The controversial non-profit political organization Corrupt Inc. has become a dominant force in dissident internet culture. With their brutal and scarily accurate observations of our modern time, it's easy to see how its philosophy can make an impression on someone. And yet one senses that Corrupt is fundamentally different from its contemporaries, both in the optimism of its outlook and holistic view of modern neurosis.

Alex Birch is the volunteer Editor of Corrupt Inc. and its website Corrupt.org. We recently caught up with him to discuss the organization itself, activism, God, western decline, and of course, kipple.

1. What is Corrupt? What is its worldview?

Corrupt is a think-tank researching the problems of modern society and paving way for a new civil order based on traditional values and ideals. We spread information through blog commentary, web media, street activism and book publications.

Corrupt is neither left nor right, neither liberal nor conservative. Some describe us as futuristic traditionalists. We carry some fundamental political ideals from Platonism and uphold the values and the spirit of the ancients, fused with a perspective and focus on the futuristic. Our worldview can be compared to the music of Kraftwerk: technological romanticism. We want to create and live in a modern civilization, but we reject the design behind modern society, and believe we need to progress through organic culture and traditional lifestyles.

2. What are your particular duties as editor of Corrupt.org? What does a "normal day" entail when volunteering for such an organization?

My duties as editor are many; I receive all articles and column submissions, and edit them until they're ready for publication; I'm responsible for all staff members working with us, making sure they complete projects in time and develop their individual skills for the benefit of the organization as a whole; I send out all public communications; I'm responsible for what goes on the website and how it's published, including technical functionality.

In addition to this I have final responsibility for the content we produce and our progress towards our main goals. It's kind of like being in charge of a political party, keeping up with world news, motivating people, and addressing our ideas in public, although we're not big enough to qualify as a party yet.

We have two kinds of people working with us: the staff member and the contributor. Staff members have specific roles within Corrupt and their job is to develop that role within our main goals. They work in teams and maintain regular correspondence among one another, including me, to which they report in their weekly work. Contributors are people who don't have a permanent role within Corrupt, but help us out by responding to project requests.

All people who want to work with Corrupt start out as contributors. Most of them end up staying contributors, mainly because not many people are able to work consistently on a long-term project, and live fairly disorganized lives. It's a product of our society, so we don't hold it against them, although we've basically moved away from spending too much time on contributors in general, since the idea hasn't paid off. Instead we hope to bring people into the movement by keeping us updated with news, interesting articles and videos, and street activism.

3. How does Corrupt plan to balance the need for active contributers with the need for high quality content?

One of the first lessons you make as an editor is that most people don't have their act together. That means you can't rely upon contributors to sporadically finish important work for you. Because of this, Corrupt encourages contributors to participate in light tasks such as voting up articles and commenting on columns with a link back to us. Everyone who has got 5-10 minutes to spare after work/studies can help us out, without any obligations or tedious instructions. The content you see on the front page is produced by people who have proven to us that they can do more than others, and have therefore been promoted to a position equal to their ability. It's the most realistic and pragmatic option to make things happen with a group of dedicated volunteers.

4. Corrupt has internally and externally evolved since its inception. How have you witnessed Corrupt's cultural role change in your time as editor, and what was done to meet these shifts? What changes do you believe are imminent for Corrupt and its potential audience, and how do you foresee the organization adapting to these changes?

Like in most other cases in life, the external changes Corrupt has gone through, reflect internal changes. The people who have followed us since the beginning, have seen Corrupt go from a static-HTML site with simple design presenting the latest articles, to a professional-looking blog with articles, columns, and commentary on the latest news.

We've expanded into the blogosphere and social network world, creating awareness among a new audience of Corrupt readers. This external change reflects a consistent refinement of method in how we achieve our goals. Our first goal is to become an influential media central, and we decided early on to make that happen by utilizing the popular blog format for commentary, add the appreciated articles on topics like politics and lifestyle, and produce joyful, warlike columnists to assist that, communicating a critical but positive message to the thinking segment of the modern world.

