My best essays of 2024
A short list of my favorite works this year.
No matter what one tries to say about a year, it will always sound a bit trite. Really — try it in your head. Attempt to construct some form of summary to describe what the last 12 months were like, and it will sound shallow, empty, or at the least insufficient.
Still. 2024 was quite a good year for me.
This year, I radically transformed my body and what I can do with it. Averaging eight hours a week at the gym for nine of these past twelve months will do that, as will the absurd amounts of will and discipline required to become what I’m becoming.
I don’t talk much about that discipline. But discipline — or self-discipline, anyway — is brutal, and is the opposite of all the comfort and coddling and ease that capitalist society promises us, and you need an extreme amount of will to run against all that.
Even transformation is sold back to you in a consumable form. Take this entheogen or join that meditation course, and you’ll finally see life clearly without any of that unpleasant self-work. Buy this supplement, or purchase this training app, or just do these three simple exercises, and you’ll turn from a brain locked in a prison of flesh into an enlightened mind driving around a machine of pure muscle.
None of that gets you there. It just makes you poorer and someone else richer, and it’s all abdication of will.
I never thought of myself as disciplined nor of having a strong will. Actually, I wasn’t, and I didn’t, until I actually tried to find out. Then I found I was, and I did, and wanted more this year, and got it. And I’ll get more next year, too.
I also transformed quite a bit else about my life and the way I go about the world. Less pleading and begging and trying to “merit” good things, and more just noticing what more can be gotten and then getting it.
This meant a lot less apologizing for the rough edges of myself, and in fact making some of those edges even rougher. I used to bend and reshape myself to fit surroundings a lot more often. Likely, the increase of testosterone flooding my bloodstream on account of all the gym work has made such placating feel even more like a betrayal of my true self, and I’m quite glad of that.
More than anything this past year, I learned that only by changing the body can you truly change yourself. This is the complete opposite of the foundation of the Western magical tradition (whose real inheritance comes from Christianity, not Paganism) in which thought shapes reality. In that tradition, you need only believe in yourself, or in the one true god (which for many Christians and many magicians is really the same thing), and you’ll be rewarded. No wonder, then, that the societies they’ve built together are so narcissistic and destructive and constantly sap from us our will.
How all this work came out in my writing might already be obvious to many long-term readers. Reading back through my best essays of 2024, I noticed a decreasing desire to accommodate critics in advance, which anyway was always just a waste of words. The result, I find, was much better writing, and apparently my writing’s much more popular than ever.
There were many, many, many more new readers this year than last year, and many more of them are paid subscribers. To all of you new folks, I’m quite honored you’re here. But especially, the best of you are the ones who’ve been reading me here and in other places for years now (some of you for over a decade now). Really — you’re fucking awesome, and I hope I continue to hold your interest for even more decades to come.
Below’s a list of my favorite essays from this year. A little more than half of them are paywalled, so I’m offering another discount on yearly subscriptions until 6 January, 2025:
No True Scotsmen and Self-Hating Jews
Israel and the diagnostic demonology of identity politics. (Free)
This essay pissed off lots of people — both left and right — and I’m glad of it.
Nothing’s torn friendships apart and upended old political alliances quite like Israel’s latest slaughters of Palestinian kids. Suddenly, thinking maybe a state shouldn’t be killing children made you a Nazi apologist or a Islamo-fascist, and otherwise quite reasonable people lost their minds this way.
However, hearing many of those “reasonable people” — who themselves were extremely critical of identity politics — then employ the very same logic as the “woke” to dismiss Jewish critics of Israel (calling them “self-hating Jews”) then made me realize a deeper truth. It’s identitarianism all the way down, and that’s what produced this essay.
No matter the identity group in question, a form of the “self-hating Jew” argument recurs, with factions within each group arguing other factions have fundamentally betrayed their identity. What is really at stake in these arguments is identity itself, competing claims on what identity should mean and what those within the identity group owe to each other.
The ultimate problem here is that there is nothing that can ever fully define every person within an identity group except the label itself. The only thing all homosexual men have in common is that they are homosexual, just like the only thing that a Jewish person has in common with all other Jews is that he or she is a Jew.
That’s it. There is nothing else that necessarily or naturally follows from the initial abstraction. Anything then added to the category, any attempt to define the group further, will always produce counterexamples who must then be excluded somehow, through the No True Scotsman fallacy or the Self-Hating Jew diagnosis.
The European Nightmare
Utopian Socialism and the Wolf-Killer (Free)
The reason why idiots consistently get away with describing social justice identitarianism as “cultural Marxism” is because of a persistent and pernicious ideology called Utopian Socialism. More obnoxious still is the fact that Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto specifically to combat the absurdities of utopian socialism, yet the two radically different ideas are constantly conflated.
This very long essay examines the way Utopian Socialism plays out in many of the totalitarian dreams of the European Union and its wolf-murdering head, Ursula von der Leyen.
