Being based is little more than a laughing refusal to be pushed around by the preposterous. It’s a refusal to go along with the crowd when the crowd has gone mad. While many people seem to realize that there is some problem, only the based realize not only that its safer and healthier to break away, but that it’s also hilarious.

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, gave in his Noble Lecture the credo, “Let the lie come into the world. Let it even triumph. But not through me,” that was based. Not participating in transparent lies or mass delusion is based. Doing so against the madness of the following crowd is based. Nearly everything that it means to be based is either contained within or predicated upon this one trait of character.

Solzhenitsyn wrote those words as a result of his observations living in what may have been the most brutal tyranny of human history: Stalin’s USSR. That simplest of refusals—the refusal to lie on command, or even to fit in—is, in the end, the summary of his observations of what kind of people had what it took to resist a totalitarian regime. Keeping your head down while you hope the unconscionable blows over, say, so you can keep your job but none of your dignity, is not based.

Being unwilling to lie, which is to say being based, is what set Solzhenitsyn’s various heroes apart from the weakness of character, cowardice, and greed that allowed others to survive, if that’s what it can be called. Solzhenitsyn’s brilliance was in observing that, in the end, this trait of character—the willingness to resist lies, be yourself, and tell the truth even when people won’t like you (or will kill you) for it—is one of the small number of necessary characteristics to grind true tyranny to a halt. The other, if you want to know, is laughter. Both of these things, mixed in the right proportions and applied in the right circumstances, make what it means to be based.

Solzhenitsyn’s time in the USSR under Josef Stalin was extreme, but it was not unique. China, Cambodia, and other places saw similar, or even perhaps worse, depending how one counts untellable horrors. While “it could never happen here” is a bit of wishful thinking applied to the question of whether the Nazi regime could ever be repeated in the United States, the ideological conditions and general cowardice that enable these sorts of catastrophes have already come knocking at our door. Their reception has been, from those with the power to answer, troublingly warm.

Though, for the moment, better conditions generally prevail in our day-to-day lives in our teetering Western liberal democratic republics, we have also found ourselves in yet another period in human history when the many millions believe—or at least pretend to believe—outright, transparent lies about the nature of reality, both social and material. What’s more, our elites and the institutions they command have taken the repetition and promulgation of these lies as sure marks of both status and, believe it or not, sanity. That is, once again the lie is coming into the world, and we have been forced to ask ourselves: will it triumph?

That’s an open question, and its answer depends, in turn, upon the answer to the more personal question Solzhenitsyn answered firmly in the negative. Will it come through me? The fate of the future of Western Civilization and Mankind may well hang in the balance of how that question gets answered, and by who, and how many. That is, its answer depends on how many people are willing to get based and stay that way.

The risk is in a peculiar way perverse. If lots of us get based, there’s very little risk to any of us. On the other hand, if only a few of us do, the risk is immense. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma writ large. If a few get based and most don’t, I lose my skin where you might not. If a lot get based, there will be some damage, but it will be minimal. The trouble is that everyone’s self-interest calculation looks straightforward: getting based is a fool’s errand. This misunderstands both the stakes and the truth of the situation. Going based en masse breaks the spell and eliminates the danger. Failing to do so will bring ruin upon all but a few. Put more plainly, you should take the radicals running this show seriously when they say “liberals get the bullet too.”

To me, then, there’s just one option. It’s time to get based and help other people get based. It’s time for based nation. It’s time for a based movement.

Before we begin on such an ambitious venture, however, the origin of the term “based” should be addressed forthrightly because it is profoundly limiting and, in fact, something that prevents being properly and fully based. The term arose online in talking about various ideas that might justify biological racism and referenced being unafraid to say those things because they are politically unfashionable. It arose in being intentionally, and often crudely, politically anti-correct. It arose, frankly, in crowds rightly identified as being “alt-right.” One could say it has expanded from there into something mostly more commendable. I contend something further: that these new early adopters of the mentality were merely re-inventing, typically crudely, something that has been known since time immemorial, while lashing out at the absurd and illegitimate powers of our absolutely ridiculous day. Forget all that edgelord garbage. The Declaration of Independence was based as hell and still is, and no sane person could mistake Thomas Jefferson for some douchey shitposter just looking to rile up some Libs.

Now we can begin. To be based, simply enough, begins with being willing to speak your mind and state objectively true facts about the world even when people don’t like you for it. It means neither lying nor apologizing just because the crowd expects you to, least of all under the absurd implication that doing so makes you more virtuous and brave. It is the refusal to be concerned with what other people think of you when you’re being yourself and the recognition that it doesn’t even make sense to apologize for being true to yourself and your values, telling the truth as well as you can see it, or making a joke, even a bad one. In judo and jujitsu, base is what keeps you from getting thrown, swept, or flipped. Having base is based.

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