As our readers have demanded more media-oriented functions and a possibility to create subcommunities under the banner of Corrupt, we spent a fair amount of time migrating to a brand new content management system, installing functions like the organic groups, user registration, ability to comment on our content, and future features that are still in progress. Before this I was editing HTML pages manually, which simply didn't work when we started to receive more readers. So technically, we've equipped Corrupt to meet the standards and demands of today's blogworld, which we intend to integrate with and succeed in.

As for the future changes, a lot of what we've done is to streamline the way we work. We've cut down on correspondence, administration and technical experimentation, and aimed to develop the fields we currently are doing well in. This is an essential change we've made, because being the few but dedicated individuals we are, there is simply no time and resources to play around with gimmicks. Our focus is on producing quality content and promoting it. As we gain more readers, we hope to expand, at which point we can refine the details I suspect some people wish we implement in the near future.

Another important aspect of our goal to become an influential media central is the publication of literature. By now I hope all of our regulars are aware of the English translation of ecophilosopher Pentti Linkola's latest book, which we will publish via our friends at Integral Tradition. As a matter of fact, Integral Tradition will function as our publishing arm, and we have more books in store for publication, but more on that in the future. What's essential to mention here is that Corrupt is establishing relationships across the web to close in on its goals, where our readers play an important role in spreading the message and suggesting us to friends and family.

5. Many readers who encounter Corrupt express concern at the arrogance or elitism associated with its philosophy. In a time of increasingly legalistic societies and sleazy politics, many citizens of the United States and elsewhere find it difficult to trust another political organization that says it has the answers. In the words of one reader "Well, who are you to tell us...?"

I want to start out by saying that while Corrupt rests on a meritocratic basis, which means that we believe individuals should be judged based on ability and character, we strongly reject the false elitism that we associate with modern behaviour. False elitism is based on ego or external things like clothes, cars and money. The reason to why false elitism is stupid is that the way we dress, talk, or drive, does not necessarily reflect who we are as individuals and what we are capable of achieving in life.

Therefore Corrupt wants to nurture people to develop their natural talents and make most out of themselves. It's unfortunate that some people confuse this for false elitism, but it should be noted that people who feel insecure or suffer from low self-esteem, inherently dislike any kind of system that affirms the inequality between individuals. Likewise, from over 2 years of experience from being an editor, I know that many people today have never been asked to voluntarily use their talents to a long-term project that requires dedication and effort. They can hardly finish a 2-week programming task.

That's why we might come off as "arrogant" sometimes: we've seen so many people flake out and leave us with all the work. Despite this fact, the spirit of Corrupt is in my opinion neither arrogant, nor bitter or negative. We're past all that, and approach everything as interesting challenges. It's an important part of our philosophy: to always appreciate conflict in life and move on.

In the past there have been people who have felt that we have no right to tell them how to live. There are two things I want to bring up here. The first is that we're not telling people how to live; we're pointing out common sense truths about personal health, lifestyle choices and psychological behaviour, confirmed by science, culture, history and religion. If I tell you that if you eat a lot of fast food and rarely exercise, you'll eventually become obese, that might offend some people. Their response might be: "It's my life, you have no right to tell me this."

My response to these people is: "Sure, no one's forcing you to listen to what I have to say. But that doesn't change the consequences of your lifestyle." Corrupt is NOT a big daddy, but that doesn't mean we think every lifestyle choice is sane, or that it doesn't matter if more than half of the people in a population is obese--it does matter. We allow lifestyle differences, just like we enjoy cultural diversity, but we also share the same reality; regardless of where you eat greasy food and spend 8 hours a day in an office, it's going to impact your health negatively.

