Apocalypse Whatever The making of a racist, sexist religion of nihilism on Sup Forums

reallifemag.com/apocalypse-whatever/

Among the white nationalists on Sup Forums’s “politically incorrect,” or Sup Forums board and on “alt-right” Twitter — or anywhere you might run into a picture of Pepe the Frog — there is a cryptic but popular saying: “Praise Kek.” Kek is how World of Warcraft translates “lol” when it’s revealed to members of opposing alliances, but it is also, conveniently, a name for a serpent-headed Egyptian chaos god.

Among shitposters, these two identities have been conflated to make Kek a kind of ironicized divinity invoked to account for “meme magic” — when something espoused and affirmed in the digital realm also becomes true beyond it. Memes about Hillary Clinton being sick, for example, “came true” when she collapsed of pneumonia this past September 11. And Fidel Castro’s death — occurring on the capitalist holiday of Black Friday — has been making the Twitter rounds with the same “praise Kek” tag.

Most of the people posting about Kek don’t actually believe that Pepe the Frog is an avatar of an ancient Egyptian chaos god, or that the numerology of Sup Forums “gets” — when posts are assigned a fortuitous ID number — somehow predicted Donald Trump’s presidential victory. (Theodor K. Ferrol goes into more detail about that claim here.) It’s a joke, of course — but also not a joke. As one self-identified active member of the alt-right told me, “I don’t believe in God. But I say ‘Praise Kek’ more than I’ve ever said anything about God.”

If I’ve learned anything as a historian of religion, it’s that belief is flexible. The actual propositional content of doctrines has little to do with how religion works socially. Far more than the content of faith as such, what makes religion religion are the images and rhetoric loaded with atavistic and esoteric archetypes (chaos; order; Kek; frogs; a “God Emperor,” to use a common Sup Forums appellation for Donald Trump) that tend to propagate virally, independent of a centralized source, because they tie into the cultural zeitgeist or answer some cultural need. They allow for a collective affirmation of identity that puts self-creation in dialogue with metaphysical questions about the universe. Religion often functions in this sense as a kind of dictionary: a compendium of symbols and their meaning that also allows for shared communal discourse: a “language” of stories we tell one another about our selves and our world.

From this perspective, it doesn’t matter whether Kek is “really” a chaos god. Sociologically speaking, he might as well be. Likewise, meme magic, to the extent that that it serves as a record of cultural engagement, is real too. So too the “reality” of ubiquitous fake news sites, which, while being wildly inaccurate propositionally, nevertheless govern events — just look at the controversy over “Pizzagate” — to an extent that renders them functionally significant: narratives, no less than an account of the Fall or salvation, that govern who we are.

Given the ideological anarchy inherent in shitposting, it tends to defy analysis. Shitposters, who are bound by nothing, set a rhetorical trap for their enemies, who tend to be bound by having an actual point. Attempts to analyze what shitposters are doing, or what their posts really mean, does nothing to defuse them; instead it reinforces their project by amplifying their signal. Shitposting can’t be refuted; it can only be repeated.

In their apparent indifference to content and their commitment to aestheticized irony, shitposters resemble the disengaged ironists the 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard discussed in texts like The Concept of Irony and Either/Or. According to Kierkegaard, the ironist “poetically composes himself and his environment with the greatest possible poetic license” and lives “in this totally hypothetical and subjunctive way.” Every act is an act of self-creation: Stories that are told are not descriptive of “true” facts out there but rather ways in which the ironist can prove his power, his philosophical strength, his verbal dexterity. He says things just to be the sort of person who says them. The ironist maintains his power by taking no position, starting every argument anew. “There is something seductive about every beginning, because the subject is again free, and it is this pleasure the ironist longs for,” Kierkegaard writes in The Concept of Irony. “In such moments, actuality loses its validity for him; he is free, above it.” For that freedom, the ironist is willing to say anything, make any argument, undeterred by any fear of being called to account. That is, the ironist is the proto-troll.

