Mr. Raven is a late GenXer who lives in a wilderness area and makes laser cut paper art. Subscribe to his Substack, Whisper from the Trees.
Topics include:
-How rural areas are treated like internal colonies
-How the rural vs urban divide plays out in dissident politics
–Sam Francis’ Leviathan and Its Enemies and James’ Burnham’s Managerial Revolution
-The class divide in dissident politics
–The smart but poor demographic who don’t fit in with proles
-How both Robert and Mr. Raven share a downwardly mobile upper class and bohemian background
-Whether America has any aristocratic attributes as a mercantile nation
–The formation of ethnic and cultural enclavism
-How an economic downturn could accelerate enclavism
-Whether enclavism would lead to neo-feudalism
-Why Mr. Raven is skeptical of Curtis Yarvin’s idea of corporate run enclaves
-Why distributism and mutualism are superior economic systems to capitalism and socialism
-Mr. Raven’s essay on Medieval Craft Guilds
-How guilds can address problems of jobs, education, and credentialism
-The need for a tripartite system where different social castes share power
-Misconceptions about the High Middle Ages
-Hans Hermann Hoppe’s, Democracy: The God That Failed, a defense of decentralized aristocracy over centralized democracy
-How resource scarcity could breakdown mass society in the future
–Whether technology will continue to be a force for centralization in the future
–Mr. Raven’s essay on beauty and the role of aesthetics in politics and society
-How America undervalues aesthetics as a hustler society
-Why old money people are superior to new money strivers
-How old money vs new money struggles play out in politics
-The class dynamics in California
-Mr. Raven’s observations on living in San Francisco in 1991
-Why neither Robert nor Mr. Raven voted for Trump
-The case for Trump as a placeholder for preventing the other side from doing bad things
-The economics of the arts
-The problem of conservatives and populists being philistines on art and culture
-Art fascists, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and the Italian Futurists
-The segment of the dissident right that is more culturally sophisticated
-Why Enclavism needs a pluralist dualism of diverse downtowns with homogenous bedroom communities
Robert Stark interviews Mr. Raven