The yin crowd

… after decades of promoting yin (i.e. the cosmic female element) and suppressing yang (i.e. the cosmic male element), the West now suffers from yin toxemia. As per Chinese Taoist precepts, this produces an overabundance of the soft, wet, squishy, sweet, flabby, irrational, diffuse energy that characterizes yin, and a shortage of the hard, dry, salty, muscular, rational and compacting male (i.e. yang) energy that could rectify this imbalance.

The yin-soaked West rests on a foundation of feelings. It feels for the plight of the female trapped in a male body, the Somali who has never seen indoor plumbing, and the abandoned son of a Kenyan exchange student who made good. That all such feelings translate into actions that dismantle the West financially, demographically and culturally no longer registers, for reason no longer registers, nor does survival. This is the age of I feel, therefore I am. The essence of yin.

— Takuan Seiyo, "From Meccania to Atlantis, Part 12"

I expect most regular readers of Reflecting Light have followed the series in Brussels Journal. If not, it won't do any harm to start with Part 12, the most recent.

Mr. Seiyo (an acknowledged nom de blog) can be infuriating. Mostly, the fury he arouses is directed at the trends he portrays, but at times he — well, "infuriates" is too strong, but he annoys me.

The exaggeration, the one-sidedness, in his writing can be of a muchness. Whether he realizes it or not, Seiyo is a caricaturist. Caricatures are not false, or need not be: great caricaturists (e.g., Hogarth or Thomas Rowlandson) are extreme examples of the saying that "art is the lie that gives the truth." By heightening impressions — okay, exaggerating, if you wish — they cut through an infinite number of stimuli to reveal something of the essence.

I too in this blog am inclined toward my own species of caricature. As a fellow practitioner, or serial exaggerator, I have to admire his way with words, even when they are not literally true or are not the only truth on the subject:

Leviathan as manifest in Snatchland – i.e. all of the West -- exists only to perpetuate itself, and it perverts the social contract any way it can in pursuit of that goal. Like the whale sucking in krill for sustenance, it prospers (until the day of reckoning) by sucking in new groups of dependents. Some of these it creates internally, like the single mothers on welfare who increase their income in proportion to the number of fatherless children they breed with a parade of male pollinators passing through the drunken night. Others are imported aliens from all corners of the globe -- the foreigner and more primitive the better.

There is no better way to fatten Leviathan than by importing people useless to the modern economy and hopeless as prospects for melting in Western society. What excitement at the thought of the many more civil servants who will have to be hired per each 1000 newcomers, to administer ever-larger public welfare and wealth-transfer programs!

Mostly, I don't hold Seiyo's wild-eyed jests against him. But he has so much fun bashing the Western world's guilt baths and wishful thinking that he doesn't seem to have much energy left for pondering how to counteract the pathology. More than a few prominent social conservatives (Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, for instance) enjoy the Dance of Death enough that they don't want the music to stop, or can't imagine that it ever could.

Seiyo seems to imply that a remnant of civilization will have to create its own Atlantean colony to escape the tyranny of the centralized all-powerful bureaucratic State, but if he is serious — I suspect it is no more than a pose — we need to hear a lot more details from him about how that could work.

His over-the-top caricature is, admittedly, bracingly savage invective. But enough. If even half of what he writes is basically true, and I think it is, having a right old time watching the collapse of liberty and justice can take us only so far. We need, as Mark Steyn might say in one of his showbiz metaphors, to turn the beat around.