Why We Fight
A speech delivered December 7, 2024
I delivered the opening speech at the inaugural meeting of the Company of Adventurers in Toronto, December 2024. I was honoured to share the stage with Dimes, Fortissax, Wilhelm Apologist, John Carter, and Dave Greene.
Something is not right in the world and everybody knows it, but it's not always easy to articulate or verbalize what's wrong. The Boomers are pushing 80, and they're having a grand old time, spending the equity in their houses on fancy restaurants and cruises. In a few years, they'll all be dead and their wealth will be in the hands of corporations and the taxman. On the other extreme, young people seem to have no hope for the future at all. When I see a group of 23-year-olds laughing, it's always about something vicarious. Either it's a TikTok video where a photogenic young woman does a perfect lip-sync to a comedic monologue, or it's because some girl with a bad haircut convinced her grandfather to address her with they-them pronouns.
Between those two extremes, there is a group of somewhat older people, among whom I am included. We remember a time when things worked. When the infrastructure wasn't constantly crumbling and in need of repair. When kindergarten teachers weren't a bunch of mentally disturbed sexual degenerates with septum piercings. Our health care system had delays, but the doctor wouldn't recommend killing yourself.
But most of all, I remember a time when people were happy to talk about their own future, and their dreams and ambitions with the alacrity of the Boomers talking about their next trip to Cabo San Lucas. I don't see that anymore. If anyone is happy, it's not because he’s accomplished things, it’s because he’s made peace with reality. They’re content to live vicariously through the next Netflix series and white-knuckle it until the next round of layoffs.
This is not a natural cycle of lean calf years after a fat calf age. A lot of these problems were imposed from the top down. At some point, we realized that our society and our communities are being managed by a large, nebulous, unaccountable bureaucracy that is not just grossly incompetent, it's actively hostile to our way of life. And what's worse, we don't even have a comic book supervillian to fight. The face of the enemy is a thoroughly mediocre 35-year-old mid, with a law degree from a third-tier school, and an ugly sense of resentment over the pretty girls, and she's going to undermine every organization she gets involved with, in the name of an ideology that justifies her resentment.
The ruling passion conquers reason still
Like many of the people in this room, the point of no return for me was the year 2020. That year made me realize just how ruthless and soulless our leaders are. They will put an untested society-wide program in place, and they will literally say you're spreading a disease if you question it. The clarity was nice, because anyone who calls you a disease vector is someone who can be convinced to kill you in your sleep and feel righteous about it.
Before 2020, there was uncertainty. I could go to bed every night, giving our leaders the benefit of the doubt, naively thinking that at the end of the day, they wanted the gears of society to keep turning. Now I go to bed knowing that if society collapses due to their stupidity, the next day they will be looking for a scapegoat. You and I will be blamed for not following their brilliant and cunning plan.
So my fellow members of the Company of Adventurers, in light of this new information, my decision space has collapsed. I really only have three options. Fight, flight, or freeze. Voice, exit, or loyalty.
I'm a bachelor, I've got a good career. I could find a remote job and go do it from the beach in Thailand. And I'll be honest, there have been times in my life when I seriously considered that. I traveled the world as a digital nomad, and it wasn't some Hakuna Matata period of hedonism and shirking responsibility. It was one of the most productive periods of my life, both professionally and in terms of personal growth. But I learned the personal cost of a life in exile, which is no life at all.
The hyperrational side of me knows that there are advantages to staying out of sight for a few years, being a corporate mercenary, stashing money, then living a quiet life and dying in obscurity in a nursing home in a cheap country. I'm not going to do that. I've decided to fight shoulder to shoulder with some of the people in this room. And it's reasonable for you to ask why I fight, because if you and I aren't fighting for the same reason, it's a lot harder to trust each other not to run at the first sign of trouble.