Kierkegaard’s ironist came of age in the an era of increasing technological production, urbanization, secularization, and — ultimately — alienation. Shitposters have come of age in an era no less turbulent. They too live in a time of economic uncertainty and spiritual apathy in which foundational myths about the self and its role in the cosmos seem to have been rendered obsolete. To fill the void, the ironist and the shitposter both create a self-image characterized by the freedom to say and do anything, beholden to nothing and to nobody — a freedom that finds expression through transgression, saying things (racist, sexist, etc.) “nobody else” will say — except, of course, for the shitposters. This is how the stories the “alt-right” tells about itself take on a religious quality. They are predicated on a desire for a meaningful narrative of the world that allows for participation.
Here, too, the narrative of individuality and freedom is illusory. The “anarchy” of the alt-right depends on that dictionary of symbols — and thus a shared discourse. The shitposter can say whatever he wants, but the second he says “praise Kek,” he’s tempering his individuality with solidarity. He’s not a Lone Ranger but rather part of a group whose stated fascination with cowboy individualism is at odds with the intense collectivism of internet culture — a culture where likes, reposts, up-votes, hearts, and other expressions of communal acceptance take on outsize importance. There is something intensely collectivist about even the most outrageously social-contract-breaking denizens of the internet. Just look at the way Reddit closed ranks around its ur-troll violentacrez.

The alt-righter defines himself, as he does his god of chaos, against the limitations of civilization, the restrictions placed upon him by the social contract. Yet he is “civilized,” to the extent that his discourse is dialogue. Every time a meme is replicated or a symbol is reused, it only strengthens the socially determined bond of meaning. The constructed narrative of uniqueness and freedom that an alt-righter adopts in fact depends on the collective meanings ascribed by his group to his actions. To put it simply: Shitposting only matters insofar as it lets you feel in on the joke, and being in on the joke demands an in-group agreement of what the joke actually is. No one shitposts alone. But shitposting nonetheless imbues a powerful sense of individual significance.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in his account of religion, famously defines it as a

system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

In other words, religion isn’t simply or simplistically an order of existence (which is to say, a metaphysical grand narrative), nor is it just the “collective effervescence” or affirmation of group identity as an older sociologist of religion like Emile Durkheim might have it. Rather it’s the space in between: the symbols (and memes) that a group creates and reinforces through communal discourse, and the individual conception of self (one’s “story,” even) that comes from the role the self plays with respect to these those symbols. If Pepe is a god, it’s not just because the alt-right has a need for religion (although, insofar as any contemporary group cries out for a meaningful narrative of self, I would argue that they do). It’s also because gods are made of memes.

In other words, religion isn’t simply or simplistically an order of existence (which is to say, a metaphysical grand narrative), nor is it just the “collective effervescence” or affirmation of group identity as an older sociologist of religion like Emile Durkheim might have it. Rather it’s the space in between: the symbols (and memes) that a group creates and reinforces through communal discourse, and the individual conception of self (one’s “story,” even) that comes from the role the self plays with respect to these those symbols. If Pepe is a god, it’s not just because the alt-right has a need for religion (although, insofar as any contemporary group cries out for a meaningful narrative of self, I would argue that they do). It’s also because gods are made of memes.

Doing things for the lulz — spreading joke-memes, reinforcing ideas and symbols within a community, promulgating them more widely — is, by Geertz’s definition, a supremely religious act.

That is not to say that white supremacy and white nationalism are not major parts of the alt-right movement; they are, and it absolutely is. To do something for the lulz and care nothing for the embodied consequences is the product and promulgation of a malignant structural racism. Only someone who has always had enough privilege to never have to reckon with the consequences of one’s words could participate in such a movement and keep up with the profound disengagement it demands. Kierkegaard’s ironist, in other words, has to be a straight white man.

