Running With Stray Pups: On the Ground

Real Examples of Myth vs Truth and Their Lessons

Let’s rewind from where I left off in the last article in this series and go back to late 2013 and early 2014, which are some very important years that teach lessons foundational to modernity. I remember being in my first civics class during the ‘13-14 school year. It was very clear during 2012-2014 that something extremely serious was changing in society and that the neo-liberal vs neo-con paradigm was being shattered. Culturally speaking there was the rise of an entirely new pop-culture occurring, underground rap culture was starting to make a comeback, tumblr communism was ramping towards its peak, and internet culture was shifting from being centered around imageboards to places like twitter. For me though one of the most influential things I encountered was the Euromaidan revolution which I lightly touched upon in the last Running With Stray Pups article. For those who are unaware the Euromaidan was a protest in Ukraine that started in November of 2013 and quickly grew into an occupation of Kyiv and eventually a revolution. I was pointed towards this protest from the /k/ board on 4Chan which I grew up browsing, and which had collated a series of 24/7 livestreams of the protests from hacked and public IP cameras. I quickly became obsessed with this protest because the scenes from it were incredible and unlike anything I had ever seen before which resonated with me deeply. I was not alone in this either, the livestreams clearly struck home with most of the /k/ and /pol/ boards, the communities digitally chanting on the protesters. Most of us online at the time viewed the protests as the manifest destruction of the Neo-Con/Neo-Lib paradigm I mentioned earlier (oh how wrong we were) paralleling the events in Ukraine with how things were here at home. Watching these people on the ground gave me and others like me an individual conscience of just what life is like for your average person going through a revolution or in a protest and just what they were thinking. Though of course, seeing things only online one only gets a romanticized version of events, even when things are ugly.

One of our greatest flaws as human beings is the way we romanticize our emotions and morality, sometimes into new stories and other times into individualism. This of course is the curse of a natural man seeking the truth. There is of course, goodness in natural law and in our emotions but when man apart from God seeks meaning through these things he will cobble together his own God out of natural law and his emotions because He does not know the true God in whom these emotion(love) and law are reconciled and ordered appropriately. Romanticism is a philosophy built upon the exploitation of these two flaws, basing the highest good in the subjective emotionalism and perceptions of human beings. Romanticism is the Philosophy behind the French revolution, which destroyed the Roman Catholic Church and instead instated the atheist state religion of the Cult of Reason. It is this same revolutionary philosophy that is at work today in many places, but it is manifesting itself both in “left wing” and “right wing” politics in America, in fact even the “right wing” is a proponent of it and it’s methodology.

The reason why I called the first two articles in this series (there will be more) “Running with Stray Pups” is because that’s exactly who rioters are. Rioters not only behave like a pack of stray dogs but like pups and domesticated dogs, they are not truly dangerous and harmful except that they are in a pack, but they also think like stray dogs too. Like lost animals rioters have banded together and have no singular true good other than that which exists in and amongst their heigherarchy, with the most wolf-like usually dominating the top. Rioters also have no real aim other than the proliferation and flourishing of the pack, any unifying story they have is just that, a story. Contrast these mere dogs to something like a lone wolf and we see that the breed of that which riots is something that is urbanized and truly lost. However, stray dogs can become pets, that is their natural state as domesticated animals and that’s the state which they prefer, they are not intended to be stray dogs but to be more than property in the sense that they function as a familial member that works in cooperation with a human family, in a perfect society stray dogs don’t exist. This observation of dogs and human politics actually goes fairly deep, though I will get to the other parts of the analogy in a later writing.

The thing about all of this is that stray pups; those who run with mobs, are those who are caught up in many of the fundamental flaws of humanity that are exploited and that we ourselves as individuals romanticize, the only difference between the two is the higher reasoning of humans, meaning that myth is what directs the mob, not just natural instincts. This human flaw brings us to a conversation I had with a family I met at the George Floyd riots in 2020. Yes, I was there at the Capitol riots here in Denver, not to participate but to observe. At the time I was involved in far-right/alt-right(or whatever you would like to call it) activism and I had been a member of groups like Patriot Front and after being removed from that group I floated around in the world of the far-right activists and organizations. Some local guys I knew wanted to go to see what things there on the ground were like. The scenes I saw that day were not actually all that shocking or surprising. Though, seeing things with your own eyes and in person is an unforgettable experience. We parked a few blocks away from the Capitol Building and on the walk to the Capitol we walked past a half dozen supply stations that were handing out food, water and medical supplies. Right when we got two blocks away there were obvious signs of a riot, we had to walk past a destroyed news van(the company of which I am not legally allowed to name, though it was sympathetic to the rioters) and the buildings began to be covered in graffiti. Upon reaching the Capitol there was a lot going on but for the sake of this story only a couple notable things, a few windows of the Capitol Building were smashed, a few were boarded up and graffiti covered everything, and I mean everything it was almost as though every square inch of the capitol had graffiti covering it, a truly unimaginable sight. The Police had removed the bollards so they could drive freely around the streets and sidewalk, and the crowd was rather eclectic, a lot of highschool and early college age kids of the rougher variety, the older adults were either activists or seemingly normal people, and the vibe of those who were not immediately around the police and tear gas was more of a party than it was of a riot, in fact at one point someone offered eggs to all those near us to throw at the police. My experience of the George Floyd riots was very strange, and it’s almost impossible to explain what was experienced and the wide diversity of attendees that I observed and interacted with there. After watching the push and pull of the skirmish between the cops and the rioters and interacting with a few rioters we decided it was time to move from the capitol steps in the center of the riot to somewhere where less tear gas was being deployed.