So why do I fight? I'll be the first to say that it isn't for a rational reason. I started writing a 4000-word screed about all the things that have pissed me off since Covid, many of which still make me quite angry. But I realized something. None of it solved the voice or exit question. I could just as easily let my anger inspire me to retire to a beach somewhere and tell the locals stories about a great civilization that squandered it all in the name of diversity. No man has ever been inspired to run onto the battlefield because of a list of grievances. And so, I consulted that great repository of writings on the human condition, English poetry, and in two stanzas, I found that Alexander Pope said what I was struggling to say in 4000 words:
’Twas no Court-badge, great Scriv’ner! fired thy brain,
Nor lordly luxury, nor City gain:
No, ’twas thy righteous end, ashamed to see
Senates degen’rate, patriots disagree,
And, nobly wishing party-rage to cease,
To buy both sides, and give thy country peace.
“All this is madness,” cries a sober sage:
But who, my friend, has reason in his rage?
“The ruling passion, be it what it will,
The ruling passion conquers reason still.”
Less mad the wildest whimsey we can frame,
Than even that passion, if it has no aim;
For though such motives folly you may call,
The folly’s greater to have none at all.
Let’s break that down. I think we can all agree with the language about “Senates degen’rate, patriots disagree.” Just look at our political class. And I would love nothing more than “To buy both sides, and give thy country peace.” So I’m in exactly the same position as the speaker in the first stanza. But the second stanza gets to the issue of motivation.
But who, my friend, has reason in his rage?
“The ruling passion, be it what it will,
The ruling passion conquers reason still.”
All that matters is my ruling passion. Not reason. I can try all I want to rationalize my motivation, but I’m ruled by a passion which tells me that the Regime needs to be removed by the root, and banished or worse.
Less mad the wildest whimsey we can frame,
Than even that passion, if it has no aim;
For though such motives folly you may call,
The folly’s greater to have none at all.
The folly is greater to have none at all. I can fight and fail, and it will all be over. Or I can live a long life with my conscience telling me that I committed the greater folly of having no ruling passion. And in 100 years, I'll be just as dead. So I'm going to tell you a story of why I feel it in my bones that I have to fight.
Why I Fight, Reason 1: Ancestral Loyalty
In 2014, like a good old-stock Canadian, I went to France and Belgium to explore the World War I battle sites. It's almost a religious pilgrimage, and I would recommend everybody here do it. There is nothing more sobering than standing in the middle of a field with a very slight grade, and remembering all the stories about thousands of men dying to take a hill. It dawns on you that you're standing on one of those hills. The concept of assimilation becomes very difficult to accept when you stand at World War I battle sites, because someone whose parents moved to Brampton from Pakistan in 1991 may be a nice, pious man, but he's not going to feel the same reverence for the place.
When I visited Passchendaele, they told us that a geology graduate student from the University of Ghent had been recently killed by an unexploded World War I landmine during his field research. I don't know what the world is going to look like in 100 years, but I know that one day in 2124, like that grad student, somebody is going to be directly affected, for better or worse, by the decisions we're making today.
We like to think that 100 years is a long time, and the world certainly looks very different now than it did then. It's easy to think that we're insulated by a century of buffer. That's not true. One day in August 1917, the British and German Armies were dug into trenches at Passchendaele. To seize the initiative, the British tried to capture a few extra acres of No Man's Land. They did this by grabbing 10 young men, and telling them “each of you has to hold a rope and run over the top. Most of you will step on a landmine and die. Some of you will make it across, and we'll be able to know the safe route by following your rope”. One of the men who didn't make it was my great-grandfather.
He left behind four sons in Glasgow, Scotland, two of whom served in World War II. One of which ended up going to the Duke of Hamilton’s estate to put the handcuffs on Rudolph Hess. A third son, my grandfather, had a heart murmur, and was unable to serve in the military, but he worked in the Rolls Royce factory, making tanks. The doctors told him that his health was at risk if he worked too many hours, but he was not going to stay home when his two brothers were serving King and Country. One day, just after D-Day in 1944, he came home from the factory feeling exhausted, kissed his wife, and sat down on the couch. He died an hour later, at the age of 35, leaving behind a widow and four children, including my dad who was an infant. He grew up fatherless in Charles Dickens-level poverty. He later enlisted in the Royal Marines, and in the 1960s, he was on 24-hours leave to go to Kuwait, which never blew up by the Grace of God. He was told “you don't need to get tattoos, but we strongly recommend you get tattoos so that we can identify your body if your head gets blown off.”