But the average Sup Forums alt-righter does not see himself as a “real” racist, nor is racism necessarily what he would regard as his primary motivating factor. His racism is secondary to his understanding of himself as free, an Alamo-style resister (including against outside and/or nonwhite cultural forces), a masculine agent not subject to such feminized niceties as politeness and compassion. The way he sees it, he’s throwing rocks through the Overton window — regardless of what else gets smashed in the process.

The alt-righter doesn’t need a nation to be a white nationalist. When they praise Kek or joke about participation in the “meme wars of 2016,” they are taking part in a collective narrative that is no less powerful than, say, the primal patriotism of populist celebrity-statesman Gabriele D’Annunzio’s irredentist march to take the city of Fiume from Allied forces in 1919, or the no less heady Wagnerian nationalism of the German völkische Bewegung that helped spawn the Nazis. The alt-righter’s “nation” is a hero-narrative about how the freedom of the individual (masculine) self can be secured, in part by adopting the toxic rhetoric of overt white supremacy.

I mean, its not a bad article.

tl;dr desu

Yes it is.

>Obscure reference only tangentially related to my point: look how smart I am.

We need to be recognised as a religion so we can have rights like $cientolology and can't be shut down or insulted. I'll manage the tax free gibs.

>But the average Sup Forums alt-righter does not see himself as a “real” racist

>Tara Isabella Burton

She must be a frequent lurker in here.

>Among the white nationalists on Sup Forums

dropped
>here is my world view
>let me construct some hypothesis around it

...

Some asshole got paid to shit this out.

>Kierkegaard’s ironist, in other words, has to be a straight white man.

>they haven't even realized Sup Forums is full of queers yet

>fake news
Wew
>Given the ideological anarchy inherent in shitposting, it tends to defy analysis. Shitposters, who are bound by nothing, set a rhetorical trap for their enemies, who tend to be bound by having an actual point.
Wew. Stopped reading there.

Was actually listening to what he was saying, but this guy obviously has no idea what he is talking about if he uses liberal memes to ad hominem information outlets that threaten his worldview and he actually thinks that liberals have any decent ideas that haven't been torn apart in the most logical manner: using facts and empirical evidence with thesis citations

Are there any British people who can tell me what that article is trying to say?

>To promulgate meme magic is to claim for oneself a higher code, a deeper freedom that derives from seeing the world as constructed, and constructable, rather than given.
I'm a subject of the Crown so I'm close enough, and this is an easy one besides: the article is saying we are literally Hitler and also playing armchair psychiatrist about why.

Academics, who thrive and succeed on their reputations can't comprehend an anonymous environment where a reputation doesn't matter and can't help you.

It's times like this that I'm glad I have a mongoloid type brain and not a faggoty euroweenie brain. Who, what, when, why, where, and how? That's what an asiatic wants to know.

This sort of mental masturbation may allow 'white' people to be slightly more creative, but it also allows them to put their heads firmly up their asses and live in a (stinky) fantasy world completely disconnected from reality.

Fuck Kek back into darkness, from darkness back into nothingness, as that nothingness rapes you in the ass while you quote Kierkegaard, just before all reality vanishes.

>>Kierkegaard’s ironist, in other words, has to be a straight white man.

But Sup Forums is full of faggots and shitskins.

And fucking leafs.

We do not believe in the holiest of holy frogs? What fucking heathens. Mark my post, for I predict, Kek willing, that in 1200yrs, our faith in the one true lord will be as powerful and widespread as Christianity is today.

It is then when our memes shall be most powerful and augment and redefine the laws of nature.

The first two thirds are not bad, after that is pure conjecture, I do not see myself explained by that.

>a masculine agent not subject to such feminized niceties as politeness and compassion

kek, women's politeness and compassion is so shallow and hollow, what a cunt

>slightly more creative
>slightly

You realize even paper and gunpowder were things that had to be brought in to your "culture" by their white inventors?

