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It must be five years ago that there was a rash of interest at MR about creating a political compass to process nationalist political affiliation.  It arose because the standard model, based as it is on conventional social and economic measures and, needless to say, the charming and by no means goy-hostile thoughts of Theodore Adorno and Wilhelm Reich, cannot process ethnocentric political attitudes and values.  So nationalists who take the test find most of the questions irrelevant, and the results puzzling.

For example, I’ve just taken it again and find that:

... I’m a centrist, damn it!  And that’s despite slamming in a string of strongly agree/disagree answers that should have shaken things up.  They didn’t.  My politics just don’t compute.

When we looked at the issue before there was some debate about whether we should be trying to develop a bi-axial compass like this model, a triaxial one that allowed for degrees of awakening, so conventionalists could take the test and get a relevant result, or a simple binning system.  I recall that there was already a test around that could bin nationalist sentiments, but it did not impress.

However, we never progressed beyond the first stumbling block, which was the axiality.  If authoritarian ? libertarian and social ? economic measures describe the liberal paradigm, what describes nationalism?  At least one of the measures has to accord with the reality of the human psyche (the standard compass’s authoritarian ? libertarian axis is recognised by psychologists as doing so).  I’ve argued here that the primary axis of nationalism is being ? becoming, and this seems too fundamental to human life to be anything other than correct.  It’s in metaphysics.  It’s in religion.  It’s good enough.  But that second axis!  That’s the tough one.

In the standard model it’s also the one that relates to purely political concerns: the social left ? the economic right.  Nationalist political concerns do not accord with the liberal value of endless progress.  There is, though, some valuational overlap with the social element, based on the care which flows from kinship.  But that would seem to dictate an opposite in elitism, and indeed the elitism of the aristocracy and of the imperium is an object of regular genuflection among some nationalists.  Norman Lowell, the Eurasianists and our friend Neo-Nietzsche would be pleased, I don’t doubt.  But it doesn’t sit quite right with me.

I confess, I haven’t grasped the whole picture to my own satisfaction.  I know I’m not thinking clearly enough.  Any ideas?

by PF

Dedicated to: the red-headed Spice girl.

I will try to clarify something which GW said to Notus on the Gödelian thread.  Notus asked:

How do you mean that logic can be used to relativise all these things?

This is a critique voiced often by GW and myself which runs along the following lines.

It was really the belief in the susceptibility of complex social realities, and ultimately the reality of our Being, to extremely primitive analytical tools, which formed the basis for social engineering experiments such as have destroyed our Folk.  Marx really perfected this as a tool of destruction - his “scientific” view of history, which was based on a simplistic and in hindsight, very arbitrary analysis of certain historical trends.

Thinkers are obviously obsessed with deconstructing the complex reality that is human experience over time, and finding in it “the central meaning”. This is “the meaning of history”. As a student of Nietzsche (ie, I read and thought about him for a few years), I saw how big N was doing this all over the place. It was for him a way of projecting his likes and dislikes across vast distances of time - and it really was basically that idiosyncratic and subjective. I hope I can belabor this point a little bit without boring everyone because it is one of the central ideas to me, although everyone here probably knows already what I have to say about it.

Nietzsche hated that his mother in Naumburg wanted to force him into the role of soft-hearted Christian do-gooder. He was a radical, adventurous, crazy man - in his own way, and suffered greatly under this constraint. Yet he could never part with his family, in some sense they were almost his only stable social contact throughout his life. So he conjured in his works a vision of Christianity which ridiculed this Naumburg strain of Protestantism, claiming of course that his critique applied to all Xtianity. F Lea, his biographer, has shown how much N’s “Christianity” was actually “Naumburg social constraint” and not the historical Christianity. Nevertheless, he said some things which have stuck, and his critique is in the main, incisive, at least from my anti-Christian perspective.

He likewise held up an ancient ideal of Greece during the time of the Tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) - and I hate to personalize things so much (too bad they are, in fact, so personal), but this had very much to do with the fact that he experienced moments of elation and higher meaning (“am” experiences in my lingo) while reading this at Schulpforta as a young student. His life-long endeavor was to show what ancient Hellas meant and how it could be an alternative model for a reborn Germany and Europe. Wilamowitz, in his critique of N’s philological treatment of ancient Greece in TBOT, basically demolished every substantial assertion of N’s about historical Hellas, showing the extent to which N was being an artist, in his construction of past ages, rather than a scientist.

What remains difficult is the fact that N, being so brilliant, inevitably spoke a great deal of truth when he spoke of these things. But look at how huge the human experience is, how difficult to synthesize - and you will realize that each man can forge his own idiosyncratic view, and many of them - where they depart from specific facts - will become mutually contradictory.

