How To Write the Banger of the Year - INTERVIEW with NS Lyons, author of The Upheaval

A written interview with NS Lyons about "The China Convergence", winner of the first-ever Yuri Banger of the Year Award

Comrades: Congratulations to

N.S. Lyons

on winning the Yuri Banger of the Year Award! His writing on “The China Convergence” is the best Substack piece I read in 2023 and I highly recommend subscribing to his stack. Today, I am honored to share a written interview with a fellow Demoralized DIEvy League dissident.

The China Convergence

How did you pick the pseudonym N.S. Lyons? 

Without much deep thought, to be honest. It just sort of came to me one day while I was absent-mindedly thinking over starting the Substack. I am a great admirer of C.S. Lewis, though, so I suspect his name was a subconscious influence (though it was not deliberate at the time). I can certainly say at least that the initials do not indicate a secret National Socialist plot, as has been alleged by some of our more sadly schizophrenic friends on the left. 

What motivated you to start a Substack?  

2020 was quite the year, as I’m sure you remember. It was “year zero” for the Revolution, when the ideas that had been brewing in the academy broke out and demonstrated their new dominance over every aspect of American life, from the street to the HR department to the federal government. This was in a sense a kind of “color revolution” by the American elite against their own country, as you have cleverly pointed out before. I had, as it happens, just spent much of the 2010s employed at a DIEvy League university, and had watched firsthand how “woke” ideology had completely taken over the institution before I left. But almost none of my friends or family would believe me when I would try to explain the seriousness and danger of what was happening there (I’m sure many of your readers had similar experiences). So I gave up. Yet just after I escaped the academy the ideological beast seemed to burst its chains and follow me out into the rest of the world.  

Anyway, the chaos and violence of 2020, on top of the pandemic – and, even more importantly, the immediate tidal wave of official lying and gaslighting about what was happening – made the year a very disorienting experience. It seemed obvious to me that we were living through a period of truly tectonic change, in which the ground was rearranging itself under our feet, not only ideologically, culturally, and politically, but in many other terms as well, such as technology’s impact on society, or the geopolitical balance of world power – but this wasn’t (at that time) really being publicly discussed; in fact people were studiously avoiding discussing it. Including in my profession, which ostensibly aimed to make big-picture judgements about the direction of world affairs.

So amid all the lies and feigned ignorance, I came up with the half-baked idea to start writing some kind diary or chronicle, in which I would record and explain as best as I could what was happening, as if to a future historian trying to piece together what had caused the sudden collapse of our civilization. Looking for a way to organize and preserve these initial writings, I decided in early 2021 to start putting them on Substack, which seemed liked the most robustly free-speech friendly platform. I never really expected anyone else would actually read it – it was more just a means to organize my own thoughts. But to my surprise it turned out that many other people were experiencing the same things and were interested in reading and talking about them too.

You chose the Chinese character "luan", which means chaos or upheaval, as your profile picture. What awakened you to the upheavals going on around us? 

My professional specialization is related to the study of China and China’s foreign affairs, and I am pretty well versed in Chinese history. So when our own revolutionary ideological takeover began the similarities to China’s tragic Communist and Cultural revolutions seemed immediately apparent to me, as was the extreme danger inherent to the sort of idiotic and malevolent ideas that began spreading everywhere. I knew the situation would continue to escalate and potentially have serious consequences, as in a sense I had seen it happen before in history.  

So using the Chinese character luan seemed appropriate for this reason. But also because the Chinese have this fascinating, extremely deep historical and continuing cultural awareness of the inevitable cyclical rise and fall of dynasties, empires, and civilizations. “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” In between periods of order and civilization come periods of luan – this great menace that seems haunt the cultural memory of the Chinese spirit.

The word implies more than just random chaos. It also describes a time period when, due to the misrule of a wayward elite, the whole world has come unmoored from the Way of Heaven, and so the established order is shaken apart, life torn asunder by calamity after calamity, until civilizational order can restored by a new rightful authority. It’s this sense of us facing an era of luan or “upheaval” that I was trying to capture. 

How much time have you spent in China or studying Chinese culture? 

A fair amount, probably nearly two decades now in total, in terms of studying China in general. I’ve visited China on and off throughout that time, though the longest I ever spent in the country at one stretch was for a little over a year. I find it endlessly fascinating, in part because it is this great repository of history and accumulated timeless wisdom about the realities, follies, and tragedies of human nature that goes largely unknown in the West. I love the Great Books of the Western world (i.e. the Humanities) for the same reason: they explain the human condition. The Great Books of the East do exactly the same thing, just from a slightly different perspective.  

“The China Convergence” is a masterpiece. What inspired you to write it? 