This is my lineage. I have to go back over a century before I find something that doesn't directly affect me today. And I would wager that everyone in this room, at least of Canadian stock, needs to go back just as far. The bad decisions made by the Regime will affect our posterity, not just for decades, but for centuries. But I still haven’t said why I fight, and I will now.
Later on, on that same trip, I was in Edinburgh castle, where two things were on permanent display. The first is the Stone of Scone, the artifact that, at least according to legend, Kings of Scotland have been coronated on since Kenneth MacAlpin in the 9th century. Another is the Scottish National War Memorial, with the Roll of Honour, containing the names of all Scots who have died in wars since WW1. I cannot even try to convey what it feels like to stand at the castle, overlooking a mountain, a few feet from these two objects. But I knew in my bones that I was a minor character in a great story. And I felt the same responsibility to maintain it that I do with my own property. In my parents' house. In my grandmother's house. In my best friend's house.
It would not surprise me if it's been vandalized with a progressive symbol in the last 10 years, and I would feel the same way that I would feel if someone burglarized my grandmother’s house. If I just ignored it, I would be violating my conscience, and my inner passion. I have a responsibility to do everything I can to preserve that feeling for any Canadian who stands on a hill in Belgium or any Scottish person who stands atop Edinburgh Castle. I believe it is right, and I'm willing to fight to assert that it's right.
And yet, I'm fully aware that it's not rational, “the ruling passion conquers reason still” as Alexander Pope said in that poem. I'm fully aware of the political situation in Scotland and I know that I'm fighting a losing battle. If you want to get an idea of what modern Scotland is like, you'll get more out of a movie like Trainspotting about a group of heroin junkies living on the dole.
As I walked through Edinburgh, I knew that most people, even most Scottish people, wouldn't feel the same resonance. They wouldn't notice (or understand the significance of) a plaque that said “James Boswell and Samuel Johnson ate here during their famous tour of Scotland in 1773”. This was the city where John Knox made Mary Queen of Scots cry by calling her an idiot for marrying Lord Darnley. This was the city where David Hume took on centuries of theology by questioning whether humans truly use "reason," and the city where Thomas Reid developed the philosophy of Common Sense, saying that no man needs to listen to philosophers and theologians, if his critical thinking skills lead him to a different conclusion. Language which inspired his American contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, to pen the phrase "we hold these truths to be self evident."
I know that most people see this stuff as cute arcana, but I feel a deep sense of responsibility to keep that story alive, even if it costs me everything, so that one day, a more learned generation can walk through Edinburgh, feel the way I felt, and can choose to continue building on it. I can't give you a rational reason, but David Hume said that rationality is overrated, and Thomas Reid told me that I don't have to justify my morals and ethics to anybody but God.
Why I Fight, Reason 2: Necessity
Of course, I have my share of rational reasons too. The most basic reason that any man fights is out of sheer necessity, and I'm starting to feel that. Quite frankly, I don't believe that Canada's leadership class cares one iota about my posterity. They want me to contribute to GDP so that a bunch of people (native-born and otherwise) can be parasites, either through the collection of government cheques, or through working some ridiculous job in the public sector or some tax-funded non-profit organization.
If barbarians show up at the gates, or if nature serves up a real challenge, I don't trust the Canadian government to fight on my behalf. And that brings us back to the year 2020.
After 2020, I have zero confidence in the public health apparatus, or any other established institutions, to solve any real problems. The government saw that there was a lung ailment going around which was at worst a bad case of the flu, and said “maybe we should fight this by shutting down the economy and printing a lot of money.”
Like I said, I'm not here to relive 2020. If you know me, you know that I have no shortage of opinions on the Covid era, and that I was calling bullshit on day one of two weeks to slow the spread. But I understand that a lot of people, either out of fear or exploited decency, bought into the hysteria, at least at first.
But in the summer of 2020, I saw a picture of nurses kneeling for BLM, after the whole nursing profession cried for 3 months about how hard their jobs were. When they then participated in the BLM demonstrations and riots, I knew that they weren’t serious. Whether or not Covid actually was dangerous, not a single person in those pictures believed that it was, and not a single nurse was making TikTok videos about how this was making her job more difficult.