We need to shut down liberal education. What a bunch of hyperreality detached verbal nonsense.
We need to reopen liberal arts education by making sure they have to learn Greek and Latin and read the masters from Greek to the elightenment. If they arn't smart enough to do that that don't deserve a liberal arts degree. I mean I read fight club in my humanities class, while a great book, what the fuck is that? You'd have to be dead to fail a modern degree

>she collapsed of """pneumonia"""

"" ""

sounds to me like a quasi smart fag trying to analyze us. He lost when he started mentioning Kieregaard.

>But the average Sup Forums alt-righter does not see himself as a “real” racist

This reminds me of those faggots who keep trying to pass off Sup Forums as a satire.

basically

>writing non-secure articles on shitty clickbait websites about esoteric kekism for (You)s and views
No

Sage

These days I dont even know what a racist is

Sage

bump while reading

>overt white supremacy

Why can people not grasp that race realism isn't fucking supremacy. Jesus christ these people suck at comprehension.

tldr; we're a bunch of deranged Davy Crocketts, wielding the Bowie knife of our racism against the world.

>As one self-identified active member of the alt-right told me,

actually a pretty interesting read.

That's not exactly what it said.

didnt read lol

GAS THE KIKES

RACE WAR NOW

Kek please smite this merchant

Believing in something so Hard, it works.
Isnt that W40k Shit ?
Will Trump finally be THE GOD EMPERAH ?

This was good except for the assumption that shitposters must naturally be straight and white. There are plenty of brown faggots here. I think male privilege is enough.

>tfw most Sup Forums users are too stupid to understand this article, yet alone read it

It was very interesting and I have suspected the Kek/meme magic thing has been more than meets the eye for a while now

bump. it is actually interesting. If anything I learned about Kierigaard

Kek is a silly fucking joke, and anyone who unironically believes this shit is an even newer than me.

There's plenty of people on Sup Forums who read and understood the article.

It's legitimately wrong. And I doubt you even know why, because you're a fucking leaf and you're the one who's probably too stupid to get it, you just want to seem smart online to a bunch of anonymous basket weavers.

Get blowed, leaflet.

>pol is satire

Wait til they see the memes

Why do leafposts have such a similar character always?

>white nationalists
I'm not white and I praise Kek and browse Sup Forums
why do liberals always classify everything they don't like under one label, yet become such hypocrites when the same is done to them or groups like muslims?

>smug anime image

Literal below 80IQ confirmed

>Oh, I see she made reference to someone that sounds smart!
>Used a lot of big words!
>Better say it's interesting/well written/good so I don't seem like a dummy, I totally understood it!
She's making up shit as she goes along. That's what's happening here. Whether or not she spent 3 months of the editing process weaving in Kiergaard and better language does not negate the fact that she clearly doesn't understand what she's talking about.

Sup Forums isn't alt-right. That's a faggoty reddit term for ex-gamergaters. I'm just here for the memes.

>some leftie tries to draw a meme with the various pictures of brainfag guy
>tries to tie it in with some nu male media
>still fails as usual

lel, try again.

What did it say?

but he already said faggots and shitskins

I remember when Canada changed on Sup Forums. What the fuck happened? You all used to be reasonable, and even if you had a slightly liberal slant, you weren't completely pozzed.

Did Trudeau do this to you?

I like these articles. Normies read them and fear grips their hearts.

Imagine lviing in a culture which is teeming with myths about secret societies influencing the world via esoteric means: the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians etc. But you never actually get a glimpse as to how they are supposed to work.

Then, for the first time, you do, through these articles. And you see, truly and finally, that you don't stand a chance of understanding what the fuck are those people doing and why exactly are they doing it, assuming, of course, that "why" is a valid question at all. Labeling the phenomenon 'alt-right' is just a convenient device to elicit the illusion of understanding for the masses.

Can't argue with Kek

Please explain how I am being liberal?

I'm conservative as fuck.

