In the West, reproduction is practiced at a fraction of the rate it once was despite our material wealth being magnitudes higher than it has ever been. For all its vast resources and high per capita wealth, the contemporary West is perhaps the most miserably unsuccessful society in human history when it comes to converting resources into offspring. Most countries do not even meet the replacement level fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. What else are we storing up resources for if not the future? Those who leave no legacy have no future: what is their resource-driven future orientation for then if not to build the potential for creation and procreation? What is the wealthiest civilization on the planet going to do with all those shekels when it surely dies, alone and afraid? Nothing. Many Westerners are therefore acquiring resources, for the sake of acquiring resources. It is hedonism-materialism, pursuing purely pleasure and property. Much of our economy just consists of shifting these resources back and forth, frequently in the abstract form of currency (as in the financial industry). The gatherer has beaten the hunter, the farmer, and the craftsman, and sits atop a mound of Chinese plastic and silicon. Everyone lives in their own little cave, filing their hoard with what only matters to themselves. There is no value to such a lifestyle, because everything one has worked for will be meaningless upon death. In the world of anomie, having a community —having shared ties of extended kinship, local neighbors, mutual values, and cooperative goals—is an abstraction. One is born into a highly individualistic culture that is agnostic at best about the value of social cohesion and shared identity, while downright zealous about resource acquisition and selfishness. And of course, virue-signaling about how piously cosmopolitan they are.

The only transcendent goals, going beyond the pursuit of economic and material happiness, are those one sets for himself. The only meaning in the alienated, atomized West is one that is self realized. Western man no longer recognizes the advancement of the race, procreation, or anything outside himself as all that important. But to be fair, most people are incapable of doing this level of introspection anyway, either unwilling or indifferent. Weak institutions lead to weaker persons, and the lemmings were never interested in higher ideals to begin with. We can “be” whatever we want to be, but we don't want to be something —we want to own some things. There is thus a default to egoistic perpetual consumption, fling one's void with market goods, because that's the message being communicated. If not hedonism materialism, what? For some, especially on the left, a secularized pseudo-religion of equality, diversity, and social justice has stepped into their headspace. In the United States, if one is not part of the coastal progressive, cosmopolitan culture in mind or geography—the mindset of the Judeo-Saxon elite, those Davos men at home in any penthouse in the world—he or she is inherently alienated. Folkish people like that don't believe in making their country into the world's shopping mall, in multiculturalism, in “affimative action,” in homosexual marriages, in transgenderism, in preferred pronouns, in xenophilia and ethno-masochism, or in other strains of cultural marxism, or are indifferent to them. Judeo-Calvinist Progressivism is not their paradigm. They are literally alienated —made to feel foreign by it. They feel no connection to this supposedly high culture and is cult of virtue signaling about self- hate and the original sin not being a person of color.

The Amerikaner is under siege by these values. They are on television. They are in the universities. They are in the halls of government. They are in the newspapers and in the journals of opinion. Anywhere he goes in the United States, he will see, hear, and read them being communicated. But they are someone else's set of norms and values, not traditional or organic in any sense to much of their audience. That very conflict is what produces so much alienation, | think—the reordering of America’s norms at the whim of an elite brahmin caste. It hates — the historical American nation and says so quite frankly, labeling [White] enemies as racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. It is being hated for having the wrong values system, despite the mismatch being due to an external force doing the validation. It is double alienation—living in a hyper individualistic consumer culture while being ruled by a hostile semi-foreign elite.

Change has come so rapidly that there are people still live who remember a very different world. | don't even mean the 1950s. | could be referring to the 1970s or 1980s even. Maybe the 1990s. Our postmodern compulsion to remember history by arbitrary ten-year blocks is testament to the collapse of norms in and of itself. (The Romans used to mark time periods by whoever was consul or emperor, and the Japanese still mark them by reigning monarch). And then we are born into this, into a blurry date range spanning 1980-2000. We are born into these “communities” of doublespeak ethics, parallel isolation, voracious consumption of goods, and double alienation. It's a wonder that there are any thoughtful people who don't feel anomie. If one has values beyond hedonism-materialism and rejects cultural marxism, he will not feel at home in Weimerica. There are studies showing now that young people today are the most conservative generation since the Boomers, even if most of them are liberals. People don' like what's being forced upon them.