Setting a healthier lifestyle direction is not about limiting people's taste in music, favourite DVD selection, car brand, or clothing. It's to point people in a general direction; it's about establishing agreement on general principles on how we should live our lives. If we disagree on the most fundamental issues of human existence, our society is going to continue degenerate, no matter how we much we discuss personal liberties.

The second thing is that we intentionally use a writing style that comes off to some readers as provocative and determined. This is part of how we present our ideas: we mock what we see as stupid, expose unpleasant truths without flinching, and point to a positive way out of negativity and ignorance. It's not meant to negatively offend, put off, or upset anyone. But we want to shake people up and show them that this is not a game.

The problems we face today are real. We don't have an exact lifestyle plan for people, but we emphasize general directions and ideas, which we believe are more or less essential to a healthy, productive life, no matter where you live. If you feel you don't need that inspiration--which is great, since it should mean that you already have good control over your diet, your exercise, and the way you spend your free time--we have more to offer that might interest you.

6. What do you believe sets Corrupt apart from other modern and anti-modern political organizations? From whence do you derive confidence in your purportedly functional philosophy? Do you believe you have a fundamental right to dictate how people should live, or do you believe that such an interpretation of your views is an unfortunate misunderstanding?

Corrupt is a unique organization, both philosophically and in regards to method. Our philosophy is called parallelism and suggests that there are several, parallel perspectives to approach reality, which means there is not one societal or cultural design that is superior or absolute, and can or should be applied everywhere to all people. This separates us from communists, neo-nazis, liberal democrats, capitalists, globalists and anarchists, who all believe in one system for all of us.

Our philosophy emphasizes relativity and the beauty of having different communities with different values. At the same time we avoid the pitfalls of pure relativism, since we believe that all societies and all perspectives ultimately must conform to the one and same reality. This means that while democracy remains a bad idea both in America and in Africa, because it fails to properly reflect the change in ability among people in a society, Corrupt may support one community that allows free drug use, and one community where it's banned. Parallelism is therefore a flexible philosophy, without diminishing the holistic aspect.

The Corruptian philosophy is reflected in the method we use to spread our ideas. Unlike most political organizations today, we're not only concerned with politics, and we're not dogmatically defending our view point as the Absolute Right perspective on things. Corrupt is trying to remake modern society, which you don't do simply by changing political direction. We work on all levels, including lifestyle and culture, the latter being a very important part. We want the modern people to embrace a new spirit. We don't think political policies, economical changes, cultural revival, or green activism alone can do it. We consider all aspects in our work.

The method we use to spread our ideas is called asymmetric activism, which means that instead of promoting our own message through a single political channel, and repeating it until we gain domination over other organizations, we want to primarily influence other groups. Therefore we don't have any real "enemies;" we work with leftists, libertarians, greens and separatists. We want these and other key groups to understand and change their point of view to fit the basic values and ideas we represent.

So a leftist could for example agree with us on globalization and come to agreement on certain key issues regarding how a government must operate. Libertarians agree with us on our policy on terrorism, drugs and power structure, where we defend a decentralization of power, and the freedom of individuals to do drugs and sodomy, as long as it's at home and not to any harm of the community as a whole. Separatists find us equally appealing, since we agree with them that pluralism (including variants like multiculturalism) doesn't work. Primitivists, survivalists and greens like our radical but realistic stance on how to deal with environmental problems, anarchists appreciate our instrumental view on power (if it doesn't serve a purpose, remove it), and traditionalists agree with us on the importance of ancient values and traditional spirituality.

Corrupt may therefore be one of the first organizations in modern time to not track down certain groups as enemies, but being geared at creating consensus among people, no matter what political, cultural or religious background they have, and point to a general direction which we believe is realistic and sane. Indeed, many describe us as pure realists, with a flavour of romanticism, meaning that while we remain critical and provocative, we also communicate a playful, adventurous message to our readers. Life should be interesting and we want society to reflect that.

