Dear Jeffrey Tucker,
I’m very sorry that you live in a society where notions like “productivity” and “mutual service” cannot be rationally advanced on a masturbatory social media outlet like facebook.
What if Doublelift didn’t make it?
Anywhere along the way a calamity could have struck. An earthquake, an injury, a misclick during one of those many tournament games could have easily happened. The same occurs if something good failed to happen. What if he hadn’t happened to meet who he met when he did, discovered certain playstyles, or found out about how much money he could make off of guides? Failure at any point could’ve meant not going pro, to not even being able to work, period.
The backdrop is League of Legends and a video produced by Machinima and these things certainly make Doublelift who he is. But it’s not The Road To Success: Pro Gaming version, like a special section out of some business magazine slipped between two venture capitalists. No step-by-step process, strict timetable, or funding plan is specified. A successful person is telling a story in this interview, yes. But it’s just a story.
The story would’ve been the same if failures came along the way. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been told at the same time, and it probably wouldn’t have been as well-known. But it would’ve been the same.
A story of a son having to find his own way in the world.
Let me begin by stating that I believe everyone reading this article will at least share my desire for a more orderly and prosperous society than what currently exists in the West today. With that said, my criticisms and considerations are mainly directed at libertarians.
I should preface that I myself have been a libertarian since 2007 or so. I supported Ron Paul in 2008 and would have liked to have seen him get the GOP nomination at least in 2012. Besides that I have read, watched and studied libertarian ideology since then, so don’t believe a return criticism that can be leveled at me is, “he just doesn’t understand libertarianism!” In fact, it is my understanding of the subject that informs these criticisms.
Libertarians desire a society that has more personal liberty, economic freedom and less “nanny state” molestation of the individual. These are indeed admirable goals, but their ways of achieving these are mistaken. Many think this can be done through either nonviolence and the non-aggression principle, or a sort of Fabian philosophical drift.
Seeing nothing new under the sun, I’ve come to think, as The Joker put it, “that is the one rule you’ll have to break to know the truth.” To paraphrase him, the only sensible way to live in this world and achieve your goals is not through the absence of rules(ers), but by not allowing everyone to decide on the rules.
Among my supposed “fellow travelers,” one finds a recurrent theme: the 
cultural/economic system known as “Capitalism” is almost universally considered an ideal means toward achieving true human progress.
Some theorists venerate Capitalism as a culmination of human action, the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though sometimes amoral and conflicting, system for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the dopey and/or murderous “public sector” and often succeeding in competitions of wits with their peers (and little else).
With the rise of Democracy, the identification of Capitalism with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense, such as “Everything you love you owe to capitalism.” The useful collective term “individual” has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the Capitalistic realities of a Postmodern West, a Geist without a Zeit.
Mediocrity as Spirituality.
“Life is a well of delight, but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned.” – Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Western civilization is ten or so generations of rabble defiling the works of their betters in the name of “progress.” Nowhere is this cultural degradation more profoundly experienced and tastelessly displayed than the film industry.
The clip above comes from the 1999 movie “American Beauty,” in my opinion one of the more repulsive and poisoned works of our Present Age.
“…The Americans’ ‘open-mindedness’, which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their ‘individualism’. Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, “I think, therefore I am”: Americans do not think, yet they are. The American ‘mind’, puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization” – Julius Evola
I am non-aggression, therefore marijuana.
Individualism is a formless quantity, like water. The individual man can thus be seen as a single droplet.
