John K. Press explores how the horror film Smile 2 reflects the existential and cultural alienation faced by modern White society, using the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel to illustrate the broader implications of disconnection in a globalized, de-racialized world.
The amazing new horror film Smile 2 illuminates the White man’s fundamental quagmire and also negatively suggests a way to remedy Whites’ philosophical and social ills. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) battled the rising dominance of scientific empiricism. He did so by emphasizing the psychic nature of our existence. What we know of the world comes to us via sense processing. We have opinions concerning the world we process. When combining our mental knowledge of the world and our thoughts about it, we can see that our existence is purely mental. But, while he rescued us from the material view of ourselves as machines, Kant ultimately concluded that we cannot know anything about the material world outside of ourselves, the “thing in itself.” Thus, Kant’s refutation of materialism led to solipsism and a form of alienation from the world.
In Smile 2, the lead character, Skye (admirably acted by Naomi Scott), also has a very troubling relationship with the outside world. First of all, she cannot trust anything she sees in the physical world. Is her friend really lying next to her in bed? But it gets worse! Skye is a mega-pop star. As such, her world constantly demands her attention. Shows, signings, talks, appearances demand she relentlessly stay focused on her commitments to material engagements. This parallels the problem Kant confronted, wherein empiricists framed the entire world as material, leaving no room for mind or spirituality. She has an inner world, but it has no connection to the crazy material world constantly demanding her attention.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1918) bridged the solipsism Kant ran into by noting that we know ourselves in relation to the world and others. Without an object, there can be no subject. We fully only come to know ourselves when we interact with others. We see our consciousness in their acknowledgment of our consciousness. Given the current multicultural status of White nations, our White identity no longer receives any validation. Skye feels no relation with anyone. Her mother uses her as an object. And, due to Skye having betrayed her, Skye’s best and only friend has not spoken with her in over a year. Over and above her lacking intimate connections with others, her fans seem like demonic ants swarming over her body. She feels yet violently rejects her connection with the alien swarms that surround her.
Skye’s madness also concerns the reality of the physical world. When confronted with horrific visions, she repeatedly closes her eyes and then tepidly reopens them, hoping to have gone from the mental world of madness back to the predictable world of physical laws. She longs to ground herself in the physical world but cannot escape her mind. Fichte placed us in the social world. Yet, like Kant, Fichte did not have a way to connect us to the physical world. As she sees only imagined horrors, Skye shares in this dilemma. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) bridged Kant and Fichte’s chasm by noting that nature itself is alive and we are a part of it. We know nature because, as it does, we too are growing, living, and dying in relationship to our living world. Sharing a fundamental essence, we can intuitively understand the world as we understand ourselves. Interestingly, Skye’s fans attend concerts and we current horror fans watch horror movies to have some feeling of connection with our empty world.
Kant tried to confirm the mind’s importance in the physical world. Fichte connected us with each other. Schelling connected us to the world. But, still, science’s rise stripped man of meaning by stripping him of religion. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) worked to give humans meaning. Hegel contended that Fichte’s social man lived in Schelling’s living, growing world, and that he should find his meaning in being a part of the progressive direction of the world. Fundamentally still stuck in thought outside of nature, Hegel argued that the story of man is the story of him moving increasingly towards manifesting himself socially as rational. In doing this, we also commune with God because he too is rational. And, this development would culminate in a state which self-consciously manifests the rational nature of the universe, the Absolute in its aims and population.
The world Skye inhabited involved a lot of rationality. She had an industry and commitments that made her money. Rather than build this system herself, it laid prepared for her. Perhaps Hegel’s rational vision does not lead to fulfilling lives. Hegel celebrated art as an outlet whereby rational man saw his self-consciousness objectively and relished in it. In a speech, Skye’s teleprompter breaks.
Therefore, the machine could not fill her mind. Adlibbing, she explains how the beautiful inspiration she found in music has turned into a nightmare. It has mired her in a soul-stealing industry. In the music Skye performs in Smile 2, we hear the cold rationality that pervades so much modern music. It sounds like a formula played over a drum machine. This weakness in the film very adeptly illustrates the sad, unfulfilling nature of the “modern” society Hegel promoted.
Hegel’s explanation of a historical, directional world created the intellectual atmosphere into which Darwin could conceive of evolution. Schelling’s placing us in nature also presaged a view wherein humans arise from natural processes. And, Hegel had enough awareness of world dynamics to consider Germany the world’s closest approximation to his goal of a state which self-consciously embodied universal rationality. Yet, in its infancy, in Hegel’s era, evolution had not yet been able to categorize racial sub-species. Hegel, like Kant, thought in terms of universals: “Mankind” moved towards rationality. “Mankind” shared a reverence for rationality. “Mankind” had the capacity to embody rationality. In fact, only high-IQ races can do so. We need to embody an evolutionary view of Hegelian dynamics, which singles out Whites for having created the modern world and all in it.
Skye inhabits a de-racialized, globalized West. As such, she feels no connection to her people or their history. Her audience is noticeably mixed-race. She shares nothing in common with them beyond a desire to be united in something focused on sad, generic, meaningless idol worship. Her close circle consists of her mother and a helper. The helper is a nearly White, black gay person with blond curly hair, who, by transgressing all boundaries, represents the philosophy wherein one can be anything, and so, as such, everyone becomes fundamentally nothing in particular. His gay sycophant character embodies a careerist lack of inner purpose. Any normal person that looked at it/him/she would ask, “What the hell is that?” Skye herself first appears whitish-Latino but then turns to a faux-Aryan hair dye. She fiendishly drinks water, as Schelling might advise, for a connection to the world. Yet, she lives in a spiritually-racially denuded world that has no soul outside of Hegel’s vapid unfolding rationality.
White youth, White people, feel Skye’s horror. They have no connection to their history or their race. In their newly multicultural society, they have no connection to those around them. They live in a horror show of material, spiritual alienation that, riffing on Hegel’s fading dream, calls itself “progressive.” Fichte was right: we find our identities socially. Yes, Schelling was right: we exist in and develop within nature. Hegel was right: the arch of history trends upward. White people now need to combine these three and put them in the context of evolution to realize that the White sub-species of man, and he alone, constitutes the peak of this evolution. Hegel’s noting that the future unfolds first in German lands (unlike what he thought) is not a fluke. Whites need a place to call their own rather than neutered, culturally neutral, mechanical jingles. If Skye embraced her White heritage in a White world, she could make music that relied on Whites’ history of folk and classical music, furthering the only musical tradition to ever properly evoke the sublime. And, if she sang to a White audience worthy of her, it would reciprocally bolster their sense of identity and belonging. Instead, as Kant predicted and as the horror of Smile 2 perfectly portrays, alongside Skye, we Whites remain reduced to cogs in a spiritually denuded, impersonal, horrifically mechanical world.
John K. Press is an Arktos contributor and the author of The True West vs. the Zombie Apocalypse.
