This essay is the third instalment in the on-going authenticity series but the second of my reflections on technology and its totalistic, artificialising co-option of the life which we in the West know today and lead, and can lead; and as things stand will know much more co-optively tomorrow.

This is not an especially ideological essay, or a “nationalist” essay.  Its intent is to further shape our consideration of technology’s synergy with Man, the technological animal.  To that end, a distinction will be made between the effects and meanings of the four ages in this, a history almost as ancient as the first hominid.

The essay will be followed by a final offering in this triptych titled Opening and Presence, which will ask what, as the only viable conclusion to be drawn from Martin Heidegger’s valedictory advice on technology, the thought and speech of a naturally emergent life would actually look and sound like in practise - which is also, as it happens, where we begin here!

2. INTO HEIDEGGER WORLD OR INTO THE HYPER-WORLD

“So I ask, in my writing, What is real?  Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.  I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power.  They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.  I ought to know.  I do the same thing.” ― Philip K Dick, 1928-1982, science fiction writer and visionary.

Here is a radical thought.  What shared future, within reasonable material parameters, would our people desire and choose for our progeny?  Let’s pitch that future not too far ahead: say, that of the adult lives of our grandchildren.  What if that question - admittedly, a question which, in its fullness is not easily framed - could be answered definitively enough to then adduce a majority opinion?  What if that opinion could be employed as a filter for politics such that everything incompatible with it, everything restrictive or exploitative of it, is itself restricted or excluded completely?  Other things being equal, what if by careful discrimination and curation, government could create the conditions in which the desire of the nationalist heart can become the reality of our people’s life?

Only eight years (we are told) short of the age of Technocracy, you may be thinking that this is a somewhat naïve and idealistic bet on politicians’ respect for our ethnic person, as well as for the liberty and democracy they affect to hold sacred.  But, actually, it is a bet on the timelessness of human authenticity and its agency in a world in which Power is intent on bringing forth no less human artifice, diminishment, and subjection than ever did Philip K Dick with his Tyrell Corps replicants.  As Heidegger himself said in his long essay Discourse on Thinking, published in 1966, with material written eleven years earlier:

... the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.  What great danger then might move upon us?  Then there might go hand in hand with the greatest ingenuity in calculative planning and inventing indifference toward meditative thinking – total thoughtlessness.  And then?  Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature - that he is a meditative being.  Therefore, the issue is the saving of man’s essential nature.

That said, what if the present-day Tyrell Corps were, in fact, operating from a sounder psychological and sociobiological basis than we nationalists?  What if authenticity resided deeply enough in, and synergised enough with, technology itself that it - authenticity - transported us not to Heidegger World but to Technocracy?

It is a terrifying thought that we may belong too much to modernity and the technological paradigm to escape even the negatives of its grip upon us ... that its diminishments are also a part of us.  But this is the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from Heidegger’s appeal to his goddess of truth.  Let us examine it.

The ages of the god of the forge

We can clear the way a little by finding a meaning - not necessarily only Heidegger’s - for “what makes up what is most modern technology’s own.”  To that end, we shall not be examining technologies as such, or how men have thought technologically of Nature (the outer meaning of “standing reserve”).  Rather, we shall trace the eras of technology’s making of Man in pursuit of Heidegger’s “construct”.  We will find throughout that development, from its beginning to the present day, technology’s innermost power of human transformation of his body, his personhood, and his mind’s ordering of reality.

First, though, let’s trace the history of Man and his technology and, too, their seeming future.

Technology as such pre-dates the genus Homo sapiens.  Driven by life’s will to survival and continuity, our hominid ancestors increased the possibility of life in their environments by whatever means their creativity allowed.  “Found” clubs and projectiles for hunting and fighting and stones as hand-tools were the beginning of technology.  Although there is a 700,000 year break between the date - four million years ago - assigned to the development of bipedalism and the archaeological evidence for simple “found” tools (from the age of Australopithecus or “Lucy”), it is bipedalism which is usually associated with the evolution of tool-use and tool-making.  Certainly, bipedalism freed the hands for additional tasks, particularly during movement, and there is no better candidate for the absolute point of origin of all our technology today.

