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Vijay Prozak is leader of the website with the hilarious name anus.com (American Nihilist Underground Society), despite the name the website promotes abstruse thought as well as underground metal music. The website is probably more famous for its promotion of underground metal bands and its unique-styled band reviews. Prozak and his website has earned a level of notoriety, disdain as well as respect among most (if not all) of the metal music communities on the website. It has existed in one form or other for the last 20 years, a currently unsurpassed achievement. For many people, metal serves as a starting point into something deeper: that is a starting point for exploring philosophy as well as hidden meanings and patterns within society and the universe. Not everyone pursues this line of thought whenever they become interested in metal music; unfortunately, those that don't are happy to drink beer, smoke pot and party --- they never aspire to great things in life. Those that do look for deeper meaning will find Prozak's website thought provoking and (most likely) controversial. So here we go....
E: I first came across your website anus.com about 7 years ago, I found a link to the reviews about metal bands on your site. Back then I was near the end of my teens and had developed an interest (as well as solace) in metal music. Admittedly I was reluctant to accept the way the reviews were written (the method and content) but later came to realise the point of it. At the top level, for a layman, the ethos of the Dark Legion Archive (DLA; the metal part of the website) is to promote an academic understanding of metal music. That is an important factor why people like Kieth Kahn-Harris (a sociologist that studies metal) has a favourable view of the DLA.
The philosophical (and latterly political) ideas expressed on the main website are controversial in nature, just as metal is controversial in nature. Controversial because they are contrarian and often misunderstood because they are obscure and abstruse. First of all, could you give some insight about your website: why does it exist? And what was the main impetus behind creating and continuing with the website?
VP: The website exists because the web is a useful way to spread ideas. It kills no trees, requires no purchases and is going to be there anyway, so we want to inject our meme into the slipstream like all the others. Since the advent of mass publishing, the West has been gripped by "memetic warfare" where people try to convince others to see the world
in a certain way that usually benefits the speaker. In our case, we are trying to show people an alternate vision of reality. It's tied to metal in that black and death metal, as well as literature, awakened many of us to the ideas and outlooks necessary to move outside the modern brainlock.
As long as the website serves a function, it will exist. It started at a time when there was no information on black metal available to the general public; since there was a need, and I was DJing a radio show at the time, I started publishing thoughts on metal. And then added some other ideas that were not represented in the mainstream either. I found
that 90% were appalled and shocked and horrified, and 10% of the audience found what we were doing to be interesting. So I kept it up, and then others joined me, and so now it's a worldwide group of about a dozen people promoting ideas that are not popular because they're not easy, but are vital to a human future.
In a nutshell, the website exists to pass along truths we've found from experience, and nifty music, art, literature and ideas we encounter in life. It's now part of a network of sites including Amerika.org and Corrupt.org.
E: Metal, perhaps specifically black metal and death metal, is a poorly known and misunderstood form of music (in general). There is relatively little good information about metal in the mass media or published media in general; however, as esoteric knowledge is by definition a type of knowledge that is very specialized and only for an small number of people then how important is it to communicate esoteric knowledge to the rest of society? Such knowledge would eventually become exoteric.
VP: Esoteric is a word that describes its own definition. At first, it means only for a small group of people; when you think about that further, however, it starts to mean that it's for a self-selected group. That in turn means that this group had to learn to be receptive to the knowledge. So while propaganda, for example, is a binary condition -- either you have it memorized or not -- esoteric knowledge is a path, like a trail of yarn leading offscreen, waiting for someone to pursue it
out of sight of the public eye and unravel it.
And this leads us to the importance of the esoteric being visible. People don't yet know what it is or how to seek it. However, they're the right ones to seek it if they spot that thread and pursue it. But for that stage to arrive, it must appear in their lives, in a slightly out-of-the-way place so they can be intrigued. This is why to my mind metal, transcendentalism, nihilism and radical traditionalism should be shoved down the throats of the public -- so the 10% who might be able to perceive can spot the beginnings of a new path.
E: I'd agree that propaganda is essentially a binary condition, while esoteric knowledge is not dichotomy of two states but something more complicated. Acquiring knowledge, obscure or not, is only one aspect of personal development but another important factor is the ability criticize and evaluate the information being acquired. A dump of knowledge into the brain is likely to flood it with both useful and useless ideas. The problem is that useful ideas are not necessarily going to take precedence over the junk. Which leads me the next question: the topics you mention above are of an esoteric nature
(metal, transcendentalism, nihilism, radical traditionalism), what is their importance for personal development and for society in a larger context? Can they be used to discern useful from useless?
