"Harassment Architecture" by Mike Ma: A Review
A Review & Analysis of this quintessential extremist classic from 2019
The only White Boy Summer worth having in this wicked world teetering towards its ultimate reckoning is a summer of sun & steel. It’s easy to forget that and lose yourself in frivolities. But no, you must harness the life-giving rays of The Sun not just to indulge in sensual pleasure with greater zest but to conquer the slothful slug within you. You must let the sunlight propel you towards lucid sobriety of spirit to grow in enlightenment and embrace the sting of lifting steel to grow in musculature. Without those two together, after all, what are we even doing? Unless we become jacked mystics, how can we expect God to save us? Only the warrior-scholar has conquered the modern world within himself.
With that in mind, I have let my intuition guide me towards books that will act as fuel for the flame of thumnos in my heart, and so it has come to pass that I have read Harassment Architecture for a third time. This book, which came out in 2019, remains quintessential in a sensitive young man’s library.
Harassment Architecture is nebulously structured like a journal, at times even documenting what day of the week it is or the author’s current location, as he chronicles his quest for meaning at the end of history. I’m sure Mike wouldn’t appreciate me using such a turns-of-phrase as “Quest for meaning” but that’s still essentially what it is. His attitude of cocky and carefree youthfulness is there to crack jokes and deconstruct liberal bullshit along the way, and his attitude of romantic virile nihilism easily draws you in to this highly experimental book even if your soul doesn’t already hum with that vibe every second of your life. There are times when his quest takes a pit stop at the blackest pitch of destructive Nihilism that he can discover, and this is highly necessary for anyone on a sincere quest for meaning because only by really revelling in the feeling of meaninglessness and being acquainted with it is one able to discern what is genuinely meaningful. Indeed, one must even be able to frequently dive back into the dark ocean of Nihilism to ensure that one’s new idols are not corroded by its waters, to ensure that they are as worthy of veneration as we suppose! Such hard truths have never been more true than in our time, because the blame for the miasma of spiritual squalor that permeates Modernity belongs squarely to the fact that meaningless gobbledygook is being exalted as an ersatz religion: “Human Rights” “Equality” “Progress” and so on. Any astute person knows at this point that those are but the names of false gods, and those brave enough1 to accept this to the fullest extent are the ones who wind up completing the quest for meaning. But when you’ve knocked down those idols, the ice-cold howling winds of the bleak possibility of there being simply no meaning to anything at all starts blowing your way, and you must not shy from this. This bleak blizzard may knock you down for a while at first, but you must get up and learn to brave these winds, you must let this storm of nihilism make you strong. Only then will you be able to carry the new idols to come in your heart.
This book is at its most nihilistic2 when Mike entertains the possibility that we really are at “The End of History” - when he considers if it’s really the case that “This is it.” The triumphal bellow of Liberalism excites screams of existential horror in those who are sensitive to the higher things in life. Hope strong enough to stir him into affirming life is only present when he considers that there is a new historical cycle coming, after a convergence of catastrophes that wipes the slate clean enough to build something new. I relate to his wholeheartedly, and dorky effete philosophers could never understand this sentiment. For the dry pundits and drole commentators out there, what invites nihilistic feelings is the possibility that the immensely complex structure of law, business, etc. that secures commodious bourgeois living is irreparably damaged and will soon come crashing down. But for people like me who still have thumnos in their veins, what unleashes the onslaught of nihilistic anguish is precisely the possibility that the suffocating legalistic bureaucracy will never end and will precisely keep on growing as the most naive Liberals still think it will. There is nothing more horrifying to me than the prospect that the lifestyle of working in white collar jobs in-between lounging around your suburban home is the only lifestyle there is left. Nothing makes my skin crawl more than considering that the state-media-academia-corporate bureaucracy will keep on growing forever and encroach upon every aspect of human life everywhere, suffocating every possibility of higher life with ruthless “rational” efficiency before it even has a chance to cry. Let the world burn in Nuclear Fire forevermore, for all I care, if this is the “end of history!” Yes, my dear reader, I make confession to you: whenever there is a possibility of catastrophe on the horizon I root on the side of the catastrophe. I was quite disappointed that hundreds of millions didn’t die from Covid-193, and if The Fire From Heaven comes to cleanse this junkyard world I will get a flamethrower to make sure it doesn’t miss anything. I am on the side of The Fire because I still have fire in my soul4.