There is another 700,000 year break to the Olduwan Industry period of some 2.6 million years ago, to which the oldest knapped stone tools have been dated.  Subsequently, hand actions such as throwing, cupping, and gripping have shaped technology and been shaped by it.  Within the whole organism of the hominid body, including the brain, it was the hand which most directly testified to that wild synergy, and the hand that, by its dexterity and versatility, extended the crude striking of stone against stone and stone against animal flesh to the working of wood, and of skins, clay and natural fibres, and the control of fire.  With each advance the world opened up as an ever more negotiable and manageable evolutionary space.  Our ancient predecessors made themselves as they made the world about them.  For example, they acquired control over fire perhaps 400,000 years ago, setting in motion the rich history of fuel.  So, when Homo sapiens arose between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago, they were essentially pre-technologised, and technology itself was inseparable from human being because both were entered synergetically into the natural, daily processes of life.

This first, organic phase of technologisation, the phase of physical synergy, lasted as the only phase through the pre-Neolithic, when animal husbandry, a true symbiotic form, first developed.  It took another 5,000 years until the Neolithic Revolution of 10,000-11,000 years ago for the cutting and dressing of stone to produce permanent structures (as, for example, at Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia, dating from around 9,000-10,000 years ago, or nearby Karahan Tepe, a ritual site which may be two thousand years older).  Within a millenium or two, crop farming came to (what we know today as) the Fertile Crescent.  The farmer and the stone tool-maker together made possible the urban settlement; and, thereby, civilisation itself.  The metal-worker - Hephaestus at his forge - joined them 3,000 years later.  The potter’s wheel took another 3,000 years to arrive.

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Canterbury, the old surviving English cathedral

James Bowery has raised a question about the cognitive verities of our being-in-the-world, characterising it as a point on a faith continuum.  In a comment on “The final question” thread he writes:

Every decision is an act if not leap of faith.  All our decisions are informed by our limited knowledge and limited intelligence to act on that knowledge.  While we may remain true to ourselves in our phenomenal perceptions, we are on shaky ground the moment we begin to interpret them - yet interpret them we do without so much as a prayer that we may “bracket” them to attain the elusive transcendental attitude.

So we are creatures of faith.

Now, you may wish to interject a qualitative distinction between the kind of faith it takes to, say, interpret a collection of sensations as an object of our world, vs faith it takes to believe in a big hairy thunderer who intervenes in our affairs based on what rituals we engage in, but I would assert that these are on a spectrum of faith.

Well, I do wish to “interject” some qualitative distinctions; or at least to set forth the meaning and relation of things as I understand them.  So, to that end ...

I will not spend too much time on the first, which is the human brain’s rendering of a representative reality from the raw data of the world beyond the organism.  Obviously, the brain stands at the apogee of three and half billion years of evolution, from the first simple cells which sensed light in darkness and succeeded in transmitting that capacity to other cells.  Figuratively speaking, God was light.  Non-figuratively, the whole, limitless noumenal truth is le soleil absolu, but the form in which we limited beings re-cognise it is strictly shackled to planet earth.  My favoured guide Martin Heidegger accepted the Cartesian subject-object duality but placed human being in the “there-then”, which is a human-scale objectification of that whole truth.  But the whole question of how we are evolved to “sense light” therein, how we autogenetically construct from the input of our five senses a sublime simulacrum limited to our own cortex, and how we then filter it through the great external-facing, associative systems, remains; and it is, of course, that most important and ancient mystery which is the Mind-Body problem.

There are many theoretical solutions, the most populous among academics being species of physicalism and emergentism.  With so much post-Christian, blue planet, Gaia thinking prevalent in the West it is perhaps not a surprise that pan-psychism is making a bit of a comeback.  Beyond formal academia, in the badlands, Chris Langan’s CTMU appears to be both pan-psychist and a mathematical proof.  Even by the standards for pan-psychism, it is not taken seriously by academics outside his own immediate high-IQ cohort.  It is at least complete, or claimed to be.  Not one of the other theories are claimed by anyone as adequate at this stage.  All are problematic.  All are contested.  No one has anything even close to a definite and provable account of brain function. 