7. Why do you believe what you propose will be better than what is?

I believe that Corrupt challenges the status quo by targeting the root causes for the decline of the modern civilization, analyzing its failures from a larger perspective that transcends all of those currently available today, and finding simple, realistic solutions that are concerned with both our ecology, our society, and our individual spirit.

I believe in Corrupt because no other anti-modern organization out there today addresses all the issues, and believes that we can change modern society without a bloody and useless revolution. Corrupt's reform plan of our politics, our culture, our spirit, our lifestyle, and our technology is all-comprehensive and pragmatic, in that it doesn't serve to spot enemies or blaming certain groups. There's no scapegoating and dogmatism. Quite simply, Corrupt is like the strong dad who comes home after work, finds his family in endless arguments about triviality, selfishness, ignorance and stupidity, and says:

"Listen up, the game's over. Stop fighting. Let's agree on how to move on with the current situation and let's do it now, with passion and adventure!"

8. Is there an objective ground of argument where we can resolve these issues?

This question can be answered both philosophically and generally.

Philosophically: I'm a Nietzschean at heart and therefore remain critical to the idea of pure objectivity. I don't think it's possible to escape viewing the world from a certain perspective, and as long as we're confined within the limits of our subjective perception, we can only come to conclusions with varying objective merits. This doesn't mean everything's relative; it's merely a philosophical note on the basis for our perception of reality.

Generally: If we are to place trust in science, tradition, and history, sure there is. Most issues today (environmental problems, ethnic conflicts, economic recessions, neo-colonialism, materialism, spiritual hollowness) are not new, nor are they so complex that we can't agree on basic ways of solving them and moving on. We face these problems today because humanity as a collective has lived in ignorance of the consequences of its actions. We overpopulated the planet, drained its resources, over-industrialized wild land, and then we asked: "Why do all fish contain cancer these days?"

We allowed multinational corporations to overthrow our governments in secret, importing millions of people as cheap labour to reduce production costs, and then we asked: "Why did the wages drop?" We privatized the economy and began replacing the production of domestic goods with pure financial speculation, and then we asked: "Why are we suddenly in a recession?" We decided to let national interests be controlled by corporate interests, so the hunt after natural resources and world power led us to a new age of colonial wars, and then we asked: "Why don't the Iraqis appreciate our freedom?" We exchanged the traditional values of heroism, honour, honesty, and transcendence for the hollow values of consumer materialism, and then we asked: "Why do our teenagers commit suicide?" We killed the myths and the religious wisdom because we failed to understand what it meant to us, and then we asked: "Why did God die?"

Yes, I believe we can resolve the main problems of modern civilization through fairly objective means, but it's not so much a question of objectivity, as it is about consensus. We have all the "proof" we need to change our civilization, now we need agreement on how to solve these basic problems. Think of it as the Kyoto protocol of all main problems we face today; for everyone it's obvious, the problems affect us all, so we need to sign the contract and work together to change the world. It's possible, but not as long as we keep our heads in the sand and prefer to watch whatever's on television instead. Escaping problems has never done anything good, but a handful of brave and idealistic people have through the history of mankind changed our world forever.

Change is possible, but it doesn't come about by waving a flag, voting on politicians, or donating $20 to Greenpeace every month. We need to change ourselves first, and then actively participate in society to live that change and influence people around us. I'm not so concerned about whether we scientifically can "prove" that we've polluted the groundwater, or "prove" that we live less interesting and healthy lives today. Empirically, for all people living in this age, it's the big elephant in the room. Address it, and we can finally move on to solve the real problems.

9. How do you know our civilization is in decline?

Every civilization is an organism; it has its birth, its growth, its highest ascendancy, its shrinking period, and its eventual decay into death. We place the Western civilization in its shrinking period, closing in on the eventual state of total decay. How we can confirm this? First, we look at history. We study previous civilizations; what gave birth to them, how did they grow, when were they in their prime years, when did they start to decline, and what killed them? We look for basic changes in society prior to their downfall, and find the same patterns in every human society, no matter where you go: leadership is overthrown and replaced by populist commerce rule, the traditional values are replaced by short-term materialism, and the lower segments of the population slowly take over society.