Yes, us Sons of Europe who are Aryan in Blood and Spirit crave a lifestyle of adventure in the manner of Alexander The Great’s Conquests at the level of base instinct that a fish craves a lifestyle of swimming or a tiger the life of the hunt. We are teased with such a life constantly in historical monuments, video games, tv, and for those of us with naturally high Thumnos this is just utter torture because the drive to live out such a life is aroused in us constantly only to be always denied its natural satisfaction at every turn by bureaucracy, finance, “law” “morality”, and other tricks of our rat overlords. Our ancestors who tamed the American Wilderness got to live out this innate lifestyle of adventure but the bureaucracy they created out of the wilderness they tamed was subverted to become the greatest system of slavery ever thought up by the mind of Man.
Precisely what makes some depressed is what makes us optimistic: The possibility that the system will collapse, leading to the possibility of new warlords, new campaigns of conquest, new adventures, new civilizations. I think that there is no way to “restore western civilization” but I respect those who go about this in a certain way. No, what young hot-blooded Aryans must look forward to now is not a “Renaissance of the West” that will be too little at too late a time but a new grand epochal cycle that is as different from Western Christendom/Faustian Civilization as it was from Greco-Roman Civilization5.
Mike Ma soon discovers real values and idols worth exulting, and these look much like the ones that were present before The French, Industrial, and Sexual Revolutions held sway over the mind of Western Man. But I don’t think that the label “Trad” could ever be accurately applied to Mike Ma. He is too free-spirited and amoral to fit into the “Trad” mould, and I think most “Trads” could never accept one as wild as the author of Harassment Architecture. Mike’s quest ends having arrived at certain definite hunches, certain absolute moral and spiritual intuitions that he has a confident faith in but which can’t quite be articulated in a concrete system of faith, nor does he desire this. Yes, I believe Mike Ma’s circuitous quest for meaning ends at the same place mine did a few months before discovering this book for the first time: We need a new expression of eternal values. This is the start of a new quest, essentially, or perhaps the second chapter in a grander saga would be a more accurate way of putting it. The new and eternal values must be lived out, felt, embodied, and glorified. Vitality, tribalism, finding God in Nature, the coming Judgment that will wipe out this bloated society, the honourable love of warfare: these are among the positive road signs that point us questers towards our goal.
Perhaps all of those things were a foregone conclusion, but you need to be reminded of them much more than you think. You need to read books like this so they colour your thoughts and thus propel you to a life of virile spiritual accelerationism because whether you notice or not a thousand lies are already implanted deep in your mind and a thousand invisible hands are trying to drag you down into the abyss.
The greatest value of this book lies in what I think many of you might find most disturbing about it. Without spoiling too much, the author understands what radical steps are necessary to really build a new world in place of this one, and his violent exhortations are good at shocking yout of complacency. If that troubles you, that’s because you’re too lily-livered to even be involved in this whole scene to begin with, or you still just don’t understand how bad things really are.
Overall, this book comes highly recommended by me.
You can still purchase it on Amazon.
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The ones who aren’t brave enough to accept that these are false gods wind up needing to lie to themselves, and thus in a twisted way become the most zealous supporters of the establishment. But the vast majority of course are not even astute enough to see through the falseness of the modern idols, and these gormless majorities will not cease believing in these false idols until long after they come crashing down directly on them.
I am not “a nihilist” but since the only things presented to most people as meaningful are utter nonsense like Liberalism, I am quite sympathetic to such folks, and offer my newsletter to them as a way out.
I am, of course, un-vaccinated.
But why wait for the fire to come? There are “suggestions” that we shouldn’t wait around idly for the blaze to ignite but that we must accelerate by doing its job ourselves. I send my highest kudos and honour to those of you courageous enough to accelerate in this manner, so long as you do it wisely. That is all I will say about this.
I use the Spenglerian terms here. For those of you not familiar, Spengler considers Greco-Romanity and “The West” to be two different civilizations as opposed to different “phases” of one civilization as mainstream historians do. He calls The West “Faustian” because it is characterized by, among other things, a love for infinite space and a desire to surpass all limitations. I think Spengler is right about many things but I am not straightforwardly “A Spenglerian” and I think The West is characterized by a tension to be sincerely yet uniquely Christian and/or to be Faustian. But I think Spengler misunderstands Western Christianity, lumping it in with “Magian” civilization (“Magian” is Spengler’s catch-all term for the near eastern religiosities - Islam, Zoroastrianism, etc.) and failing to understand that West Christianity is characterized by believing that the Transcendent is very near, that it is a person, or a Eucharist that can be consumed in one’s body ever week - and this tendency in The West to believe the Transcendent Kingdom of Heaven can be brought down to Earth or already is results in a feeling absent in “Magian” Semitic religiosity even when the Semites are Christian because our Christianity was always different from theirs even if it “comes from” them. I will write more about this at another time, on the uniqueness of Western Christianity.