Finding a slightly better spot on the other side of the Capitol, we encountered a Latino family of about six or seven in size, four or five adults and two kids, the oldest of whom was about 7 or so years old, maybe younger. It was in talking to this family, who told us of their life problems that I heard some things that made me realize ‘wait your rioter isn’t your average activist’(at this point in my political life I had almost exclusively battled activists). This family was at the riot because they had their own personal life problems and because they were just sick of the way the government had handled nearly everything for years, the majority of their grievances were basically the same as mine(they were very conservative and family oriented people for Democrats, and existed in a sort of political no man’s land) but most strikingly, the man of the family said they were there because they were told that they were supposed to be there. It was in reflection on this moment and a smattering of other moments like this(which I may get into later) where I realized the majority of the people involved in political action don’t really believe anything of substance, they see the issues and problems of society today and since they are incapable of creating and enacting a solution, just go with whoever’s myth has the most emotional resonance and impact. This family was told about another man who grew up in poverty and died in poverty due to all the same issues they had and that this man was a good man who was martyred and murdered by the same system which treats them awfully and destroys their family, they were told that if they want better lives they should go out in the streets behind this martyr who is exactly like them because that will cause change, so they did. All sides are guilty of this myth making, and they do it as a means to power, the methods of which I will tackle in future writings, but to your average stray dog all you need is something to fight for and a pack. Ultimately, I came away from that experience seeing the mob for what it really is, disgruntled and dissatisfied Denverites.

In the end so much of what we see today is the manipulation of normal people by myth makers, who intend on using the average person as a means to an end. Most of the issues with society today are seen by the majority, because the law is written on man’s heart, this family wanted a society where they could raise children in peace. However it’s the manipulation of this morality and conflating it with passions that myth makers use to exploit people to their benefit. It’s for this reason I wrote the last article in this series because I see far too many young Christians falling victim to the ploys of modern politics and philosophy, and in their passionate yearning for justice are played like a fiddle by a the real enemy, the devil. Young Christians give up their identity in Christ for to instead identify with a myth, this is a problem across the political spectrum and for every Christian. Whether one is chanting on the Right Sector, in Ukraine or Black Lives Matter at home the error of both is the same. They have denied the real truth of God’s law and the Gospel, denying the revelation of Christ and are pursuing their own kingdom, by their own means and justifying whatever their interpretation of law and morality is by their own emotions. So when you hear someone say “X issue is terrible we must do Y thing” learn what they mean by that and why they mean it, and if someone is advocating violence with the promise of a solution don’t be the fool who runs along thinking that there will be an actual utopia delivered(because you got sold a myth and not reality) or that the person speaking truly didn’t mean it, people mean what they say and when people threaten their opposition they mean it, probably more seriously than you know. When a mob says they will burn, loot, pillage and kill, the people speaking mean it, even if the strays don’t and are just looking for an answer. This is one of many reasons why Christians should not run with mobs, like a stray pup they are going astray into something they cannot even begin to fathom because though all I have talked about so far are the strays, there are also Humans and Wolves. The solution to all our problems rest in Christ and in doing things lawfully in accordance with both the law and the gospel, as He would have done. In scripture, war and political conflict are not unheard of, but rebellion, rioting and scheming are the devices of evil and wicked men. When Christ had the opportunity to rebel against Caesar He didn’t take it, even when offered multiple times, and when even His own disciples thought He came to do so and wanted Him to do so. As Christians we must keep our eyes upon the Truth and the God-Man who hung himself upon the cross as the ultimate truth, Him who is greater than myth, not to our passions or to what the world tells us. May Christ our Lord ever guide you and keep you in the way of truth unto life everlasting. Amen. ⳨