Last month I attended the North by Northwest (NxNW) conference at the Wagon Box Inn in Story, Wyoming. The event was co-hosted by Justin Murphy's OtherLife group—an online group of independent scholars, writers, creatives, and entrepreneurs that I've been a part of for several years—and a tight-knit group of friends led by Paul McNeil, founder of the Wagon Box. McNeil recently purchased the property with the vision of transforming it into "something between a college campus, a cherished vacation home in the mountains, and the tea houses and taverns that were once the seedbeds of philosophical and political discourse." He envisions the Box as a kind of meeting ground that different online groups can plug into to host physical events and to interface with other groups; the NxNW conference was one of the first such events. He further envisions that the Box will grow in popularity such that organic meetings and creative cross-pollination regularly occur, a phenomenon that he believes will facilitate culturally impactful artistic and business collaborations.
Cultural Mission
The event's attendees were loosely oriented around a cultural mission, one originating in a deep concern for the fate of our nation and culminating in a dedication to bold grassroots action aimed at revitalizing it. Chief among their concerns were the corruption of mainstream institutions like media and academia, the censorship of political speech its accompanying social and economic persecution, the prevalence of degeneracy and ugliness in our culture, and the fracturing of community in our digital age. Proposed grassroots efforts to revitalize the nation, of which the Box is one example, stood at the crossroads of business, entrepreneurship, emerging digital technologies, classical education, and the production of powerful writing, music, and art. McNeil added that the Box maintains a loosely Christian mission, encouraging righteousness and the "flourishing of the good, the true, and the beautiful—the Kingdom of Heaven." Yet he also emphasized that everyone at the conference is on a good faith journey of understanding and open to hearing from other people. (Many of the event's attendees were Christians, of various denominations, though a few were non-believers, such as myself.)
While united in their overall vision of the Wagon Box project, McNeil and Murphy each emphasized the importance of different aspects of the project. McNeil, a Montana-based libertarian outdoorsman, emphasized the need to form tight brotherhoods, to build relationships with the local community, and to maintain close ties to the land. Murphy, an Austin-based entrepreneur who left a professorship of political science early in his career, emphasized the importance of a physical meeting ground to gather independent thinkers, scholars, and writers currently scattered across the internet. Such a meeting ground, he feels, will concentrate and mold this elite group of thinkers into a powerful cultural force, one that may facilitate the kind of revolutionary cultural change that is needed in America right now.
McNeil espoused a frontiersman's view of the formation of America: America was built by tight bands of brothers working together, many of whom undertook the project of expanding the frontier westward. This expansion exemplifies the more general principle that nation-shaping change flows only out of tight fraternal bonds. Consequently, McNeil emphasized the need to restore fraternal orders and guilds in the modern world as well as the need to restore the classic dynamic of brotherhood and male friendship, a dynamic that is captured, for example, by the relationship between Thaddeus Toad (to whom the Box's logo artistically alludes) and his friends in the classic novel The Wind in the Willows. Moreover, developing a tight-knit community is central to McNeil's vision of the Wagon Box. While maintaining its business and cultural missions, the Box will support its community members personally by providing housing and other support to those who fall on hard times. He further envisions that many community members will return to the Box year after year and develop a lifelong attachment to the project and to the land.
McNeil emphasized the importance of maintaining strong relationships with the local community. He is bullish on small Western towns, such as the one in which the Box is set, and emphasized the importance of supporting and interacting with the local community. This interaction is facilitated by the Box's restaurant and bar that is well attended by locals, hosts local music shows and other events, and facilitates random interactions between locals and visiting groups. I experienced one such interaction on the final day of the conference when a local housing contractor joined our group on the restaurant's porch for several hours to discuss his entrepreneurial project, which has to do with helping men overcome difficulties in their marriages (difficulties which he himself had experienced and overcome in his marriage), and to learn about our group's writing and entrepreneurial projects.
As an avid hunter and outdoorsman, McNeil purchased the property with its connection to nature closely in mind. The property was outfitted with a variety of outdoor activities, including horseback riding, fly fishing, archery, and a ritual morning cold plunge in the icy creek that runs through the property. The property itself covers about twenty acres of land and houses guests in a wide variety of dwellings which include cabins, a lodge with communal-style living quarters, renovated campers from different time periods (from the 1960's to today), and glamping-style tents and tepees scattered across the property. McNeil, as well as many of the attendees, emphasized the importance of maintaining close proximity to nature in order to counteract the ills of our digital age.
