A Bad Trip with Leo Strauss: Review of Matt Pegas’s The Black Album
A pragmatic proposal for the reintegration of those too far gone.
With the growing popularity of O9A1 and contemporary Discord spin-offs like Rapewaffen and 7642, 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 keistered 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 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.
Order of nine Angels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Nine_Angles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/764_(organization)