, it’s easy to be lured into identifying yourself with your work. To some extent, it’s important to take pride in your work, so that you feel compelled to  make it as good as possible. At a more basic level, though, the writer should be aware that he is not his work, and his work is not him. When someone praises or criticizes the work, it can never really be personal praise or criticism.

For writers, even with a long and well established reputation, they are mostly only as good as their last book or their last column. Readers may give a writer a short grace period depending on the reputation of the writer, but otherwise, their relationship to the writer is similar to that of a diner to a chef at a restaurant. If the chef cooks well, the diner loves the chef. If the chef fucks up, the diner becomes pissed off at the chef and the entire waitstaff besides, unless he has been a loyal customer for a long time.

Readers will tend to think that they know a writer because they have come to be familiar with expressions of that writer’s mind. And it is a good way indeed to get to know how someone thinks. But it is not the same as getting to know and love the person, but this is easy to misunderstand, especially for writers who have never experienced the stress of popularity.

Love for the person’s writing is not the same as love for the person. Those writing simply to earn what they think is adoration are doomed to be disappointed, because people can only adore what they can see, and if all they see are the words, that is what they come to adore, rather than the person writing them.

So, in this, the writer can only be successful insomuch as he elevates his reader. Writing to fill a deficit of love or friendship rarely works because the writer is simply another vendor in the life of the reader, and the relationship, while it may be warm, is not the same as a more intimate or friendly one.

It’s easy to mistake readers for friends. Friends may be readers and readers may be friends, but the groups are usually separate from one another, especially as the readers multiply.

This is one of the reasons why personal writing is such an unhappy practice, and why it is so popular among publishers these days. There are countless writers eager to pitch their personal essays, and editors are happy to publish them to provide the illusion of intimacy within their publications. It is cheap to commission the articles, and provides lonely people with a sense of connection that would otherwise be absent from their lives.

It also promotes the egalitarian notion that even regular people ought to publish autobiographies, rather than just the great and the good. Some of the most popular personal essays of today tend to be written by the mediocre and depraved. Websites like Salon and Huffington Post deal in this sort of material on a daily basis.

Yet it is entirely possible to publish a deeply personal memoir, give hundreds of thousands of people the illusion of intimacy, but to create no real connections at all. The author can step into a party held in their honor, meet dozens of strangers who claim to know the author and to have been touched in a profound way by her works, and then all of them can return home from the party afterwards, no more familiar with one another than they had been before meeting, either in text or in person.

This image has a tendency to overpower the impression left by the real person, and people incapable of discriminating between the two often find themselves in sad entanglements as a result.

This is the typical farce of fame, not rising to the level of tragedy because it’s so silly. What’s famous can only be an image or a glimpse of a person, and the shallow worship of millions of that image can never substitute for the true fidelity of a few.

Knowing this, writers should know that they are only as good as their service to the reader. The reader owes the author nothing but the purchase price of the book, and his attention is freely given, his praise freely withdrawn, or turned to scorn. To the extent that the work elevates the life of the reader is the extent to which it is good work. An architect leaves something of himself in his buildings, and a writer leaves a sliver of himself in his work, but the architect is not the building and the writer is not the writing.

To reiterate the title, almost no one cares about you, the writer. The depth of the indifference that your readers feel for you, if you truly knew it, might drive you to despair if you attached your sense of self-worth to it.

They care about what you can do for them. To the extent that you care about doing all you can for them is the extent to which they might choose to care about your interests, and not a jot more.

Jargon is an common feature in modern intellectual life, as a sign that a person has been initiated into a body of knowledge. These jargon terms are symbols for concepts that have more recognizable words that can also be used to describe the same concepts. But the jargon allows the group to insulate itself from outside scrutiny and to raise the status of the people who understand it within their own sphere.

The pseudoeducated public now sees plain language as low-class. People who use esoteric jargon are respectable, owing to the massive amount of resources that it takes to learn that otherwise useless jargon.

Teachers, even today, often assign Orwell’s essay on this topic, but then proceed to reward their students who churn out jargon-laden papers. After these students graduate, they refocus on promoting the secret language that they learned in the schools, to garner wider adoption of their dialect in a piecemeal fashion.

