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|---|---|
| Enjoy the Decline by Aaron Clary. | |
| You know, I was trying to figure out the best way to start this book review, and I figured that I should tell you about the man behind the book first. | |
| So, with that in mind, I have my Weasel Whiskey. | |
| And on top of that, some lovely clove cigars that he forgot over here. | |
| Aaron Clary. | |
| Ah, these things are nice when you haven't had one for a while. | |
| Aaron Clary is Tokebel's American. | |
| One moment he's saying he's a complete selfish free market capitalist, and the next moment he's shouting to the skies how we're doing God's work. | |
| He enjoys high art while being as casual and friendly as a day laborer. | |
| The man's an absolute genius who I feel privileged to call a friend and has been putting out the most brilliant economic work I've seen into the alt-right manosphere for years now. | |
| And Enjoy the Decline, named after his catchphrase, is his best book to date. | |
| So Enjoy the Decline and Clove Cigarettes. | |
| We are living during a dark time. | |
| And this is a dark subject matter. | |
| And despite his entertainment, like he is such a good writer, okay? | |
| He has terrible grammar, but he's an amazing, amazing writer. | |
| And he is so lighthearted about the whole thing. | |
| But he doesn't shy away from the darkness. | |
| The very first chapter, the introduction, starts out with a story from war-torn Germany. | |
| Friends and neighbors having one last party, one last time to drink it up and roll in the hay before committing mass suicide. | |
| This isn't the first time our species has been through a very dark time. | |
| And God willing, it won't be the last. | |
| Remember, our species survived the ice age. | |
| Our population was reduced to 10,000 human beings. | |
| And we survived that. | |
| But it doesn't change the fact that we are living in dark times. | |
| It's one thing to be pessimistic and obsess over the negative. | |
| It's just as bad, though, to live in denial and pretend that we're not living in this era of history, to not confront and deal with the problems that we encounter. | |
| And that's why he wrote this book. | |
| I hear so many questions. | |
| If we are in the decline, if things are this bad, what the hell are we supposed to do with ourselves? | |
| And that's precisely why he wrote it. | |
| But he starts off justifying the claim that we're in the decline, that dark times do lie ahead of us. | |
| And certainly he mentions culture. | |
| He mentioned if you can't see that culture is declining, I don't know what to say to you. | |
| It's clearly in decline, but you can't measure it. | |
| You can't put it in numbers. | |
| And Aaron is an economist and a damned, damned good one. | |
| He knows how to read numbers. | |
| He knows how to find them. | |
| He can guess at the number before he goes and researches it. | |
| He's a very honest statistician, and he's very, very good at it. | |
| So he starts off by justifying his claim about the decline. | |
| If you read his blog as regularly as I do, none of this will be new to you. | |
| This is almost entirely stuff that he's researched before, that he's posted about before. | |
| But he puts it together all in a single chapter, interrelates it, explains it, takes these esoteric numbers and tells you what they mean for you on the ground. | |
| And it's a dire picture, my brothers. | |
| There's no bones about this. | |
| We are in a very bad situation. | |
| And so the book is about how to live through it. | |
| How to enjoy the decline. | |
| Because we're all in this world. | |
| This is the era of history we find ourselves in. | |
| Either we become great during it, either we enjoy ourselves, or we try and double down. | |
| We try and follow the myths of past generations, of living in denial, of not accepting reality. | |
| In the fourth turning, the authors talk about how to somebody living in the 1920s, the 1950s would have seemed very stifling until they experienced 10 years of Great Depression, until they experienced another further decade of war. | |
| At that point, boring old suburbia starts to look interesting about how we all live in our own historical era, how we all have to confront the problems of our time. | |
| And living during the decline, living in the years coming up to the decline, we need to find sane psychological coping strategies. | |
| He goes into all of this, talking about what matters in life. | |
| Psychologically, what really matters. | |
| There's hints of the four-hour work week, where in that book, the author says that don't try and be a millionaire, try and live like a millionaire. | |
| And it's a great book, despite a few flaws, the four-hour work week. | |
| But during the decline, we don't quite have that. | |
| Aaron's a man that makes no bones about it. | |
| The odds of working a career, busting your hump, of earning a position with the company, and then finally being able to afford the sports car, those odds are not very good for any of us. | |
| You'd be better off finding a stable, reliable form of self-employment that you'll never own the sports car, but as Aaron did recently, you can rent the sports car for a week and have just as much fun in the damn thing without worrying about expensive oil filters or car repairs. | |
| The whole book is a life hack for enjoying the decline, for making the most of it, for valuing what matters, your friends, your family, your loved ones. | |
| There's an excellent portion in it on what matters in romantic relationships and what, at the very basic level, you should be doing to find somebody to sleep next to you and hug you and share meals with. | |
| This book is a hack on just about everything that would matter to a millennial nowadays. | |
| How to do investment, how to find a sane career. | |
| It doesn't go as in-depth about the university bubble as his last book. | |
| Quite frankly, the mainstream media has caught on to that. | |
| So he doesn't really need to say anything there. | |