This is true even of accounts of how the sleeping brain conjures into existence its dream-world.  We know in our waking hours that dreams are brilliant, strange fictions.  But however improbable or fractured a dream may be, once the brain chemistry flows we are totally immersed and certain of the dream’s material reality. One would think that this contradiction might help in the formal search for a solution, but it hasn’t yet.  Anyway, in my distinctly informal estimation, certainty speaks of an evolutionary attention to survival and continuity which is so needful that all that is Mind derives from it and serves it, and so constant that no moment of human experience escapes it, not even what we dream.  The mechanics of it are absolute.

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Given that the West is saddled with a tradition of freedom and democracy (which its elites want to retire, of course, but never mind for now), and given that a Sino-Russian global hegemony is the end-game of the Ukraine adventure, should we not look into the Eurasian face, mindful of its natural affinity for authoritarianism and conformism, and ask the final question:

Would it be easier for us to fight for our people’s life and land in a Western hegemonic system or in a socialist system under the tutelage of, principally, China, with input from Russia, India, and Iran, if these are indeed the alternatives?

Today, a nice piece by the writer Frank Wright appeared on the state of affairs appeared at what we must now call TCW but was, until a few weeks ago, The Conservative Woman, virtually the last surviving British “right-wing” site at which a free man can sound off.  Frank is awake, to put it really rather mildly.  He seems to model that rare conservative estate which is one step away from nationalism, and which is too well rooted to be susceptible to the customary scarecrow tactics.  His piece, titled “The more normal you are, the more the Regime hates you”, and is well worth a read.

Very rarely, the writers of pieces above the line venture below and converse with the hoi polloi.  But Frank was kind enough, or crazy enough, to get himself into a conversation with me, which went something like this:

UKCitizen • 6 hours ago
Unfortunately they found it is difficult to generate widespread resentment among the normies so they needed to create as many divisions as possible to make being normal a minority. Can’t control and gain power from a content and happy populace.

guessedworker  UKCitizen • 6 hours ago
“They” were the gentlemen of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt University. Their creation was Critical Theory, and they and it have since proved to be a curse on our race.

Frank Wright  guessedworker • 4 hours ago
I’d argue for Bernays and Lippmann as the engineers of consent, perfecting a method of the attachment of emotions to symbols by means of the creation of false events.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • 4 hours ago
Perhaps they are both creatures of subversive persuasion rather than subversion as such. Convincing people to act in some way is fundamentally less dangerous than forming them from childhood for that action.

Frank Wright  guessedworker • 3 hours ago
I’d argue they created the modern personality.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • 3 hours ago
You can argue it, but I would question your theory of Mind.

Frank Wright  guessedworker • 2 hours ago
Go on then.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • 2 hours ago • edited
OK, well, first, I applaud your clear-thinking. You are right that the sum of the acquired is the nidus of our sorrows. I only wish more of our people understood that the way out, so to speak, is through our own immersion in the formative influences of the day. But there are many sources and levels of influence. We can never be pure nature. We always carry the mark of what does not actually belong to us but, subject to its difference from nature and its reliance on a state of psychological lightness and/or suggestibility, structures us. But not all influences in that regard are equal.
The question you are really asking me is: how do we measure the structure for its fundamentality. Half of my answer is that there is the Jesuitical sense, there is the propaganda sense, and there are degrees in between. The degree to which we are made the possession of what we are not varies accordingly. But there is another half, which is the solidity and internal connection of the subject. Human beings can, under negative familial circumstances, suffer from a lightness of being which opens them out to, as they say, “support the latest thing”. They have no personal richness, no source of internal self-validation. Three or four generations of that will produce societal insanity in every way, from elite decadence and corruption to general criminality and psychopathy.
Lippman and Bernays dealt in the shallow end of the pool, softly drowning the weakest of us on a daily basis. But Jesus, Paul, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Voltaire, Marx, Freud, Adorno, Hirschfeld, and a cast of Enlightened and Marxised thousands have worked weakness into our very bone, and it is that weakness which, ultimately, we have to find the philosophical means to address and restore to health.