All of this has already happened in the West, and we are now beginning to experience the consequences. Notice that the historical scheme I outline for a civilization doesn't include apocalypses or total self-destructions. Rome didn't simply vanish into thin air when people began to pay more attention to sex and booze than to society and culture; all civilizations suffer a slow, long death, and consequences of bad decisions can take centuries to appear. For instance, we surpassed the number of people our planet can sustain a long time ago, but first now do we see the real horror effects of this in terms of biological extinction of species, mass poverty, and looming food wars.

Along with history, we've lost the connection with traditional culture and its values, which means we become directionless and therefore self-referential, meaning we no longer see society as connected to reality or nature, but as a separate space that exists according to its own norms and values. An idea like equality is one example; obviously no one seriously believes that people are born with equal abilities, but over time we've come to justify this idea by pointing to ourselves. We think we can master the world around us by manipulating ourselves socially, but sooner or later reality knocks on the door and then we act baffled. Science confirms a lot of degeneracy in terms of our health, our psychology, and how we function as individuals, mainly concerning individualism and the inability to think outside of our own immediate existence.

The spiritual aspect of the decline is perhaps the less mentioned but possibly the most important, because what the West, and those regions who are currently following in its tracks (China and Japan being two examples), really has missed is its vitality and forward-motion. We're no longer building great cathedrals, composing great symphonies, writing great literature, revolutionizing philosophy or winning fierce combats (bombing Arab cities to dust for material interests doesn't count). This is what we've really missed.

People live boring, miserable lives, and that's how the decay self-perpetuates itself. It's like one giant negative cycle; the more "modern" we become, the more CORRUPT we live. When something is not moving ahead, but is spending its time justifying its own mode of thought and making up excuses for failures, it's in stagnation, whether it is a political movement, a civilization, a family, or a group project.

10. From what do you derive certainty? Nature has been thoroughly promoted by Corrupt as representing an important level of objective reality outside the individual, but what about the other extrinsic logical designs, like the Infinite (GOD)?

We derive certainty from external, empirical observations and internal, introspective conclusions (intuition, logic, rational discussion). These two dimensions share a common function, so I want to stress that one cannot make an absolute distinction between the both. Regarding extrinsic logical designs, I'm personally critical of whether they actually exist outside of the realm of our world. As soon as we move these things beyond the realm of possible knowledge, we automatically devalue this world, which from a larger historical perspective has contributed to the decline of the Western civilization. To me, the soul, the infinite, God, and immortality, are all important and intrinsic concepts of this world. They are immanent properties of life here and now.

People who believe that these transcendent properties exist externally in another dimension, diverge philosophically from my own personal view point, but do not clash with the larger Corruptian picture. We have many Christians and Traditionalists who might disagree on certain points here, but ultimately we're striving toward the same goal: the creation of a traditional society, culture and spirit for the post-modern age. Part of the ancient traditional outlook is the emphasis on consensus, despite internal disagreements. So this is really a challenge for all of us to consider: Are we able to look beyond details of our individual beliefs and work together for a common future? Or are we still as dysfunctional as all the other moderns, who insist on doing it "my way or the highway," which often turns out being the road to Nowhere...

11. What is nihilism?

Philosophically, nihilism is the rejection of all values; a radical skepticism of moral and ethical systems. Historically it was pioneered by those who rejected authority, cultural norms, and religious dogmatism. It's a reductionist philosophy, which today (per Nietzsche) is often used to describe the modern age: the time of no values and ideals.