It's pretty simple really, and intuitive. Memes propagate because they're enjoyable. The propagation of subversive memes is both an individual act (removed from the mainstream) and collective one (anonymized board culture). In this way kekposting resembles actual religionous practice. Then the feedback loop is enabled and user starts to believe in checking and keking. Belief in the power of ritual is faith.

But irl religion doesn't really come with the irony escape hatch, "I was only pretending to be retarded." The consequence of apostasy in Islam is death.

Pretty desperate desu

>joke about participation in the “meme wars of 2016,”
>joke about
AY HOL UP

i thought it was a good read too, for a cunt at least. she almost writes like a man. then she falls into the trap of all cunts and starts blathering about privilege. but her analysis of kek, meme magic, white nationalism and the overton window were spot on. and she thinks of us as a reincarnation of the volkish movment, which is how i've always viewed Sup Forums.

Cool Magic card bro.

so many articles about this place recently. we are just screwing around in here and we got people sitting down with pen and paper writing stories about nothing. unreal.

Well don't forget that the end goal is mind control. Since this place tends to be out of control, that makes it a point of interest.

And then eventually we can be targeted for censorship an to motivate more hate speech stuff, tracking people and their level of dissent and so forth.

>nihilism
WRONG!

tl;dr
repeated usage of memes gib more power, truth, and awareness to a hypothetical context. Memes rises above facts and truths and other things to create an entirely new and believable narrative. More memes are used, the more users that participate/believe in this idealized context, and thus create, essentially, a cult of people who believe in the same ideas.
tl;dr of tl;dr
meme magic is real and this article proves that Sup Forums created a new universe and popular message due to the art of the meme because of repeated usage. We created a new narrative.

>Only someone who has always had enough privilege to never have to reckon with the consequences of one’s words could participate in such a movement and keep up with the profound disengagement it demands. Kierkegaard’s ironist, in other words, has to be a straight white man.

Someone is living in a dream world, but it's not shit posters.

Yes. The omission of "red pills" is probably deliberate, it also sinks her little thesis.

It's a woman trying to comprehend and analyze the concept of a Männerbund.
Ofcourse, she fails miserably.

It's the same tired bullshit all of these articles say dressed up in a coat of "I paid 80 thousand dollars for my liberal arts degree" pseudo intellectualism.

That's why they're losing.

Was a really well-informed and thoughtful article until all of a sudden...
>Only someone who has always had enough privilege to never have to reckon with the consequences of one’s words could participate in such a movement and keep up with the profound disengagement it demands. Kierkegaard’s ironist, in other words, has to be a straight white man.

He suddenly introduces the circular 'only straight white people could ever do this' as a given, and actually insists 'it's racist because it's racist and white people are behind all racism'.

Jajajajajajajaja.

>laughs in brownish.

>He

It's the one in the middle.

It's not just demonization and virtue signalling, although she had to throw some of that in there, because she was being so fair and accurate for most of the article I started to think she was /ourgirl/.

>Kek is how World of Warcraft translates “lol” when it’s revealed to members of opposing alliances, but it is also, conveniently, a name for a serpent-headed Egyptian chaos god.
She's implying this is where the usage of Kek originates, but it originated because that's how Korean's type Lol, and it was prevalent in Starcraft and on Sup Forums before WoW existed.

>And Fidel Castro’s death — occurring on the capitalist holiday of Black Friday — has been making the Twitter rounds with the same “praise Kek” tag.
Has more to do with the 100000000 get, of course she doesn't know that because she only meandered around here for like a day.

>Some correct stuff about religion that doesn't matter because praising Kek isn't a religion

>it doesn’t matter whether Kek is “really” a chaos god. Sociologically speaking, he might as well be.
So if a joke has a real world affect, it may as well be real? If I joke to my friends about a hairbrush being my dick, it may as well be my dick? No, that doesn't follow.

>Given the ideological anarchy inherent in shitposting, it tends to defy analysis.
It does, which is why this article is retarded. They're not a bloc that can be understood in an analytical framework, so she's just talking about her feelings on the matter, which is arguably worse.