Frank Wright  guessedworker • 2 hours ago
I think there is no means by which man can transcend himself, which is the very essence of the progressive idea. I do not think man has progressed morally at all, and think efforts made to demonstrate this an illusion.
What I am on about with the Bernays stuff is that we have become more machine like as this machine becomes more integrated into our lives. This is not an accident. In fact, I’d argue the self is to a greater degree dependent on or addicted to the updates in worldview, feeling, orientation and so on provided by mass media. We have fallen in love with our own reflection, but it is not cast in some impassive mirror - it is a vision granted by Satan’s window, that spellbinding instrument through which all our thoughts are delivered.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • an hour ago
Man’s essential self is not his received/constructed self. His fallenness from his essential self into his received self is the general form of “the problem”. The individualised and marxised/universalised received self of today is simply what must be transcended.
How this might come to pass is the substance of my own intellectual enquiry, which I write about, in so much as I am able, at my own website. Is transcendence possible? Yes, if we accept that there is always this struggle between presence-in-being and absence; and we all, individually and as a people, traverse the line between the two. We are not fixed. That is the human condition. What vivifies our kind ... what clarifies our will to increase ... that is what lights our way towards presence. We may, as individuals, traverse the distance in a manner in which we never can as a group (and certainly never can as “Man”, all men), but the general good of facing the right way is really the object of the common struggle. Our systemic philosophy, our politics, should lead us that way.
It is interesting to have a real conversation with someone, even though we are only lightly touching on the potentials and points of interest. Thanks for bearing with it and not reflexively shooting off into the emotional defence of prior certainty.

Frank Wright  • an hour ago
Well I never. I will try to give your arguments the response they deserve- on your own site - at another time. I’m on the phone, have a cold (it’s not AIDS honest) and can’t give you the reply your thinking merits right now.

Frank Wright  • an hour ago
I can’t find your website. Do give me a link. I’m interested to talk to you about these ideas.

guessedworker  Frank Wright • an hour ago
My site is majorityrightsDOT com. You will find the work of many others there, from all walks of the dissident right.

I don’t know if Frank will show up here.  But it would be good to explore his position in greater detail.

To the surprise of no one, Marine Le Pen has failed for the second time to make even a close-run thing of the second round of a French presidential election.  She won 41.4% of votes to her opponent’s 58.6%, on a turnout of 72% (against 74.6% in 2017).  The popular vote was 13,297,760 to 18,779,641.  The result does represent a long step forward from 2017, when Le Pen won only a third of the second-round ballot. 

On that calculation she cut the deficit very nearly in half (the easier half to persuade, of course).  The reality is a little worse than that.  Billed as an election for those one least dislikes, we now have definite proof that, allowing for a share of those who voted in 2017 but not this time, no more than four in ten French voters can be persuaded to support Le Pen.  Only 13% of non-nationalists (“nationalist” in this context meaning those who had voted a fortnight ago for Le Pen + Zemmour) felt able to switch to her.  And this after all the enormous efforts she has made to explain herself as something other than the Establishment media’s hate-object.  Even as the EU-neutral, Islam-accepting cat-lady of French politics she could not threaten a totally unloved sitting president.  It is another reminder for nationalists, were any reminder needed, how very difficult it is to break through in any systemically liberal polity.

One should also note that Le Pen did not always help herself during her campaign.  In the presidential debate last week she took the bad decision to focus on policy detail, which is Macron’s managerialist strength, not hers, and let him off the hook of his own unpopularity.  Obviously, she wanted to project competence.  But she projected his competence.  She also confused the voters by suddenly declaring that the lovable and by no means toxic cat-lady would ban the Muslim veil in public.  It didn’t need saying.  Mixed-messaging is never a good thing.  Then, too, she had bad luck in her timing with the war in Ukraine and her past approval of Vladimir Putin (basically tended for consenting to provide RN with banking facilities when no French bank would do so).  Finally, there was the very odd timing from Brussels of the launch of an investigation into fraud dating back before the last presidential election.  I don’t know how damaging that really was.  As an attempt to manipulate the election it could hardly have been more blatant.  Perhaps Brussels was more damaged by it than Le Pen.  Perhaps she actually gained votes just on the basis of the general disgust.  But all that said, these issues are petty and narrowly political.  It is difficult to believe that any of them could have made the difference for Macron.  His advantage was always secure.

