The Book Publishing Industry and the Case for (a little) Nihilism

On worth, worthiness, and worthlessness

As a straight white Christian man who supports Donald Trump there is a zero percent chance that a major American publisher will pick up my work.

I am 120 pages deep, right now, on my dissertation. I think my manuscript shows promise. I chose an interesting and politically relevant topic: WWII and its connection to our contemporary political order; moreover, I have an original thesis, strong evidence, and a clear voice. When I am finished, I plan on publishing the dissertation as a book.

There is, however, no chance that it gets picked up by a major publisher, no matter how well it is written. In fact, it is unlikely I will even find a big name academic press that wants to carry it. That is because publishing is political and I am politically incorrect, which is to say that I am not a liberal.

Contemporary liberal democracy requires a massive censorship and surveillance apparatus to sustain itself. That means that reactionaries and dissenters face an uphill battle when they launch themselves into the public sphere. It certainly means that, in this environment, they will never be respectable.

It is the fundamentally political nature of writing that the recent Substack discourse on the book publishing industry misses. Elle Griffin’s essay No one reads books anymore goes too far, I think, in its sweeping claims about the imminent collapse of the publishing industry. Plenty of Americans read books; nearly a billion sold last year, for instance.

The reality is that in any time and place, it is extremely difficult for the vast majority of authors and poets to live off of the written word. It is precisely because reading and writing are so popular that this is true. Becoming an artist and a culture creator is a highly sought after way of life. At the peak, poets receive enormous honor and power. The whole course of a people’s collective life can be shaped by a singular artist whose work transcends their own time.

We are still reading Homer two and a half millennia later for a reason.

There is, therefore, lots of competition for that spiritual prestige. Getting to a literary or cultural peak, or even the ability to simply make a meaningful income off of one’s words, is a very hard task. Griffin errs in thinking that self-publishing will solve the woes of Starving Artists. Even in the best circumstances, most writers aren’t going to make it.

Life is hard. Time is short. Talent is rare.

But there is another element in all this, one that Griffin and her interlocutors miss: success isn’t just a matter of ability.

As Thomas Hobbes explains in Leviathan there is a disjuncture between worth and worthiness. Worth is what you actually get paid for your work. Worthiness is what you should get paid in a perfect world.

And in our censorious, repressive, leftist regime, that disjuncture is glaring.

My own case is a useful example. In August of 2021, I went viral after a three-star Army general tried to cancel me through social media for criticizing his COVID policies. I got a hit on Fox News that launched my profile into the public sphere.

In August of 2021 I had 100 followers on Twitter. By December I had 14,000 and millions of views on a regular basis. As a writer I had hit the jackpot: my otherwise obscure work had found an audience. I had a growing vector to share my ideas. But then just as suddenly as I had leapt to minor internet fame I lost it all. Twitter permanently banned my account without stating a specific reason. All subsequent attempts to “respawn” on the platform were similarly booted.

RIP.

In truth, I probably brought this on myself. I criticized the Pentagon and the White House. I was speaking truth to power and power slapped me down. Should I be surprised?

The very qualities that made my work popular likely also contributed to my expulsion from the nation’s largest public square. I not only lost my audience, I also lost its future growth. As a writer that is a worst case scenario. It is hard to sell books if no one knows you wrote them.

America does not have free speech and even Twitter under Elon has not allowed me back. Eventually, I fully expect to get banned off of Substack too. It is just a matter of time.

Conservatism, as the show trials of Donald Trump and his advisors demonstrate, is functionally illegal in this country. The only reason I am not subject to multi-million dollar legal warfare is because I am not popular or effective enough to warrant that kind of attention.

Censorship prevents me from gaining those attributes, and in a way, I even agree with my silencing. Every regime needs to defend itself. The liberal democracy we live under requires near-universal adherence to the doctrines of anti-racism, feminism, and gay liberation that make up our civil religion. Let enough troublemakers run around and the legitimacy bubble on which the whole thing rests could pop. Can’t have that.

This is where the nihilism comes in.

I can easily accept that I will never make it as a writer or “influencer.” This would mean that, like most Americans, I am going to have to get a “real” job. That is okay!

It does not bother me that I am not honored. That is to be expected. In order to be honored among the great, one needs not only enormous talent but also good fortune and opportunity. Every real genius understands this state of things and accepts it with a laugh. Life is, in many cases, a series of absurdities. If one cannot laugh at it, one must despair. But that resentment is no recipe for happiness.

