We can no longer wait for the dark elves
Waiting for Godot will destroy the world
I have a very credulous grandmother. I’m sure many people can relate to this. She frequently shares over-the-top news stories with the family. Today, she may share a story about how the remains of Atlantis were discovered near Brazil; tomorrow, she may share a story about the president of Mexico’s ritualistic killing of innocent children; pretty by-the-book conspiratorial stuff. Some of these stories lead her to panic. She regularly calls my mom, warning her about the secret communist groups that are always one step closer to taking over the world or things of that sort. When her panic attacks get serious enough, my parents have me talk to her and calm her down. They know I watch the news a lot and that I’m not above believing a good conspiracy theory. My grandmother trusts me somewhat, so she usually believes me when I tell her that the story she read about 5G towers being used to control our minds isn't true.
However, a few weeks ago, my parents called me to tell me my grandmother was being crazier than usual. The reason she was panicking this time is that a priest in her church had mentioned during his homily that Democrat politicians were openly talking about the possibility of post-birth abortions, otherwise known as the murder of a fully born human baby. My parents, being consumers of regular old mainstream media, asked me to clarify to my grandmother that what the priest had told her was just another conspiracy theory and that she had nothing to worry about. I can’t blame them. After all, to a person that’s not spending most of their day ensconced in right-wing media, the idea that a politician would openly talk about those things sounds absolutely bonkers to them.
To their surprise and dismay, I took my grandmother’s side of the debate and completely justified her panic. I can remember my parents' faces as I showed them the now infamous video of former governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, talking about “keeping the infant comfortable”, “resuscitated if that is what the mother and the family desire” and then “having a discussion ensue between the physician and the mother”. Direct, cold, bloody murder. They just couldn't believe it. At first, they said it was probably a deep fake, but I was eventually able to convince them otherwise. Their outlook on American politics seems to have changed. The conspiracy had become a reality.
The reason I’m narrating this seemingly inconsequential event is to show that the consequences of losing the so-called “culture war” are not things that will be felt many years from now. The consequences are being dealt with today, and have been dealing with them for many decades. Since the passing of Roe v. Wade, according to the Guttmacher Institute, around sixty-five million children have been murdered by abortions. The number bears repeating. Sixty-Five million. That’s around 20% of the current U.S. population. Every day, around two thousand five hundred abortions take place in the U.S.
The numbers are hard to grasp. If you took between three and four average American high schools and brutally murdered every student in them, that would be comparable to the number of abortions there are in a day. This massacre is happening today. To these, we can add the number of people who are being mutilated in the name of trangenderism, the teenagers committing suicide because of isolation and social media, and the victims of the shootings brought on by young men who have fallen victim to moral relativism and atheism. This is to say, the culture war has real victims. It's taking its toll right now.
Many people seem to not realize how desperate our situation truly is. Among these people is Curtis Yarvin, who wrote an interesting piece that was recently published on his Substack, Grey Mirror. If you haven’t read it, you should. However, the basic premise is this: Yarvin distinguishes between the common folk (hobbits, as he calls them), the elite (elves), and elites who hold the interest of the aforementioned hobbits (dark elves). The elves are suited by their very nature to participate in public life. In contrast, the hobbits “just want to grill”. They want to be left alone and are not suited for public life.
His request to the common folk comes down to this: stay out of the fight. Any victory that may be achieved by them in this war may be satisfactory in the short term, but is ultimately unstrategic in the long term, for it increases the chance of the elite winning the war in the end. Instead, he asks the common folk to leave the fight to the “dark elves'' or the infiltrated elite that hold the same view as the hobbits. Their fight is won by methods of seduction and subversion.
The only culture war that matters is the culture war between the dark elves and the high elves. This war is not fought with bombs and bullets, or even laws and judges. This war is fought with books and films and plays and poems. It is still a savage war.
His main point is one I can agree with. There will always be an elite. No matter what revolutions we participate in, they will always resurface. The answer to our current predicament is not found in the elimination of this elite, but in its transformation. The people best equipped to procure the transformation of the elite are the elite themselves. Elites with the correct points of view.
My problem with Yarvin’s piece does not come from a confusing and poorly executed metaphor between the American political landscape and Lord of The Rings characters, or the fact that he does not clearly define who counts as a dark elf and, therefore, who can legitimately change the tide in the culture war. My problem comes from its lack of urgency. Yarvin later explains that a “strategic” victory is a victory that facilitates future victories. If this is the case, then when will victories lead to a position that is “strategic” enough to establish a true cultural victory, like overturning Roe v. Wade for example? There is no limiting principle.
Allow me to add a fourth type to Yarvin’s crazy cast of characters. We'll call them –with a lot less subtlety– the demons. The demons function similarly to the dark elves. The only difference with them is that they are advocates for demonic causes. These include (but are not limited to) abortion, child castration, sodomy, transgenderism, gender ideology, acceptance of pedophiles in polite society, and post-birth abortions. These demons are also a lot more serious about their cause than the dark elves. They make use of social and political tools that the dark elves would consider too harsh to make sure the regular elves are complying with their agenda. These tools have come to be known as “cancel culture”.
The demons, through the manipulation of the elves, are close to winning the war. Sixty-five million dead children prove it. The ability of some of them to talk about post-birth abortions (like our friend Ralph Northam) out in the open, only shows how close they have come to the complete defeat of any hobbit resistance. But, why do the demons hate the hobbits so much? Because they stand in the way of their imposition of a postmodernist liberal world order. The elves are not bad in themselves. Like Yarvin says, “They want to live beautiful lives”, but if the demons manage to convince them (and they have) that the hobbits pose a threat to their beautiful way of life, this will guarantee a war between them, which the hobbits are desperately losing.
Dark elves seem to have done nothing to avert our present situation. They have, in theory, always been working undercover and in the background to influence the dark elves’ way of thinking. In light of the fact that the demons have reached an unprecedented level of cultural and legal control, we can assume that the dark elves’ methods are not working. ¿How can Yarvin ask us to trust them when all they have achieved until now is loss and humiliation? Frankly, the dark elves he is talking about seem to be just as stupid, ineffective, and unstrategic as the hobbits he seems to view with disdain.
The barbarians are not at the gate, they’re very much on the inside. The city is under siege. Even if we can appreciate that poems, films, and books should, in regular times, be the primary way that balance is held in the everlasting process of the culture war, we must recognize that these are not regular times. If we were to accept that this “wait for the dark elves to fix our current situation” strategy could work, it could take decades or centuries. We don’t have the luxury of time for that. Lives depend on it.
When on the verge of complete defeat, fighting with a relentless opponent, the only strategy that makes any sense is not to die. Use whatever means necessary to stay alive and, once some tenuous control is achieved on your part, you may start to think more strategically and long-term. Right now, desperate measures are called for, even if they involve the common folk intruding on the job of the elite. We live in desperate times, and people who don’t do something about it are either, like my parents, ignorant of how truly wretched our situation is, or really, they just don't care that much.