To me there are two ways of looking at nihilism: a) the absolute view (passive nihilism) and b) the instrumental view (active nihilism). Passive nihilism is what currently infests the psychology of most moderns today: a passive, self-defeatist and inherently negative view on life. Nothing is worth doing and nothing can be done. It's a self-referential outlook that eventually develops into depression; we begin to justify our lack of participation with life by referring to fear, doubt and confusion. To me, the modern spirit is one of passive nihilism.

Active nihilism takes an instrumental view on the rejection of all values, and turns it into a method of creating new values and new ideals. It's kind of like taking out the trash on Sunday morning, clearing your mind before a university test, or sorting out your emotions about a person that you like. Active nihilism is the view of the ancients who believed that creation, positive and constructive thinking, and fantasy, constitute eternal aspects of the human existence. While the passive nihilist keeps his paper white and says we should stop painting, because someone might be offended or someone might suffer from low self-esteem, the active nihilist shrugs and uses his imagination to paint, because he enjoys creating and playing with values.

If he fails, or dies (hopefully not from painting), oh well, that happens. What separates the active nihilist from the passive nihilist is that he always reevaluates the values and morals, to find the most realistic options and use them flexibly in life. Another way of describing this is to imagine values like tools ("Today it would be beneficial to use my fishing rod to catch some salmon in the river"), instead of absolute commandments ("Thou shalt always use your fishing rod as soon as you see a river").

12. What is parallelism?

Parallelism is the belief that there are parallel perspectives on reality, and that several societal designs therefore can exist without one being "The Right One," even though all designs fundamentally share the same reality. The best way to understand this is to think about religions. There are thousands of different religious and spiritual systems among humanity, but as soon as you begin to study the religious works and their respective traditions, you begin to see certain patterns emerging. Same with cultures and civilizations.

It's not a coincidence; like the cultural flora, humanity has responded to reality in different ways and expressed unique ideas about the world it's living in. Corrupt exists to defend that diversity because it believes there is meaning and beauty in it, and is dedicated to point these co-existing designs to pay attention to the one reality they all share. We can all be Swedes, Turks, Russians and Somalis, but we only have one planet, so let us preserve who we are and protect what creates and nurtures us.

13) What has Corrupt achieved?

There are a lot of fun and inspirational things Corrupt has achieved, these being my favourites:

Jokela High School Shooting Campaign

We managed to provoke mass media world wide by being the only organization in existence to support the ideas of Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the teenager who started a mass shooting at Jokela High School, later committing suicide. The idea behind the campaign was to give Auvinen right that society in the West had declined, and that the school shootings over the past years reflect a society not being able to offer young people the hope and stability they need to grow up as responsible adults. We spoke in French, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and American news about the tragedy in Jokela, and how society ultimately bore responsibility for what happened.

While other people were busy blaming it on a lonely individual, Corrupt chose to contextualize the high school shootings from a larger perspective and point out how they serve as wake-up calls for people who're living in ignorance and stupidity. This campaign received huge response just over a couple of nights and I remember not sleeping for more than 48 hours, just to be able to respond to all media requests and radio interviews. One of our staff members even appeared on an exclusive documentary on Finnish television about the school shootings. Our campaign video has been seen by more than 30,000 people on YouTube.

Corrupt Merchandise

Not so long ago we launched the very first Corrupt merchandise portal, where we sell t-shirts and stickers (more to come!). The "End Democracy" t-shirts were especially popular, so popular that we sold out the L-edition almost immediately and are now working on getting that back in stock. Through merchandise people are able to spread the message naturally by the kind of everyday awareness that stickers and t-shirts signal to people. In addition to the merchandise, we had several groups setting up promotion stickers in cities and at campuses. This, together with the growth of local Corruptian street teams around the world, is bringing us closer to a contact with mainstream society and normal people who want to change life by finding like-minded people and working together on common goals.