Murphy's departure from his political science professorship was motivated, negatively, by a desire to escape censorious pressure within academia, and, positively, by a desire to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions. One such ambition was founding OtherLife, a community of independent thinkers, many of whom were similarly pressured out of mainstream institutions and then began earning a living independently online. Murphy is consistently impressed by the quality of people that OtherLife attracts and with the dynamic of camaraderie that has developed among the group's core members: people genuinely like each other, want each other to succeed, and often maintain PhD-caliber collaborative relationships over many years (whether they pursued a formal degree or not). He believes that the group has the potential to develop into a powerful cultural force: a dedicated community of scholars and writers, each with the intelligence, erudition, and depth of a university professor, producing insights that are valuable to high-power decision makers (in business, politics, and culture), yet also able to communicate these insights to normal people.
But such powerful, and even revolutionary, cultural change will not be the work of an isolated individual, nor even the collective work of a network of such individuals; instead, it will flow out of the ethos of a strongly connected community. Such a community can develop only through extended in-person interactions, which Murphy believes that a physical meeting ground like the Wagon Box can help facilitate. A meeting ground of this kind can serve as a kind of "pressure cooker," one that molds an intense work ethic among the group, produces an energy of fun and excitement which motivates the group's members to aggressively bounce ideas off of each other, and develops sentiments of love and care among its members. But this love is not a vacuous "feel good" kind of love directed arbitrarily at another person; instead, it derives from seeing extreme value in the other person, of seeing a divine spark within him and pushing him to complete his creative work that is ignited by it. The key insight here seems to be that the seed of revolutionary cultural change may lie dormant within the heart and soul of man who himself does not see it, but that is seen by a friend who intimately knows him and believes in him.
Murphy cited historical examples as the inspirations for his beliefs. To the need for in-person community, he stated that revolutionary cultural change has typically originated within small groups of dedicated thinkers living in close proximity to one another, such as the Beatniks in 1950's New York City and the Bloomsbury Group in early twentieth-century London. To the idea that a thinker may not be aware of his revolutionary insights, he cited the relationship between the Beatnik's William Boroughs, who had collected many insights in his notes, and his close friend Alan Ginsberg, who took the initiative to write up and publish these notes which later became influential. He also cited the story of Samuel Johnson, an eighteen century English literary critic, whose biographer had met him at a dinner party and felt that the world needed to know about such an interesting person.
As a final point of interest in the Wagon Box, Murphy sees the project as exemplary of the kind of bold entrepreneurial action that he admires and encourages. While many people talk about buying a property or founding a city as a means to escape the ills of the modern world and begin their own project of cultural change, almost none of them actually do it. But McNeil and his group actually did; they made a bold and romantic bet, taking a huge financial risk in doing so, and truly putting their hearts on the line. Murphy encouraged attendees to passionately pursue their projects and to take bold risks in navigating the internet economy, a new frontier that we are all exploring. He credits the Box with already having helped facilitate the formation of several businesses as well as several book deals through its events and social network.
The NxNW Event
The NxNW event was structured roughly as follows. Each morning began with a ritual cold plunge in the property's icy creek followed by a sauna, which is built into the communal lodge. Following the plunge and sauna, the group gathered for brunch in the property's restaurant and then for a two-hour assembly in its upstairs event room, where the event's organizers gave short speeches and then opened up the podium for attendees to share their work. Each afternoon was relatively unstructured, with attendees either congregating on the restaurant's porch to engage in further discussion or going off to do outdoor activities, such as horseback riding, archery, and hiking. Attendees gathered again for dinner, then for another assembly to share their work, and ended the night in the restaurant along with local patrons to listen to live music, much of which was supplied by the attendees themselves who sang and played guitar as well as more eclectic instruments like the accordion and the autoharp. Attendees also supplied Gospel music for the prayer gathering that was hosted in the lodge on Sunday morning.
McNeil and Murphy gave complementary introductory speeches that set a rough theme for the event; this theme was that of the hidden life, the life that is inside of you and separate from the outside world. For McNeil, deep consideration of the hidden life is necessary to counteract the ills of the modern world, a consideration that for him has a Christian interpretation: that the Kingdom of God lies within you and must be brought forth into the external world. For Murphy, the "other life," a phrase coined by philosopher Michel Foucault that became his group's namesake, demands an embrace of the Greek practice of parrhesia, or "frank speech." In contrast to the ideal of "free speech," which holds that a speaker should (almost) never pay a penalty for his speech, a speaker's facing punishment is essential to the practice of "frank speech": that the speaker is willing to pay a penalty attests to the reality of the "other life," that it is the true life and of higher value than anything in the outside world. Murphy cited the speech and consequent persecutions of Socrates and Jesus Christ as examples of the practice of "frank speech" and argued that this practice should be embraced in dissident intellectual culture today.
