Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls, For thus, friends absent speak.
John Donne, To Sir Henry Wotton
More of you should join the fray. You should write. We have an opportunity to take up the mantle of a great culture of letters which has fallen away.
Effective men can think and speak and write. Each compliments the other. Too many excellent men in our sphere inhabit a purely passive role, consuming without producing. Without actively engaging, your understanding - in all its depth and breadth - is never tested and validated.
In your day-to-day lives, many of you inhabit social milieus in which you cannot regularly discuss your true beliefs. Writing may thus be the only active mechanism available to you.
By pinning your thoughts down, you can manipulate them with far greater precision and flexibility. Interrogate them. Deconstruct them. Expand them. Refine them. Doing this well will have the secondary benefit of forcing you to read long-form as well - an undertaking which it is too easy to neglect.
It is not merely that writing ‘helps’ thinking - it is the case that thinking above a certain level of complexity and scale is not possible without writing.
To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word. Such transformations can be uplifting. Writing heightens consciousness. Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life. To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.
Technologies are artificial, but—paradox again—artificiality is natural to human beings. Technology, properly interiorized, does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it. The modern orchestra, for example, is the result of high technology.
— Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy
Why write on Substack specifically?
For spiritual dissidents, this platform provides a means of allowing you to etch the truth about yourself onto history, providing a primary source about your beliefs and values which cannot be obscured by your adversaries. What better time to do this than after the most significant repudiation of the mainstream media, in which a void of meaningful words is begging to be filled?
We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.
— Johann Goethe, Elective Affinities
Letters have a permanence which is fitting for those who think at the scale of civilizational history. Some thoughts, some ideas, some beliefs - some people - deserve the honor of being placed in the consciousness of others and of being thus immortalized.
The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers…
— Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy
One often hears boasts that anons are blowing credentialed normies out of the water with their knowledge and understanding of complex topics. We pride ourselves on knowing more than credentialed people - but this assertion of superiority has to be proven, and this will be our proving ground; our test bed for ideas and intellectual accountability.
By inhabiting a social platform and building communities of ideas, you will find strength, mutual support, and consolation in setback. Long-form allows you to expose your depths, and this is necessary as a foundation for trust. It is easy for infiltrators to parrot radical beliefs in short-form, but less so in long-form, which demands an originality and depth that is not easy for tourists to match.
Trust is necessary to transcend digital media and to enter into the physical - to use these networks as a springboard to coalesce in real life and to build meaningful things and depend on one another.
is right when he says that this platform has the potential to serve as a résumé for recruitment into important ventures. A rich collection of essays is proof of real discipline and intelligence.
This is only to say that the selection of personnel - particularly young people on the right - as we go through this major generational and ideological transition, is of critical importance. Personnel selection is maybe *the most* important thing for us to be thinking about. And the people in charge of personnel selection need to be taking this very seriously.
So how to avoid [toxic pretenders] in favor of those who work well with others and can hold their own in terms of talent and industry, people who are committed to thoroughgoing rightist politics while possessing the requisite intellect and character? Well, as it happens, there is an ongoing social laboratory of just such a filtering mechanism. It’s called Substack. Left wholly to their own devices, self-publishing and building their own networks, Substack writers who’ve successfully established themselves have done so solely through building exactly the sort of reputations that Lomez notes.
But there are broader reasons to revive the culture of letters. An open exchange of words allows space for the fostering of unlikely friendships which might otherwise be suppressed.
Take, for example, the humanizing of the supposed enemy conveyed by this letter A. D. Chater sent home from the front lines of the First World War:
I think I have seen today one of the most extraordinary sights that anyone has ever seen. About 10 o’clock this morning I was peeping over the parapet when I saw a German, waving his arms, and presently two of them got out of their trench and came towards ours.
We were just going to fire on them when we saw they had no rifles, so one of our men went to meet them and in about two minutes the ground between the two lines of trenches was swarming with men and officers of both sides, shaking hands and wishing each other a happy Christmas.
This continued for about half an hour when most of the men were ordered back to the trenches. For the rest of the day nobody has fired a shot and the men have been wandering about at will on the top of the parapet and carrying straw and firewood about in the open – we have also had joint burial parties with a service for some dead, some German and some ours, who were lying out between the lines.
— Second Lt Alfred Dougan Chater, Letter to his mother (1914)
The seriousness, weight, and sense of gravity which letters engender allows us to bring out the best in ourselves in the pursuit of higher ideals. In lives filled with fleeting moments, it is good to be forced to reckon with and raise ourselves to the permanence of the moment which the written word creates.
One such illustration is provided by the letter Jackie Kennedy sent Chairman Khrushchev upon the death of her husband:
So now, in one of the last nights I will spend in the White House, in one of the last letters I will write on this paper at the White House, I would like to write you my message.
I send it only because I know how much my husband cared about peace, and how the relation between you and him was central to this care in his mind. He used to quote your words in some of his speeches - ”In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.”
You and he were adversaries, but you were allied in a determination that the world should not be blown up. You respected each other and could deal with each other. I know that President Johnson will make every effort to establish the same relationship with you.
The danger which troubled my husband was that war might be started not so much by the big men as by the little ones.
While big men know the needs for self-control and restraint—little men are sometimes moved more by fear and pride. If only in the future the big men can continue to make the little ones sit down and talk, before they start to fight.
I know that President Johnson will continue the policy in which my husband so deeply believed—a policy of control and restraint—and he will need your help.
I send this letter because I know so deeply of the importance of the relationship which existed between you and my husband, and also because of your kindness, and that of Mrs. Khrushcheva in Vienna.
I read that she had tears in her eyes when she left the American Embassy in Moscow, after signing the book of mourning. Please thank her for that.
— Jacqueline Kennedy, Letter to Chairman Khrushchev (1963)
Writing allows us the space to communicate that which would otherwise go unsaid. How many of us harbor unexpressed sentiments to those we love most, to our family and our friends? Art is an antidote to loneliness - it bridges the terrible distance between us.
Many of you will know the final letter that Major Sullivan Ballou sent his wife before his death at First Battle of Bull Run.
Sarah my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battle field.
The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them for so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our sons grown up to honorable manhood, around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me — perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar, that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name.
— Sullivan Ballou, Letter to his wife Sarah (1861)
Few words move me like the ones contained in this letter.
You may be concerned that there will be no audience for your work. Who cares? The greatest men of history - kings and emperors and philosophers - wrote private correspondence for audiences of one. If you only find one other to commune with, that’s powerful.
For those of you who do wish to establish an audience, I will follow this essay with a premium post on how to succeed as an anonymous radical on this platform.
“It is not merely that writing ‘helps’ thinking - it is the case that thinking above a certain level of complexity and scale is not possible without writing.”
That is why I write. Writing forces me to see my thoughts in print, to examine them, to organize them, and to be critical of them. It is the best therapy known to man.
“It is not merely that writing ‘helps’ thinking - it is the case that thinking above a certain level of complexity and scale is not possible without writing.”
That is why I write. Writing forces me to see my thoughts in print, to examine them, to organize them, and to be critical of them. It is the best therapy known to man.
Thank you for a wonderful essay.
Writing is magic.
What you are really asking us to do is to perform magic, to collectively ensorcell the world.
Not a bad plan. I usually don't bother; few, if any, bother to read what I post. But you make an excellent point this is more for me than for others.
Besides, my wife has nagged me for years to write what I think. She seems to believe whatever butter is churning between my ears has some value.
Maybe she's been right.
Thank you for this essay. I hope you will present more along this line.