2D Master Race? The Anime Question I have to make good on the bait, so now let's talk anomie, anime, and the Alt-Right. Why do so many accounts on Twitter with anime profile pictures spew so-called hate? Why are adult and teenage American men watching Japanese cartoons? Why are there so many jokes about NEETs? Stop telling me to watch Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Why did the (((Forward))) write an article about this? What is a two-dee waifu? Who are cuckservative consultant Rick Wilson's “childless single men who masturbate to anime?” Is this just imageboard/chan culture like TayAI? How did an internet movement centered around White nationalism develop an association with Japanese cartoons? Was the entire purpose of this article to make a pun? Did you honestly write ~6500 words because of a pun? Anime first made its major inroads into the United States in the 1980s, when the Japanese economy was booming and 40 years had passed since the atom bombs fell. During that time period, both societies underwent tremendous social transformations. Japan had been opened to the world economically more than ever before and become a land of densely packed cities, bullet trains, and glistening skyscrapers. The United States landed on the Moon, amidst race riots in its declining industrial cities and quixotic crusades against communism in the jungles of Vietnam. Something was wrong with this society. By the 1990s, politicians of the right in the United States openly talked of a culture war being fought against their country. Paleoconservatives raged. Liberals laughed. But now men can eat gay wedding cake in women's bathrooms while blogging about trigger warnings.

When anime came to the United States, it came during a high tide of popular globalization. Sure, some industries were rusting away, but white-collar opportunities were booming. 1980s America was characterized by a sort of whiggish capitalism—things got continuously bigger and better for many people. Incomes were up and prices on goods were down, as foreign imports came rushing in. Cultural products from Japan and elsewhere began to make their way over to the deracinated and voracious United States. This was around the same time MTV and rap music took off as well, and when women were entering the workforce in huge numbers not seen since wartime. The consumer culture had found new markets and clients. On the surface, none of these really have much to do with one another, but the children of the 80s and ‘90s were indeed growing up in another world than their parents had. A world of working mothers and divorces; of popular, anti-social, urban black music, and of economic growth that seemed to legitimize cultural changes. A world that was moving or had moved to the suburbs, and required to import culture due to a lack of community, of a shared expressed meaning. A radically changing world. A world of anomie. And anime. So in my opinion, it is hardly surprising that foreign animated films and television series made their entry at this time—whether subtitled or localized—and that they captured the imagination of young Americans. On some level, anime was just another novelty, something to mindlessly gawk at.

But it wasn't just a novelty. It survived the era and grew steadily in popularity. People made subtitled bootleg releases of shows that weren't formally licensed and professionally localized. On VHS tapes even. In the early 2000s, anime exploded in popularity for a younger audience via Cartoon Network's Toonami and Adult Swim content blocs, which aired licensed, localized shows primarily aimed at teenage boys. Shounen adventure series like Dragonball Z or Digimon captured the imagination of American kids who wanted to be heroes but maybe didn’t like sportsball. (Not to go off on too much of a tangent here, but heroes used to be historical or mythical story figures who communities were taught to look up to, not people chasing balls around). With the rise of the internet and peer-to-peer torrenting clients, amateur translations of non-licensed shows could be shared with infinitely larger audiences in digital format (way more accessible than VHS tapes). Fans could discuss their favorite series in forums and on imageboards, developing their own memes and subcultures. The latest development has been streaming services—Netflix is full of anime series now. It's gone full circle from hobbyists to normies. How did anime become so popular? Is it really that popular in the first place? | would say it has definitely achieved a niche that wasn't there before, and broad "brand recognition” beyond that niche. Everyone knows what anime is. Its definitely found a place in American popular culture, even if it isn't of America. But again, how?

At the risk of painting with too broad a brush, | would say that anime offers a kind of escapism and presents the audience with a story driven by characters and events. Granted, that probably sounds very generic and like any other story-telling format. But | think there is more to it than that, because if you compare it to what's popular on American television now—and what has been for the last 20 years and intensifying in the last 10—there is a big difference. These are very different storytelling formats, and they appeal to different sorts of people—especially true for the pro-Trump, childless, and under-employed male cohort. There is a deficit of domestic meaning, and it is being filled by the foreign.