No, what really grinds my gears is seeing idiots and lickspittles elevated over the noble and excellent. I am happy to submit before greatness but I have nothing but contempt for a system that promotes mediocrities and human trash.

This is precisely our contemporary liberal world. The real problem with the book publishing industry isn’t that it separates winners from losers but that it selects the wrong winners.

Penguin Random House’s masthead offerings in politics are books like White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy and the January 6th Report with a foreword from Adam Schiff.

What utter shit!

I cannot help but laugh at the stupidity of it all. All these preening liberals, all these godless self-righteous pricks, declaiming about the evils of Trump, racism, and January 6.

Their liberal values are FAKE and GAY. When these shitlibs start blathering about the evils of the West and colonization and heteronormativity I feel absolutely nothing. I am completely unmoved. Liberalism is a fake pseudo-religion designed to control credential people. I don’t believe in it.

When it comes to the gods of the Left I am an atheist. I am a nihilist!

Every honor our liberal society values is empty. Only a fool could believe otherwise. The system that props up our DEI regime is a mound of trash. The human beings who debase themselves striving to climb to its top are no better than monkeys flinging shit at one another.

“Networking”

I do not feel resentment at my lack of success in this (literal) rat race. I am not a rat!

When I say I am a nihilst I do not mean that I am an upper-case Nihilist who thinks that life, as such, lacks meaning. It would be far too presumptuous to make such a claim. No, I am a lower-case nihilist, a nihilist about particular beliefs. I do not believe that all values are fake or that life has no meaning, merely that most values and most ways of life are meaningless.

I am not alone in this, either. Everyone who really believes in something is also a nihilist. Belief and unbelief are inextricably related. Every yes is also a no.

A Christian who believes that the Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins, thereby does not believe in the rest of the world’s religions. His faith requires him to believe that Hinduism, Islam, and animism are all heresies or errors. He is an atheist for every faith but his own.

Nihilism and the recognition of the tragic character of life are fundamentally related. The great genius of the Greeks was undeniably connected to their profound sense of man’s limitations.

Tragedy and genius go together.

Every artist, deep down, yearns to escape his own horizons: to live not only for himself but for all time. All writing—all art—is the will to power.

To be an artist is to feel the fire of life burning in one’s breast like a star waiting to shine forth in all its brilliance. And yet how shocking, how horrible, to feel oneself to be capable of great things and to have no chance to let this genius burst forth into the world even if for a moment. How terrible to watch one’s youth and vital power slip away never having had the chance to give birth to a “dancing star.”

Napoleon, as a young officer in Paris, pondered suicide as he walked along the Seine. He was ready to throw himself into its icy depths when he considered that he almost certainly would never get a chance to follow in the steps of Alexander the Great. Only the lingering shreds of hope of building his own world-spanning empire kept him alive.

All of us are beings unto death. All of us are limited and finite. Even the best human being is still a human being and not a god. We are all, in some way, the slaves of chance, fortune, and nature. Only in the best and perfect world does what is highest and most noble get to flourish in all its glory. In every other world, as in our imperfect world, that is not the case.

To be reconciled to one’s fate, to be willing to accept this life with all its error, absurdity, and stupidity, and yet to still will and wish and want what is highest and most noble, to strive even knowing that striving is not enough, that is a difficult task indeed.

For the artist and the writer that means accepting that one’s work, one’s fire, may never emblazon itself upon the earth and upon the hearts of men in the way that one wishes. It means accepting the possibility of failure and working anyway.

This fake and gay liberal trash world makes that striving even harder. The stuffed-shirt shitlibs and braindead moralists who get in the way should, therefore, be mercilessly mocked.

All of the mucky-mucks who run these big publishing companies, newspapers, and academic journals deserve nothing but ridicule.

I have a fantasy where all of these people are together in a giant ballroom—something like the White House correspondents’ dinner—passing out awards, making speeches, glad handing, jerking each other off, etc.

Into this scene of spiritual debauchery a man emerges, completely naked save for streaks of warpaint across my body.

He takes the stage, doing cartwheels and backflips in front of them as the audience of hypocrites and liars gasp in shock. Women clutch their pearls. Men cry out, “How dare you!” He dodges security, sprinting through their midst, laughing maniacally, middle fingers to the air screaming “You are all FRAUDS!”

This is justice! This is moderation! This is radical bipartisan centrism!

Better to be a shitposter in the forums of the based than a libtard in the courts of the cringe.

The Emperor has no clothes; no honest man should pretend otherwise.

This man, he understood!