Issue 2
When the edge becomes the median.
The Satanic Citizen newsletter is an irregular missive of thinking, recommendations, and site updates. Warning: opinions.
First Thought
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
— Frank Wilhoit
I believe, overall, the trajectory of human civilization bends eventually toward classic liberalism, even if unintentional.
In the big blob of humanity, most people are grouped in the center; the bell curve median of progressive and conservative. The edges of that blob — and the edges of said bell curve — are occupied by ideas and personas defined as “edgy” or “being on the edge”.
This is a natural tension. The “edgy” people on the conservative side try to slow the momentum of humanity’s arc toward liberalism. The progressively edgy people push forward. Both parties use whichever tools they have at their disposal to strengthen their position: online rhetoric, marching and protesting, voting, editorializing, memes, preaching, etc. The harder they press, the more annoying they become. But the equilibrium holds.
Social media presents humanity with a novel problem: any individual’s voice can be amplified so literally every other person on earth can hear them.
Now, the “edge” is so much louder. It’s bullying itself back into the mainstream via unfiltered, cacophonic amplification, eroding the safe political median. Now, even a “centrist” position is “political”. When people say they “don’t want to talk politics”, they don’t want to electrocute themselves on that edge that feels everywhere, inescapable.
The edge is inherently based in dissatisfaction with the status quo; its nature is literally defined by rejecting the median. It’s never been responsible for providing policy ideas because it’s a minority that’s never been taken seriously; grievance was enough to keep it alive. In America, the edge of the right is now just the right in its majority. It offers no policy that builds, only policy that removes. In fact, as the edge of the right swallows the median of the right, the entire conservative project becomes unmoored from policy-making of ANY kind. The result: regressive cultural desertification.
The mainstreaming of the conservative edge is creating a new edge even more radical. Abortion bans, injecting religion into public schools, suppressing women, and promoting child labor were fever dreams 15 years ago. Now those protections are falling one by one.
The cultural desertification of the right is spreading so much faster than the progressive edge can compensate for. The left is underfunded, under-organized, near powerless in some circumstances. Just as most individuals lean liberal, most institutions lean conservative. And the caustic, bleating, reactionary grievances of the right are a designed distraction to keep power in power and retard the macro momentum toward social maturity.
None of this is a new idea. But when people start talking about “edgy”, we’d better check ourselves before we wreck ourselves because our generation has seen ideas go from “dude, go back to your tinfoil hat” to “well that’s now the central campaign theme for this Senator”.
(Thank you to the Satanic in Nature podcast that inspired this thinking with their episode “Going Too Far When Being Edgy”.)
— Agonist
June 2024
New Citizen Resources
Vendor
Unholy Rosaries
Book
The Origin of Satan
Organization
The Infernal Circle
Misfit Links
Greg Olear @ Prevail
Sunday Pages: Paradise Lost
Kay Redfield Jamison @ MIT Press
In Their Own Words: Narratives of Mania and Depression
Will-o-the-Witch @ Tumblr
Everything You Want to Know About Lilith
The Last Note
Virtue Falters by Ritual Howls
Gothy post-punk from Detroit for fans of Bauhaus that appreciate a certain noir twang, their fifth album is a grimy, gnarly tour of America’s rotten center.