VP: Primal conservatism -- the oldest form of conservative and conservation thinking -- states that the quality of the individuals in a society determines success more than the bureaucratic and financial systems used to control them. In fact, the hallmark of liberalism is the invention of such systems to control the proles, who distrust themselves and each
other as much as they distrust hierarchy. Esoteric learning systems inherently rank us by how far we can go toward penetrating reality and expressing it in a cause-translated form, meaning that we identify cause/effect chains reasonably correctly. This is the basis of the scientific method as well as all known esoteric philosophies, but in the esoteric realm, we are not filtering by what is "politically acceptable" meaning that it panders to the self-image demands of the proles. After
all, once you become socialized, self-image first becomes important, because you're thinking of how others think of you. The neurotic personality that results from this is what modern people call The Ego, as if they're so witty for just figuring that out. The mental disciplines I have discussed here enforce hierarchy, reward the tripartite quality of individuals (intelligence, health, moral character) and present a system of governing ourselves that does not rely on bureaucracy and financial systems -- instead, it starts with the betterment of the individual through discipline, and the exile or discarding of those who do not meet the standards of the community. It is inherently ultra-conservative, because it focuses on the quality of
the individual, and inherently ultra-liberal, because it finally liberates the individual from The State, which is itself a creation of liberalism.
E: That answer will be tough for many to understand and will doubtlessly require several readings. What we consider as scientific should never be guided by politics (or what is politically correct) but rather what constitutes a search for truth. The problem with science (yet many don't wish to accept this) as well as politics is the fact that they are controlled by populist tactics.
The requirement of the need for a hierarchy is something that mimics nature; hierarchies are everywhere in nature. Someone knee-jerked in opposition to that idea when I mentioned it. That part of the debate was short lived.
Something that will read as confusing for many is the concept of ultra-liberal being compatible with (contradictory to?) ultra-conservative. Something that will need further explanation. If conservative means a society based upon quality of the individuals and liberalism means a society of 'free' individuals then the two are not opposites. Current liberalism is based upon populism and egalitarianism, which many would argue is the basis for promoting quality for all for people---not just for certain individuals. Part of modern liberalism is an element of libertarianism, where an individual can do what they want provide it doesn't interfere with others.
How would you take the current thoughts on liberalism and show that it doesn't promote quality in society and, on an easier note, that it doesn't promote individual discipline? And by necessity comment on what is quality as related to an individual and society.
VP: I think we need to pay attention to the natural model, which is what got us this far -- and by that comparison, has done a heck of a lot more than humans. We can make a machine fly, but we cannot make a monkey into
a genius. Nature could. Even more, our technologies cluster around only a few nodal points -- internal combustion engines, transistors, statistical analysis -- which makes us not masters of our world but fortunate tool-users. The natural model got us to this state and in exceptional humans, pushes beyond it.
Liberalism is a mess because in it, esoteric and exoteric are confused. The exoteric is what you tell a crowd to make them happy; the esoteric is what leaders know inside. If you define your political alignment as the party of revolution, the party of freeing the individual from the state, etc., you get away from your primary direction. In liberalism, I think that direction is derived from the notions of the Enlightenment, which suggest that the individual human be the measure of all things.
That says nothing about making that measurement an average, but that misperception is a necessary consequence -- all philosophies decay to their lowest common denominator as perceived by a crowd, and so good philosophers design ideas that decay very slowly and resist simplification to the linear. In that sense, liberalism is a doomed philosophy because it quickly breaks down to "everybody do what they want without obligations to others," which is the message most people
want to hear anyway, because they want to retreat from interactions with society, because in interactions where they are actually challenged they can be shown to be weak.
But if we go back to that core idea -- the human individual being the measure of all things -- we can see how liberalism can be applied to itself: pick the best individuals, and aim for bringing all of us up to that level. Conservatism is an inherently similar doctrine, although unlike liberalism, it is based on the idea of a collective which requires a hierarchy. This is, as you pointed out, where liberals freak out. Everyone is not equal if there's a hierarchy... but as we all know, in every society someone needs to lead, someone needs to be the doctor and someone else the nurse, and someone needs to clean toilets while someone else invents new technologies. So that inferiority complex of liberals is not liberalism itself, but the mentality of underconfidence into which liberalism dovetails because it is designed to appeal to a crowd and a crowd by its very nature has a lowest common denominator level of individual confidence -- high-confidence individuals don't need a crowd to ratify their own perceptions and make themselves feel good.
From that we can see that the difference between liberalism and conservatism is basically psychology. Conservatism has suffered because without the ability to come out and say we need collective leadership not for preservation of the whole collective, but to encourage the best individuals (in the tripartite intelligence, health/beauty and moral character) to come out of that collective, it staggers off into a baffling array of big speeches about freedom and Pearl Harbor. However,
its essence remains a conservation of the collective, both environment and culture, toward the end of cultivating great individuals. Liberalism in its purest form is praise for the highest individual above both the crowd and any moribund social mechanisms the crowd have put into place. This is why both liberals and conservatives cheer any story where the
exceptional person rises above convention and does something that benefits all others. The only reason they do not see each other as on parity is a matter of identity politics: people feeling smarter for calling themselves liberals, or feeling more correct for calling themselves conservative, and consequently they are unwilling to analyze their beliefs too deeply.
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Thoughts 
