Looking Back at North by Northwest
A first impression of The Wagon Box Inn, from our Memorial Day collaboration with Justin Murphy's Other Life.
Following our Memorial Day gathering (“North by Northwest”), Nick Gallo wrote a thoughtful reflection on the weekend.
It was a remarkable weekend and Gallo’s perceptive report captures quite a few interesting details.
This week, we’re sharing a few highlights from Gallo’s review.
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.
“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.)”
“McNeil… 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…”
“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.”
“Murphy is consistently impressed by the quality of people that [Other Life] 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.”…
Murphy believes… 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.
Murphy cited historical examples as the inspirations for his beliefs… 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. He also cited the story of Samuel Johnson, an eighteen century English literary critic, whose biographer [was a lifelong friend].
“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.”
“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.”
Now, Nick is hosting his own event at The Wagon Box on September 6-8. Learn more and then sign up here.