If you share any ethics with me, you should find everything about this picture revolting, and you should feel like your morals and ethics were used against you for purely cynical reasons.
I could go on about the complete violations of basic human decency in 2020, and the people who know me will tell you that I do go on about them, ad nauseum. But our ruling class thought they were clever or moral by doing one thing after another that was stupid or horrible. Just as a partial list of things they thought it was “worth it” to do, they decided to…
Cannibalize the economy
Bankrupt thousands of small businesses
Cause thousands of missed cancer screenings
Cause cases of addictions to skyrocket
Increase the M0-money supply by a factor of eight
Let the world watch as the police sat by with their hands on their hips as riots tore through western cities for 4 months
Stack corporate C-suites with hundreds of unqualified diversity hires, and
Dump billions of dollars into a vaccine development program which produced a vaccine that I will be generous and just say didn't work.
Do you believe that your elected government has your best interests in mind? I don’t. I opposed every single one of the above measures, at the time. In 2020. Not retroactively. And Toronto in 2020 was a very lonely place when you were opposing all that nonsense.
And now, less than 5 years later, let’s take a look at what those policies have wrought:
Canada has rampant inflation
Our national reputation has been tainted by draconian Covid policy culminating with martial law being invoked over truckers honking their horns
Zero net Real per-capita GDP growth since 2015
Globally, the most famous thing about our health care system is assisted suicide
And worst of all, absolutely nobody who is honest has any trust in the government to maintain the condition of Canada as a going concern.
All because there was theoretically a chance that Covid might have been a bigger deal than the flu.
Why do I fight? I beseech you to look at the last five years and tell me that anyone is coming to save us. Even if our ruling class grew a conscience, they don't have the competence to fix anything. But in reality, they just don’t care that much about you, and they proved that 5 years ago.
Why I Fight, Reason 3: Finding Friends and Allies
When you know that help isn't coming, you're faced with that original question: fight, flight, or freeze? Voice, exit, loyalty.
If you decide to fight, great, but there's a challenge, which is that after the events of 2020, it's going to be hard to trust my countrymen by default. A lot of people who I used to admire just submitted to every humiliation ritual there was. I think the biggest humiliation ritual was standing on the dots and following the arrows at the supermarket. This reminded me of special-ed kids in Grade 3 who all had to hold a rope so they could walk in a line. And a bunch of grown-ass men were doing it. That was my line in the sand. They can show up at my door and throw me in solitary confinement, but I’m never standing on the dots in the supermarket.
And of course it wasn’t a big deal. If anybody gave me guff for walking down a supermarket aisle the wrong way, I'd just say "oh I just need to grab one thing" and nobody would ever say a word to me. You read theories about how everybody believes in following procedure, but nobody takes it seriously, and that was proven by the dots in the supermarket aisles.
The bigger issue is the number of people who proved they were willing to be snitches, to call the police on a family gathering. To literally walk up to a church service in a park, during communion, during a sacrament, and ask the minister to see his permit. Or worse, to sacrifice their own children, forcing their own children to be isolated, or to force them to miss out on education or socialization during critical development years, or to obstruct mouths at a time when children are learning to speak. One prominent governor in the States said children would be fine with lockdowns and masking because they were "resilient", which is like saying "my kid never complains when I sexually abuse him".
No, I realized that I share a society with a lot of my enemies, and I need a way to filter them out. Why do I fight? When you fight, even if you're just doing a small act of rebellion like walking the wrong way down a supermarket aisle, you get to see people's negative reactions, but there’s another side of that equation, which is that you see the positive reactions too. You see the sighs of relief when someone sees you’re not a member of the Covid Gestapo. You see who your friends are.
Those of you above a certain age have watched the movie They Live, where Roddy Piper finds a set of glasses allowing him to see which of his neighbours were aliens, the enemy invaders. I think we're beyond that point now. We need glasses to see who our friends are. When you fight, when you do something unpopular, you get to see who your friends are, and that’s a pretty great feeling.