‘Queer’ and ‘gender’ theory are languages that encourage new emotional and philosophical associations with given jargon terms. Entire clubs in economics form around a given jargon term, aiming to change the emotional associations that people have around certain words representing certain policies. In some cases, like ‘inflation,’ a concerted campaign lasting over 150 years has gone into altering educated opinion on the subject in a subtle way that has had profound impacts.

These clubs formed around linguistic tics, once they have established the new definitions, then get to policing the use of their own language, to ensure that no one misuses the jargon, and places the enforcement of the grammar of the secret language as their highest priority.

This is not sensible behavior, because it impedes the examination, debate, and spread of useful knowledge. It is a sort of intellectual protectionism that limits the potential growth of a set of ideas, and closes off opportunities for exchange. The practice also tends to hobble the jargon-users, because they are more focused on erecting walls around their words and less about making the concepts which the words represent more intelligible to those who might benefit from it.

Because this practice has become endemic, the thinking fraction of the public has become uselessly derivative, thinking thoughts about other thoughts, speaking words representing underlying concepts that they either don’t understand or that don’t exist in the real world.

Since the only criteria for appearing thoughtful is to use the stylish jargon, you wind up with a lot of parrot-humans with colorful feathers that are good at repeating the terms taught them by their trainers, but not good at producing useful thought. These writers exist to repeat the consensus of their superiors, but are incapable of helping their superiors to make better decisions, because all their focus is on repeating the magic language which justifies one political policy or another.

This type of person may know that using words like ‘studies,’ ‘statistics,’ ‘reports,’ and the name of a prestigious institution will result in their words carrying more persuasive impact. It doesn’t matter if they have no understanding of the underlying material: they can appear to have authority by cloaking themselves in the pretense of scientific knowledge.

In the case of the typical person who believes themselves to be capable of thought, it results in mistaking the memorization of a set of jargon terms to be the possession of the underlying knowledge itself. If it develops that the intellectual body which justified the jargon has turned out to be corrupt, the people using the jargon may not react for decades, because they never understood what the terms were intended to represent in any case.

We are all in a state of profound ignorance about the universe. The contemporary mentality puts pressure on most people to appear knowledgeable about everything, to provide more legitimacy to the modern arrangement which places experts in positions of authority to direct all activity. The faith that people have in these experts is in turn justified by giving people the sense that they, also, have the scientific knowledge possessed by the experts, because of their understanding of the jargon terms which purport to symbolize the knowledge which confers power.

To state that something is a mystery to you, or a mystery to mankind, often results in anxiety. It’s easier to reference a theory about it that you don’t have the capacity to understand than to say that you don’t know. In schools, students who respond that they “don’t know” receive a negative mark, even if the statement is true. Even if the answer is not known, you are at least supposed to report back the most fashionable theory that purports to provide an answer.

It’s easy to learn the jargon, but more difficult than most can muster to gain knowledge of the concepts that those terms purport to represent. It often develops that the jargon represents no valid knowledge, but is instead a gateway to one academic language cult or another. Also, many bodies of knowledge are useless without a broad context, because they only examine a given set of variables which are likely impacted by other factors. Knowledge of certain concepts in economics will be profoundly confused without corresponding knowledge of history, and knowledge of history is likely to be confusing without a knowledge of historical art & literature, and those are likely to be misleading without an understanding of religion, and so on and so forth.

The sheer challenge of becoming learned makes it impossible for most to gain general knowledge beyond the borders of their own nation, which would make a genuine ‘multicultural’ education ridiculous. To raise an educated ruler, it would be challenging enough to provide a brilliant youth with a general education of his own country, culture, religion, and those of neighboring states with which he’s likely to have some relations with.

To do the same with the entire world is not feasible, but politics charges the modern university with this responsibility, so the teachers compensate by creating the sense of an education with a mix of extreme detail and vapid generalization. This is excellent at inculcating pride, but not so good at transmitting useful knowledge.

It’s sometimes observed that different political orders flow down from different moral understandings. The facile conclusion to draw from that is that changing the moral beliefs within a society will then change the political order. Since politics is war at a low violence threshold, this implies that it’s possible to alter the political order through the use of rhetoric alone, without resort to force at any level.

Superficially, this can be true in certain situations. When the USSR fell, yes, there were some tanks driven around near the Kremlin, but it was more of a demonstration than an actual instance of combat. Rhetoric and internal dissolution eventually made the Soviet state untenable, as the lack of belief in Marxism-Leninism lead to the incapacity of that state to defend itself with the vigor that it had shown in decades past.