About forty people attended the NxNW event, with about half coming from each of McNeil's and Murphy's groups. The attendees were employed in a wide variety of professions and had a wide variety of interests. Among the attendees were writers at influential online political magazines, publishers, fiction writers, independent scholars who had self-published books on historical, religious, and philosophic studies, retired entrepreneurs who had exited successful startup companies, tech entrepreneurs who were just beginning their journeys, designers of artistic Catholic-inspired clothing, experts in psychological personality profiles, poets, people with deep knowledge of contemporary dissident politics, and many skilled musicians.
Many attendees came prepared to share fairly long and well thought out pieces at the open podium. Some of these pieces were excerpts from forthcoming novels, set to be published in well-known online cultural magazines, or were simply thoughtful essays intended for private discussion. Some of the topics that were discussed included: the need to get back to the land and away from the internet; developing myth in the modern world; reuniting men and women in love (contra contemporary feminism and gender wars); the power of good music to heal the heart and of good stories to heal the mind; the need for developing spiritual infrastructure through art, clothing, and the restoration of beauty; what it means to be in love with the world and God; the need to revive the craft of modern poetry; the structure of fraternal organizations and how they can be implemented in the modern world; and the revival of the masculine spirit in the modern age through historical fiction.
The NxNW event highlighted to me the crucial importance of in-person events. I met many more interesting people and had many more impactful discussions in three days than I would have had in many months online. I also developed stronger relationships with people over this time, through our many discussions as well as our shared participation in physical activities, like the cold plunge, and even in simply attending the event itself. This made it much easier for me to form collaborative relationships with them. One collaboration that I intend to pursue is the creation of a dedicated writing retreat or residency program at the Box, which I would attend and help one of the professional writers organize. Another is a gathering of patriot entrepreneurs at the inaugural Liberty Tree Conference that I will be co-hosting at the Box later this summer.
The in-person nature of the NxNW event helped me gain a deeper understanding of this community and how I can help it lead it; through the commentary and encouragement of the attendees, it also helped me strengthen and complete a fairly long article addressing this topic that I had been in the middle of writing at the time of the event. My article reviewed an Echelon Front leadership training conference (run by retired Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin) that I had attended shortly before the NxNW event. The NxNW event provided key insight into the leadership challenges among this community that I reflected upon in my article. In particular, I saw the lack of a concrete mission as well as an aversion to both joining and leading teams as the key challenges, with many people (myself included) adopting a "lone wolf" mentality and holding a negative view of leadership, seeing it, for example, as a dehumanizing management of people or as requiring the leader to bark orders at others. My article suggested that Echelon Front's leadership approach may uniquely appeal to this community for many reasons including its focus on developing human excellence rather than treating people as resources to be managed, its focus on a leader's building relationships with his followers, and the overall depth and intelligence of its teaching.
A New Frontier?
For quite some time, I have been searching for a place like the Wagon Box: a place where I can connect my skills and passions with those of similarly-oriented people, a task that has been difficult to accomplish on the internet alone. My interest in the Box is further motivated by my past experiences at graduate school where I witnessed the decrepit state of our universities first hand, discovering that it was impossible to carry out even basic discussions on many cultural and political issues, let alone to earnestly pursue the most important questions about human life and the fate of our nation. I was honored to have had the opportunity to meet so many interesting, talented, and dedicated people at the NxNW event, and to have helped advance the Wagon Box project, even in a small capacity.
While the Wagon Box project is just beginning, it does so with a bold and positive vision of the future: of growing into a meeting ground that regularly facilitates cross-pollination among high-caliber thinkers, creators, writers, and entrepreneurs; and of inspiring the creation of a nation-wide network of similar properties, each gathering thinkers into a dedicated work environment, building bonds of brotherhood among them, bringing them into close connection with nature and the local community, and pursuing a holistic development of human life.
It is enticing to imagine the impact that such a project might have on our culture and on the trajectory of our nation. Has the essential power of a physical meeting ground been wildly overlooked in our digital age? Have the prejudices within academia and other mainstream institutions scattered enough intelligent, ambitious, and noble souls throughout the nation who are now in need of being gathered? And if so, might meeting grounds like the Wagon Box become the frontier for the most culturally impactful thinking of our generation?
Good coverage of the event, Nick. Enjoyed reading it. Sounds like a great three days.
It was a pleasure to spend time with you at the Box, Nick, and I hope we can meet up there again soon! Great reporting work, as always.