Cyberhit: Domination of Overpopulation Debate

We've conducted several so called "cyberhits," or promotion attacks, one on a mainstream article about overpopulation being our most successful. Thanks to a group of dedicated supporters, we placed comments on the article that appeared on one of Britain's largest news sites, and made it to a list of top comments, where we were in a majority. The influence that made is still clear on current environmental articles on the same site, where people now are commonly addressing overpopulation as soon as someone starts to talk about green politics. It was both fun and effective, and we hope to conduct more of these cyberhits in the future, as it's part of our main goals to spread our ideas on the Internet, before we move on to "real life" consensus plans.

Pentti Linkola Book

After Integral Tradition became our official publishing arm, we finished a large translation of ecophilosopher Pentti Linkola's latest book, "Could Life Win - And on What Conditions?" It's revolutionary for Corrupt, since it will be our very first book, hopefully to make it to the big media, and an important part of spreading our ideas about the ecology and what we can do to protect and save the environment. It will be a controversial release; an injection of realism in the green debate today. And, of course, this is only the beginning of Corrupt as publisher of literature.

Interviews: Part of General Consensus Strategy

In order for Corrupt to spread its ideas among other groups and establish general consensus on important issues, we've conducted a series of interviews and relationships with different individuals from different groups of the political spectrum. These interviews have been highly appreciated by our readers and very much so by us working at Corrupt as well. Lots of inspiration have flowed from environmentalist activist John Feeney, cranky tech geek John Dvorak, city reconstructor Michael Arth, and psychology professor Richard Lynn.

From each individual we establish agreement on vital ideas, reexamine our own views, and challenge those of others, to close in on a general agreement on environmental, political, cultural, religious, technological and scientific topics. We will continue to work with other groups and remain a provocative and influential media machine, or as one user commented about our strategy: "[The] policy of listening to everyone [...] and following no one." In other words, realism and determined open-mindedness.

14. The societal stagnation you expose seems to run in cycles. What is Corrupt's plan to prevent these crippling processes from becoming inevitable?

I'm glad you bring this question up, because I believe this is the key to understand how we're going to have to approach the decay we're seeing in the West right now. To start out, I want to begin by answering your question: we can't prevent this process from occurring. It's natural. Some might be acquainted with the second law of thermodynamics: energy movement within an isolated system always increases entropy. Another reference, less scientific and more cosmological, is what sci-fi author Philip K. Dick described as "kipple," and I will allow myself to quote straight from "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" to really explain what I mean:

- Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
- I see.
- There's the First Law of Kipple, "Kipple drives out nonkipple." Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody there to fight the kipple.
- So it has taken over completely. Now I understand.
- Your place, here, this apartment you've picked - it's too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apartments. But -
- But what?
- We can't win.
- Why not?
- No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

Let's use this analogy to answer your question more in detail. The idea here is that kipple/entropy (crime, corruption, decay) is a natural part of an organism (and here we assume that civilizations function like organisms) and naturally increase over time. Think about great civilizations: born from a set of smaller communities, they grow, thrive, develop great art, philosophy and science, and after they've peaked, they slowly turn inward like neurotic teenagers and begin to sob over their own lack of greatness. Morons outbreed geniuses, culture gets hollowed out, life becomes boring, corruption thrives behind closed doors, and religion is reduced to empty symbolism. It's happened everywhere, all throughout time. You can compare it with something as simple as running: you start out slowly, then increase speed, but after about an hour, depending on your fitness and how fast you run, you'll begin to feel more and more tired. Eventually you have to stop. There's no turning back. When you've caught some fresh air and strength, you move on. This is the process of life: always onward (into countless battles).