In contemporary politics, the end of the Soviet Union has out-sized relative importance, and often, observers and political actors tend to draw too many lessons from it which are not necessarily appropriate.

In contrast, when Hungarian students revolted in 1956, expecting eventual armed assistance from NATO, Khrushchev showed no pity in suppressing the rebellion. He had no pity because at that time, patriotic feelings and moral legitimacy were still high within the Soviet states. Further, the westerners were not willing to go to war in support of their stated beliefs about universal liberty — the desire for self-preservation won out over the desire to promote democratic-universalist values.

In this case, radio broadcasts from American intelligence encouraged the Hungarians to revolt, but the military support that they expected did not materialize. In a rhyming event, something similar happened at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba — the military support for the planned invasion was withheld at the last moment. This is a typically American political error, arguably deriving from pervasive beliefs that spiritual force trumps material force, and that with enough of one, a people has no need for the other.

Although Americans would not typically call their moral beliefs about the liberating power of democracy to be spiritual, it is a spiritual belief nonetheless.

The notion that the promotion of moral values is a risk-free activity that can never lead to violence is completely false. Promoting a competitive system of moral values is a whole lot more dangerous than “shouting fire in a crowded theater.” The latter can be a harmless prank, but the growth of an alternative value system reliably leads to war. Indeed, when the American State Department helped to overthrow the governments of Egypt and the Ukraine recently, enormous political violence resulted in the aftermath of the spread of the new moral teachings.

Similarly, in the US itself, the new morality of Civil Rights lead to waves of crime, disorder, and terrorism, not to mention a wildly expensive (in moral and material terms both) reaction, termed the ‘War on Drugs.’

Moral entrepreneurs tend to be furtive, claiming that they are not violent people, but we see from history that they are much more dangerous than fighting men themselves, because when they are successful in establishing a new moral order, physical conflict typically results. Moral entrepreneurs, similar to economic entrepreneurs, seek to re-arrange the moral basis of society.

The common portrayal of such people as inherently peaceful is spurious, because encouraging moral change, if successful, usually results in physical conflict.

This is because when there are differing conceptions of moral order within a single state, that state becomes destabilized — as Lincoln cribbed from the Bible, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” It must be split into multiple properties, or the people living in the residence will fall to violent squabbling. Even after the separation, violent squabbling is likely.

This dynamic helps to explain why America’s educational and press organs are so frantic in promoting the new morality of non-morality — when too many people are left behind in the push towards a fully Satantic moral system, the state itself must become destabilized, as too many people fail to comply with its directives, and the ability of its administrators to govern depletes. To the extent that the people prove themselves unwilling or unable to adopt the new morality is to the extent that they become enemies of the state.

This dangerous dynamic was well understood by the American founders, which was why they built legal structures designed to permit some measure of moral pluralism within certain legal limits.  Private sovereignty was permitted in the context of obedience to certain public restrictions, within a framework of the culture of English Protestantism. Given that that cultural framework has been broken, and the legal framework weakened to the point of nonexistence, the struggle for moral supremacy becomes more severe.

Whereas previously, under the more Constitutional order, there was space for some private moral sovereignty (households and communities could make important moral distinctions), there is now a pervasive demand to keep up with the rapid pace of moral disruptions emanating from the capitols of democratic politics and media influence.

Those that fail to keep up with the pace — even if they are bumpkin television chefs held guilty of violating the new moral laws in past decades — find themselves the target of retaliatory lawsuits, employment discrimination, and public defamation.

The funny thing about the leftist ratchet is that a person becomes wicked by simply maintaining yesterday’s beliefs, by not keeping up with the rapid pace of moral disruption. This must inevitably lead to physical conflict, which is generally why many  everyday Americans, frightened by the idea of fighting, stay glued to their TV sets, to ensure that they stay within the realm of the acceptable opinion.

In this the leftists are the real traditionalists, doing their best to resurrect the chaotic ways of living from the dead tribes of eons past, whom they idealize, versus the relatively recent moral innovations of the Christian culture which they have mostly succeeded in undermining. Cthulhu’s music provides the background track to their dreams, pulling them down towards the ancient cities without names, generating an irresistible attraction to forgotten rituals performed according to laws written in incomprehensible runes.