>Kieregaard reference, gib credibility plz!
People will genuinely fall for this crap "Oh, it's a good article because she made reference to a smart guy and I don't wanna seem stupid!" but she's really talking about nothing here, just using mental gymnastic to shoehorn people into a narrative, one could do it with any author.

>Doing things for the lulz — spreading joke-memes, reinforcing ideas and symbols within a community, promulgating them more widely — is, by Geertz’s definition, a supremely religious act.
If you're a dumbfuck. Dick jokes are religious as long as they spread virally? Wow, potent analysis.

Out of room, but the rest is retarded too, obviously.

Could you post the rest of your English 102 final essay? I really liked that two-paragraph excerpt.

>Kek is how World of Warcraft translates “lol” when it’s revealed to members of opposing alliances
only one way. If Horde players say "lol" it comes out as "kek", but when Alliance players do it says "bur"

An Egregore is a thought-form fueled by Human suffering.

sure cant
I also got 4u

This. The Alt-Right are really Economic Libertarians, as opposed to the Molon Labe 'Libertarians of Sup Forums.

There is no god but kek, and pepe is his prophet.

It all changed with Trudeau, we all kind of just went insane at the realization such a stupid dweeb would be our Prime Minister.

That's when the downfall noticeably occurred, it was with the creation of the DUDE WEED LMAO and other memes that we just shiposted into obscurity. That is to say, we shitpost so much we don't actually say anything serious ever, everything we write is satirical, sarcastic or ironic.

lol no
libertarians are kosher right
Alt-right are white nationalists

That image is retarded, it's basically saying that a term doesn't apply to the groups it's talking about unless those trends happened AFTER the term was coined. Laughably retarded.

Not that I don't think the rampant use of the term "alt-right" isn't stupid as well.

Academia is always 10 years behind. The analysis works better for the type of racism that was on Sup Forums back in 2007.

What exists now is a coherent, positive worldview that was built inside the space created by annihilating all other normative worldviews with irony.

Also the writer is prevented from fully understanding by the requirement that they say we're all straight white men. Probably wouldn't be allowed to publish if they didn't include that though. For all their openmindedness they can only examine opposing views in a limited manner before they must go "but of course they only believe this because they're racist white men"

>Only someone who has always had enough privilege to never have to reckon with the consequences of one’s words could participate in such a movement and keep up with the profound disengagement it demands. Kierkegaard’s ironist, in other words, has to be a straight white man.

That's pretty funny. I wonder if there was any spark of self-awareness in the writer when they put this down, that they might be doing the exact same thing they analysed as Sup Forumssters being and doing except from the side of the sjw tribe and religion.

Also notice the tone, it's typical of leftist social theory. Always as if they're "studying" a specimen rather than engaging with the ideas of human beings, when they talk about what any right-winger believes.

The leftist is automatically in a position of objectivity and we're automatically in a position of bias and ignorance, and we need to be studied in the manner of a social ailment to see how to solve it. This is the premise they start with, so of course they won't conclude other than to re-enforce their original opinion.

But this is breaking down for leftists since they don't accurately view what we are, won't let themselves do this, and this is preventing them from thinking of ways to combat us.

but im a spic and i know for a fact theres alot of minorities here too so shieeeeeeetttttttt

>What exists now is a coherent, positive worldview that was built inside the space created by annihilating all other normative worldviews with irony.

What worldview is that. Who am I senpai?

>I know people will rape my piece to pieces so there is no comment section
Any news or blog site without a comments section should and will be raped to death by reality

>Davy Crockett
>bowie knife
*Autexas screeching*

>It’s a joke, of course — but also not a joke. As one self-identified active member of the alt-right told me, “I don’t believe in God. But I say ‘Praise Kek’ more than I’ve ever said anything about God.”
fucking dropped
what a waste of an article meme magic is the real deal
>praise kek