Rather, the constant electoral problem for nationalism is that its grand cause is national and existential but the concerns of the majority of voters are stubbornly personal and economic; and here Le Pen really tried to break the mould.  She alighted on the rapidly rising cost of living at the beginning of her campaign, and pushed it throughout.  Many commentators praised her political shrewdness, acknowledging that any treasure trove of votes was going to be found on the left.  They obviously expected to see a pay-off for her at the polling station.  She obviously expected to see it.  But nothing very much was forthcoming.  One wonders whether something more than a me-too expression of solidarité with the policy-goals of the left and some communitarian empathie with those left behind by Macron is required.  In the absence of a complete economic vision will such offerings always be seen as opportunistic?  In the end, do voters look to nationalism for a bit of tax relief?

All this raises the vexing question of where French nationalism goes from here.  There will very likely need to be a self-critical assessment of the performance of Rassemblement National in the legislative elections scheduled for 12th and 19th June.  OK, Zemmour’s alternative Reconquête!, even with Marion Maréchal on board, may be unlikely to achieve much of an impact itself seat-wise.  But it could make the always problematic task of election difficult for RN candidates, and not just this June.  How can nationalism cut through if it is outflanked on the issue of Islam on the right by an essentially conservative party and out-flanked on economic issues on the left by an essentially Corbynist party?
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Personally, I suspect that, after his creditable performance in the first round of the presidential election, the old-left ideological warrior Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”) will harvest much of the anti-Macron sentiment in June.  There is a strong possibility that the French, having elected the little man because they thought they had to, will delight in denying him the capacity to form a government in the legislature.  La France Insoumise is not a formal party, and is a classic vessel for temporary political protest.  It is a broad church of the narrow left consisting of supporters’ groups and small committees campaigning for “ecosocialism”.  One assumes that this oddity is for unhinged CO2 obsessives whose interest in the environment very oddly and abruptly curtails itself when the subject of population growth due to immigration pops up.  The égalité of Africans and Arabs is obviously much too pressing to allow ideological consistency to get in the way.

Accordingly, Mélenchon greeted Le Pen’s defeat (rather than Macron’s victory) with the words, “It’s very good news for the unity of our people,” which, naturally, demonstrates the customary pig-headed refusal to acknowledge who the French are and who they are not.  Over 7 million people - a fifth of the total vote - actually put a cross against Mélenchon’s name in the first round of the presidentials.  La France Incurable might have been more accurate.

As for Le Pen, she seems set on fighting on.  But what can she do that she has not already done to untie the gossamer bindings of her supposed toxicity?  Five years ago she was able to respond to other presidential candidate’s tough election-talk on immigration by saying, “Why vote for a fake when you can vote for the real thing.”  Now she has come to the point where her opponents can invert that and say the same of her centrism.  Of course, it’s true that ordinarily the centre is the ground an election winner must occupy.  It is where the most votes are.  It is where the most floating votes are. In addition, in France the traditional parties of power - the Gaullists and the Socialists - are dying.  The latter is effectively dead already.  The centre is eminently contestable.  But the gods of political change do not seem to be with Le Pen.  She sacrificed her authenticity to be their beneficiary.  It is difficult to see any real identity now, or much creative energy, in RN.  Perhaps Le Pen and her party have simply been around too long.  Perhaps RN will now fall victim to the same malaise as the Gaullists and the Socialists, and Marion will inherit the tricolour of Delacroix’ revolutionary Marianne.

Yesterday the UN General Council voted by the required two-thirds majority to exclude the Russian Federation from the UN Human Rights Council.  This morning the Kremlin’s reply landed at a train station in the Donbas - not one missile but two, and not a single-warhead but cluster munitions.  Initial reports say thirty people were killed on the spot, and a further hundred injured.  It is totally apparent from the personal items and clothing strewn about the place that this was not a military target.  The local mayor has stated that there were some 4,000 civilians at the station at the time.  The strikes were a perfectly clear statement to the effect that the Kremlin doesn’t give a damn about the safety and human rights of the people of the Donbas, never gave a damn about the safety and human rights of the people of the Donbas, and will break any and every moral boundary it pleases.  Even to make a bitchy political point.

