A pragmatic proposal for the reintegration of those too far gone.

With the growing popularity of O9A and contemporary Discord spin-offs like Rapewaffen and 764, Pegas is attempting to mitigate the damage while appealing to these 4chan nihilists. There’s a hint of self-awareness in the first part of the book, during which he has a long exchange with a mentally ill young man. Pegas opened the door, and this kid ran right past him into O9A necrophilic goat-fucking territory. He attempts to bring him back into the fold of a reactionary program but fails. The energy he unleashed cannot be reined in through Socratic discourse.

The central reactionary pragmatism expressed by Pegas indicates that he’s painfully aware of where the pipeline can end. The inverted morality gleefully propagated by would-be school shooters is a direct threat to the formation of a coherent right that’s capable of mobilizing political action. In one of the essays, he fondly recalls the energy and unity in Charlottesville as an example of when the right came together before its cannibalistic vitriol turned inwards and grifters became informants.

His nostalgia for getting stomped out by anti-fascists and then ramming crowds with a 21% APR Dodge Charger lays bare the bankrupt cowardice of his strategy. There’s no dignity or glory in his vision. He wants crybaby unification and a show of force from weak men who prefer the comfort of insulated road rage. Behind the memes are frightened little boys who run from a fight but strike when no one’s looking.

Throughout the collection, he scatters fragments of his project, which, when mashed together, form a soggy polemic for a reactionary program that attempts to rehabilitate those too far gone to be politically useful.

As he attempts to recalibrate the fringe, he offers them a reformulated esotericism—one he hopes can reinvigorate decrepit traditional forms. But at the core is a rigid Straussian pragmatism he can’t shake. Look closely behind the apparition of myth, and you’ll find a cold, strategic rationalism.

You can’t dom the sacred.

Pegas cannot escape his neurotic compulsion to order and make sense of the world. Even his spirituality is just opportunism he’s boofed past the guards.In A Curse Against the World, Pegas opens by quoting a fictitious livestreamer who awkwardly fumbles through a string of erotic metaphors:

“I’m not just in tradition as such, but the phases of tradition. How sparks of spiritual ecstasy tumescence into civilizations and empires but then how the erection fades… trying to recreate the divine sparks. I am interested in reigniting spiritual will to power. What we need now is some good spiritual pornography.”

He unintentionally lays bare the vapidity of his project by invoking a pornographic imitation of the sacred.

He names his cock, “Divine Sparks” as he lubes it for spiritual ecstasy with a dollar-store knockoff of the will to power. He straddles a 3D-printed blow-up doll designed to resemble St. Teresa of Ávila mid-tumescence and begins to fuck it. With one thrust, he tenses up and unintentionally coats the modest saint with rope after rope of his pent-up, no-fap penitence. His erection fades as he solemnly declares his congealing DNA: Tradition.

The pornographic performance of spirituality throughout The Black Album never develops beyond liturgical roleplay. It’s a memeified divinity emptied of content that functions solely to evoke emotional excitation. From the start, Pegas approaches the sacred like Leo Strauss does myth: as a tool to construct ideology without concern for the real. The sacred, for him, holds no intrinsic value; it exists only to prop up tradition and serve as the emotional core of his reactionary project.

This simulacrum, born of the chronically online, is a bizarre hybrid of pop magick and an Evola-flavored esoteric neofascism. At least Evola starts from spirituality and works outward. Pegas does the opposite. He knows tradition’s cadaver has long since rotted, so he attempts to reanimate it with jolts of “spiritual energy” and mail-order testosterone injections.

He gropes around in the dark, desperate for something to hold onto—but all he manages to grasp is a book by a celebrity influencer who once taught Taylor Swift the Left-Hand Path.

A bad trip with Leo Strauss in the ruins of a disjointed cosmology.

His vision of the sacred is lifted from a mass market guidebook that doesn’t even begin to skim the surface. It’s seemingly a bullet-point introduction to half-wit woo-woo practices in which the author rattles off nonsense about using the sacred to bolster one’s professional career. It’s barely a step up from enrolling in an influencer’s real estate course.

His limited imagination never extends beyond the useful function of the “divine.” It is sheer arrogance to suppose that the erotic energy boiling under the surface of our deeply schizophrenic society can be tapped and put to work goose-stepping towards a no-fap meet-up. It’s like thinking you can put a leash on a tiger and it won’t shred you to bits.

The sacred is in direct contrast to the profane world of utility, in which objects arise out of continuity and are contingent upon their functionality. The practice of sacrifice—or sacred violence—is a return to continuity through the destruction of thinghood.

In the text, Pegas unwittingly demonstrates precisely this core aspect. He references a hike he went on as a ritualistic practice during which he refuses to drink his bottle of water and instead leaves it unopened as a sacrificial offering of expenditure. The thing that has the most use is wantonly destroyed for no practical return. This excess is fundamental, and attempting to subjugate it to pithy human practicality is pure hubris. He engages with the sacred on its irrational terms but then misses the point. Perhaps this was left out of his little book of spells.

The only description of a quasi-mystical experience he references is someone else’s psychedelic trip. He is right that psychedelics can allow for a fleeting glimpse of continuity, but he ignores its nefarious double that emerges when the ego attempts to assert control. The mind spirals in endless loops, the world fractures, and rationality collapses. It’s a harsh lesson in humility that Pegas seemingly needs to experience. The “bad trip” is his entire project. There is no balanced cosmic order, only a chaotic fractalization of the ontological field. The more he attempts to impose coherence on a rapidly decomposing world, the more he exposes his panic. It is this metaphysical fear that drives his neurosis.