| But it does talk about the things that matter. | |
| Your employment, your investment, your friends, your family, all of these things. | |
| How to make the most of them. | |
| And even if we're in a decline, maybe you don't get the same opulent lifestyle as a baby boomer got to have, but you can actually have a better life than them. | |
| And an interesting part of this whole book, from my perspective, this is something I noticed talking with Aaron, but it really just comes through in the book, is that there's a very fundamental debate going on. | |
| There's a blog, The Observer Watches, and I ran into him because he quoted one of my videos. | |
| The link below is the one that quotes the video. | |
| And he's pointing out that between the two sides, the Manosphere and the MRAs, there's this very major debate that the MRA wants to work within the system to try and get some anti-misandric legal things in place. | |
| Whereas us in the Manosphere would point out that the MRAs are falling prey to cultural Marxism, that they're becoming the replacement group of useful idiots for the feminists. | |
| That fundamentally these MRA laws that get passed are just going to serve the state. | |
| Rather than guaranteeing father custody of children, as was the norm 150 years ago, instead we're going to have professional bureaucrats monitoring who gets to keep the children and intervening constantly in your private family affairs to make sure that you're a good parent. | |
| So this debate, work within the system or give up on the system. | |
| And on the alt-right, we say that the system is so compromised by this point that there is no solution within the system. | |
| Any solution within the system only strengthens the system and makes things worse. | |
| Now, I don't know if Aaron has a stance on this, but there are some very major implications from his book. | |
| So, here I am arguing that the system needs to collapse before we can rebuild it. | |
| We're the junkie that needs to hit rock bottom. | |
| And in one of his chapters, Aaron talks about how if everybody followed his advice, the system would collapse. | |
| One of the statistics he mentions is that essentially, every person supporting themselves with an income has to support a second person with welfare. | |
| It's what, 58 to 42. | |
| So, if you earn an income and you pay taxes, you're supporting one person for yourself just by virtue of the fact that you're paying taxes. | |
| That the American voter has made their preference known, that they prefer Barack Obama, they prefer socialism to freedom and independence and free market capitalism. | |
| The system's compromised, and if you try and work within the system, if you try and be part of the system, you are going to be one of the ones feeding into the whole damn thing, making it worse, being exploited for your labor. | |
| You spend 30 years training yourself to get an education, then you work for another 30 years to spend the next 20 years in retirement. | |
| This is not sustainable. | |
| And if you're one of the people working for all of that, you, sir, are a chump. | |
| See, if you work and pay taxes and bust your hump and climb the corporate ladder, you are going to be absolutely miserable, as opposed to finding that minimalist lifestyle, to focusing on what really matters. | |
| A McMansion doesn't matter. | |
| A brand new sports car is it really that different from a 20-year-old sports car? | |
| I shall tell you that my 20-year-old sports car is a hell of a lot sexier than the stuff on the road today. | |
| If you live this minimalist lifestyle, you're actually accelerating the decline. | |
| You're accelerating the collapse because you are not paying net taxes. | |
| You, if you're smart. | |
| And by the way, he has an Ayn Rand quote backing this up and justifying it. | |
| A smart man in a socialist system, no matter how noble their spirit, doesn't break their spine to support the socialist system. | |
| If they insist on handing out government cheese, take some, eat it, still cheat. | |
| So you are accelerating the decline, but us reactionaries happen to be of the opinion that we need to hit rock bottom the sooner the better. | |
| And I know Aaron would say this much, that if we hadn't bailed out the corrupt bankers, if we hadn't bailed out the failed auto companies, if we let them declare bankruptcy, sell off what assets they have to somebody more competent to manage it. | |
| if we'd had a brief two-year depression instead of these eight years of recession, that we'd be a hell of a lot better off right now. | |
| But the American voter has made their preference known. | |
| They want socialism, they want equality, they want all of us down at the same level. | |
| As I said, these are dark times, my brothers. | |
| On the plus side, it is darkest right before the dawn. | |
| But we still have to live through the next few hours. | |
| If you're going to live, you might as well live in style. | |
| And if you want the advice of an extremely intelligent economist who has analyzed, what is he, an investment? | |
| He basically looks at people's portfolios and sees what they can realistically do with their money. | |
| I forget if that's an analyst or what that is. | |
| But he knows personal finances. | |
| He knows global finances. | |
| He knows macroeconomics. | |
| And this book is absolutely chock full of advice on how to hack the system and live an awesome life despite how bad everything's going. | |
| And if you follow this advice, that minority of you, maybe not the minority of my viewers, but that minority of millennials that will actually listen to somebody that knows what they're talking about, you'll have a better life than the baby boomers did, born into a generation of opulence. | |
| Enjoy the decline. | |
| Available in print and on Kindle. | |
| Yes, it's available on Kindle. | |
| Everybody always asks him if his books are on Kindle. | |
| Link to both below. | |
| And you're supporting a very awesome and good man that your country should be proud of. |