Murder Your Darlings

The institutions you love are killing you

A late-night tweet posted by a woman in Boston exposed the troubling, subconscious realization we all share.

Boston Mom @paulanoukas

Anyone else in a blue area feeling yourself trying to detach from all the things you love in order to accept that you might have to leave? I can’t believe I feel this way in America.

If you want to know the truth, it’s not medical tyranny or mandated vaccines or even a tyrannical apostate pope that has us angry and afraid—it’s our attachments to things of this world.

By “things of this world,” I mean only the creature comforts like our favorite recliner or some concoction at Starbuck’s, though those are attachments that we will soon forego. Rather, the attachments that we, of our volition, must sever and depart from are the very things that, up to now, have defined many of us:

• The United States of America

• School systems

• The military

• Law enforcement

• Political parties

• Fraternal organizations

• Professions or trades

• Places of employment

• Cities

Every legacy institution of every kind must become to us something foreign and uninteresting because every legacy institution, including the administrative Church, has become rotten and corrupt. In short, everything of this world must become, at best, something indifferent. Take it leave it, like the last slice of cold pizza when we’re already full.

Conservative have long curated lists of hated institutions: the media, academia, entertainment, teachers’ unions, the Southern Poverty Extortion Center, and the like. We should continue to hate such institutions. What I’m talking about here is our darling institutions, the ones we salute and endorse and revere.

We can do this no longer, because the enemy uses our attachments to entrap and enslave us. The enemy knows that we will violate our principles to “save” our pets.

We must murder our darlings.

The phrase is a common writing suggestion and comes, originally, from an English writer named Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. According to Seth Fried writing in Tin House:

Of course, this expression is not meant to suggest that literally killing the people you care about will make you a better writer. If that were the case, the novels of William Burroughs wouldn’t be complete gibberish. Rather, it is a metaphor for how you should behave toward your writing while you are revising it. The idea is to proceed objectively and without sentiment. Just like you would if you were to kill a loved one.

To find the true root of this idea of detachment and indifference, we must go beyond writing and much further back in history. We must look to the words of our Lord and Savior to find this bit of advice has been with us metaphorically forever; we just didn’t really think about it until now.