Our Ascetic Age

A Nietzschean Analysis of the West’s Decline

“Look at that, these shits are going home right now. You fucks—hope you get to work on time.”

Gibby Haynes clearing the room, 1984

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

Oscar Wilde, 1892

We aren’t always the best judges of our own success. Isaac Newton, discoverer of infinitesimal calculus, the classical laws of physics, and the law of gravitation, judged his greatest achievement to be lifelong celibacy. Nor are we always the best judges of what’s good for us. The West has had everything its own way for half a millennium. This has been an unprecedented disaster.

This disaster has ended in the ascetic age of the West. Does this sound insane? Ascetic?

The idea that we have never been more hedonist is common in trad circles. Often, it’s repeated by people who are too young to remember anything else; anyone who attended Woodstock—1969 or 1999—remembers what license looks like. This is not to say that there aren’t subhumans out there doing repulsive things—of course, there are—but rather that taken as a cohort, (white) Millennials and Zoomers are pretty well behaved. Alcohol consumption has declined steadily since 2002; gym membership and frequency are up; smoking has nearly halved in 15 years (even considering vaping); kids are having less sex than their parents at their age; teen pregnancy has dropped by two-thirds.

Even if we understand ascetic in the common usage, arguably we have entered into an ascetic age. But if we understand ascetic as Nietzsche gives it to us, it becomes clear. On this understanding, asceticism is the will turned back against itself, the beaten dog who has enough fight left in him to mortify himself, but not enough to lash out. A world full of ascetics seems

[…] a den of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures, who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves, of the world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as possible out of pleasure in hurting—presumably their one and only pleasure.¹

Nietzsche is speaking here specifically of the ascetic priest.² But this priest is not just a weakling. Unlike the mass of broken souls that he ministers to, the priest’s asceticism is an expression of his will to power. Defeated by the world, the priest’s life force still screams to assert itself, but can only assert itself against itself—this is what’s meant by “asceticism is the will turned back against itself”:

For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules resentment without parallel, the resentment of an insatiate instinct and ambition, that would be master, not over some element in life, but over life itself, over life’s deepest, strongest, innermost conditions; here is an attempt made to utilise power to dam the sources of power; here does the green eye of jealousy turn even against physiological well-being, especially against the expression of such well-being, beauty, joy; while a sense of pleasure is experienced and sought in abortion, in decay, in pain, in misfortune, in ugliness, in voluntary punishment, in the exercising, flagellation, and sacrifice of the self.³

This is starting to sound familiar. The ascetic priest is too weak to master life, but not too weak to master himself. The West too has turned from mastering the world to mastering itself, with ascetic results.

We should rid ourselves of the idea that the liberal is amoral and licentious. His morality is aberrant and disgusting, of course, but he is not without morality. Not nearly. The liberal is, rather, hyper-moral. If you look at the modern Netflix-binging wokescold, he is no Hun. Here is one of the most refined, manicured, cultivated, “moral” people alive, a born rule-follower. He doesn’t do whatever he wants. Far from it—he is enslaved to a social expectation so constrained that it would give the Puritan pause. The NPC/progressive is utterly tame and conventional. His convention is self-mortification—Nietzsche calls it “self-contradiction”—the philosophical expression of which is his cognitive dissonance.

No better illustration of this dissonance can be found than the so-called “paradox of tolerance”. This is no paradox, but a schizophrenia-inducing contradiction that the liberal is expected to juggle. The idea that intolerance is intolerable is so totally indigestible, vaporizes reason so completely, that it brings one to a sublime, almost mystical encounter where all opposites resolve into the Absolute. Nietzsche has anticipated us:

All this is in the highest degree paradoxical: we are here confronted with a rift that wills itself to be a rift, which enjoys itself in this very suffering, and even becomes more and more certain of itself, more and more triumphant, in proportion as its own presupposition, physiological vitality, decreases.⁴