One awaits the first Western nationalist to explain that if only the UN General Council hadn’t been so aggressive in pushing Putin to the limits, those refugees might still be alive.

Well, three days ago the Spectator carried a piece on the massacre in Bucha.  It referred to a remarkable article which had appeared in the state-owned, Russian-language news service RIA Novosti.  The Spectator article was written by one-time resident in Putin’s fiefdom Christopher Booth.  It set out the future of endless de-Nazification for Ukrainians in the Donbas and the south who cannot free themselves from Russian occupation and control.  Of the Novosti article it says:

It speaks in detail of how Russia might achieve the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine – the first stated aim of the invasion.

The piece comes just as the Kremlin would have us believe that the goals of the so-called ‘special military operation’ have been recalibrated, and perhaps all will end in some sort of queasy compromise in the east of the country. In case you have fallen for this idea, here’s a quote from the RIA Novosti article in question:

“Apart from the Ukrainian leadership, a substantial part of the population is also guilty of being passively Nazi, and facilitators of Nazism. They supported the Nazi regime and urged it forward… The further denazification of the population will require re-training through ideological repression and fierce censorship, not only in the political sphere but also in the sphere of culture and education.”

The author goes on to say: ‘History teaches us that Ukraine cannot exist as a nation state’. Note – this was written less than a week ago. He recommends further that Ukrainian school textbooks be confiscated; that the population should be compelled to denounce one another for the greater good; that memorials to Russian soldiers should be erected to commemorate the war against Ukrainian fascism; and that ‘anti-Nazi’ commissions should be established in what remains of the country for at least 25 years.

So, a Russian propagandist writing in a state-owned Russian publication, giving advice that cannot be at odds with Kremlin thinking, is seeking a “de-Nazification” that is not at all restricted to the Azov Battalions but is code for a population-wide cleansing of “guilt”.  This is precisely how the horrors of the Soviet Union proceeded.  It explains what a survivor of Bucha told the Western media, namely, that the Russian soldiers were demanding where “the Nazis” were and, in some cases, stripping villagers in search of incriminating tattoos.  Some of this behaviour has been ascribed to Chechens.  But it is also ordinary Russian soldiers ordinarily brutalising and murdering people of their own accord, because such behaviour is, if not ordered, more or less given licence from above.  Russian military operations have been that way in Chechnya and in Syria.

So we come to the matter of support among Western nationalists for Putin and the Russian military.  For years now I’ve been referring to the borderline personality types who populate our world.  These are people who are unable to “fit in” with the general Mind.  But they are perfectly able to withstand all the hatreds that are visited upon nationalism, rather like bacteria in hospitals that survive the action of chemical cleaners.  Our politics, therefore, is a natural home for these people.  On the Spectator thread there was an explanatory comment by someone named Venk (evidently not a nationalist himself) which I found relevant:

It puzzled me too until I realized that their hatred for western elites has twisted their worldview. They loathe our leadership class and they admire Putin because he’s a strong-man alternative to woke green-obsessed liberal western elites. Unfortunately, they lack common sense and moderation, so they adopt a “see no evil” approach.

If the western media says it; it must be a lie. If Putin’s propagandists say it; it must be true. If Putin’s forces do something obviously evil, it must be a western lie or a justified action given the circumstances. It’s a bit like the trait psychologists call splitting in people with Borderline Personality Disorder.

They remind me a little of the Cambridge Five, upper class communists who hated our system so much they sided with the enemy. They managed to convince themselves that the USSR was the solution to Western shortcomings, and they either ignored evidence to the contrary or explained it away as a necessary evil on the path to the greater good.

I don’t think it’s a phenomenon that can be attributed to the left or the right, but to certain personality types who can’t process complex realities or balance the good and bad in any scenario.

One would hope that the missile strikes on Kramatorsk train station might cause some of these folk to think again.  But for many, I think, the itch to attack “the West” and “the Jews” will be just too powerful, and they will go on, like the Russian propagandist who apparently wants the gulags back for the next twenty-five years, giving voice to the same certainties in fulfilment of the same emotional needs.