This anxiety runs throughout the entirety of The Black Album. Pegas approaches the sacred with the nervous energy of a mid-level bureaucrat. He writes up a list of various checks and regulations to channel these irrational forces, and then after filing the proper permits, cautiously nails his proclamations to the door of reactionary Discord servers.

It is a condemnation of life prompted by fear that lies at the core of his position. He takes a good long look at the chaotic, ungirdled eros and declares it guilty. It must be made sense of and harnessed in service of a rational, systematic worldview. Life itself must be put in proper order and in doing so it becomes subject to a fiction that hovers above it, always just out of reach. But the ordering is first constructed and tweaked as an idealistic phantasm. It is then the application of this fiction to lived existence which takes place secondarily. The image can never properly align with the territory, so it begins to degrade life in order to force a fit.

It initially occurred the morning after the first time I did cocaine. I was 21, and on New Year’s Day, my ass began secreting blood. Panic ensued as I attempted to recall every anti-drug PSA I’d seen. I didn’t remember one in which someone does coke and then proceeds to die by bleeding out of their rectum, but I went to the hospital just to be safe. I didn’t want to be the first.

I dragged my moist, tender ass onto the subway and to the Emergency Room where some poor intern stuck her barely lubed finger up it. I winced as she shoved it in and muttered about how I was wasting hospital resources. She wrapped up the exam, rolled her eyes and said, “It’s just hemorrhoids. Buy a cream at any Duane-Reade, and stop reading WebMD ”.

I ignored it like most medical advice I got in my 20s—I didn’t have insurance anyway. Since then, I’ve been plagued by this modern affliction, born from our anal-retentive compulsion to doomscroll while taking a shit. I’d occasionally bleed out of my ass, but it was just a minor indignity.

That is, until I traveled to the Middle East and it became an international humiliation.

On November 18th, 2018, I was in a Syrian oil field outside Hajin, holed up in a defensive encampment as a foreign volunteer in a local militia (YPG). The day before, after several hours of fighting, we’d repelled a counteroffensive until they faded back into the fog. We knew a larger attack was coming, and I was up most of the night on guard duty. In the early morning, the fog thickened, and we stumbled around in the dark, unable to see beyond our own fumbling hands.

I crouched out of sight, shivering in the damp cold as I cupped my cigarette to hide the burning ember. These are the moments when everything slows down, and reality finally sets in. All I could think about was how I’d brought my stupid ass to Syria, spent months pressuring the Hevals¹ to send me to the front—and now I was going to die out here.

Gunfire rang out, breaking my thoughts and flooding my body with adrenaline. The grip on my rifle eased as I realized it was just the commander, firing into the air in an attempt to motivate a reluctant Heval. Some of them refused to do watch. Earlier, during the fighting, I saw a few hiding in the garbage pit—as if closing their eyes would make it all go away. A lot of them were just kids, and even more afraid than me.

After spending the longest four hours of my life sitting in the complete dark with nothing but my anxiety of what was about to come in the morning, I managed a short nap—only to be jolted awake by a new fear, that of being killed while still having to shit. Not only would it be painfully uncomfortable up until my death, but your muscles relax, and everything vacates the bowels. The corpse of an International covered in their own feces would be too good of a propaganda photo for ISIS to pass up. More likely, it would be the image of a headless American, which might actually be preferable; at least then I’d be an anonymous, excrement-caked corpse. But they’d probably just have kept my head around for good measure.

Propelled by the fear of ending up in some scatological jihadist snuff film, I knew it was now or never. Rifle and wet wipes in hand, my asshole resolutely clenched, I jumped the berm separating our defensive position from the open desert and made my way to the designated minefield of human feces just in time. I squatted, and as I defiled the sand, I noticed a fine mist of bright red blood speckling the runny brown film that I had become accustomed to expelling after weeks of eating dry, tasteless chicken and smashed hard-boiled eggs delivered in plastic bags.

The panic set in further as I frantically dabbed my ass with the wipes in a futile attempt to subdue the flow. Not only was I outside the defensive perimeter, pants down around my ankles while an attack was imminent, but my rectum was expelling blood. It’s difficult not to see the humor. When I needed every drop in case I was shot, the cowardly hemoglobin deserted me. Now I only had four pints to spare.

As the flow became a trickle, I remembered what had seemingly become the unofficial motto of the war: “What can you do sometimes?” The answer was almost always—not much, other than to embrace the absurdity of it all. If you can no longer find humor in your fragile fate—when the fantasy fades and only the naked reality remains—then you’ll never make it. You’ll end up hiding in the garbage pit. Bartering with God, trying to convince yourself that it isn’t happening. But it is.

I ran a final wipe over the tender protrusions, confirming that the bleeding had stopped. I pulled up my fatigues and, still clutching the rifle that I had yet to let go of, climbed back over the berm. A few minutes later, an RPG fired from too far away exploded overhead, followed by the sharp whizz of incoming rounds. I removed the electrical tape from around one of my grenades, just in case we were surrounded.This is what I get for bringing my dumb ass to Syria, I thought—at least I won’t shit myself.

Notes:

1. Heval means comrade and refers to anyone in the military structure but in this case I’m talking about higher up commanders.