Three "motherfuckers"
“You don’t need twenty friends. You need three bad motherfuckers.”
Joey Diaz, decent comedian and memorable guest of the Joe Rogan Experience, solved a question that was floating around in my head for quite a while with that line.
How do you stay away from isolation in your pursuit of Bunkerized Christianity?
Sweet-spot for the Bunkerized social animal
Bunkerized Christianity can be pursued individually. However, the human being is a social animal, so any functional way of life must allow for interaction. And a shared mission can also make your individual pursuit more powerful when shared with the right people.
The sweet spot, then, is a few motherfuckers. Not necessarily three. Could be 5 or 8. Perhaps 12. The number of people doesn’t really matter.
The group need a shared mission pursued with a similar degree of intensity. A possible mission for a group of bunkerizing people could be: acting as sovereign as possible within the confines of modern life while pursuing virtue.
A distinctly Christian pursuit isn’t required. One person could take the Christian route, another the Buddhist, yet another could take virtue ethics as a guide.
Can’t you just do it by yourself?
Naval Ravikant’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience delivered a quote that I often revisit. It is quite long, but perfectly explains why it isn’t all that wise to go at it alone.
“In modern life we’re so free, everything has become atomized. We stand alone. You live in your apartment alone. You live in your house alone. Your parents don’t live nearby. Your parents don’t live nearby. You don’t have any tribal meaning. You don’t believe in religion anymore. You don’t believe in country anymore. It’s fine, you got a lot of freedom. It’s fantastic. But, now, when they come to attack you, you’re alone. And you can’t resist. So how do they attack you? It’s all well-meaning. I don’t fault capitalism. I love capitalism. But, look at how it happens. Social media, they have massaged all the mechanisms to addict you like a Skinner pigeon or a rat who is just going to click, click, click, click, click, can’t put the phone down. Food, they’ve taken sugar and they weaponized it. They put it into all these different forms and varieties that you can’t resist eating. Drugs, they’ve taken pharmaceuticals and plants and they synthesized them, they’ve grown them in such a way that you get addicted, you can’t put them down. Porn, right, if you’re a young male and you wander around the internet it will sap away your libido and you’re not going out in real life society anymore because you got this incredibly stimulating stuff coming at you. Video games, another way to addict people. So you have entire large factories of people who are working to addict you to these things and you stand alone. So the modern struggle as an individual is learning how to resist these things in the first place. Drawing your own boundaries, and there’s no one there to help you.”
Part of not being alone is accepting God into your life. This provides a sense of connectedness to something higher. It fills the spiritual gap that modern life exploits with empty promises of pleasure.
Yet there is also a social gap. To bunkerize effectively you must stay away from isolation and from large collectives embedded in modernity. The solution could be a small network of interconnected bunkers inhabited by those with a shared mission.