Long before I knew any better, I often imagined the European Union as one of the most hopeful social experiments humans have ever come up with. This was, of course, before I actually lived here and understood anything about the absurd technocratic fantasies which animate it. Eurosceptic politicians and thinkers in Europe tend to describe the EU as “socialist,” a label which quite annoyed me for several years until I understood the truth to it. That’s not to say the EU is leftist or Marxist by any means; rather, it’s utopian socialist.
Borrowing Against a Future That Cannot Come
Degrowth will happen, whether you plan for it or not. (Paid)
This essay is a second critique of Utopian Socialism, but this time in regards to its fantasies that we can innovate our way out of the problems industrial capitalism has caused.
In almost every way we can think of, the labor savings offered by capitalism produce growth for the economy but destruction for the environment. And again, they aren’t actually savings at all, just payments made from other lines of credit that someone will eventually need to pay back.
This is how “growth” and technological advance within capitalism always appears to have bettered our lives and reduced the amount of work we need to do, while actually just substituting one kind of work for another while accruing unmanageable environmental debt. This is also why the techno-socialist fantasies of a “Green New Deal” are merely just another borrowing scheme. Such visions again propose we substitute certain kinds of work for other kinds of work, paying down one credit card with yet another one while maintaining the overall economic growth which drives capitalism.
The Mysteria, 11: The Persistence of Paganism
What’s really behind recent fears of a “pagan resurgence?" (Free)
You maybe remember a spate of articles from journals of note — including The Atlantic, though I’m not sure why anyone reads that anymore — warning about the “new pagans.” Such panics recur regularly, especially amongst those who think Western Civilization needs them to defend it.
This essay was originally written for Unherd, but the editor responsible for it left to work for another journal. So, I instead published it on my substack.
…why then blame such things on paganism? It might just be because moralists and leaders have been doing so for at least as long as Christianity has been around. Calling things you don’t like “pagan” certainly sounds a bit more serious than saying something is “diabolic,” “witchcraft,” or “satanic,” but the underlying accusation is there regardless. There are ancient and dark forces moving about the land, tempting people away from right belief, and especially urging them on towards behaviours that undermine and even directly threaten the stability of the political order…
Gardens Come With You
...and also wait for you on your return. (Free)
There’s sadness and love and loss and joy in this essay. And if it’s possible to write a memoir of your life through the gardens you’ve tended, this is what would look like.
A garden is a gathering of spirits, of old friends and new, of allies and companions. They are great, thronging crowds of voices whispering, cajoling, and summoning you to the life you summon for them. And when you leave a garden, they come with you, long trains of spirits singing and laughing as you lead them across the earth to their new home.
I have had many gardens in my life. This garden is my fifth, but the more I tend this one, the more I see it not as a new one, but merely a continuation of all the others.
They continue like we continue, they — like we — die back and live again.
The Immigration Crisis
And Its Most Beautiful Solution (Paid)
Hearing right wing sorts panic about immigration destroying European culture is as depressing as hearing left-liberals claiming that immigration has absolutely no negative effect on culture at all. Both get things quite wrong, and both are being used by larger capitalist forces.
For this essay, I wrote quite candidly about my own experience of being an immigrant (no, not an “expat,” but an actual immigrant) and what I wish both sides of the issue understood.
This is something leftists all knew until class consciousness got replaced with the false enlightenment of social justice. Immigrants are not the enemy, but disruptive mass immigration is one of the enemy’s weapons. When a large group of us (remember, us — I’m an immigrant) move into a place, we will change it no matter whether we want to or not. This is even more true if the communities into which we move have already begun to fall apart through cultural erosion or economic damage.
Immigration is a natural act of being human, and it is something that will only increase dramatically as capitalism’s crises accelerate. Some of us will leave for new lands no matter the circumstances, but many more of us will find ourselves forced to travel very far from the violence of places we once considered home.
And as immigration increases, the problems we immigrants cause will also increase. This is inevitable, and a lot more strife will be arriving everywhere soon. But since we do the most inadvertent damage in places with no real sense of community or culture in the first place, the most beautiful way to avoid the problems we cause is to rebuild community and culture before we get there.
The Mysteria, 12: Hearing Voices
On spirits and schizophrenia. (Free)
In this installment of The Mysteria, I wrote about several true experiences I had with schizophrenics who could accurately speak otherwise unknowable truths.
I think this might have been the essay — more so than the previous one in this series, that finally sloughed off the most hardcore of my Christian and atheist readers.
This is where my position on these matters becomes rather unpleasant, because yes — I believe in evil. Some spirits are quite helpful to humans, many are neutral, and some are really quite awful. This is also what “most of humanity” has believed, though those societies didn’t always use the same metrics for deciding what was evil and what was just merely unhelpful.
The Future Ghetto
Children of Men, Gaza, and our collective future. (Paid)
Another essay that made me lose some readers yet simultaneously brought in a lot more. This one especially brought in lots of accusations about me being evil — or, as a longtime friend unfortunately accused, a “useful idiot” for Islam-fascism.
