The Great American Remnant

Should We Appeal To The Masses Or The Remnant?

One of the most important articles for dissidents to read is an essay that dates back to 1936. This article clearly lays out a fundamental concept regarding historical, political, and spiritual evolution.

It was written by a man named Albert Nock, a well-known social critic of the era. It is not his concept, but one he noticed was recognized by eminent men throughout all of human history. Starting with Isaiah—the biblical prophet.

What is notable about Nock is that he was one of the first Americans to point out this concept and apply it to our modern day.

The concept itself is the need for people like us to focus on edifying a remnant of the people, instead of the general population. Our task is not to awaken the many, but to strengthen the few.

Even though Albert Nock uses Isaiah as an example, this essay is not just a religious work. Nock is far from an evangelical or anything of the sort. He also uses Greco-Roman history and pure logic to prove the same point. Don’t skip over this if you are not Christian, he addresses that critique by applying this concept even to the secular. It’s a universal principle that all dissidents should recognize.

Read the full article here. I strongly recommend a full read. But I have highlights below:

In the year of Uzziah’s death, the Lord commissioned the prophet [Isaiah] to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. “Tell them what a worthless lot they are.” He said, “Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don’t mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you,” He added, “that it won’t do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.”
Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job — in fact, he had asked for it — but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so — if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start — was there any sense in starting it? “Ah,” the Lord said, “you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.”
Apparently, then, if the Lord’s word is good for anything — I do not offer any opinion about that, — the only element in Judean society that was particularly worth bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got it through his head that this was the case; that nothing was to be expected from the masses, but that if anything substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it. This is a very striking and suggestive idea; but before going on to explore it, we need to be quite clear about our terms. What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant?
As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord’s word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah’s testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah’s fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts. Curiously, too, he applies Isaiah’s own word remnant to the worthier portion of Athenian society; “there is but a very small remnant,” he says, of those who possess a saving force of intellect and force of character — too small, preciously as to Judea, to be of any avail against the ignorant and vicious preponderance of the masses.
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But without following up this suggestion, I wish only, as I said, to remark the fact that as things now stand Isaiah’s job seems rather to go begging. Everyone with a message nowadays is, like my venerable European friend, eager to take it to the masses. His first, last and only thought is of mass acceptance and mass approval. His great care is to put his doctrine in such shape as will capture the masses’ attention and interest. This attitude towards the masses is so exclusive, so devout, that one is reminded of the troglodytic monster described by Plato, and the assiduous crowd at the entrance to its cave, trying obsequiously to placate it and win its favor, trying to interpret its inarticulate noises, trying to find out what it wants, and eagerly offering it all sorts of things that they think might strike its fancy.
The main trouble with all this is its reaction upon the mission itself. It necessitates an opportunist sophistication of one’s doctrine, which profoundly alters its character and reduces it to a mere placebo. If, say, you are a preacher, you wish to attract as large a congregation as you can, which means an appeal to the masses; and this, in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit. […] If a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician, many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of these several desires, the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities, in every instance, that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message.

Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen; and knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any circumstances, he made no specific appeal to them, did not accommodate his message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favor, and answerable only to his august Boss.
[…]
The prophet of the American masses must aim consciously at the lowest common denominator of intellect, taste, and character among 120,000,000 people; and this is a distressing task. The prophet of the Remnant, on the contrary, is in the enviable position of Papa Haydn in the household of Prince Esterhazy. All Haydn had to do was keep forking out the very best music he knew how to produce, knowing it would be understood and appreciated by those for whom he produced it, and caring not a button what anyone else thought of it — and that makes a good job.
[…]
What chiefly makes it so, I think, is that in any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those — dead sure, as our phrase is — but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.
[…]

If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewußtsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man’s conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.
[…]

So long as the masses are taking up the tabernacle of Moloch and Chiun, their images, and following the star of their god Buncombe, they will have no lack of prophets to point the way that leadeth to the More Abundant Life; and hence a few of those who feel the prophetic afflatus might do better to apply themselves to serving the Remnant. It is a good job, an interesting job, much more interesting than serving the masses; and moreover it is the only job in our whole civilization, as far as I know, that offers a virgin field.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

With this being perhaps the most important paragraph of all:

[The LORD, paraphrased, speaking:] There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.”

