Now that there are more than four thousand of us, this project will begin moving from being just a blog to being a community.
As a first step, I have opened a Becoming Noble Chat on Substack, which allows you to communicate peer-to-peer, unrestricted by the comment section of a particular post. It functions as an open space for conversation and coordination.
Please start any discussions that you believe would be interesting to other Becoming Noble readers, or hang out and lurk. We have some exceptional people in our community, and I know you will generate threads worth reading and ask questions worth asking. I will also drop things that I find interesting: art, quotations, music, and so forth.
I also wish to develop more personal relationships with many of you, and to provide more value to those of you who choose a (hugely appreciated) paid subscription to Becoming Noble. To this end, I have turned on DMs for paid supporters who wish to ask me direct questions or suggest future posts.
I will also be dropping private ‘mini-posts’ in the Chat on a variety of subjects. My cultural commentaries have received some of the strongest receptions of any of my posts (The Philosophy of Dune is nearing three hundred likes, which is incredible - thank you) but don’t really fit into the main theme of the blog, which is primarily about personal, spiritual, and community development in the face of civilizational decline.
The Chat affords me the option of continuing to write these without disrupting the wider blog. I have started with a review of the American epic 'Lonesome Dove' - the greatest Western I have yet read. Please check it out.
The sense of space in early America is as much a character as the characters themselves, imposing itself on the frontiersmen who go forth to meet it.
The full post next week should be a good one. It is on the subject that I am most frequently asked about: ‘I want to believe in God but I can’t. What should I do?’. I have a lot to say about this, much of it quite personal. I hope you will take something from it.
I look forward to talking with you all.
Sic transit imperium,
Johann
I look forward to seeing how this develops, I'm not yet a subscriber but have a few on the go and will replace some soon. One thing I have noticed is that I have recently joined a number of private spaces through Substack subscriptions which has resulted in me now having lots of new apps on my phone (Discord, Slack, Telegram) but I have found none of them conducive to discussion due to their format; in addition, dependent on the demographic of the participants, they seem to suffer from hyperactive posters dropping continuous links or memes that break up the discussion. I guess what I'm saying is that I find old fashioned forums with threads better for generating meaningful discussion. Sorry, I appreciate I should really post this in my subscribed spaces and will do so shortly!
If I can get a promise from you that you will post a comprehensive "Becoming Noble's essential books-list" in the near future, I promise I will subscribe for one year 😉