The horrifying, growing realization over the last few years that, since 2016, many of the features of governance and society that I’d seen develop in the People’s Republic of China could increasingly be seen being implemented in the West, and that something like the China model seems to be the destination our post-revolutionary managerial regime is headed in. I had also grown a bit frustrated with some of the discourse among our fellow “anti-woke,” too many of whom I think see what is happening as just this destructive but ultimately silly counter-cultural movement by blue-haired left-wing snowflake students, and think that what we need is just for the firm hand of a conservative government to crack down on these neo-hippies. I wanted to try to show these that unfortunately that phase of the revolution is long over, and we’re advancing well into the gigantic bureaucratic party-state phase. Combatting this increasingly totalitarian managerial regime is going to require a real shift in perspective and approach by them, from average “law & order conservative” to something far more dissident and counter-cultural themselves.  

What are the similarities and differences between a GAE PMC and a CCP party member apparatchik, or Hunter Biden and a CCP Princeling? 

Ultimately the GAE PMC and the CCP apparatchik both want to do the same thing: micromanage every aspect of life in order to enforce their oligarchic control and use their allegedly superior, enlightened wisdom to force their vision of utopia on all the rest of us. 

The average CCP member is a much more serious person, to be honest. They are in their own way ridiculous, of course, and the Chinese people mock them relentlessly behind their backs and on the internet. But, being old-fashioned Leninists, they are very realistic about the nature of power and force, and are pretty open about how they use it, and about how they rule the Chinese system and Chinese society. With the People’s Republic of China being in what Vaclav Havel labeled a mature “post-totalitarian” phase, the average CCP member is also rather more realistic and open about his self-interested nature, and that of the regime, and is therefore easier, in a way, for common people to understand and deal with compared with our elites.

Our boomer elites still portray themselves as, and even genuinely think of themselves as, passionately counter-cultural rebel flower-children of the 1960s resisting fascist authoritarianism and protecting progress toward some liberal-democratic utopia. In reality they act as iron-fisted tyrants, but this fact makes them feel uncomfortably un-righteous, so they have to cloak everything they do in the cloying language of compassion and performances of moralistic virtue, and they can never admit their real motives, even to themselves.

We have, I think, way more true believers and practitioners of this kind of nonsense here than in China, where everyone knows what the CCP really is, whether they think it is a good or bad thing for the Chinese nation, and there is less pretending. In comparison the unreality forced on us by our apparatchiks only grows increasingly unhinged, producing the theatre of the absurd that the internet appropriately calls “Clown World.”  

Moreover there is frankly more accountability, and therefore competency, among the CCP, even among its spoiled princelings. The world of the CCP under Xi Jinping is totally cut-throat, with officials regularly being purged. And there is a real concern about keeping corruption from undermining the state’s legitimacy too much. Even if they are usually more a matter of political loyalty, at least these purges inject some level of fear of potential accountability for behavior into the system – at least a sort of Darwinian selection pressure of some kind.

Occasionally a Chinese version of Hunter Biden gets dragged out of his hooker-filled hotel room and off to some black site prison and is never seen again. In contrast our elite face no accountably of any kind for anything they do, so they just grow more and more brazen, incompetent, and transparently ridiculous.

How much do you think the CCP understands baizuo wokeness and how to weaponize it to weaken us from within? 

I think they understand it very well. Because we see them taking seemingly urgent steps to defend against it, for one thing. For example, China has cracked down hard on LGBT and feminist groups, essentially banning them from public life. It has also just announced regulations to further tighten its (already tight) regulations over TikTok-style social media videos, including to ban internet influencers from using “uncivilized” behavior to gain traffic and “spread wrong values.” This includes “deliberately making oneself ugly” in order to “challenge public aesthetics,” e.g. through drag/cross-dressing.

All this is part of a broader effort by Beijing to fortify and wall China off from what Xi Jinping sees as an absolutely fatal global epidemic of cultural nihilism produced by liberalism (which today takes the form of “wokeness” in the West.) He thinks it’s imperative that China retains its cultural cohesion while the West loses it. We know this because his top ideological and strategic advisor, Wang Huning, has said as much for decades (I wrote about this in an essay for Palladium here). Keeping these ideas out of China while they undermine the West seems to be a core part of Xi’s strategy. I think they obviously see the self-destruction of the West as a huge opportunity.  

Whether China is also actively weaponizing and spreading woke ideas in the West I don’t really know. There is some evidence that they are, such as one recent TikTok video in which a young, Western-looking woman railed against marriage, but which sharp-eyed viewers discovered was actually produced in China. On the other hand, though, I think it would be a mistake to assume that China plays any primary role in our self-destruction: we’re more than capable of doing this shit to ourselves, with the CCP probably just doing their best to amplify it where they can. Overall our cultural lunacy is probably more just a source of great entertainment and self-satisfaction for Xi Jinping.