Take note here. To every dissident reading this: Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it!

If you read the full article, you will notice that this shift in focus from the remnant to the masses happened in the 18-19th century due to leftism:

This view of the masses is the one that we find prevailing at large among the ancient authorities whose writings have come down to us. In the 18th century, however, certain European philosophers spread the notion that the mass man, in his natural state, is not at all the kind of person that earlier authorities made him out to be, but on the contrary, that he is a worthy object of interest. His untowardness is the effect of environment, an effect for which “society” is somehow responsible. If only his environment permitted him to live according to his lights, he would undoubtedly show himself to be quite a fellow; and the best way to secure a more favorable environment for him would be to let him arrange it for himself. The French Revolution acted powerfully as a springboard for this idea, projecting its influence in all directions throughout Europe.
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Notice the change to leftist Enlightenment principle of “environment” and “society” being the problem with the masses, instead of it being an ingrained spiritual problem. This is the (failed) Enlightenment era mindset that I often critique:

This lie is exactly that: a lie. It is an inversion of the reality that everyone understood before modernity. From Isaiah to the end of Christendom, we all knew that the remnant mattered and the masses did not. We knew there was no way to truly “reach” the masses. The masses simply respond to the leaders. This is a harsh reality of the human condition, but we cannot ignore this reality and expect to find success.

Modern America is spiritually identical to the debauched, wicked civilization that Isaiah himself experienced through Israel/Judah. So what did he do? Isaiah did not focus his message on the average person, but on the few that could hear. We should do the same.

We seek the remnant. There is no use in seeking the masses. They will fall as they always have. And we will rebuild, as we always have. If some come to us, let them come. But there is no use in their conversion being our primary focus.

Now that you understand this essential nature of the character of man, you will start to see it in action in everything you consume.

While you go about your political readings, listening, and watching, you’ll notice two types of strategies that people take:

The first strategy is a focus on reaching the grey masses—I.e., converting the “normie” or “reaching the general public”.
The second group is a focus on reaching the remnant—I.e., edifying those that already have been gifted the capacity to truly understand.

It is not hard to see these strategies in action once you know about them. People like Alex Jones at Infowars are taking the former. Small-time bloggers and podcasters trying to reach true dissidents are taking the latter.

I do not dislike the first group (it may even be needed in some quantity in any society), but I feel it is significantly inferior to the second. The remnant is more important.

Sometimes people start off with good intentions of reaching the remnant and sell-out, because it is more profitable or prestigious to indulge the masses. Some stick to the remnant to the end, and are small and insignificant for just as long. There is no guarantee on any path, but the different strategies do produce different results.

For a more concrete example, you can see my own strategy highlighted in my About Page:

My writing is predominantly for those on the Right who have the capacity to be renewed and restored to their truthful heritage. To build, educate, and mold them into the vanguards we need.

Nowhere do I make the argument that my writing is for the average person. Because it is not for them. It’s for the remnant. I have chosen to take this path. Others will take other paths. Hopefully, we’ll all meet in the Victory Hall once we rebuild, but nonetheless I fear those taking the other path are doing so misguidedly or with bad intentions. We need the remnant to win, not the masses. We should never lose sight of this.

What the people want does not matter. They don’t even know what they want or can conceptualize the consequences of that want. The remnant does and can. Seek them out. Edify them. Support them. Build the remnant, and it will push us forward far more than anything else could.

I once had a commenter ask me if I would choose to lead only 1% of the remnant population or 90% of the entire grey masses. I chose the former. Because the latter is worth nothing. They will never truly be behind you or understand you as that small group of the remnant can. The remnant are the true world movers. Who would say no to a full 1% of them? That’s even being generous; I’d take 0.1%.

Be an Isaiah. Or a Plato. Or a Macus Aurelius. Perhaps even a Dante. Either way, choose the American Remnant. It’s the winning strategy; that all of history clearly narrates for us.

It is also what you are called for, as my brother or sister within this Great Remnant.

Let’s end this article with a whitepill: Study history, and you will find that the remnant has never truly lost. Even since Isaiah’s time, we’ve always pushed on. The masses will drag us down, but we will once again rise back up. We will continue to take part in this great cycle until our final victory at the end of time.

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