This idea of entropy, or kipple, being a deterministic force in our world that keeps destroying what we build, may at first seem like an uncomfortable reality. Why? Because it seems like we can't do anything about it. The Western civilization is growing closer and closer to the state of "absolute kippleization," and with that in mind, many people today--especially smart people, feel depressed and angry. They ask themselves a question I think all of us at one time or another have asked ourselves: "What can I do about it?" Philip Dick provides us with a seemingly bleak answer in return: "We can't win." It seems to suggest some form of fatalistic attitude towards the process of entropy. But when we think about it, we come to realize that this is all it really is: an attitude. Even if every single civilization has, and will, go through a state of absolute kippleization, why would this mean that we should give up? We can't "win" in the sense that no one can prevent entropy from occurring. Even in the most brilliant of societies, there will be a small degree of corruption, selfishness and idiocy. That's why the Ancients believed in hierarchy and leadership: let only the brilliant of men rule, and have them control those who are less good at creating brilliance. But we can succeed with change by approaching negativity with a positive outlook. After all, if everything's bad, why spend time on pointing that out, when you can begin rebuilding and participating for a positive change? That possibility is always there, and that's your key out of depression and self-defeatism.

We can't turn back time and turn the West into what ancient Rome or Greece were thousands of years ago. It's impossible. We're already too far down the path of self-destruction. But it doesn't make sense to give up either. We have to fight back. Some people, like Theodore Kaczynski, decide to blow away the key proponents of the decay and inform the public through violence. Finnish school shooter Pekka-Eric Auvinen belongs to this category as well, when he began to shoot innocent people at high school in Jokela, as a cry for help and attention: "Your society is corrupt, please pay attention to the destruction around you." Without glorifying these people as heroes (most of them are not), they provide us with a different approach to decay. They accept it as a reality, but persist in what they believe in. They believe in change. And change, although publicly misused by popular democratic figures, is most certainly real. So while we can't prevent the process of entropy from occurring, we can make sure that we are in control of our own future, when the decay has been exposed and the light is separating from the darkness.

However, the change we believe in is not some kind of utopian master plan to save everyone from chaos and destruction. That's too late. We want to focus on the good-hearted, creative and assertive characters of our society. They must lead us into a better future. We can't save all of our civilization, neither is that wanted, since most of it today is all-decay. You don't save a fruit by spraying it all over with pesticide; you pick out the rotten parts and protect what's healthy. Most intelligent people I've met have been depressed simply because they've taken on the entire burden of our society and spent their free time trying to figure out how to save it all. They usually start to look positively at things when I tell them that they simply can't save it all. We shouldn't save it all. We should focus on what we want to save, which means our change includes selective parts of what we like about our civilization, that we believe can be saved. Think of our civilization as a burning house: if you try to save every single thing from burning up, both you and the things you wanted to save will burn up. Smart people run in, get the few things they really care about, and then run out as quickly as they can, before the whole thing falls apart. After that you can build a new house. You didn't "prevent" entropy; you escaped its self-destruction by actively participating in life.

Corrupt constitutes such a force. We accept entropy--in fact, we embrace it, because it's part of our natural world, but we refuse giving up. Depending on the structure and design of a civilization, it can last 100 or 1000 years. But even more important, I think, we have to look at the products of a civilization. What great art did it produce? How far did it take philosophy? How developed was its science? Did it defy any outside attacks? How noble and coherent was its cultural life? What was the essence of its spirit? Corrupt celebrates the ancient view that time is cyclic and this goes for civilizations as well. We're not trying to reach the ideal civilization that will never die, because such an idea would be a lie. No such civilization will ever exist. However, we do strive toward excellence and brilliance, which is not the same as perfection, because all it implies is that we make most out of the possibilities in life. First now do we understand what this means for us in the modern time. Yes, we live in an insane society. But let us not grieve. Think about the positive things we can contribute with. Entropy doesn't matter. We have to follow our inner voice. No matter if we'd be citizens of Rome during its peak era, or citizens of an America in absolute decline, our attitude and spirit should be no different. This is part of believing in the Tradition: it permeates all of life, and ultimately transcends its entropic limitations. That is the spirit of Corrupt and its answer to how to deal with your kippleized society.

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Thanks to Alex and Corrupt Inc. for granting this interview conducted by Goluf of P.F.M.G. Publishing.

Read Alex Birch's columns here