An Introduction
What you can expect to find here
First and foremost, I write books. This Substack has various extracts from those books, some original material and a fair number of casual reflections, but if you are interested in my work, the best of it is all here:
My non-fiction covers a wide sweep of experience, from an original perspective, which I call panjective primalism.
By panjective I mean the truth, which is neither a form of subjectivism (what today we usually understand as ‘postmodernism’, or, seen from another angle, ‘superstition’ or ‘idealism’) nor of objectivism (which is to say the civilised religion of ‘scientism’, ‘materialism’ or, for many people, of ‘common sense’).
By primalist I am referring to a kind of anarchism which is outside the coordinates of civilised political thought, and so neither left-wing (e.g. socialist and democratic) nor right-wing (e.g. authoritarian and capitalist) and so, despite the mind’s craving for labels and the ego’s thirst to co-opt the freedom that primal anarchism represents, impossible to categorise.
It’s very simple though really, as I explain in my introductory podcast…
Here are twelve of my most popular essays on this site:
A few things you won’t find here. I am not a nice man; I love many things, but striving to be likeable is death for the writer. I do not pander to mass ideology (I argue, for example, that video games are not art, that love is not an emotion, that feminism is a betrayal of femininity and that democracy is tyrannous). I don’t comment much on current affairs because I consider the news a rarefied form of pornography.
I don’t [usually] have comments turned on, because I find that managing digital ‘participation’ is a drain on my time and kills my spirit, but you can drop me a line if you have something to say. Please, if you do, introduce yourself a bit (just a bit) and please use your real name, because, being an ordinary flesh-and-blood human being, I find anonymity unpleasant and disconcerting. And if you’d like to criticise me, that’s fine, but read this before complaining about anything.
Thassal. Thank you for reading.
Low bows,
Darren Allen