Our friend in the north responds to an article at the Guardian titled, Europe has rediscovered compassion for refugees - but only if they’re white.  It is written by a typical Global Boy.

Morgoth tells me that someone who viewed the video wiseacred to the effect that Salter’s thesis is falsified by the truth that people prefer a dog in their home to an African.  If proof were needed that Salterism itself has already dropped out of common use among nationalists, there it is.  Or maybe that person’s relationship to his pooch is just a bit different!

The purpose of this series of essays is to explore the function and effect of a politics of ethnicity, should it prove possible to bring one to the public life of this land.  Properly speaking, within the layout that is in creation at this site, such exploration has to follow on from the work on The Structure Project, ie, on ethnic nationalism’s principles, parts, and processes, and its episteme.  But that, too, is a new venture not much added to at this point.  So it is cheating a bit to categorise work today under the “The Politics Project”.  But we’re going to do it because, well, I want to!  All of the work on this project will be reflective and propositional in kind, and will concern itself principally with the metapolitics of our lived life.  It will not, therefore, venture on to the ground of political argument or activism as such.

1. STOLEN FIRE, TECHNOLOGICAL APOCALYPSE

“Sometimes his genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart. But mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously” ― Friedrich Hölderlin, 1770-1843, the early-Romantic era German poet whose influence upon Heidegger was so strong. 

Some weeks ago Fróði Midjord and Morgoth livestreamed a wide-ranging discussion on many of the issues which presently concern nationalists.  There was much germane and thoughtful comment, as one would expect.  But one sentiment peaked my interest.  It concerned a sentence offered by Martin Heidegger to Der Spiegel on the occasion in 1966 of the last interview he ever gave.  Publishing the interview was held over at his request until after his death in 1976.  That sentence - “Only a god can still save us” - has, unsurprisingly, assumed the status of a final testimony.  Its resignation to the darkness, along with the temptation to the religious to take it as literally as possible, hacks away at the will, as does all defeatism, and runs in the face of the very spirit of creativity which has, in no small part, led us to our present pass.  I want to challenge that resignation, which I will do in the next instalment.  In this one, though, I will just set out my understanding of “the problem”.

At the outset, and for the clarification of any religious literalists who may read this, neither Fróði nor Morgoth (who, by the way, both agreed with Heidegger’s sentiment) are prone to such literalism.  Obviously, it is not the death of the gods which thinking nationalists abhor but the spiral of disconnection, nihilism and degradation which has come after.  A whole (it would seem) indispensable and vivifying life of the spirit, a whole world of connecting traditions and order, a way of thinking about self and kin, has been swept away, condemning us, so it is said, to a death spiral of our own.  Observations to that effect arrived in our culture within sixty years of the start of the Industrial Revolution, and seventy years before Nietzsche’s Zarathustra spoke on the matter.  For example, Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel Frankenstein is subtitled The Modern Prometheus.

By 1966 the Western half of Heidegger’s Germany was in the full flowering of its Wirtschaftswunder, the post-war economic miracle.  Not only National Socialism’s deeds and dreams but the romantic soul of 18th and 19th century Germany had long since been bombed and burned and carried away in wheelbarrows to the outskirts by the women of the rubble.  What modernity threw up in its place was a Germany of growing civic pride in featureless economic utilitarianism.  In its reflexive, driven focus on a redemption by work and consumption it was as sickly and distancing from the essential as was the worst night-life of Weimar Berlin.  Something American and Jewish had eaten away at the things of the patriotic heart, and substituted the paper-thin public value of loyalty to the corporation.  Perhaps that is what happens in modernity to a people for whom the past is cut off, and may not be visited except with shame, even a patently manufactured shame.  Some miracle, anyway.

This, then, was Heidegger’s Germany at the time of his final pronouncement on the modern and, too, on his grand historiographical revolution, launched with such adventure four decades earlier.  One could be forgiven for thinking that it shows.  The full quote from which those famous words are taken actually reads:

Philosophy will not be able to bring about a direct change of the present state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human meditations and endeavours. Only a god can still save us. I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline in the face of the absent god.

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