Choice Quotes From Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq is the patron prophet and Saint Shiv of Chateau Heartiste. He is a Frenchman novelist who grasps the essential corrosive nature of modern Western society, and who is unafraid to tell it like it is (in language poetic enough to disarm the outer defenses of the Cathedral). Here are a few choice quotes from his books which, I am sure you will agree, closely align with the CH message.

It’s a fact, I mused to myself, that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women, others with none. It’s what’s known as ” the law of the market”. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude…………

Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two. In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag.

– Whatever, quoted in a review of the novels of Michel Houellebecq, “The Suicide of the West“.

The sexual market is not just differentiated from the money market; it is foundational of it. The money market is subordinate to the sexual market, though most times to the conscious observer it seems as if the money motive is all there is. But the exquisite perfidy of the sexual market relies in good part on its shadowy functioning. It works out of sight and mind because few can, or are willing to, discern its intricate workings, and even then, fully discerned and understood, it continues working. Its power is absolute.

Houellebecq here correctly identifies the winners and losers in the liberalized sexual market, and his hierarchy matches the writings uncovered on ancient CH scrolls:

Alpha males: biggest winners.
Alpha females: marginal winners.
Beta females: marginal losers.
Beta males: biggest losers.
Omega males and females: same as it ever was.

But the alpha male suffers a penalty of the soul for his embarrassing riches. As the commenter The Man Who Was… put it:

“Success with women is more disillusioning than failure.”

Houellebecq says much the same. The least romantic are those who have gorged on romance. Like economic prosperity, fulfillment of man’s deepest desires is the very success that suffocates his idealism, crushes his hope, and enervates his spirit.

The only known cure for a failing empire, like 2013 America, is economic and social collapse, to seed the ground for rebirth. Similarly, the only known cure for a bifurcated, winner-take-all sexual market, is collapse of equalism, that wrong-headed ideology which assumes the sexes are interchangeable. The collapse is inevitable, whether it happens all at once or slowly, because these forces, having been set in motion generations, perhaps millennia ago, perhaps even set in motion at the very beginnings of humanity, are incorruptible. One cannot manage or reason with the Gods of the Copybook Headings. The prime directive, will, once again, as it has done so many times before, shatter all illusions.

***

It is interesting to note that the “sexual revolution” was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word “household” suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.

– The Elementary Particles

The modern leftoid is not a Communist. He is a radical indivdualist. The nuclear family is the final defense against unfettered individualism. Hence, the need for its destruction. As long as there are functioning nuclear families, there is the possibility for in-groupism, tribal loyalty, and nationalism. And these are anathema to certain peoples. The Western man has at last been reduced to a gram of currency, rendered powerless, unable to perceive his growing powerlessness as his sinister baubles and superficial dopamine fixes become more entertaining, distracting, and enfeebling.

***

To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.

– The Possibility of an Island

Modern Western society has been one giant compliance hoop, to borrow a term from the pick-up literature. Maybe a better way to describe modern Western society is as the mother of all cockteases. The Western man has been orbiting in the LJBF zone for decades, gratification and glory so tantalizingly near, a simulacrum of the moist pleasures of kingship held to his parched lips, yet at the same time all this has remained light years from his possessive clutch, cruelly mocking him from a guarded, viewable distance. As a reader comments:

Show men endless images of beautiful models and actresses and singers, show them endless images of beautiful, slim, women engaging in sex with enthusiasm, tell them that a world of uncommitted and marriageless sex is the norm — then, for reasons they don’t understand, slam the door in their face.

This is not a prescription for long term stability.

We are the front lines of a grand sociological experiment the fruits of which are just now beginning to ripen. There is no way to know the exact contours it will trace, because nothing of this precise nature on this gargantuan scale has befallen an entire civilization of our size, until now. But if past performance of similar civilizational devolutions is indicative of future returns, there is little cause for optimism. The omens are everywhere.