Worship Your Ancestors Not Carrots

Cezanne was wrong when he said that a carrot, freshly seen, will start a revolution.

It’s been over a century, and the carrot revolution has yet to hit.

Perhaps, our eyes need some adjusting or our spirits are too impoverished to pull it off. Whatever the case, history is not on his side.

The future has not been made by re-imagining carrots. It has been, like most things, seized by men who grab power and impose their will upon the world. Technology, art, and every other feature of civilization serve that single purpose.

All else must submit to the need for autonomy. As the Spartans said, “We know how to rule and be ruled.”

Revolutions are within reach, but they won’t be waiting in oils of water lilies or the self-portrait of a nympho with a uni-brow.

Revolutions are found in the bones of your grandfather. A little plot of land on a wooded hill. Or in an urn sealed in a wall. Or in the ashes scattered into the Atlantic.

Worshiping those bones with the same fervor as a medieval pilgrim before the tomb of St. Peter will shake things up.

Shades live in an eternal now. Not the blissful, liberating eternal now of a yogi, but a retarded, pixelated world of unrelenting outrage and terror streaming through electronic devices and frying their nervous systems 24/7.

Ask a colleague what they had for lunch a week ago to the day, and most will struggle to recall.

Ask them about basic historical facts of your (or their) own country and see how they fare.

I’m an expat that calls the tropics home. I have only a passing interest in the history of my residence, yet I’m typically the one who has to educate the natives.

Here, the tradition of wearing black for funerals is understood as going back to the origins of time. In fact, it’s only been around for 60 years. Long enough for the older generations to have forgotten about it and the younger generations to have never heard of it.

What exists now without a vivid memory of its absence is taken as eternal.

“It’s always been this way,” they demure.

No, it hasn’t.

They’ll argue until they’re blue before shutting-up once they bother to get their phones out.

I’m not patting myself on the back. I’m an utter failure and a fool who has to humiliate himself by being a minstrel. This is not the fate of an intelligent man.

What’s so surprising, however, is how even a fool like me can be better informed than 95% of those around me.

I’ve witnessed many more examples evincing the shade’s impoverished sense of time and history, but these should suffice.

A lack of temporal horizon would not be a problem if it just meant scoring poorly on trivia, but it’s an existential problem.

Dogs are difficult to train. You must spend dozens of hours and hundreds of repetitions to teach them how to sit or not jump onto the couch.

An intelligent, conscientious young man can be told once to wipe his feet off before coming into your home, and he’ll do it every time until the day he dies.

Memory and intelligence are the deciding factors. A dog cannot recall what happened thirty seconds ago nor can he interpret the signals you’re trying to communicate to him. He merely reacts based on a sliver of pattern recognition and feeling.

The two are intimately related, for the intellect is always bound up with the ability to clearly recall prior situations and apply them to novel or similar situations in the present.

A man living in the eternal present is an idiot. He will not learn the lessons of history from even a month or a year ago. He and his fellow idiots (myself included) are doomed to repeat its failures as we bounce about in a haze, unsure of where we are, where we came from, and where we’re headed.

Tyrants have weaponized demographics to rob their subjects of power and cement their rule. The different races end up bickering among themselves rather than uniting and overcoming their common enemy: the tyrant who is off throwing money at whores (I’m sorry, courtesans) and extravagant crocodile tournaments (both of which, I must admit, sound rather cool).

An internal memo from Amazon observed this same phenomenon among their own workers. Diverse workplaces are easier to enslave.

Many frogs, who have an acute sense of history and are highly intelligent, have screamed about this for decades, but to shades unmoored from history, the lessons of ancient Greece (or even America’s Gilded Age) are irrelevant. Even what happened a year ago is largely irrelevant save for as a raw, emotional reaction stored in their tissue.

Their minds are leaky buckets. Whatever you pour in quickly spills onto the pavement.

If you wish to lead history rather than be led by it, you must have a long memory. Years. Decades. Centuries. Recalled with vividness and precision at the drop of a hat.

The most important history you must learn is your own. The history of your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Going back as far as your family tree traces and then several thousand more years.

History, like much of politics today, is more akin to porn or football. A vague form of entertainment with almost little bearing on our own lives or the results of the match.

Study about the ancient Egyptians or the flowering of liberalism in Iran in the mid-20th century all you want, but the most pressing history is the history that informs where you are right now. And I mean you, you. Not America. Not Ireland. Not Auckland. You.

You are where you are, and you came from where you came from. To direct your future and the future of your people, you must understand both.

As a great philosopher put it, “You didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree.”

Those stories are in the bones of your grandfather, great grandfather and great-great grandfather—all the way back to Nuada, Lugh, Wotan, or whatever holy figure stands at the origins of your bloodline (I’ll speak more on this later).

What you will discover in those stories is the struggle, valor, and sacrifice that brought you to where you are today. And the troubling patterns that have sabotaged your success and explain why your mother turns into a banshee whenever you leave the dishes in the sink for more than 5 minutes and how these patterns live on in you, for better or for worse.

Facing the past is harrowing. You will and should feel gratitude and an overwhelming feeling of awe and reverence for all your ancestors have done.

How can you not marvel and blush with shame contemplating all that has come before you and now culminates in you sitting down reading this rambling post by a degenerate anon?

Your life is a miracle.

But you will also feel remorse, shame, anger, disappointment, and the entire cocktail of emotions that run through you everyday. And here, you will learn to right what has been wronged.

Your life does not stop.

You shall join the ranks of your ancestors and stand in their stead and judgment by your descendants. You shall be honored and revered. Your work, your sacrifice, your struggles, the glory that you achieved, the name you won for yourself, the example you set, the wealth you acquired—all of this will live on in those who come after you.

And you will be judged for your failures, your ignorance, your carelessness, your vice, your stupidity, and they will bear the burden of your weakness.

And you will certainly bring both: blessings and curses.

Even if things have not been great. Even if you grew up in poverty, abuse, darkness, misery, and chaos, you are still here with the choice to turn everything around for your own children and theirs. To carve out from this darkness and misery, beauty, light, and the grandeur of the gods.

This is ancestor worship.

You can throw yourselves at the feet of an altar and repeat prayers (as I do everyday) or not.

But if you wish to live well, if you wish to shield yourself against hopelessness and fickleness, if you wish to march onwards confident in yourself, your history, your purpose, your place, your people, don’t freshly see carrots (or any other vegetable for that matter).

Worship those bones and spirits of your ancestors with the same fervor as a medieval pilgrim before the tomb of St. Peter. There lie your relics and your saints.

There lie the men and women that will inspire you to pursue the higher. There lie the divine, barreling onwards through history through your tibia and ulna, and through the children you shall bear.