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by PF

In the first Critique of Palingenesis we considered some aspects of the total phenomenon that is palingenetic nationalism. Some of these included:

- Centralization of social narrative / happy unity, and resulting tendency to groupthink

- Mythicization of concepts relating to national life

- Weaponization/militarisation of national life

- Cretinization of the ‘tough boy’ class by apotheosizing the weaponization of man

In the follow-up piece, The End of Teleology, we named and described the psychological mechanism which has driven so many statesman, philosophers, politicians and military men to don variously-styled masks of greatness, and seek to appear before us and themselves as Geniuses, Heroes, World-Architects, and Philosopher-Kings.

This illustrated the psychological antecedent of palingenetic politics, by showing how multiple interests act in collusion to ‘scale the heights of Olympus’ and win for themselves make-believe laurels, trophies, fame, etc.. The thinker reaches back to Athens and Shakespeare, and becomes a genius; the philosopher of history reaches back with transhistorical ‘decadence’ critique to the thinker and lacsadaisically to the hype surrounding Shakespeare, and becomes a world-architect, creating a vision of epochal changes; the statesman reaches back to the philosopher of history and lacsadaisically to the thinker, and becomes a philosopher-king; the soldier reaches back to a foggy understanding of all of these, elevated by the philosopher-king’s vision, and becomes a hero. Last of all comes the teleological WN blog commentator, who also thinks to clothe his nakedness by reaching back to these men. If you are able to look closely at real instances of this - occuring again and again with great regularity - you can see how these images of greatness conflict with one another and also with the nature of the men who sport them as costume. Time spent in dead earnest study of these men will reveal that a non-insignificant amount of lying went into crafting this charade, as it is hard for a man to become an image of perfection. One might even say it is impossible. 

Now we return to the investigation of one particular psychological aspect of Palingenesis. Not the teleology that precedes its formulation as a philosophical system, but the mechanism that precedes and justifies the uptake of palingenetic memes after they are formulated as a system and put on the political market.

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by Rod Cameron

I see one of the brothers has recently been writing about the end of teleology. I am a fan of teleology and whatever the brother was on about, it was not teleology. I wish he had found another word for his angst. Speculation about the future is what keeps us on the political margins going, so I thought I would show what it is about. Teleology is about joining a few dots to predict a glorious future. We all do it: take a few premises and cantilever an extrapolation till it crashes and burns. The critics of teleology say it is not within a million miles of being a pseudo-science, and they are right, but it is a lot of fun and I am actually serious, especially since the answer to the first question, “Where are we?” is damn obvious.

We are in a post-ideological age; we are beyond the debates based on political economy – Easy. Next dot, “What does that mean?” It means we are beyond trying to understand the world in terms of good and evil; we are beyond ethics. Dot 3, “Enlarge on that”. Basically ethics was behind ideology and in the end ethics had nothing to do with predicting the eventual answer which is known as liberal democracy or democratic capitalism. Dot 4, “So?” Well, look at our particular situation. Instead of a debate on immigration we get an ethical invective, “Racist!” And do we buy that as a comprehensive response? Does any-[intelligent]-one continue to think politics is applied ethics? Dot 5, “So?” Liberalism and its mate ethics are shagged-out. With their inane reply to the anti-immigrant protest they are begging us to say something really intelligent that will bury their faith in ethics. They are destined to be replaced and we have to get in early with some new Absolutes to replace the worn-out, simplistic one commonly associated with shagged-out Christianity. Dot 6, “You are sure history is against ethics?” All ethical absolutes finish up in the same place – the philosophy dump. Dot 7, “And you no doubt have a few Absolutes handy to fill the vacuum after ethics and thereby predict future developments in the world of ideas?” Yeah. And that is enough dots to get me started. I will have to make a few points before the teleology is launched.

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True, as we look through Being itself, through time itself, and look into the destiny of Being and the extending of time-space, we have glimpsed what “Appropriation” means.  But do we by this road arrive at anything else than a mere thought-construct?  Behind this suspicion there lurks the view that Appropriation must after all “be” something.  However:  Appropriation neither is, nor is Appropriation there.  To say the one or to say the other is equally a distortion of the matter, just as if we wanted to derive the source from the river.

What remains to be said?  Only this:  Appropriation appropriates.  Saying this, we say the Same in terms of the Same about the Same.  To all appearances, all this says nothing.  It does indeed say nothing so long as we hear a mere sentence in what was said, and expose that sentence to the cross-examination of logic.  But what if we take what was said and adopt it unceasingly as the guide for our thinking, and consider that this Same is not even anything new, but the oldest of the old in Western thought:  that ancient something which conceals itself in a-letheia?  That which is said before all else by this first source of all the leitmotifs of thinking gives voice to a bond that binds all thinking, providing that thinking submits to the call of what must be thought.