What is the likelihood that the US and CCP go to war? If it happens, how do you think it would play out?  

Well that is a very big question that I probably can’t do justice to here. I don’t think such a war is inevitable; both sides have reasons to avoid it for now, namely the fact that neither can be confident they would win. But sadly I think the chances are nonetheless quite high that there will be a major war within our lifetimes. And if that happens I think it will very likely be a protracted and necessarily global conflict. Which is to say pretty cataclysmic. We would then find out pretty quickly the answer to a really big question: which country’s economy and military is more of a fake paper tiger. And we’d experience what the world would look like with suddenly a whole lot less globalization. Which would probably be pretty rough for everyone for a while.  

How much do you believe in spirituality and that many of our current battles are in the spiritual realm? 

Quite a bit, I’ve been forced to conclude. It’s fair to say that the experience of the last few years has converted my mindset. You can’t look evil in the face – especially, in my case, knowing the depths of depravity revealed by the catastrophic history of communism – and not have to reckon with evil as a real thing. And in that case, if you recognize evil as a reality, you must then also accept the necessity of its opposite, the Good, and some kind of right order of things in the world. Suddenly you’re then on a religious path – and must take much more seriously the testimony of so many witnesses to the evil of totalitarianism, like Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn, who portrayed it as a great “possession” of mankind – a turn to mass madness that came as the result of society forgetting God, and therefore any real sense of morality, normality, or the inherent dignity of an individual human life.  

I think even many previously non-religious people can feel this today. They can feel, almost palpably, the spirit of madness or simple wrongness that has its grip on our societies. Even if they don’t want to admit it. But come now: one can’t see some of our more wide-eyed, self-medicating and -mutilating gender-goblins, as they try to tear down everything good and beautiful, and torment everyone normal, and not suspect that they’re at least metaphorically possessed by something deeply malevolent, much like Mao’s Red Guards or Hitler’s SS. I think this is the real reason we’ve seen so many former atheists recently either converting to religion or at least admit that their former belief that atheism could form a stable basis for civilization was a terrible mistake. Because at this point it’s pretty clear that, to paraphrase Jordan Peterson, if you kill God you just end up with Stalin instead.

What are the best ways we can push back and restore sanity? 

That’s another question that is too big to do justice to here. I think it would be best to accept that our power structures and cultures in the West may be lost for now – but also that there is nonetheless a plurality of sane, normal people who currently feel very isolated. The real task is to bring those people together, to network them, and to weave together a distinctly counter-cultural parallel society – an island of sanity within our batshit crazy broader society. I.e. to build a Parallel Polis as first described by the Czech anti-communist dissidents. It is from there that a solid basis could be established from which to wage a real counter-revolution. I’ll be writing a lot more on this soon, so if people are interested they should probably subscribe… 

What are you looking forward writing about in 2024? Any major contrarian predictions? 

My main priority is now to write about this question of what is to be done, and to expand on what a practical “parallel” strategy would look like and involve. And how it could generate real political power. I don’t think anyone has yet done that very successfully. In terms of more contrarian takes, I think I may have to write a follow up to “No, the Revolution Isn’t Over, ” as I think after the recent backlash against DEI in elite universities some people are getting a bit too optimistic about the prospect of woke going away. The reality, as I think needs to be emphasize again, is that our whole ruling regime – not only in this country but across the whole Western world, both government on non-government – is not only woke, but worse than woke: it is the true source of woke.

The principles of woke and everything many people hate about it will remain and simply be readjusted, even if the language of woke is put away and a tactical retreat is made on a few subjects like college admissions. What people need to understand is that, as I explained in “The China Convergence,” we can’t simply “de-wokify” the regime, because woke is really a reflection of the managerialist ideology at the core of all our regimes and institutions today. So there is no use hoping things will improve on their own; a coherent and concerted strategy is going to need to be implemented for anything to really change at any fundamental level. 

How did you learn how to write long-form so well? Where did you write before joining the platform? How has the transition been from part-time to full-time writing? 

I didn’t, not really. Though I’ve always kind of enjoyed writing in general, I didn’t do any writing of this sort at all before starting the Substack, other than some scattered professional writing of various reports and things. I just sort of went for it. But let me advise anyone who will listen: don’t write long-form, lol. It’s just not worth it. If you really want to successfully grow a Substack, release something quick and formulaic at least once a week. Channel your inner Heather Cox Richardson!

Only write long essays like me if you are a masochist with a dying need to hammer out your scattered thoughts on paper, enjoy long stretches of watching your subscriber count dwindle away, and are probably just slightly mad. That said, somehow it has largely worked out for me so far, for which I am profoundly grateful to my subscribers, and to Substack as a platform. I’m still in the tail end of a transition out of job and into making this my full-time gig, but will have completed that by the start of 2024 – which is exciting and terrifying in equal measure.