Of course, I don't want to sound like I have self delusions of being the one man standing up to the stupidity of the masses. But when I would ignore a Covid rule, most of the time I could see relief in people's eyes and faces, like they knew they could drop the stupid act. On the few occasions when somebody would see me walking the wrong way, and then start walking the wrong way themselves, I felt the same way I did at Edinburgh Castle. Like I did what was right and just. If somebody was going to scream or use force to make me wear a mask, fine, you can't win them all. But it wasn't about winning some stupid shouting match with a barista, it was about following my conscience, and I sleep a lot better at night knowing who my friends and enemies are. That's what inspires me to fight.
We live in an age where the Regime is starting to crack down on dissent. The Americans may be scaling back on censorship given the recent election, but here in a multicultural vassal of the Global American Empire, there’s a good chance it will get worse before it gets better and if you want to find a friend, just look for a dissenter.
Why I Fight, Reason 4: Conscience
So I fight out of loyalty to my people and my ancestral bloodline, I fight out of necessity, and I fight because it reveals the line between friend and enemy. The next reason I fight is something I've already mentioned. I fight out of conscience.
I'm a smart person. I like to think that I've thought through all my positions, but the more I read about propaganda, and about memetics, the more I realize that I'm not in control of my thoughts nearly as much as I'd like to be. Of course, I'm not saying anything radical with that, since it's what David Hume said 300 years ago. And it’s what Alexander Pope described as the “Ruling Passion.”
The more I read about Scottish Calvinism, the more I realize just how much of my morality has been passed down through the ages, through mechanisms that maybe nobody truly understands. From the day that Calvinism arrived on Scotland’s shores, Scottish Protestants were known for straddling the line between brave and crazy, because they would call out a noble who was behaving unbiblically. In those days, Scottish Nobles had the ability to write a murder contract.
Following one's conscience at all costs has been a fundamental part of Scottish Protestant culture since the Reformation, when George Buchanan wrote that you have the right to kill a king if he orders you to do something against your conscience.
In 2020, I realized that Scottish Calvinist morality was not just something that I read about in theology textbooks. It lived on in my programming. I could not behave any other way, because I could not in good conscience play along with the Kabuki theatre of Covid masking, which was self-evidently harmful to children. I needed to voice my opposition.
Over a couple centuries, this shared vision turned Scotland from an illiterate backwater to inventing the steam engine, to inventing life insurance, to turning Edinburgh into a legendary city known as the Athens of the North. Scottish people love to argue, but a shared vision built great things.
Canada was settled by French Catholics, English Anglicans, and Scottish Calvinists, but a shared morality was able to hold us together for centuries. And now, we're expected to let in hundreds of thousands of people who see no moral issue with stealing from a food bank. The internet is full of videos of people shamelessly telling each other how to scam the system in Canada and cry racism when someone says no.
We are creating a diverse society where it is literally impossible for any shared vision or morality to survive, and I feel compelled to say something about it. Why do I fight? I fight because my conscience won’t allow me not to fight.
Maybe guys like me are the dying breaths of a culture and a morality that is on its way out for good. I don't believe that to be the case, but even if it is, who cares? Maybe that's just my role to play. Cultures die off just like people die off, and an 85-year-old doesn't just give up on breathing, he tries to make it to 95.
But to be clear, I'm not even convinced that Anglo-Scottish-Irish-French Canadian culture is dying. But I am convinced that the soft censorship of the Regime is starting to fail badly. As a short list of things we’ve seen in the last couple years:
There has been a series of absolute system-wide failures
Wealthy men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk have gone on the warpath
The Regime is increasingly dependent on hard power to crack down on protests, which is not sustainable because foxes have a hard time handling the tools of lions.
If you're waiting for the right moment to jump into the fray, there is no better time than when the machine is starting to sputter. If you want to run, or you want to sit and wait, God bless and I hope your life pans out in a way that makes you wealthy, and satisfied on your death bed.
I've given you 4 reasons why I fight. Out of ancestral obligation, out of sheer necessity, to make the friend-enemy distinction reveal itself, and so that I can live my life with a clear conscience. But, going back to David Hume again, maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe that's the story I'm telling myself to post-hoc justify my actions. All I can tell you is that once you grow a pair of balls and start to speak your mind, you find yourself surrounded by people who you trust, it's really hard to go back. And maybe that's the only reason why I fight.
Thank you.