The task of our thinking has been to trace Being to its own from Appropriation—by way of looking through true time without regard to the relation of Being to beings.

To think Being without beings means:  to think Being without regard to metaphysics.  Yet a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics.  Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself.

If overcoming remains necessary, it concerns that thinking that explicitly enters Appropriation in order to say It in terms of It about It.

Our task is unceasingly to overcome the obstacles that tend to render such saying inadequate.

The saying of Appropriation in the form of a lecture remains itself an obstacle of this kind.  The lecture has spoken merely in propositional statements.

Martin Heidegger, “On Time and Being” translated by Joan Stambaugh, ISBN:0-022-32375-7, p 23-24

I present this for discussion by those more familiar with continental philosophy than I because I have a hunch it is as important as it pretends.

A few thoughts about an imaginary problem

“Identity” is not a word that need ever pass our lips - not if we have zero respect for the liberal analysis, and wish to be free of its formative power.  For this is a word of the left, and like all words of the left it pressages on us a modern conception of Man which is fatally light and relativistic.

How so?  Well, shouldn’t it be a grave and weighty responsibility for a man to define who and what he is?  After all, modernity places the highest possible value on the individual, denying all bonds, all blood their primacy.  To use the Schmittian formulation, “None but the individual shall dispose of the life of the individual.”  Surely, then, that life should be sufficiently valued by its owner to imbue the exercise with a high seriousness and a desire for some specificity.  Yet in practice the reverse is the case.  We live in the Age of the Left.  It is an age when realization of the Self, once the preserve of the religious and Chivalric orders, has been democratized and, in democratization, has been relativised.  When the measure of a life is mere personal taste all claims are equal.  There is salience but there is no depth.  There is “progress” but there is no movement.  Something vital, something authentic and original has fallen out of the equation.

In the sociological sense what remains is the modern us and the meaning of us.  For well over a century nationalist and traditionalist thinkers have judged that meaning in historical terms and found it wanting.  The ineluctable conclusion is that we are moving away from our truth as men, and putting on the cloth of an increasingly artificial self.  And we are doing this, most of us, because we are ignorant of politics and of ourselves, and we are weak and suggestible.

Artificiality in the modern conception of Man (modern in the context of an industrialised and, later, consumerised society) is precisely a sign of lost being.  It seems improbable, somehow, that the men and women of pre-industrial European societies, filled as those societies were with brothers to the ox, with men listed in the Orange and the Blue, and their widows in the pews, and the widows of the sea, would have had any reference point at all to the narcissism of a self-ascribed “identity”.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims assuredly did not define themselves according to their fascinations with the Self.  They were fixed by their relation to kin, to the soil and the seasons or the tides and the wind, to the economy as manor, town or village, to Nature and to God.  These were givers of riches aplenty for all but the high elites of the Court and Barony, of the Church, and of learning.

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by DanielJ

From the Preface to this work, Rieff quoting two historians’ summary of his work:

“If the dominant character type of the twentieth century is really what Rieff calls ‘psychological man,’ the consequences for western society are quite incalculable.”

This is certainly true. If man is a psychological creature than we must use the weapons of psychology to turn him to toward the defensive weaponry of Christianity, ethnic solidarity, epistemology, etc. Simply concentrating on Van Tillian presuppositionalism will do no good when men are no longer motivated by philosophies, but by psychologies.

From the Introduction:

Literature and sociology have long supplied eloquent and knowing professional mourners at the wake for Christian culture. After Matthew Arnold, much of modern poetry [he quotes Yeats in the very beginning of the Intoduction] constitutes an elegiac farewell ... to the religious culture of the West. After Auguste Comte, much of modern sociology has struggled for diagnostic ideas refined and yet wide enough to encompass the spectacle of a death so great in magnitude and subtlety. Now the dissolution of a unitary system of common belief, accompanied, as it must be, by a certain disorganization of personality, may have run its course.

Rieff seems to be stating in this passage that the central crisis of our time - this dissolution of personhood and entropy of personality - is a culture war where the combatants are fighting to “organize” (this has the faint smell of technocratic and bureaucratic totalitarianism parading itself as scientific management with disinterested and rationalized dispassionate concern only for the psychological well being of mankind) the human psyche.

He goes on to state that the:

...long period of deconversion, which first broke the surface of political history at the time of the French Revolution, appears all but ended.

and that:

several systems of belief (are) competing for primacy in the task of organizing personality in the West.

Hence, the “culture war.” The “cult” is the cult of personality.

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