But again, as I told someone, even if I were forced at gunpoint to choose one of the three monotheisms, I’d still select “none of the above.”
Both the Rightist belief in racial, religious, and national destinies and the Leftist faith in human management have created the situation in Gaza. Israelis who’ve accepted the delusion that they are a chosen people who were “promised” the land upon which they live have swallowed the very same Rightist poison the average German who believed in an Aryan destiny accepted. But Israelis who instead believe that they could benevolently manage the Palestinian population, usher them gently to the formation of their own liberal democratic governance, and do all this without facing any kind of primal anger from those they managed accepted the Leftist delusion.
The Body is Never an Interloper
How the gym cured my "imposter syndrome" (Free)
Absolutely my favorite essay of the year, because the gym is also my favorite thing about living.
What made me braver was an odd craving I’d never experienced before. My body wanted to do more, wanted to try other things, and when I’d leave despite this, I’d feel a profound disappointment in my stomach. It felt a lot like being hungry at a table but being too afraid to eat the food in front of you. I wanted to do more, and to be there longer, and most of all to feel like I was “allowed” to be there.
The Hill In The Distance
The Cult of the Raven King, Part 2
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve a bit of a habit of starting a new series before I’ve finished earlier ones. Sorry. But this one was desperately begging to exist, and so I complied.
This is the second essay in The Cult of the Raven King, which, to clarify, isn’t fiction at all. Yes, that’s correct. It’s all true, or as close as anyone can come to telling the truth.
When a man in a dream meets you on a hill and shows you really strange visions about the end of humanity, and then you, by complete “chance,” stumble upon a picture of that very hill, what can you really do except go try to find out why?
The Archive of Ancestral Flesh
And on doing what you're "supposed" to do. (Paid)
This essay’s about my grandfather, and also about how ancestors bleed through everyday life.
Hearts — and dreams, and loves, and life — are like that, I think. You can only put them off for so long before they finally tire of waiting around for you. And it’s in exactly the times I put off something for another time that I feel my grandfather’s flesh in mine.
“Is that what you really want?” he seems to ask, “or only what you’re supposed to want?”
I don’t always have the courage to answer him.
“Are we the baddies?”
The “left” versus the working class. (Paid)
This essay is about class, which of course no “leftist” talks about anymore.
Also, it was profound enough that several readers asked me to please make it available to everyone, rather than keep it behind a paywall. I’ll certainly do so, soon, but because several people became paid subscribers specifically to read this one, it’s only fair to them I keep it this way for at least 30 days.
But where the old Petite Bourgeoisie usually has some physical wealth (a house, a workshop, a storefront, manual tools, etc) to fall back upon, the New Petite Bourgeoisie has nothing. That makes them less resilient and therefore more terrified of these changes. And because they’re so precarious, they’re more likely to support and even agitate for politics and politicians that keep the current neoliberal order together.
That’s why they supported Kamala Harris despite her having no other policy platform except “more of the same.” That’s also why they so vehemently opposed Brexit in the UK, and why they’re so eager to see EU expansion in Europe. Any alteration of the previous “progress” that created their class in the first place means they’ll have to join the faceless mass of regular workers that Blair, Clinton, and Obama each promised they could finally escape.
And that’s especially why they hate Trump so much. Not only does he not speak for them, but he speaks to the very classes against whom they’ve constructed their entire personal identities and moral constellations.
If there was another essay I wrote in 2024 that you really think I should have included in this list, please tell me (and others) in the comments.
Happy New Year.
—Rhyd
A mighty year! It's great getting less scared. I especially like the way telling the truth functions as an act of solidarity: seeing others be braver emboldens one to be braver oneself. Signed, one of those long-time readers
“Only by changing the body you can you truly change yourself” Rang a bell with me. Overstatement I think with a whole lot of truth in it nonetheless. Recently I decided to apply John Michael Greer’s triad of ritual, meditation, and divination which in his system is the foundation of magical practice. I ordered a number of his magic practice books. Couldn’t apply them hook line and sinker as I am a charismatic Christian with Druidic nature tendencies. So I devised a circular ritual, inspired by the Druidic Sphere of Protection expressing and applying my own peculiarities. The physical element is an application of standing postural integration along with elements of tai chi and qigong, along with prayer, tongues at times, raising my hands, the name of Jesus the sign of the cross, the Our Father, the Gloria Patri at the end. All in a set pattern. The deliberate conscious settled physical embodiment in good standing posture applying gentle qigong movements (Gathering Heaven and the Open-Close from Sun tai chi) at the center of the circle and at the points of the compass is an essential foundation for a whole being response to and knowing of God, anchoring myself in the life and energy of the creation in His presence. Followed by a chapter of New Testament, discursive meditation on chosen verse from the chapter. And the divination part at the end is seeking and knowing the Spirit’s voice. The whole thing is an application of the will and it has steadied and grounded me. A TSW moment. The W stands for “works”.